OnePlus One Review: Smartphone Value Redefined By A Newcomer

OnePlus is a rare beast: A startup building smartphones. Their first device is the Android-based OnePlus One, which, despite its unnecessarily repetitive name, is impressive hardware in a market where legacy device makers rule the roost and charge top dollar for smartphones packing the same kind of internals as the One. The OnePlus One is actually a remarkable deal at $299 for an unlocked device, and proof that Google isn’t the only company in town that can offer Nexus style price economics.

MSRP: $2995.5-inch, 1920×1080 display16GB storageQuad-core 2.5GHz processor with 3GB RAMLTE, 802.11ac Wi-FiProduct info page

Pros

Cheap without compromisesHighly customizable out of the box

Cons

Hulking huge designCustomization isn’t for everyone

The OnePlus One is a monolithic device; with its 5.5-inch screen, it’s firmly in the realm of what we once referred to as phablet devices (sadly the term is dying as more phones extend to larger displays). But it does at least manage to fit all that screen in a package that’s as slim as possible – the device is only around 0.35 inches thick.

It’s just a shade smaller than the Galaxy Note 3 in terms of overall footprint, but it more closely resembles the Nexus 5 in terms of its lines and the matte finish of the plastic back, which is somewhat rubberized for grip. As far as gargantuan devices go, the OnePlus One is among my favorite to hold, however, and the Nexus styling is visually appealing, too, as is the slightly protruding top and bottom metal-look lip. It manages to be one of the best looking Android phones recently launched, even if the look is a tad derivative.

The OnePlus One’s performance is unparalleled for a device in this price range, and that’s almost all that needs to be said about that. It packs as much RAM and the same kind of processor as smartphones that lead the category in terms of specs, like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One (M8) – yet it manages to do so at a fraction (more than 1/2) the price of those devices. And the specs aren’t hollow; their effect is felt in the animations of the OS and the performance of Android games and apps loaded onto the device.

There were some issues early in testing with weird visual glitches when accessing the settings and notification panel from the top bar of the home screen, but OnePlus quickly acknowledged and then zapped these issues with a software update – another of its virtues is that it can push these out without leaning on either Google or carrier partners thanks to the use of Cyanogen as its primary OS. This Android fork offers a near-stock experience in many ways, but with extensive customization options. It’s a very capable performer, too, and in many ways much better than the customized interfaces that most other Android OEMs throw down on top of Google’s mobile platform.

Speaking of Cyanogen, it provides the OnePlus One with many of its tricks, which include the ability to fully change the skin of your device with various onboard and downloadable themes. By default, the phone came with a horrible square icon reskinning of Android, but the point is that I didn’t have to live with the bad design choices of the phone’s creators; instead, I was able to swap out for a much more default KitKat look with minimal effort and no special permissions required.

OnePlus is full of such customizations, and a quick look at any Settings screen will reveal the extent to which you can modify elements including the lock screen, notification/status bar, home screens and more. The whole thing is basically a playground of tick boxes, switches, submenus and more, and that’s a very welcome thing for people who like to fuss with their phones. But for those who are content to have a device that works reliably and consistently, and presents an uncomplicated experience, this could be a bit overwhelming; most OEMs try to reduce and refine the Settings app, not complicate it further.

Still, for this reason, OnePlus’ inaugural device is something that probably appeals more to hardcore Android fans than even stock Nexus devices. It encourages playfulness and meddling, which is in the spirit of the original Android OS, before Google started slowly massaging it into more of a closed and controlled direction. Software-wise, this is the Nexus for Nexus lovers, as illogical as that may sound.

Founded 2013     Overview OnePlus is a technology startup committed to bringing the best possible technology to users around the world. Created around the mantra Never Settle, OnePlus creates beautifully designed devices with premium build quality. Founders Pete Lau Website http://oneplus.net/ Full profile for OnePlus

The OnePlus One is impressive in most regards, but the fact that it can manage to include such an effective and good-looking screen at this size in a handset at this price is perhaps most impressive of all. The 5.5-inch display has excellent color rendering, and at 404 PPI pixel density, also won’t show any pixels no matter how hard you stare at normal viewing distances.

The display seems to hover at the very top of the glass on the front of the phone, too, and renders text perfectly. It’s great for watching movies and viewing images, and if there’s a flaw to it at all, it’s that some of the assets included, like stock OS icons for the built-in flashlight and audio recorder, aren’t designed to be viewed on such a high-res display, meaning they appear slightly fuzzy and look wrong.

OnePlus One manages to do the impossible, offering up top-tier specs at mid-tier prices. It does this seemingly without sacrifices (battery life was excellent, for instance, especially when using the smartphone’s display sparingly). The camera is a decent performer, beating the Nexus 5 by a wide margin, though falling short of the Galaxy S5 and the iPhone in this department. But its flaws are small things, details that fail by matters of degrees rather than huge margins, and for a smartphone that costs less than half of many of its competitors, that’s nothing short of amazing.

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Samsung Outs Its First Tizen-Powered Smartphone

Samsung is taking another baby step away from the Android platform today, with the announcement of the first commercial smartphone powered by the open source Tizen platform, instead of Google’s Android OS.

The hardware specs of the device offer little in the way of differentiation — albeit it does include a built-in fingerprint sensor, as the Galaxy S5 did — but the Samsung Z runs Tizen 2.2.1, making it a novel beast indeed.

It’s slated to ship in Q3, initially to Russia with a plan to expand it to other unnamed markets thereafter.

The Z will include access to a Tizen app store, which means buyers can expect a few thousand native apps. However the OpenMobile application compatibility layer will enable the handset to run Android apps too. And given how far ahead of the field Android is on app numbers then any challenger platform needs a line-in to the dominant ecosystem to stand any chance of gaining traction in the shadow of the Google-powered competition.

Samsung has of course been trying to drum up developer interest in Tizen for several years now — and plans to host local Tizen app challenges in Russia and CIS countries when it launches the Z. There’s also a Tizen Developer Conference kicking off in San Francisco tomorrow.

But all these developer efforts are inevitably going against the grain in a smartphone market dominated by the duopoly of Android and iOS. Developers develop for the largest, most lucrative markets, as you’d expect, which is why Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform has struggled to eke out any marketshare.

Today’s outing of the Samsung Z follows an update Samsung put out last week to its original Galaxy Gear smartwatch, to switch it from Android to Tizen. That brought the wearable in line with the Galaxy Gear 2 — which was Tizen from the get-go, rather than Android.

The world’s number one smartphone maker, which built its handset empire atop Google’s Android, has seen growth slowing in recent years as competition within the Android ecosystem continues to intensify. Ergo, there is a strategic imperative for Samsung to diversify its reliance on Android, and to try to build traction behind an open alternative that’s not led by Google.

