Google I/O 2013: Galaxy S4 with ‘pure’ Android, Hangouts and everything else

by Shruti Dhapola

Google’s I/O conference has begun in San Francisco and the keynote address happened late last night India time. While Google did not show off a new version of Android or a new Nexus 7 or a new smartphone, it has made significant changes to a lot of its existing products. We take a quick look at the key things that Google showcased.

Google Hangouts: Rumours of a unified chat were true and the new service is an updated Hangouts service. If you have an Android device, it will be replacing Google Talk, Google Plus Messenger etc, on your smartphone. Google Hangouts will let you make  video calls, voice calls, send messages, emoji style emoticons, photos and video messages. It also comes with conference call feature as you can add up to 10 friends on a video call. The app is cross-platform and available on your desktop, your iOS devices, and of course Android.

For Android users, you might have to go to the Google Play Store on a desktop to hit update and the Hangouts will replace Talk.

Samsung Galaxy S4 with Stock Android: Think Samsung’s Touch Wiz is crap and wish you could get the stock Google Nexus Experience on an S4? Well Google is now offering that. The Google Nexus Samsung will get updates regularly and will be sold from the Play Store.

The bad part: will cost $649. This is not in sync with Google’s usually aggressive pricing policy, and is being seen more as an unwillingness on the part of Samsung to reduce the price of the S4. Which makes sense, if you think about it.

AFP

Google Plus: As expected Google has significantly revamped its ‘social network’, Google Plus. Google Plus has a new stream with a multi-stream design which can be customised. There are lovely cards which can be flipped and faded out.

Google Plus is also going Twitter’s way, with related hashtags. It sounds actually, like a combination of Google search, Google Goggles and Twitter. “We’ll analyze the contents of a post and Google will add a related hashtag”, said Google’s Vice President Vic Gundotra.

Basically Google Plus will look at your posts and photos and recognise things like Google Goggles does, hashtag them automatically, and then you can click on those hashtags and get more information about what has been tagged. You can turn off the hashtags of course, if you think that its just too creepy. The update is across platforms and devices.

Photos on Google Plus have got instant uploads and auto adjustments called Awesome. Really its called Awesome. There is one feature that will automatically backup photos taken on smartphones, and send them to Google’s cloud storage but you can turn it off. Google also announced a bunch of new tools like a highlight tool that will strip out duplicates, an airbrush tool called image softener and improves your photos automatically, based on your camera. The Awesome feature lets you create GIFs. Pretty awesome, eh?

Google Search: New additions to Google’s Knowledge Graph include trend charts. Like for example India’s population will show with a graph and it will also offer comparative statistics. So if what you asked for was ‘India’s population’ it will also show you how India’s population compares to the populations of China and the US.

Knowledge Graph will also be available in Polish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.   Not only will Google answer the question you ask, but users will also get an answer to the next few follow-up questions people often ask.

Conversing with Google Search on your Desktop: Soon users will be able to talk to their computers and not just iPads, iPhones and Android device and get answers for their questions without having to type. And you can use ‘regular’ language, without having to use keywords. So you can use generally vague language like ‘it’ and ‘here’ that AI normally finds it hard to pick up on.

Google Now also got a serious update reminders  which will let you save things to remember later, and users can actually pick a time or place to trigger those reminders. Again all of these changes are across platforms like iOS

Google Maps: This is another Google Product that got a serious upgrade. Currently the features are invited based. Google Maps is also coming to iPad. Some of the features include:

Each click will draw new maps highlighting the key recommendations that you have chosen. Google is hoping for users to give more data on their home, work, favourite restaurants, etc to highlight a map that suits you.

Finding local places is now easiers, with search results being labeled directly on the map with brief place descriptions and icons that highlight business categories. Of course its all linked to your Google Plus circles as well.  Google Maps also gets some better imagery and will offer give users 3D access on the Chrome browser.

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