OnePlus offering 10% discount to students

For a lot of folks, it’s back to school season. Some may have already started, while others are gearing up to go back. In light of that, OnePlus is offering a discount to students.

It’s called the OnePlus Student Program, and it’s pretty straightforward: get 10% off on any order placed from OnePlus’s online shop. To be eligible for the discount you’ll need to confirm you are a student through a site called Student Beans. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to buy one OnePlus 5 (and only one per order) or any other product and get that 10% discount. This discount brings your 128GB OnePlus 5 down to just $486.

It’s certainly worth taking a look at if you’re a student and are in the market for a new phone. Who’s planning on taking advantage of the deal?

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Android and Me 12:51 AM No comments

YouTube gets a new logo and adds new features to mobile app

The YouTube logo has been the same for quite some time, but everything is eventual, so a change has finally arrived.

Today YouTube officially announced several updates, including a new logo, the dark theme finally rolling out to everyone in a new desktop experience, and new features for mobile users. So, first thing’s first: the new logo. YouTube is dropping the stylized “Tube” and going for a more simple logo. The iconic play image is now sitting off to the side.

Desktop, meanwhile, is adopting Material Design, which many Android users are familiar with by now. The team says it should make navigating the desktop site more intuitive and everything should look cleaner. Perhaps most importantly, though, the dark theme that has been available for a limited number of people is now rolling out to everyone, just like the new Material Design experience in general.

The mobile app is seeing some changes and new features, too. There will be a new gesture that lets users swipe to the left to watch a previous video or swipe to the right to watch a new video. Mobile users will be able to change the speed of videos, too, from slower to faster depending on what they want.

The mobile app will also quickly adapt the viewing experience based on orientation. “Soon, the YouTube player will seamlessly change shape to match the video format you’re watching, such as vertical, square or horizontal,” says YouTube.

Quite a few changes, to say the least.

The new experiences are rolling out now.

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Android and Me 12:06 AM No comments

Google Maps adds even more parking features

Google Maps isn’t just about getting you to where you want/need to go, but also a way to find out what you should do when you get there, and an easy way to remember where you parked when you arrive. And now Google Maps is getting even more features when it comes to parking your car.

Google is making it easier to find a place to park thanks to a new feature aptly called “Find Parking.” The feature will pop up when you pick a destination and it will let you see a list of nearby parking sites, including garages and lots.

Google Maps will then navigate you to the parking area you pick and give you walking directions from the lot or garage to your final destination.

This new feature is only available on Android for now, and it’s available in the following cities in the United States: Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas/Fort Worth, DC, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, and Tampa.

Google is also expanding the parking difficulty icon, which it added to the Google Maps for Android and iOS not too long ago, to more than 20 different cities across the globe. Here are the new additions: Alicante, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Cologne, Darmstadt, Dusseldorf, London, Madrid, Malaga, Manchester, Milan, Montreal, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Toronto, Valencia, and Vancouver.

What do you think of the new parking features?

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Android and Me 12:06 AM No comments

YouTube enables desktop Material Design interface for everyone, reveals new logo

Google started testing a Material Design makeover for the desktop YouTube site over a year ago. The design went into open beta a few months ago, and now Google is finally flipping the switch for everyone. Also, YouTube has a new logo.

The interface hasn't changed since the public beta went live, but if you've never used it, the new site heavily relies on Google's Polymer framework to deliver a fast and reliable experience.

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YouTube enables desktop Material Design interface for everyone, reveals new logo was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

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Apps , Apps/Games – Android Police – Android News , Games , Phones , Tablets 11:04 PM No comments

Google launches ARCore for augmented reality experiences

Google is no a stranger to augmented reality by any means thanks to Project Tango, but that project might not have been the perfect match for the general consumer. Another project was inevitable, and today Google unveiled just that.

It’s called ARCore, and it appears that to be a direct response to Apple’s ARKit augmented reality platform. ARCore is an AR software development kit (SDK), and it essentially draws from all of the Project Tango core elements and puts them into phones that don’t require all of the Tango sensors. This is Google’s AR experience for “normal phones.”

ARCore is meant to put AR creations right in front of you, similar to how digital pocket monsters appear in the popular AR game Pokémon GO. The camera on the back of your phone will make it possible to detect flat surfaces and let users place AR objects into the world as they see fit. And thanks to the built-in motions sensors in the phone, users will be able to walk around their AR content in real-time.

ARCore will also make use of the light sensors, so there will be dynamic shading and lighting, so those AR objects can have shadows while they are integrated with the real world.

ARCore is already seeing support from Unity and Unreal Engine, along with plenty of other developers out there in the world. Google is obviously supporting the platform, as are Niantic (the folks behind the aforementioned Pokémon game). ARCore even supports browsers, so users can experience the technology from inside a browser.