It is of course fantastically unlikely that Tizen is going to grow to the point where it entirely replaces Android in Samsung’s portfolio. But the platform gives Samsung another string to its bow, and one that looks like it’s being deliberated tuned to stand out on power efficiency and consumption grounds, as a lightweight alternative to Android.

So while the Samsung Z may not look especially stand-out on paper, it will be interesting to see how well features such as an ‘ultra power saving mode’ go down with users — and indeed whether consumers can be convinced to eschew Android for the promise of a more efficient alternative. The pricing of the handset — which has not yet been announced — will also undoubtedly be key.

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Twitter’s Crashlytics Launches Cross-Platform App Beta Testing Service

Back in February, Crashlytics announced its first product since being acquired by Twitter. That product was an app beta testing platform that would allow developers to distribute test apps to users to get feedback and suss out bugs.

The platform is now live, and anyone can sign up to use it. It’s essentially a competitor to TestFlight and HockeyApp, two of the most popular beta testing platforms out there for apps. TestFlight, of course, was acquired by Apple along with its parent company Burstly back in February.

The below gif, included in the post, actually says volumes. The UI and ease of inviting users activity and provisioning goes way beyond what Apple or Google offer:

The offering is cross-platform as well, which means developers can test across various platforms. I’m not a developer, but the offering looks pleasantly designed enough, and Crashlytics has testimonials from companies like DocuSign, Path and Hangtime that (unsurprisingly) sing its praises.

The current beta testing situation when it comes to Apple’s developer portal is dismal. It’s frustrating, slow and kludgy, and it’s one of the biggest complaints that developers have when it comes to Apple’s toolset. That’s why Apple likely purchased TestFlight and why third-party beta platforms have become popular at all.

“With Beta by Crashlytics, you can easily invite new testers through a seamless sign-up workflow, manage testers on the web or right within your IDE, and analyze key metrics to determine when your app is ready for prime time,” reads the announcement blog post. “Combined with our crash reporting solution, there is now a one-stop-shop for debugging and distributing apps. Oh, and it’s free.”

Among the developers I speak to, Crashlytics’ crash reporting product is well-regarded. Seems like the beta tool is something developers frustrated with current options should check out.

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A Danger Programmer Pours One Out For The Hiptop

With all this talk of laplets, tablets, iPhones, and GalTabs, we often forget one of the finest mobile platforms ever created, the Hiptop. But Chris DeSalvo didn’t forget. One of the original programmers for Danger’s groundbreaking hardware and software platform wrote a beautiful meditation last January on his work and the way it changed mobile. The piece didn’t get much traction then but it just resurfaced on Hacker News and deserves a mention.

The platform was groundbreaking at the time and the Sidekicks, from the early black and white models to the full-color roller-ball models that appeared just before the launch of the Android-powered HTC G1 that essentially spelled the end of the feature phone.

That is not to say the Sidekick was a feature phone. As DeSalvo notes, this phone had a real TCP/IP stack, web browser, powerful text handling systems, a microblogging setup, and an app store and OTA updates before Samsung was aware that the mobile Internet existed. One of the most important features, however, was IM. DeSalvo writes:

Multi-Protocol Instant Messaging—we included an IM client(AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger). We had Jabber support early on (the technology that Google Talk is based on) but we never shipped that. I don’t recall why. You could have up to 10 chats going at once and use the shoulder buttons to rotate between them, or chord the menu button and the number row on the keyboard to jump directly to a specific chat. It supported graphical emoticons and everything. We couldn’t use the full set of Emoji images back then because they were still under copyright from SoftBank in Japan, but we had pretty good coverage of the smileys that most people used.

The Sidekick died in July 2010 and its services were terminated a year later. A massive outage in 2009 reduced consumer trust in the service as millions of photos and other data disappeared completely. It was a mess. But the Sidekick could have been a contender. DeSalvo writes that they even approached Nintendo about offering a mobile-enabled Game Boy using the Hiptop platform. The plan was to allow OTA downloads of Nintendo games which, surprisingly, Nintendo’s licensing terms did not allow. This chimera could do some amazing stuff.

This led us do the following demo: start a Gameboy game and be watching regular Gameboy video. Then you’d receive a phone call and the Gameboy game would magically pause, and a hiptop alert window would display over top of the Gameboy video asking if you wanted to answer the call. As soon as the call was over the game would resume.

Nintendo passed on the technology.

The last Sidekick appeared in 2011 but it ran Android and was a Sidekick in name only. By that time all of Danger’s hard work had spiraled out into the rest of the ecosystem, leaving a legacy of solid mobile interfaces and some amazing memories. DeSalvo’s piece is a great walk down memory lane and definitely worth a read.

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Amazon’s Mayday Service On Fire Phone Means It Might Be Able To Sell Its Unique New Features

Amazon has brought Mayday to the Fire Phone, it announced today. The Mayday service offers one-tap access to customer service agents who can talk to phone users via video chat, and take over the screen on their devices to show them exactly how to do something, complete with annotations. The service is available 24 hours, and service representatives will respond to requests within 15 seconds, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said on stage.

It’s accessible from any screen on the Fire Phone via a simple pull-down of the menu from the top of the screen, in the same way you’d access notifications on an iPhone or Android device. Mayday is a big deal for Amazon, which recently shared stats about use of the service on its Kindle Fire HDX tablets. The company said that customer service agents generally respond in fewer than 10 seconds, which sounds like magic when you consider how long people generally have to wait on hold — often without even talking to a human — in most customer service scenarios.

Mayday is available free to all owners of the device, but its cost may be built into the cost of ownership; AT&T is going to charge $199 for the entry-level 32GB version, which is right up there with flagship devices from top-tier Android makers and the price of Apple’s iPhone at launch, despite the fact that on paper at least, its internal specs have more in common with last year’s Android flagships than today’s Galaxy S5, HTC One and others.

Fire Phone might need Mayday, too. It has a unique perspective-shifting 3D feature that makes it quite different from ordinary phones, as well as a dedicated Firefly button to let it identify products on the fly. These are not features that smartphone owners will be familiar with, and they could well require some explaining in order for new users to get comfortable operating them.

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Android Wear Developer Team Talks Building Apps For Moto 360 And LG G Watch

Android Wear is going to be a big part of Google I/O 2014 this year, and Google helps developers acclimate to the idea of wrist-borne apps. Already, internal developers working on the project are working on software to help them demonstrate and validate concepts for apps for the platform, and they’re using the upcoming LG G Watch and Moto 360 to help them prototype.

In a blog post detailing their efforts, Android Wear team members Roman Nurik and Timothy Jordan discuss how they built a walking tour app for Android Wear, using rough mock ups for a Google Glass app that never got built as a starting point. Doing so required thinking about battery conservation, differing notification prioritization, and also working with the constraints of a screen size that maxes out at 140 x 140 (or 160 x 160 on the round Moto 360) resolution.

