#GWB - Android Feature Drop: Diese neuen Funktionen werden jetzt für viele Smartphone-Nutzer ausgerollt (Galerie) - https://www.googlewatchblog.de/2025/03/android-feature-drop-mar2025/ #androidfeaturedrop #android #Google
#AndroidFeatureDrop
#GWB - Android Feature Drop: Google bringt neue Funktionen auf viele Smartphones – Rollout beginnt (Screenshots) - https://www.googlewatchblog.de/2024/12/android-feature-drop-rollout-q424-rollout/ #androidfeaturedrop #android #Google
Weekly output: AT&T’s wireless backup to AT&T’s fiber, new Android features, court approves TikTok commercial ban
This year has only two full work weeks left and CES is only four weeks away–and somehow I have yet to get a cold call from a publicist about the annual gadget gathering in Las Vegas. I’m sure that I just jinxed myself with that last statement.
12/2/2024: AT&T Rolls Out Free ‘Internet Backup’ Wireless Service for Fiber Customers, PCMag
I’m pretty sure that the only times our Verizon Fios fiber-optic connection has dropped since we had it set up in 2010 involved power outages, so I used some of this post to remind readers that AT&T fiber subscribers probably won’t ever need this backup connectivity.
12/5/2024: Latest Android Feature Drop Upgrades Speech to Text, Images to Words, More, PCMag
Of all the features in this latest round of Android feature updates, the QR code media-sharing shortcut seems like the one I’ll use most often.
12/6/2024: Appeals Court Sides With US Government on Pending TikTok Commercial Ban, PCMag
I hadn’t planned on spending half of Friday writing up the opinion from that Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that agreed with most of the government’s arguments about the need to impose a ban on app-store and Internet-hosting transactions with TikTok, but I did know that a court ruling was coming at some point, and at least this one landed on a day that allowed me some time to digest it.
#AndroidFeatureDrop #ATTFiber #ATTInternetBackup #ChinaSpying #ChineseSocialMedia #fiberBroadband #PixelDrop #TikTok #TikTokBan #TikTokCourtRuling
After a great week in Berlin for IFA–with most of my travel expenses covered by the organizers of that tech trade show as part of their usual accommodation for a group of invited U.S. journalists and analysts–I’ve got Monday at home before I fly to Chicago Tuesday to moderate a panel discussion at the robotics firm Vention’s Demo Day. Then Wednesday I fly from there to Orlando to cover the early-Thursday-morning launch of AST SpaceMobile’s first set of BlueBird phone-broadband satellites. I realize that this scheduling may look a little crazy, but I could not pass up a chance to see a Falcon 9 liftoff from six miles away.
9/3/2024: How Aurora is finding its own lane on the road to autonomous trucking, Fast Company
This story had a long editorial on-ramp–I made my day trip to Dallas to visit Aurora at the end of July, then needed another week to talk to a couple of industry analysts, then was out of town for Black Hat and some quasi-vacation time, then had to set the story aside for work on a Fast Co. project with a more defined deadline, then finally filed the piece in late August. And then we had to correct a detail in the story after publication when Aurora clarified to me that their scenario of an autonomous truck running from Long Beach to Dallas would require a refueling stop.
9/3/2024: ‘Lunar Lake’ Leaves the Launch Pad: Intel Unveils Core Ultra 2 Laptop Chips at IFA, PCMag
PCMag asked if I could fly out to Berlin a day early to cover Intel’s event unveiling this new line of laptop processors, and I was happy to oblige–even if describing the finer points of CPU architectures represented a stretch from my usual coverage.
9/3/2024: Google Drops 5 New Android Features As It Ships Android 15 Source Code, PCMag
I wrote this in advance off an embargoed copies of Google’s blog posts and filed it last weekend to a) avoid having this hanging over my head during IFA, and b) stick the work on my August invoice.
9/5/2024: Court to Internet Archive: You Can’t Turn Printed Books Into Online E-Book Loans, PCMag
Having a morning with no must-attend IFA events booked left me time to digest this court ruling shutting down the Internet Archive’s “Controlled Digital Lending” project and have an explainer filed by the time my editor in New York was logging on.
