Tag: Google

Project Fi, Google’s MVNO mobile service, has added several new countries where their low cost international usage is provided.  The list is now over 170 countries strong with the latest addition of 73 countries announced today.  In these countries, Fi users will have the same costs as they do at home, which is $10 per GB of usage.  Text messaging is unlimited as part of the package and voice calls are a low .20 Cents per minute.

Some of the new countries that Project Fi users can travel to and get coverage include:

• Algeria
• Armenia
• Bangledesh
• Laos
• Madagascar
• Mongolia
• Niger
• Oman
• Uganda

You can see the complete list of countries in the announcement made by Fi today.

For the third month in a row, Google has begun rolling out menu tweaks to some of the G Suite apps today.  The update that is rolling out today impacts Google Docs and Google Sheets online and will be coming to all G Suite customers over the course of the next week or two.

Like the updates from last month, these tweaks are aimed at making navigation within Google Docs and Google Sheets easier by clarifying what a function does.  These are all visual changes and not changes in function.

Four years after being acquired by Google, Nest has now become merged into the Google hardware team.  The announcement came today from Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz and it made it clear that the goal of merging the teams was to accelerate smart home technologies with Google AI at the heart of that innovation.

By working together, we’ll continue to combine hardware, software and services to create a home that’s safer, friendlier to the environment, smarter and even helps you save money—built with Google’s artificial intelligence and the Assistant at the core.

While details on when the full merging of teams would be complete, the announcement highlighted that the teams already work very closely together, indicating it would be in short order.

Over the course of the next few days, a new version of Google+ will be rolling out to Android users.  While visually the app won’t look much different than it does today, Google’s Leo Deegan has taken to the community site to let everyone know what to expect.  Given he is the lead engineer of G+, he should know.

Though it very closely resembles the current app, this new version is the culmination of a complete rewrite of many core features using Google’s latest Android app infrastructure which will allow our Android team to build new features on a modern tech stack.

During the rewrite, we were able to build in some subtle updates. For instance, stream rendering and scrolling have been improved, the photo lightbox has been redesigned, comment options slide up from a bottom sheet, and grey-spammed comments are now viewable by post authors.

All of these changes point to a smoother experience overall with the community app.

A new update to the Google Backup & Sync app for MacOS and Windows 10 is rolling out that brings a lot of fixes and a few new features.  The updated build is version 3.39 for those keeping score at home.  This new build was released on February 1st so it is likely that you already have it installed as Google pushes updates to Backup & Sync behind the scenes.

For those who use Network-Attached Storage (NAS), this update is an important one for you as it is finally supported.  You can now backup files and folders stored on a NAS to your Google Drive.  The folder has to be mounted and you will be able to add a NAS folder from the My Computer section of Google Backup & Sync.

An update to the Google app on Android Wear has resolved a significant bug with the OK Google detection on wearables.  The issue was that if you had OK Google detection enabled on your watch, overall performance of the watch would be impacted.  Watches were either laggy or they would stutter through things as you navigated the watch interface.

This seems to have been fixed with the 7.18.50 release of the Google app for Android Wear.  According to Android Police, once you have this update, you should be able to turn on the OK Google detection and not impact the overall performance of your watch.