The app is simple, basically popping up a notification on your wrist when you’re near a walking tour in the software’s database, and then providing you with simple directions if you choose to undertake a trip. It offers you a number of stops, and a very brief description of the place when you arrive spread across multiple pages.

It’s a clever little bit of software, and one that emphasizes Google’s view of how designing for it will be much different from creating experiences either for mobile or desktop. It’s also a clear and present sign that wearable design and development will be a big part of Google’s I/O show this year. Will that be enough for us to finally see wearables take off in a big way? I’m not making any bets just yet.

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OnLive Is Now Streaming Top-Tier Games To The Wikipad Gaming Tablet

Remember OnLive? Despite a messy sale to escape a dark and stormy financial picture, the company lives on, and in March it launched its new CloudLift subscription gaming service. Today, it’s partnering with Wikipad, maker of the dedicated Android gaming tablet, to deliver full AAA PC gaming to the tablet. OnLive already offers this to any Android device with access to Google Play via its app, but the version for Wikipad is optimized, with special support for its dedicated built-in gaming controller.

The Wikipad 7 will be the first to get the OnLive treatment, but support will also be extended to Wikipad’s forthcoming Gamevice hardware, which adds a detachable gamepad to any tablet that wants one. The game streaming from OnLive can be paired with the CloudLift subscription service which makes it possible for players to pick up right where they left off on their home gaming rigs thanks to cloud-based save states and metadata.

It’s a move that should add value to both Wikipad’s business and OnLive’s user base, but in the end it’s unlikely to prove truly game-changing to either. Especially as players like Nvidia are moving to create their own streaming game services like GRID, the system that works in the same way as OnLive but with the backing of one of the biggest mobile chip and graphics card makers in the world.

It has yet to prove itself a sizeable business for anyone involved, however, which could just be a case of the tech (especially on the user end) needing to play catch-up with the service.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab S Review: Beautiful Screens Make These Tablets Magic For Movies

Samsung has never made a tablet that truly got my blood pumping, but that might’ve just changed. I bought an original Galaxy Tab when it was first released, only to find the experience frustrating and return it a few days later because of a dropped Wi-Fi issue. Now, Samsung has a new line of tablets called the Galaxy Tab S, and though there have been many different Samsung slates between then and now, these represent the biggest changes to date, and put an entirely new face on Samsung’s flagship tablet devices.

10.5? or 8.4? 2560×1600 display
Wi-Fi 802.11ac
1.9GHz Quad Core/1.3GHz Quad Core Octacore processor with 3GB RAM
16GB storage, expandable up to 128GB via microSD
MSRP: $399.99 for 8.4, $499.99 for 10.2
Product info page

Pros:

Amazing display
Size and weight

Cons:

Design choices aren’t for everyone
Weirdly I miss the S Pen

Samsung has produced a tablet that’s deserving of lots of praise with the Tab S when it comes to design – and an almost equal amount of scorn. These slates look an awful lot like every other device Samsung has put out this year and late in 2013, including the Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S5, with a metal-look band surrounding the entire device, and a faux-leather back panel that feels nice in the hand. The size and weight are amazing, as these are incredibly thin and light devices given their impressive screens and internals, but they also clearly aren’t designed to appeal to my particular demographic.

There’s a gold tint on that metallic border I mentioned, and the back in both white pearl and “titanium bronze” look has a strange silken sheen to it that’s a little flashy for my tastes. Both types of cover, including the full front-and-back Book Cover and the lightweight front cover come in similar shiny finishes, delivering an appearance overall that would be quite at home with bedazzled garments but that could never be called austere or simple, both adjectives I like to be able to use when describing my electronics.

The snaps included in the back of the Tab S to affix the covers do work wonderfully and keep things ultra secure, however, and the finishes are such that the tablets don’t feel like they’re going to easily slip out of your grasp. The side facing speakers naturally project sound forward when you’re hold thing the devices with two hands to watch movies, too. Button placement on the 10.2 puts the sleep/wake switch at the top left, which is not ideal, but otherwise these are ergonomically pleasing and well-built, questionable aesthetics aside.

The Tab S devices both perform very well, considering how much power they have to put out to make sure those displays are looking their best. The processor provides ample muscle to power HD video, including video captured in 2560 x 1440 resolution at 30 fps. There’s a sample video included on the tablet that shows just how awesome stuff looks at this resolution on this screen, and some cameras will capture at that resolution (though the Tab’s built-in 8 megapixel camera doesn’t).

In general browsing and other OS performance I found the Tab S to be mostly solid, but there were some times where the homescreen stuttered when paging through. Running apps in split screen proved no problem, however, which is one of Samsung’s key tablet signature features. Photos from the 8 megapixel camera aren’t amazing, but they’re more than tolerable if the Tab S is the only camera you have on you. If you’re using a 10.2-inch device as a camera you have other problems to worry about.

Some of the highlight features on this tablet include the split-screen app multitasking, which again works as advertised, and Samsung SideSync feature. SideSync is pretty great, letting you see your screen exactly as it appears on your Galaxy S5, Note 3, S4 and S5, and letting you send and receive voice calls on the Tab S from your S5. Pairing is a cinch, and it worked well during my tests, making for a useful tool if your phone is downstairs or across the room.

Another feature new to the Galaxy Tab S is the Adaptive Display, which is designed to make the most of the SuperAMOLED screen included in the tablets. The screen really is the highlight here, and the adaptive mode works like it does on some modern TVs, changing things like color rendering and contrast depending on what kind of content you’re viewing. In practice, it really does seem to help with the experience of watching movies, playing games and more.

The fingerprint scanner from the GS5 makes an appearance in these tablets, and works as it did in that smartphone, which is to say well and reliably, but with a little bit of futzing required to get the positioning right when you’re performing a swipe. On a tablet, it honestly doesn’t seem all that appealing as a feature, but the payment authorization through PayPal is still here and still impressive.

Founded 1969     Overview Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., together with its subsidiaries, is engaged in consumer electronics, information technology and mobile communications, and device solutions businesses worldwide. It develops, manufactures, and sells various consumer products, including mobile phones, tablets, televisions, Blu-rays, DVD players, home theaters, and digital cameras and camcorders; home appliances, such as … Website http://www.samsung.com/us Full profile for Samsung Electronics

As just mentioned, the display is the star here. Samsung has indeed nailed the tablet screen  – both look terrific, and you’d be hard-pressed to tell that the 8.4-inch model actually has a higher pixel density, as both defy your ability to distinguish individual pixels. In fact, these are top contenders for best screens in the industry, and that’s really going to help when Samsung starts offering up content sources that are better-than-HD quality.

