According to the sources close to the Wall Street Journal, Google is in talks with major publishers like Time Inc., Condé Nast and Hearst Corp. to discuss the launch of a digital newsstand for magazines and newspapers that would run on the Android mobile operating system. The move, still in its early planning stages, would be Google’s direct answer to Apple, which has long been at the center of digital newsstand rumors and iTunes recurring subscription speculations. Google’s newsstand, either based on the existing Market or a new infrastructure, would allow Android users to read digital content on the go. Rumors point out to Google willing to share subscribers’ data with publishers. Read more
Posts tagged with "google"
Google Planning Digital Newsstand, Apple To Launch Subscriptions “Early This Year”
Why Apple Doesn’t Care About The $75 Android Phone
An article published by Seth Weintraub over at Fortune last week made the rounds of the Internet detailing how the Android platform will “explode” next year thanks to relatively low-cost components. Broadcom has announced a new 3G HSDPA chipset called BCM2157 that allows for popular specs like Bluetooth, GPS, dual core ARM processors, 5MP cameras and capacitive displays. Broadcom is marketing this new chipset to Android OEMs. And the best part, according to Handset Line of Business for Broadcom Jim Tran? Phones built on the new chipset will retail under $100, possibly even touching the $75 price point. And we’re talking about retail prices of unsubsidized phones. That would allow “average users” who don’t normally spend hundreds of dollars on smartphone to buy a high-end Android phone and runs apps on it. Read more
Mailboxes Comes Back To Offer The Best Gmail Wrapper for iPad
In the past months, I’ve tried a lot of iPad apps to access multiple Gmail accounts. Sure, I could use Apple’s Mail app to manage them. The problem is, Apple Mail doesn’t let me access most of the features of Gmail and I love the Gmail web UI for iPad. Also, Google has been busy updating Gmail to make it play nicer with mobile devices (smoother scrolling, better selections in the left panel) and these native “wrappers” provide a way to quickly switch between accounts with the tap of a button.
So far I’ve tried Mailboxes, MailWrangler, MultiG and Mailroom on the iPhone. On the Mac I use Mailplane (which is simply amazing) and on the tablet I’ve sticked with MultiG for several weeks. Until Google changed something on its backend, MultiG stopped working and the developer didn’t release an update. I had to change, and I went back to Apple Mail because of all the alternatives I had tested none of them managed to top the excellence of MultiG. Read more
Google Voice App Now Works On The iPad and iPod Touch
One month after the release of the official Google Voice app in the App Store, here comes an updated version that works both on the iPad and iPod Touch. Announced by Google a few minutes ago, the new Google Voice app has been updated to work on non-iPhone devices allowing you to send and receive text messages. As you can guess, no – you can’t make cellular calls on the iPod Touch.
Still, the Google Voice team introduced a new functionality called Click2Call which lets you initiate calls with your phones. On your iPad or iPod Touch, tap on the “call” button and select which phone you want to ring. It’s a very easy way to let Google Voice call your phone and then connect the call to a contact’s number.
Among other improvements and bug fixes, text forwarding is now disabled by default when you activate push notifications so you don’t get multiple and annoying dialogue boxes. You can now set a “Do Not Disturb” status in the settings, access you Address Book contacts from a built-in Contacts tab, tap & hold on inbox messages to delete or archive. Nice. I’m pretty sure MacStories’ own Cody Fink (who’s a die-hard iPod Touch user) is going to love this.
Google Voice app is, as usual, free in the App Store.
Google Instant for Mobile Now Available Worldwide
Back in November Google announced Instant for Mobile, the same instant search for the desktop ported to iOS and Android devices. Instant for Mobile, though, was unveiled as beta and made available only in the U.S. with searches in English language. Google promised Instant for mobile would be released internationally in the coming weeks.
With a brief post on the company’s blog, today Google announced the global release of Instant for mobile, now available in 28 languages and 40 countries worldwide. To use the feature, users will need to run a device with iOS 4 or Android 2.2 and above, visit google.com and tap on the Instant link below the search box to activate it.
In case you missed it, check out Google’s promo video for Instant below.
Move Your Browser Tabs Across Mac and iOS Devices
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to worry to manually trigger any sync process. Everything would happen in the background, in your local wireless network or over-the-air, and manual sync would be an option to customize contents and options. In today’s world, and especially if we happen to have multiple iOS devices, we’re stuck with cables and fragmented databases.
Several developers are trying to put an end to this by supporting online sync services such as Dropbox in their mobile apps, some devs are even trying to do this on the desktop. Apple, on the other hand, still forces you to sync music, apps and movies with the cable, in iTunes, on your computer. Read more
Official Google Books iOS App Goes Live
Google launched its official eBook store earlier today, and promised an official iOS app for iPhone and iPad would follow in a few hours. The app is now available for free in iTunes here.
Google Books allows you to check on Google’s 2 million book catalogue and download ebooks to read them on your iPhone and iPad. The app comes with the same page turning animations of Apple’s iBooks, but the overall interface is quite different and similar to Google’s standard color schemes. Google Books features an offline reading mode to read books when you don’t have an active internet connection (useful on WiFi iPads when on the go), possibility to search within a book and adjust a font’s size, a night reading mode.
Surprisingly enough, the app doesn’t seem to support landscape mode on the iPad. I found the scrubber at the bottom to be particularly useful to jump between chapters of a book. Last, the app lets you download 3 books for free: “Pride and Prejudice”, “Frankeinstein, or, The Modern Prometeus” and “Wonderful Stories for Children”.
Check out the full changelog and more screenshots below.
Mozilla Evangelist Asks Google and Apple To Stop Being Evil
Asa Dotzler isn’t happy about the behavior of software giants like Google, Apple and Microsoft. In fact, Mozilla evangelist and co-founder of the Spread Firefox project in 2004 thinks they all should stop being evil. How so? He’s tired of finding unwanted plug-ins installed in Firefox by software such as iTunes, Windows Live and Google Earth.
Why do Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others think that it is an OK practice to add plug-ins to Firefox when I’m installing their software packages. When I installed iTunes, in order to manage my music collection and sync to my iPod, why did Apple think it was OK to add the iTunes Application Detector plug-in to my Firefox web browser without asking me? Why did Microsoft think it was OK to sneak their Windows Live Photo Gallery or Office Live Plug-in for Firefox into my browser (presumably) when I installed Microsoft Office? What makes Google think it’s reasonable behavior for them to slip a Google Update plug-in into Firefox when I installed Google Earth or Google Chrome (not sure which one caused this) without asking me first?
Google Docs Editing Finally Comes to iPhone and iPad
Finally, Google has announced that they’ll roll out Docs editing for mobile devices in the next few days. The feature, first announced several weeks ago but never actually deployed, is now ready to go for Android and iOS devices. All you have to do to edit a document on a mobile browser (including the iPad) is pressing the Edit button in Google Docs. That’s it.
In the next few days, we’re rolling this out to English-language users around the world on Android with Froyo (version 2.2) and on iOS devices (version 3.0+) including the iPad. We’ll be adding support for other languages soon. And as before, we also support editing of spreadsheets from your mobile device’s browser.
Well done, Google. A simple implementation we were all waiting for. Check out the promo video below. Read more