Google is launching ARCore today, and it will be available with preview experiments for the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Google Pixel phones. Of course, support for other devices is on the way, with device manufacturers like Huawei and LG expected to arrive on the scene soon. You’ll need a handset running Android 7.0 or higher to get ARCore to work.

Who’s excited for more augmented reality experiences?

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Android and Me 11:01 PM No comments

Amazon Echo gets multi-room audio

Amazon is gifting Echo owners with a new feature.

Starting today, Amazon Echo owners can use multi-room audio on their devices. This feature enables Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show owners to synchronize their music playback across multiple devices in different rooms.

To enable multi-room audio on your Echo devices, go into your Alexa app and group together two or more Echo devices, then name that group something like “downstairs”. You can then tell your Echo device “Alexa, play Smash Mouth downstairs” and playback will begin.

Amazon says that multi-room audio is supported for Amazon Music, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and Pandora to start. Support for Spotify and SiriusXM is coming soon.

Also announced today is Amazon’s Connected Speaker APIs, which will let you use Alexa to control connected audio systems. Amazon is working with companies like Sonos, Bose, Sound United, and Samsung on this feature.

Multi-room audio is a pretty big addition for the Amazon Echo. With it, you can fill your house with tunes and listen to them as you move from room to room, all without having to carry headphones or any other device with you.

If you need a new Echo device or two to build out your new multi-room audio setup, you can get an Echo Dot for $44.99 (a $5 discount) or an Echo Show for $229.99. While the standard Echo is sold out, you can get a refurbished Echo for $129.99, which is $50 off the price of a new Echo.

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Android and Me 11:01 PM No comments

Biliscreen is an app that could use selfies to to help diagnose pancreatic cancer

It may seem unthinkable that the much maligned 'selfie', a photo of oneself taken by oneself, could be used in any sort of meaningful, useful way. Yet that's exactly what is being proposed by researchers at from the University of Washington. They've developed an app called Biliscreen which could utilize selfies, as well as computer vision algorithms and machine learning tools, as a method of screening for pancreatic cancer.

For anyone who takes things too literally, let's be clear; this doesn't involve trying to take a snap of your own pancreas with your smartphone.

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Biliscreen is an app that could use selfies to to help diagnose pancreatic cancer was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

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Apps , Apps/Games – Android Police – Android News , Games , Phones , Tablets 10:44 PM No comments

ARCore: Augmented reality at Android scale

Posted by Dave Burke, VP, Android Engineering

With more than two billion active devices, Android is the largest mobile platform in the world. And for the past nine years, we've worked to create a rich set of tools, frameworks and APIs that deliver developers' creations to people everywhere. Today, we're releasing a preview of a new software development kit (SDK) called ARCore. It brings augmented reality capabilities to existing and future Android phones. Developers can start experimenting with it right now.

We've been developing the fundamental technologies that power mobile AR over the last three years with Tango, and ARCore is built on that work. But, it works without any additional hardware, which means it can scale across the Android ecosystem. ARCore will run on millions of devices, starting today with the Pixel and Samsung's S8, running 7.0 Nougat and above. We're targeting 100 million devices at the end of the preview. We're working with manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, LG, ASUS and others to make this possible with a consistent bar for quality and high performance.

ARCore works with Java/OpenGL, Unity and Unreal and focuses on three things:

• Motion tracking: Using the phone's camera to observe feature points in the room and IMU sensor data, ARCore determines both the position and orientation (pose) of the phone as it moves. Virtual objects remain accurately placed.
• Environmental understanding: It's common for AR objects to be placed on a floor or a table. ARCore can detect horizontal surfaces using the same feature points it uses for motion tracking.
• Light estimation: ARCore observes the ambient light in the environment and makes it possible for developers to light virtual objects in ways that match their surroundings, making their appearance even more realistic.

Alongside ARCore, we've been investing in apps and services which will further support developers in creating great AR experiences. We built Blocks and Tilt Brush to make it easy for anyone to quickly create great 3D content for use in AR apps. As we mentioned at I/O, we're also working on Visual Positioning Service (VPS), a service which will enable world scale AR experiences well beyond a tabletop. And we think the Web will be a critical component of the future of AR, so we're also releasing prototype browsers for web developers so they can start experimenting with AR, too. These custom browsers allow developers to create AR-enhanced websites and run them on both Android/ARCore and iOS/ARKit.

ARCore is our next step in bringing AR to everyone, and we'll have more to share later this year. Let us know what you think through GitHub, and check out our new AR Experiments showcase where you can find some fun examples of what's possible. Show us what you build on social media with #ARCore; we'll be resharing some of our favorites.

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Android Developers Blog 10:18 PM No comments