Some Netflix content is already optimized for super high-resolution TVs, so it’s logical that they could eventually make that available to other platforms too. But for photos and other types of content, it’s going to make a difference right away.

These screens are so good that with the 10.2-inch device, it starts to feel like you’re not compromising by using a tablet to watch a video over, say, a TV or home theatre setup. It’s really that good, and if you’re looking for essentially a portable movie machine, Samsung’s devices are a safe bet.

The Tab S line packs a better battery than previous devices, and gets some power savings thanks to the SuperOLED display using true blacks instead of backlit dark tones. But this is an area where these tablets still lag considerably behind iOS devices, especially when in standby. They’ll do a fairly decent job still, however, and should give you plenty of viewing time on a long haul flight, so it’s not as much of a concern as it has been in the past. They do take a long time to charge, however, so be ready for that.

The Tab S line is a solid showing by Samsung, but their real value can be summed up in one line: these are the tablets to watch movies on. They really do the best when they’re playing back any kind of media, and the rest of their features and software feels like a gloss on top of that. Truth be told, that’s likely what most tablet users are in the market for – especially those who don’t need the power and productivity of a notebook. I still find that the Android tablet ecosystem lags behind that of Apple and its iPad, but Samsung has put a lot of work in since the first Galaxy tablet devices, and it really shows.

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Xyo Debuts An Alternative To Google Play’s App Store, Focused On Discovery

A number of companies have tried their hand at introducing their own app-discovery services as alternatives to the default mobile app stores, like iTunes or Google Play. Some have been fortunate to find an exit (like Chomp or Hubbl), when all was said and done. But few have managed to establish significant user bases of their own. Today, a company called Xyo is giving app discovery another shot with its first consumer-facing app offering a better way to search Android applications, like those found on Google Play.

But this time, there’s a twist.

Though the Xyo app is live on Google Play, the app itself is really more of a showcase of the technology that Xyo has developed.

While certainly generating consumer interest in the new Xyo app search service would be nice, the company’s real business model involves licensing its technology to partners. In fact, Xyo already has several partners lined up who will pre-load this new app on their devices (though Xyo isn’t permitted to disclose names at this time). And, as a part of the pre-load deal, Xyo will promote other apps from the partners in the recommendations it serves.

The company also does revenue-sharing for its app advertising services, so its potential partners have an incentive to promote the app. In addition, says Xyo co-founder Matthaus Krzykowski, the plan is to roll out other incentivization schemes in the future that will give the partners even more reasons to promote the app after it’s pre-installed.

As for the app itself, Xyo offers a touch-centric way to browse an app store without having to type. Instead, a user flicks through the app suggestions Xyo provides, which are based on 400 different signals – far more than many competing app stores and discovery services offer today. Badges in the top-left will help end users to better understand why each app was recommended.

For example, a new game might be recommended to you because you play “Candy Crush,” while others might just be suggested because they’re just universally popular.

The early results are promising. Says Krzykowski, users who have been testing the app browse over 30 apps per session without having to type a search query.

One of the interesting things about the Xyo technology, now over three years in development, is its understanding of narrow and even niche app subcategories. Only in the recent iOS 8 update did Apple introduce a longer list of subcategories for the applications it showcases on the iTunes App Store. Meanwhile, Google Play hasn’t implemented subcategories in its top-level navigation outside of the “Games” category.

But Xyo offers over 1,000 subcategories, which its system is able to automatically detect. And as you browse through the app, you’re also able to tap on these subcategories to dive into their “stream” as well as bookmark them in order to save them on the app’s homepage.

Xyo’s technology is available to its partners in a variety of different integration points - phones, tablets, app stores, messaging apps, watches, browsers and cameras. The company has particular traction for these integrations in Asia, and by next month, Xyo will be able to announce it has a top five global carrier as a partner, too.

While testing the app myself, I found the experience of browsing through Xyo very fluid and fast, and because of the way Xyo groups the apps, it’s easy to actually find new applications and games you may like to try. That being said, I’m still interested in seeing the top-ranked apps in a given app store or category, and this isn’t something an app discovery service provides. I’d likely return to Google Play at some point, as opposed to using Xyo for everything but the final download. (The app redirects to Google Play for installs.)

I’m not alone in having a hard time giving up Google Play. It’s very difficult to get a consumer to switch from the default app store for an alternative, studies have shown. That’s one of the reasons why Appsfire exited the app-discovery business last year to focus on native ads, and why others in the space have business models that no longer rely on consumer adoption, like Xplode.

Sometimes they go deep on a particular niche, like Appolearning does for education. But rarely do you see a pitch for a pure consumer play in app discovery these days, and Xyo, despite the fact it has a new consumer-facing app, is no exception.

You can check out the Xyo app for yourself here.

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Google I/O 2014 Preview: The Developer Conference Has A Design And Wearables Focus This Year

If you’re gearing up for Google’s big annual developer event this year, you might be wondering what the company will be doing with its full two-day event, which kicks off Wednesday. Google’s focus this year is expanding to include more information and value for the gamut of app and software makers. That means speaking not just to developers but also to designers and marketers. But for the average user, there’s still plenty to look for here in terms of news and excitement, too.

A key focus this year, according to people familiar with the matter, will be Android Wear. Google announced the project earlier this year, and released it to developers in beta form. It’s an extension of its mobile OS that is designed specifically for use on smartwatches and other wearable form factor devices, and we’ll almost certainly hear a lot more about it at I/O this year.

Two manufacturers are set to debut the first shipping smartwatches running Android wear this year, including Motorola and LG. Both had promised a summer launch window for these devices, which are the Moto 360 and LG G Watch, and we’ve just entered into summer technically, so we’re almost guaranteed to hear more about these at I/O, if we don’t get a full-fledged launch of both.

We’ll almost certainly get a good long look at Android Wear in a consumer-ready form, with more details and specifics on how it’ll work in terms of both basic built-in functionality and third-party support, and there will probably be a lot of attention paid to best design and development practices for the platform, given that Google and its OEM partners will be pushing for content to populate a wearable app store for the launch of consumer hardware.

Apple has pushed its CarPlay infotainment integration a lot this year, and Google is expected to follow shortly with its own version. Officially announced in January, there’s not much known about the Android-powered in-car system, but already, partners including GM, Audi and Hyundai are on board and the tech is set to debut in new vehicles by the end of this year.

Google is said to be planning a full-scale announcement and reveal of its Android car efforts, which would be in keeping with its other efforts this year to highlight how Android is expanding beyond just smartphones and tablets to cover a wide range of connected hardware and software. Google is said to be planning to make its in-car system directly web-connected, with a focus on making it usable separate from your device, but also complementary to smartphones.

Google is looking to make this year’s show about Android above and beyond traditional mobile screens in general, and that means we could see updates on other projects that involve the broader Internet of Things. A couple of examples include its television efforts, which currently consist of Google TV. There’s said to be a competing Android TV initiative in development, which could break cover at this event.

