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Google IO 2012 Keynote Roundup – Android, Google+, Glass

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Tech Roundup

Google certainly had a lot of announcements this morning at Google IO, I’ll recap some of my favorites here.

Android 4.1 – Jelly Bean

Google announced Jelly Bean with various enhancements to performance and some new personalized features.  Project Butter uses VSync, triple buffering, and a 60 FPS refresh rate to provide smoother experience.  From a development perspective, there is also a new system trace utility to see exactly what the system is doing.

The Google Now feature uses your daily patterns to provide items like traffic and calendar appointments to tell you when it’s time to leave for an appointment, or suggest alternate routes in times of heavy traffic.  These learning features are verging on creepy, but I’m a big fan of pushing the envelope and making life events easier.

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Nexus 7 Tablet

The Nexus 7 tablet fills the 7 inch tablet space, and comes preloaded with Jelly Bean.  Price is $199, and it will be available in mid-July.  This device is targeted for media consumers (movies, music, ebooks), and does not include an SD Card slot.

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Google+ Enhancements

Google announced updated tablet and phone Google+ apps today, and both will be released this afternoon for Android, and “very soon” for iPad.  They are really targeting the mobile space here, since the majority of Google+ access has been through mobile devices.  Google+ Events was the other highlight, and features the ability to go to “party mode” and share photos to a common event.  If Google can increase the adoption rate of Google+, this will be an exciting feature. (I, for one, would welcome a widely-used replacement for Facebook.)

GooglePlusEvents

Looks like the new events feature is active!

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Google Glass

This was definitely the most cutting-edge announcement of the day, and was introduced by a team of skydivers and bicyclists.  Glass is most like a set of glasses with photo/video recording capabilities and reality augmentation features.  For more information about Glass, I’d encourage you to check out the links below.  Pre-orders are currently available only for IO attendees, and there are no plans to release a consumer version at this time.

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Further Reading

I only covered my favorite parts of the keynote here, but there is a wealth of information on both The Verge and AnandTech that covers all announcements.

Google+ Initial Impressions

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gplus

After finally receiving a Google+ invite today, I decided to take the service for a spin to see what sets it apart from other social service like Facebook and Twitter.  Here is a quick list of thoughts that I have so far:

  • Circles – Finally, a way to share posts with a subset of users.  If I have posts that are only relevant to a specific group of users, I can simply specify that circle when posting content. This is great for posting info for a specific geographic location (local concerts, expos, LAN parties…), or specific interests (technology, birds, photography, LAN parties…).  This is a killer feature for me, and will likely decrease my use of Facebook and Twitter.
  • Hangouts – Free group video chat with some cool other features.  The coolest use that I’ve seen of this feature was when someone worked on some javascript coding while answering questions live on Google+.  Since you can have up to 10 people in a hangout at once, this should easily accommodate family chats or small-business meetings.
  • Huddle – This is a feature that lets you chat with specific people or circles while on the go. The example that Google uses is trying to organize a movie run with a bunch of people.
That’s it for now, but you can find more information about Google+ at Google’s site.