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.

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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.

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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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