Android TV is reportedly more focused on content than apps and software, as opposed to Google TV. Beyond that, not much is known about it. Google also just acquired Dropcam with its Nest division, which is quickly becoming a hub for all things connected home, and we’ll probably see them talk more about this push and its growing orbit of devices and services. Expect talk around Google’s growing stable of first-party products, but also a focus on how third-party software and device makers can get in on the action.

A new version of Android isn’t necessarily going to be launched at this year’s event, but we will probably get a taste of what’s to come. A recently revealed project called Quantum Paper looks to be set to bring a total redesign to Android software via distinct new guidelines, and Polymer is said to be a framework to hep make that happen via customizable, reusable interface elements.

These would make for a very different, significantly redesigned experience not only for Android, but for Google everywhere, on iOS and the web in addition to its own devices. Google wants to really hammer down on design this year, and Quantum plus Polymer look like the best possible candidates to help it chart a path forward. Given how much emphasis is being placed on including designers in the event this year, these are likely candidates for further announcements and explanation.

Google’s event this year will be heavy on those building software for its platforms, but it’ll also introduce a more inclusive definition of the “developer event” that extends to designers and marketers, too. Essentially, everyone involved in the process of building and selling software is meant to get something out of this year’s show, and that includes the old-fashioned developers too.

We’ll have all the action for you over the two-day event right here, including live keynote coverage on Tuesday morning.

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Hands On With The Galaxy Tab S, Coming To The U.S. June 27

Samsung has a new tablet, and the company is framing this as their new flagship slate line. The Galaxy Tab S was unveiled at an event last week, and brings an ultra-thin design and a super high-resolution display to Samsung’s Android-powered tablets. In both 8.4 and 10.5-inch flavors, these tablets promise dynamic screens that change their settings depending on content types. The Tab S hits the U.S. starting June 27, with a retail price of $399.99 and $499.99 for Wi-Fi versions of the 8.4 and 10.5 respectively.

We’ll have full reviews forthcoming for the new tablets, but for now I got to spend a limited amount of hands-on time with the Tab S 8.4. Samsung is making a lot of marketing claims around this device, suggesting it’s something that injects some genuine fresh energy into its tablet lineup, but does it live up to those claims? We’ll require more time with the gadget, but initial impressions reveal that Samsung’s highlight features on this tablet are indeed highlights.

The screen on the Galaxy Tab S really is amazing in person. It has a 2560 x 1600 screen that uses SuperAMOLED tech to delivery crazy contrast and color – but at times this can go too far, depending on your tastes. Oversaturation is an issue, with colors that are exaggerated over what you can actually find in real life. Some people love this, though, and the demo videos included on the slate really do pop on that screen. Detail is crisp and clear, but for most standard 1080 videos you might not get as impressive results. It should still be an extremely solid media playback device, however you slice it.

The weight and thinness of the device is also very impressive on first encounter, despite the fact that the construction is still plastic and shares the somewhat blah design chops of the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S5. It’s better looking than either of these somehow (might be the solid edging) and the portability is tremendous.

OS and software are still going to be important factors in the overall picture, and we haven’t had time to give those a full run-through yet, but Samsung has made some decidedly impressive technical improvements to its Tabs based on first impressions.

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Samsung Aims To Reinvigorate Its Tablet Line With The New Galaxy Tab S

Samsung has announced a new tablet family that presents a marked departure from the parade of mostly forgettable slates that the company has been pumping out the past few years. The company unveiled the Galaxy Tab S line of devices at a special event in NYC today. Available in July, the Tab S comes in both 8.4 ($399) and 10.5-inch ($499) flavors in white and titanium bronze finishes with LTE-equipped models in the pipeline.

The new Tab S boasts a Super AMOLED screen that’s really the star of the show. It has adaptive settings that change based on what kind of activity you’re doing on the tablet, much like many modern TVs, and will offer richer color rendering, better contrast and viewing angles, deeper blacks and more pure whites overall. Screen resolution is a whopping 2560×1600, which means that it can output better-than-HD-quality content, and it’ll do things like soften the intensity of the screen for reading while pumping it back up for blockbuster movies.

Along with the stunning new screen, Samsung’s other marquee features with the Galaxy Tab S are its physical specifications. The device is only 6.6mm thick (the iPad mini is 7.5mm for comparison) and the 8.4-inch version weighs only 10 ounces, while the 10.5-inch version doesn’t tip the scales too much more at 11 ounces total.

Other new hardware features include a built-in fingerprint scanner that can support up to three fingerprints per user and PayPal-facilitated mobile payments, as well as an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a 2.1 megapixel front-facing shooter for video chats. The processor is a 1.9GHz quad + 1.3GHz quad octa-core Samsung Exynos 5 processor, and there are 3GB of RAM on board. The tablets have 16GB of built-in storage, and boast up to 128GB of additional capacity via micro SD cards. Special accessories include the new Simple and Book Covers, which click into new button-style clicker fasteners on the tabs themselves.

Software features unique to the Samsung Galaxy Tab S include a specially designed version of Milk Music, the streaming service Samsung originally introduced for Galaxy smartphones; Quick Connect, a feature that lets it easily detect and share files with nearby devices like the Gear 2 smartwatch or Galaxy S5 smartphone; and SideSync 3.0 , which can share screens, windows, call forwarding and other options between Galaxy devices and PCs.

These look like a decent upgrade for Samsung’s tablet line, which hasn’t really had much in the way of dramatic design changes in recent memory. It’s still an Android tablet, with all that entails, and the ecosystem for Google-powered slates just isn’t up to snuff with iOS and the mature iPad software space.

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Google Said To Be Planning Android TV Launch At I/O In June

Google has long been rumored to replace Google TV with Android TV, a new crack at the home media market with more roots in its mobile OS and less of a separate focus, but a new report from GigaOM today suggests we’ll see it very soon; in fact, it’s apparently set to make its debut at the I/O developer conference taking place at the end of this month.

The Android TV platform isn’t a specific piece of hardware, GigaOM reports, but is instead a software effort that will work with gadgets from OEM partners including LG and others. The Android TV platform will focus on bringing online media services to televisions, the report claims, as well as Android-based gaming, at least initially, rather than concentrate on the ‘apps for TV’ angle that it espoused with Google TV.

Android TV sounds like it could have similar goals in mind to Amazon’s Fire TV; namely, it aims to be a single source platform for media regardless of the service where it’s found. A new UI layer called “Pano” internally is the core of the product, says GigaOM, and it presents show episodes and movies in a card-style interface right away when an Android TV device is launched. This means that content is foregrounded, rather than apps, so that users can get watching immediately instead of having to select a service first. The idea seems to be that service providers take a back seat to the actual content they house, which makes sense, given that those shows and movies are what consumers are after to begin with.