9/7/2024: Boeing’s Starliner Touches Down Unscathed But Uncrewed, PCMag
Time zones worked in my favor again when Starliner landed in New Mexico just after 6 a.m. Central European time, allowing me to have a writeup done before I headed downstairs for breakfast.
9/7/2024: Cordless Blender? ‘Ki’ Standard Aims to Unplug Small Kitchen Gadgets, PCMag
After getting an in-person pitch for this cordless-power standard, I’m more convinced that it has a future as an extra feature on future induction cooktops than as something embedded below countertops.
9/8/2024: Beyond AirTags: 3 Unique Accessories You Can Track With Apple’s ‘Find My’ Network, PCMag
I started writing this roundup late Saturday afternoon, then finished it Saturday night after dinner–which meant I missed the chance to go out for drinks with some of my fellow IFA travelers, but I did not want to have to finish this post on the flight home in addition to the other writing I had to do from a chair in the sky.
#Android15 #AndroidFeatureDrop #Aurora #autonomousTrucking #Berlin #Boeing #ControlledDigitalLending #copyright #cordlessCharging #cordlessPower #CST100 #ESR #FindMy #HachetteVInternetArchive #IFA #Intel #IntelCoreUltraSeries2 #InternetArchive #Ki #laptopProcessors #LunarLake #Qi #Satechi #Starliner #TwelveSouth
The end of May coinciding with the end of a four-day workweek was a pleasant bonus of Memorial Day’s spot on the calendar this year. Another bonus: I had my last client-paid copy for the month filed by 2:09 p.m. Friday.
Patreon readers got one other post, a rant about the woeful UX of a Hilton offer for double points on upcoming hotel stays. That didn’t get published until almost 9 p.m. on Friday–which is still a lot better than the filing frenzy I’ve exhibited in the final minutes of the final days of other months.
5/28/2024: T-Mobile to Buy Regional Carrier UScellular, PCMag
I didn’t notice the name on the credit of the photo of a T-Mobile flag on a golf course that I’d selected from Getty Images to illustrate this post until I copied that metadata to paste into PCMag’s CMS. That’s when I realized that my Georgetown Voice friend Darren Carroll, a seriously talented photographer, had taken that shot during an idle moment at a golf tournament sponsored by the carrier.
Screenshot
5/28/2024: A Lot of Websites Ask You About Cookies. How Should You Answer?, AARP
My editor at AARP asked if I could write an explainer about those dialogs you see on so many pages that suggest, ask, implore or assume that you’re okay with the site–and, in most cases, advertising networks–writing information about your visit to small text files saved on your device. After talking to numerous experts, I continue to think that your best response to those dialogs, should you not want to be tracked by advertisers, is to use a browser like Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge and Mozilla’s Firefox that will block ad-network trackers by default.
5/29/2024: Verizon Enlists AST SpaceMobile to Kill Off Its US Dead Zones, PCMag
Verizon’s apparent disinterest in using low-Earth-orbit satellites to provide at least emergency-level coverage in dead zones was looking increasingly weird. Then the carrier signed up the same satellite operator as AT&T to provide that backup connectivity, although it seems to be more conservative in its sales pitch than AT&T.
5/30/2024: Android Update Will Let You Fix Dumb Texting Typos (to Other Android Users), PCMag
I’ve yet to get the update to Google’s Messages app that enables this editing of sent RCS messages–assuming the recipients also have the same update installed–so I cannot yet report on how satisfying it might feel to fix a text typo.
5/30/2024: IRS Direct File App to Return for 2025, Welcome Taxpayers in More States, PCMag
This was one bit of news that I didn’t expect to see coming this week, but with the information-security conference I was attending not yielding any obvious breaking news, I jumped on the chance to write this up instead. And to point out to readers that while the IRS may call this rollout of its free tax-prep app “permanent,” you have to expect that voters returning convicted felon Donald Trump to the White House would soon be followed by Trump scrapping this program.
5/31/2024: FCC: It’s Game Over for Affordable Broadband Connectivity Program, PCMag
The official end of the ACP and the $30 monthly discounts on broadband it provided for more than 20 million American households led to my editors asking me to cover this program one more time.