The gaming focus is also something that Google’s Android TV effort would share with Amazon’s approach, if this report is accurate. Overall, it really seems like Google is building an approach to television that incorporates the same kinds of lessons that Android itself said it learned about the current crop of smart TVs from users reviews on its site when building its media streamer. And of course, Android TV would extend the reach of the company’s mobile OS, into a medium where it’s easy to imagine the potential for advertising and search-based revenue.

Google has some advantages, including a likely willingness to work with OEMs to build this kind of thing directly into television sets as well as inexpensive Internet-enabled dongles. It’s interesting to see it move away from the app paradigm instead of embracing that, given Android’s software advantage there, but if the failure of smart TV devices to really take off before now indicates anything, it’s that users don’t want their TVs to be giant smartphones – they’re looking for something unique to the medium, and perhaps Android TV is exactly that.

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Fleksy Builds A Texting App For The Samsung Gear 2 Smartwatch

Virtual keyboard startup Fleksy is pumped about iOS 8 and working on a beta of its software now that Apple has relaxed the platform restrictions on third-party keyboards. But that hasn’t stopped it from giving love to other platforms, too. Today, Fleksy is unveiling a full-fledged SMS messaging app for the Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch, which runs on Tizen and syncs with a user’s Android phone to facilitate back-and-forth sending, composing and receiving of SMS texts.

This marks a departure from Fleksy’s usual focus on dedicated keyboard software; the app uses Fleksy’s unique keyboard design, of course, which uses algorithmic prediction to make it so that a user theoretically doesn’t even have to look at their wrist. The app goes beyond that, however, giving users a way to see how they might be able to take advantage of Fleksy’s tech to do real work and actually input text even on small wrist-mounted screens that seem best designed for reading off brief snippets of information.

“When the first smartphones came out, many thought typing on glass would be impossible,” Fleksy co-founder and COO Ioannis Verdelis explained via email. “Fleksy’s next generation technology is now redefining the use case and capabilities of wearable technology, and we are hugely excited to be doing this with Samsung Gear 2.”

Fleksy isn’t the only virtual keyboard company targeting devices beyond smartphones and tablets, of course; Toronto startup Minuum has released a smartwatch version of its own minimal keyboard software, too. Arguably it’s a bigger opportunity than traditional mobile devices. Interfaces for wearables and other connected gadgets don’t necessarily have default input methods yet, meaning a startup like Fleksy could win the lion’s share of consumer attention, whereas it’ll always be an uphill battle on platforms like iOS and Android where the default is often good enough for most.

The Fleksy Messenger app is available to Samsung Gear 2 owners via the Samsung Apps marketplace as a free download, and requires a Gear 2-compatible smartphone to work.

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Nike+ FuelBand App Now Available On Android

Nike has made the companion app for its FuelBand and FuelBand SE activity tracking wristbands available to Android users finally, two years after it first introduced the hardware and its apps for iOS devices. The companion app provides access to NikeFuel score information and history, and makes it so that your Android device can connect to your FuelBand as long as it has Bluetooth LE capabilities.

The app is compatible with Android Jelly Bean 4.3 and higher, and supports only a few handsets at launch, including the Samsung Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4, and Galaxy S5, as well as the HTC One, Nexus 5 and the Moto X. It’s an English-only app, and is available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany and Japan from the Play Store now.

Other features for those new to the FuelBand world include the ability to track and receive progress updates for a daily NikeFuel goal, tracking by individual session, the new “Win the Hour” feature for FuelBand SE owners, leaderboard with friends, syncing in the background over Bluetooth LE and more.

Nike’s FuelBand has been the subject of a host of recent reports, including one involving layoffs in the company’s hardware department that led many to believe it would end the FuelBand program altogether. The new app for Android indicates that at the very least, the company is continuing to work on software to support existing devices. In fact, its arrival on Android runs somewhat counter to recent reports that Nike and Apple would be working closely together on upcoming fitness-tracking initiatives, with Nike focusing on software while Apple tackles hardware, presumably through an upcoming wearable.

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Watch LG’s G3 Flagship Android Smartphone Launch Here

Watch LG’s G3 Flagship Android Smartphone Launch Here | TechCrunch #site-logo { background: url(http://s1.wp.com/wp-content/themes/vip/techcrunch-2013/images/logos/green.png) no-repeat !important; }if (!ads.isMobile()) {(function(window,$){window.TechCrunch.loader.on('tc_ads_wrapper_omniture', function(){if ( !window.ads.isAdPageSet ){if ( typeof window.adSetAdURL == 'function' ) {window.adSetAdURL('/wp-content/themes/vip/techcrunch-2013/_uac/adpage.html');window.ads.isAdPageSet = true;}}window.htmlAdWH('93312536', "LB", "LB", 'f', 'adsDivb4cfd8dc2f');});}(this,this.jQuery));}Got a tip? Let us know.MenuSearchNewsChannelsStartupsMobileGadgetsEnterpriseSocialEuropeAsiaCrunchGovTrendingYahooAppleFacebookTwitterGoogleMicrosoftNSATCTVShowsTCTV NewsCrunchWeekFly Or DieFoundationInside JobsTechCrunch GadgetsGillmor GangTC CribsTechCrunch MakersAll ShowsAll VideosEventsTechCrunch EventsDisruptCrunchiesMeetupsInternational City EventsHackathonHardware BattlefieldNews AboutGoogle I/O 2014CESSXSWWWDC 2014All EventsSearch TechCrunchSearch TechCrunchCrunchBaseFollow UsFacebookTwitterGoogle+LinkedInYoutubeRSSEmailMoreLinkedInYoutubeRSSEmailDeadlines Extended! To Apply to the Startup Battlefield

GadgetsWithings New Smartwatch Looks Good Playing DumbPebble Teams Up With Misfit For Standalone Activity Tracking AppSoundHawk Unveils A Wearable For Your Listening Pleasure, Partners With FoxConnBrowse more...AndroidSamsung Galaxy Tab S Review: Beautiful Screens Make These Tablets Magic For MoviesFirechat Enables Cross-Platform, Off-The-Grid Chat Between iOS And AndroidMicrosoft Has Just Launched Its First Android Smartphone, The Nokia X2Browse more...g3Panasonic Officially Announces G3 Micro Four Thirds Camera With Touch ControlBrowse more...LGThe LG LifeBand Touch And HeartRate Earphones Are The Wonder Twins Of Activity TrackersThis Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Apple/Beats, LG, And A $200 3D PrinterHere’s The First Hands-On Video Of Android Wear In Action (Spoiler: Lower Your Expectations)Browse more...Watch LG’s G3 Flagship Android Smartphone Launch HerePosted May 27, 2014 by Darrell Etherington (@drizzled)MoreAdd to Flipboard Magazine.Next StoryThe Next Open Source Battle Is Being Waged In The 3D Printing Industry

LG’s keynote event for the new G3 Android smartphone is about to get underway, so you can follow along live with the video stream above. The G3 has been leaked amply in the last little while, so it’s mostly a known quantity, and we’ve just posted a detailed profile if you prefer to read all about it that way.

window.TechCrunch.loader.on( 'gravity-beacon', function(){ window.tc_loadGravityScript( 'recirculation' ); } );AdvertisementAdvertisementif (!ads.isMobile()) {(function(window,$){window.TechCrunch.loader.on('tc_ads_wrapper_omniture', function(){if ( !window.ads.isAdPageSet ){if ( typeof window.adSetAdURL == 'function' ) {window.adSetAdURL('/wp-content/themes/vip/techcrunch-2013/_uac/adpage.html');window.ads.isAdPageSet = true;}}window.htmlAdWH('93312537', "RR", "RR", 'f', 'adsDiv5efaa68bfa');});}(this,this.jQuery));}CrunchBaseLGFounded1947  OverviewLG Electronics is a South Korean multinational company that produces electronic and telecommunications products. It is a member of the [LG Group](/company/lg) and is based in Yeouido-dong, Seoul.LG Electronics was launched in 1958 as [GoldStar](/company/goldstar), which produced Korea's first radios, TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, and air conditioners in the 1960s. It was renamed to LG Electronics …Websitehttp://www.lg.comFull profile for LGCrunchDailyLatest headlines delivered to you daily

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Microsoft Has Just Launched Its First Android Smartphone, The Nokia X2

Meet the Nokia X2, the first Android-based smartphone being made by Microsoft.

Yes, you read that right: Microsoft has just made a new Android-based handset.

It’s also still using the Nokia name at this point, despite previously saying it didn’t plan to trade on that name for long. (Evidently Microsoft’s marketing minions are still working on cooking up that “go forward” smartphone brand.)

The Nokia X2 is not the first Android device Microsoft owns, being as Redmond took over Nokia’s mobile making division in April – a move which brought the original Nokia X device under its wing. But some doubted whether Microsoft approved of Nokia’s Android experiment — and speculated that the line would be quickly culled by Redmond.

Nokia forked Android back in February to create a new smartphone platform, which it called the Nokia X Software Platform to slot in between — pricing-wise — its Series 40 based low-cost Asha devices and its Windows Phone powered Lumia smartphones.

At the time Nokia described the fork as a Lumia “feeder” — with then CEO Stephen Elop saying Nokia X devices would be a Trojan horse within Google’s ecosystem by introducing first time smartphone owners to Microsoft’s services rather than Mountain View’s.

Evidently Microsoft approves of this strategy after all — since it’s now building on that experiment with a follow-up device. Or at least it’s willing to give the fork a chance.

The Nokia X2 is priced at €99 before taxes and subsidies (a little up on the original Nokia X’s €89 price-tag), and has a slightly larger screen (4.3 inches vs 4 inches), along with a beefier processor (1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor vs 1GHz dual-core in the original device).

Otherwise it’s much the same fare, with the handset coming in a range of eye-popping colours and featuring Nokia’s blend of UI experiences — with a Windows Phone-esque tiles-based homescreen, combined with Nokia’s Fast Lane notifications screen, plus plentiful Microsoft (and Nokia) services preloaded, including Skype, Outlook, OneDrive, Mix Radio, Here Maps; and — of course — access to Android apps.

The X2 also supports dual-SIM — a popular feature in emerging markets where Microsoft will be hoping the Nokia X platform can better compete with other Android rivals than Windows Phone has been able to, thanks to those plentiful Android apps — and by reaching a lower price tag than entry-level Lumias can.

The Nokia X2 extends the original trio of devices on the platform which were the Nokia X, X+ and XL.

Below is a Microsoft demo video of the X2:

Wondering what Nokia has been up to since handing off its mobile-making division to Microsoft? It’s also been dabbling with Android — releasing an alternative homescreen for Google’s software platform called Z Launcher just last week.

In mobile, (almost) all roads now lead to Mountain View. So finding ways to build atop Android is the order of the day for mobile players of all stripes.

View the original article here

A Sneak Peek Into Android’s Future

Google is giving its apps and platforms, including Android, a big redesign, according to a recent report posted on Android Police, which backs up some things we had been hearing as well, but hadn’t fleshed out until now.

According to the new report, Google is working on a new design language focused on giving all Google apps a more unified look-and-feel across the web, Android and iOS.

But these visual changes are only the beginning of what’s in store for Android, we’ve learned.

You can see where Google is headed, design-wise, by looking at the card-style layout of something like Google Now, for example, or this leaked screenshot of a revamped Gmail app and mobile website.

The Android Police post indicates that this new design framework is code-named “Quantum Paper,” which they describe as “a hugely ambitious project, looking to unify and codify paradigms for visual, motion, and interaction design across all platforms, including web, Android, and iOS.”

We’ve also learned that Google is now starting to release Quantum to top developers and design firms, on a private one-on-one basis for testing purposes. (This could also explain how details are leaking out.)

If Quantum is an early version of Google’s new design guidelines, a related project called Polymer is a framework that can help developers to meet those guidelines.

Polymer offers a prototyping tool that lets you build responsive websites using predefined, customizable building blocks. (Google talked about Polymer at last year’s Google I/O. This video, around the 1:04:00 mark, has more.) Polymer is already here on GitHub, but it’s incomplete.

Internally, Quantum is being built with a different prototyping tool, which is used to make the user interface/user experience design for Android, but that tool will not be open-sourced like Polymer is.

We may hear more about Polymer at this year’s I/O conference, which we’ve heard will emphasize design. Sources say that Google is feeling the pressure of Apple getting better at infrastructure faster than it’s getting better at design.

The idea with Polymer is that developers could build reusable elements. For example, a  element would render whatever you’ve designated as a piechart whenever it’s called.

Already, Polymer can be seen influencing Google apps’ design, as in those screenshots of the Gmail makeover leaked earlier. The leaks show new iconography and design choices, some of which are already found in the Polymer designer tool.

Of course, to what extent or when any of this will come to Android, the platform itself, is still unknown.

But AndroidPolice pegs the arrival of the Quantum framework for Android when the “L” release debuts (we’re on K, or “KitKat,” now). At that point, there will be a new series of guidelines for developers called the “Quantum Paper Spec,” which will speak to overall approach and best uses for the various elements, they report.

We’ve also heard that unifying the design language across platforms is just the first step when it comes to the future of Android.

That part is about getting one universal look and feel for all Google platforms and services – and even those built by third-party developers, with the arrival of the new design guidelines. (And, as AndroidPolice points out, the framework will include interface, motion and interaction, as well.)