#ACP #AffordableConnectivityProgram #AndroidFeatureDrop #ASTSpaceMobile #cookies #DirectFile #IRS #RCS #satelliteBroadband #TMobile #taxPrepSoftware #textingTypo #trackingCookies #USCellular #UScellular #verizon
I have only two days this upcoming workweek that aren’t blocked off completely, Monday and Thursday. Tuesday I’ll be working the Virginia primary election (hard to believe it’s been almost four years since my first long day as a poll worker), Wednesday I’m covering the ACA Connects telecom-industry conference, and Friday I fly to Austin for SXSW.
In addition to the stories below, I wrote a bonus post for Patreon readers recapping some of the more interesting things I saw at MWC.
2/26/2024: Google Brings Gemini to Messages App in AI-Flavored Android Feature Drop, PCMag
The first story I filed from Barcelona is one that I could have written from home–Google PR gave me an embargoed copy of the announcement of these new features. But I did appreciate being able to try them out in person at Google’s MWC exhibit during a press breakfast Monday morning.
2/25/2024: 2 Wheels, 3 Cameras, One 5G Radio: Orbic Debuts Connected E-Bike at MWC, PCMag
Writing about a 5G-connected e-bike was not in any of my MWC plans, but the nice thing about large tech events like this is that they can serve up surprises that justify making your way to an exhibitor’s corner of the show floor.
2/28/2024: Cyber diplomacy for the next era of connectivity, Compiler Pop-Up Series: The Barcelona Edition
I moderated this panel discussion between a trio of diplomats–Steve Lang, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international and communications policy, Vassiliki Gogou, a cybersecurity expert with the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, and Maite Arcos, director general of the ESYS Foundation–at an event hosted by Compiler. That’s a new non-profit tech-policy publication supported by the Hewlett Foundation and founded by Mike Farrell, a longtime information-security journalist.
2/28/2024: NTT Docomo ‘Feel Tech Animal’ Exhibit Had Me Walking a Virtual Dog, PCMag
This virtual-reality demo was another thing not in my MWC plans until another attendee suggested I check it out.
2/29/2024: Bluesky Adds Hashtag Support, Better Account Portability Than Mastodon, PCMag
I saw the news about this on my way to the airport in Barcelona early Thursday morning, pitched a post about it in PCMag’s Slack workspace, and got a go-ahead from my editor before I’d cleared security in BCN. Then I wrote the post during my layover in Zurich.
2/29/2024: At MWC, AT&T and AST execs talk up space-based possibilities, Light Reading
The interviews for this piece happened Monday, but I didn’t finish writing it until Tuesday and then my overworked editor, also at MWC, needed a little more time to get this published. And then we had to correct it because I didn’t look close enough at the transcription of the interview provided by Google’s Live Transcribe app to notice that I’d jotted down a different number for the capacity of AST’s NextGen satellites in the notes I took on my laptop.
3/1/2024: Facebook Finds New Way to Unfriend Publishers by Nixing News Tab, PCMag
Writing this post became a little more fun when I realized that Facebook had not only gotten rid of the option to put the News tab among the basic shortcuts in its iPhone and iPad app, it had also left up old documentation that directs users to a nonexistent part of the settings interfaces on those apps.
3/1/2024: Ep 96 SmartTechCheck Podcast MWC, Qualcomm FastConnect 7900, Apple kills car project, SCOTUS, Mark Vena
I shared my impressions of MWC at my industry-analyst friend’s podcast in which we also discussed such recent tech plot twists as Apple closing down its car project and the Supreme Court taking up what strike me as flagrantly unconstitutional Florida and Texas laws that would compel social platforms to publish speech that they might find repulsive.
#AndroidFeatureDrop #ASTSpaceMobile #ATT #Barcelona #BCN #Bluesky #cybersecurity #eBikes #FacebookNews #hashtags #infosec #MarkVena #MobileWorldCongress #MWC #NTN #satelliteToPhone #virtualReality #wireless
#GWB - Android Feature Drop: Diese neuen Funktionen werden jetzt für viele Nutzer ausgerollt (Galerie & Videos) - https://www.googlewatchblog.de/2023/11/android-feature-drop-november23/ #androidfeaturedrop #android #Google
#GWB - Android Feature Drop: Google bringt viele neue Features auf alle Smartphones – diese Updates sind dabei - https://www.googlewatchblog.de/2022/12/android-feature-drop-google-weihnachten/ #androidfeaturedrop #android #Google
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