Much further down the road, though, the idea is to make over Android not only to resemble something like Google Now with a card-like design, but also to make Android itself more like Google Now.

This mobile assistant technology for Android and iOS today brings users information just when they need it, including things like weather, stock changes, sports scores, birthday reminders, traffic reports and more, as well as information gleaned from Google’s own services like Gmail and Google Calendar, such as meeting reminders, shipment notifications for packages, details about restaurant reservations or upcoming flights.

Google sees “Google Now” as having the potential to shape Android itself, potentially operating in a way that’s more visible to end users than it is today, where it’s typically activated with a swipe gesture, launched after a user taps on one of the Google Now notifications, or discovered via the Google Search app.

In a future version of Android, third-party apps will plug themselves into a Google Now-like architecture in order to surface the data they contain in Google Now’s eerily predictive way. Google Now works with Google’s own services and other data it can extract from your Gmail, like OpenTable reservations, for example.

Google currently works with third parties who markup their emails to users to be indexable by Google Now. But opening it up to third-party mobile app makers could make the assistant a better competitor to Apple’s Siri, which is also just now working on more third-party integrations for its own assistant, including, most recently, integration with Shazam for identifying songs.

If Google Now became more integrated into Android, the OS might function more like one of those contextual homescreen/launchers, like Aviate (acquired by Yahoo) or Cover, which place relevant apps on Android’s lockscreen.

The difference is that Google Now would not be just a layer on top of the OS, but a deeper part of the OS that’s capable of gathering data from the apps that run upon it and using that data to provide users with relevant, timely information and intelligent suggestions.

Step one, magical, creepy assistance; step two, magical, creepy ads?

There’s also some speculation out there that Polymer (the framework)’s role in this Google Now-ish version of Android could be to help Google better index mobile applications.

Today, mobile app indexing is just getting off the ground. Google initially introduced mobile deep linking this past fall, which allows Google search results to point directly to pages within an application. In April, it then expanded its lineup of supported apps.

It’s rumored that with Polymer, Google will be able to better index apps, as well, as its crawler technology would be trained to identify and understand the various Polymer elements. For example, if it saw a list element, it would know how to surface the list’s values in an indexable way. If this rumor is true, it could possibly hint at Google doing something in Android with hybrid apps, those that take advantage of web components (HTML5/JS/CSS). If they were more indexable by Google search engines, that would make sense.

This smarter, more “Google Now”-ish version of Android is not something that’s arriving any time soon from what we’ve heard. But one day, it could tie into and incorporate data and information from more than just your Google apps and your phone.

With Google’s smartwatch platform, and presence in your home (thanks to Nest), Google’s potential data sources — and therefore, its personalization capabilities — expand.

Image credits: AndroidPolice.com; Geek.com; Polymer-project.org, Geek.com again

IMAGE BY Bryce Durbin

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The Metal Framework Gives iOS A Lead In Gaming For The Foreseeable Future

Among the many announcements made during the two-hour keynote at WWDC yesterday, three were targeted specifically at game developers: SceneKit, new functions in SpriteKit, and Metal, a new framework that opens the door for vastly better performance in higher-end games on iOS, and does it in a way that Google simply can’t respond to because of the way Android works.

For those without a technical background, Metal offers developers a set of functions that are “closer to the metal” than OpenGL, the application programming interface traditionally used on iOS (and Mac, Android, and game consoles not made by Microsoft). That means that they have more direct control over the graphics hardware, enabling faster performance because there’s less overhead for the system to deal with.

In practical terms, this won’t mean much for most developers — only those who really need to get into the guts of their code to boost graphics performance need be concerned. But there’s an entire industry built up around creating “game engines” for developers so that they don’t have to rebuild the wheel every time they start a new project. Getting those developers interested is how Apple gets Metal into most iOS games.

As it turns out, some of those teams have already started building Metal into their engines. Yesterday, Unity3D rendering guru Aras Pranckevicius  tweeted that building Metal into the company’s engine was the “fastest port to brand new 3D API ever”:

Playing around with Apple #Metal was super fun btw. Fastest port to brand new 3D API ever. #unity3d—
Aras Pranckevicius (@aras_p) June 02, 2014

On his blog, iOS developers and startup consultant Nat Brown points out that this won’t mean that games aren’t going to be built for Android just because developers can get better performance on iOS through Metal. Most won’t even touch it, because it’ll be baked into the tools they use to make their games.

But gamers might start to notice when games built for the platform start to offer significantly better graphics:

That said, of the class of very advanced programmers who will jump on Metal are… the teams that maintain the game engines, frameworks, and toolchains used by 95% (perhaps 99%) of the games for mobile. Unity3D, Unreal Engine, and a few others simply dominate mobile gaming on both iOS and Android and have traditionally targeted a relatively common core of OpenGL ES for both platforms.

Due to this I find it unlikely that the API itself will act to lock anybody into iOS from a classic API perspective – everybody is using an engine or framework and indeed tools much higher up the value chain. But… Metal could very well offer an iOS performance lock-in on mobile.

While there are equivalents of the Metal framework available on other platforms — Mantle on AMD-made graphics chips, and DirectX 12 from Microsoft for Windows and the Xbox platform — neither company has complete control of the ecosystem for which they are building, which complicates things and limits the extent to which they can optimize for specific hardware.

After all, AMD makes a wide variety of graphics cores that can be used in a nearly infinite range of PC hardware configurations, while DirectX has to work with the same range of CPU, RAM, etc., while also accounting for graphics chips from AMD, nVidia and Intel.

That means these frameworks simply can’t optimize for specific hardware in the same way that Apple can, as Anandtech’s Ryan Smith noted this morning:

Of the other low-level APIs we’ve seen so far – AMD’s Mantle and Microsoft’s DirectX 12 – the former is an API established by a hardware vendor who has to ride on top of other companies CPUs and OSes, and the latter is an OS vendor who has to ride on top of third party CPUs and GPUs. Apple on the other hand is in the enviable position of being as close as anyone can be to offering a fully vertical ecosystem. Apple designs their own CPUs, configures their own SoCs, and writes their own OS. The only portion of the chain that Apple doesn’t control is the GPU, and even then the company has exclusively used Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR GPUs for the last 7 years with no signs of this changing.

With the iPhone 5s, iPad Air, and iPad mini all running on the same A7 system-on-a-chip — and this year’s models presumably sharing the A8 — Metal can be optimized specifically for one set of hardware and get the same gains across its range of mobile devices.

While the diversity of Android handsets comes with its own advantages, Google simply can’t create a Metal equivalent that optimizes for every device manufacturer’s hardware. As gamers’ expectations for what their phones are capable of evolve, it’ll be interesting to see how the introduction of Metal shapes the mobile gaming landscape.

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