Google's Nexus 7 tablet outed before I/O

Well, it looks like the leaks were accurate. This morning, just an hour ahead of Google I/O's initial keynote, Android Police got its hands on what appears to be a press shot of Mountain View's 7-inch tablet, aptly named the Nexus 7.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean: 5 Features We Want in Google’s New OS

When Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, arrived on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone last November, it marked the most radical change Google’s hugely popular mobile operating system had undergone since its debut.

It was also the best thing to happen to Android so far. It was the first version of Android designed for both phones and tablets, and it was the first version of Android that was truly beautiful to look at and fun to use.

But of course, Android can be improved. On Wednesday, Google is expected to kick off its Google I/O developer conference by introducing Android 4.1, dubbed Jelly Bean. Unlike version 4.0, which featured a top-to-bottom redesign of Android, version 4.1 is expected to bring a number of incremental changes. Rumor has it the new OS could even debut on a Google-branded, Asus-built Nexus tablet, and it could land on Google’s developer-friendly Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone as well.

Whenever it arrives, we’re expecting new features and bold moves. Here are a few things we’d like to see in Jelly Bean.

Ditch Browser, Go With Chrome

Android has two web browsers, both built by Google. The boringly named Browser is the default entry point to the web installed on every Android phone going back to the first version. The thoroughly modern Chrome, however, has only been available as a download from the Google Play store since its debut on Android in February, and it only works on ICS devices. Chrome is still a “beta” product — Google is killing bugs and polishing off the app. But Chrome’s time has come.

When the world thinks of Google’s web browser, it thinks of Chrome. Android’s Browser app is an afterthought. Chrome is the better browser in absolutely every way: user interface, tab handling, speed and support for web standards are superior, and Chrome can sync your bookmarks and browsing history between all your Chrome installations across all devices and platforms. Not to mention that Google is extending the Chrome brand beyond just the browser, with the Chrome OS and devices like the Chromebook and Chromebox. It’s time to simplify things, Google — go with Chrome and ditch Browser.

Unify Messaging

Another example of multiple apps that do the same thing: messaging.

Google could ease the lives of Android users by delivering one unified messaging app. Currently, Google offers a stand-alone text messaging app (Messaging), a separate app for chatting over Google Talk (Talk) and yet another for sending notes to Google+ contacts (Messenger). Three apps that all do the same thing — that’s more complicated than it needs to be.

It’s time to take a page from Apple’s playbook and offer just one messaging app. All three services could be rolled into just one app — call it Messages or Messenger or Messaging or Talk or anything you’d like. When a user messages a phone number, it can be sent via text message. When a user messages an e-mail address, as they do via Talk or a contact on Google+, that message can be sent using web data as opposed to a standard text message through the wireless carrier.

The app could even recognize when a user is sending a message to another Android phone and send that message using web data as well — just like Apple’s iMessage app in iOS. One app for all three services. This is the way to go.

Program Your Own Gestures

We’d like to see Android give users the ability to create their own gestures, specific swipe combinations for opening up apps or forcing their devices to perform specific actions. Google already has a patent for this, and no other platform — iOS, Windows Phone or the different flavors of BlackBerry — currently offers this feature.

If you’ve ever used Android’s gesture-unlock feature, you already have an idea of how this might work. Essentially, your phone would record a specific swipe or gesture that’s unique, and launch an app or action of your choice whenever you perform that gesture. Apple already has a number of multitouch gestures, such as the five-finger pinch-to-close gesture found on the iPad. But so far, Android is largely devoid of this sort of thing. The ability to program your own gestures would bring a level of personalization to Android that’s unmatched. To make things easy, Google can throw in a couple multitouch gestures of their own for those who don’t want to customize their devices, but still want a shortcut to popular apps.

Add More Built-In Apps

Ice Cream Sandwich has no built-in apps for audio and voice recording, to-dos and reminders, or weather. Other operating systems — namely iOS — do. So this update seems like a no-brainer. Integrating with Google Drive for saving audio files, or re-purposing Google Calendar’s Tasks to handle to-dos and reminders are easy wins. As for weather, Google’s desktop search engine delivers forecasts from the Weather Channel, Weather Underground and AccuWeather. It’d be nice to see these three options show up on the ground floor of Android as well. If Google had to go with one, we’d like to see it pick Weather Underground, which offers crowdsourced weather reports down to the neighborhood in many cities.

Do Not Disturb

Apple introduced a “Do Not Disturb” feature for iOS 6 at its Worldwide Developer Conference just two weeks ago. Android should match it.

OK, so it’s a bit lame to see operating systems ripping off their rivals off — iOS’s Notification Center if a notable offender — but a good idea is a good idea. And Do Not Disturb is brilliant.

You walk around with your phone in your pocket (or very close by) all day. When you get home, you’ve still got your phone on you, and you might have a tablet kicking around, as well. Having the ability to take a break from text messages, alerts, e-mails and phone calls would be welcome. Of course, like the iOS version, Android’s Do Not Disturb should still allow you to get all of these messages and notifications, only later, when you want them. But during the Do Not Disturb period of your choosing, your gadget should remain silent with out a ring or vibrate to bug you.

Exceptions are a must, too. This way, select friends, family and even bosses can reach you if you decide. Or, if someone calls multiple times — maybe you can decide what the threshold is — the call or message will go through, alerting you that this time, it’s urgent and your attention is needed.

A look inside Leap Motion, the 3D gesture control that's like Kinect on steroids

Leap Motion's not the household name Kinect is, but it should be — the company's motion-tracking system is more powerful, more accurate, smaller, cheaper, and just more impressive. Leap CTO David Holz came by the Verge's New York offices to give us a demo of the company's upcoming product (called The Leap), and suffice to say we're only begrudgingly returning to our mice and keyboards.

The Leap uses a number of camera sensors to map out a workspace of sorts — it's a 3D space in which you operate as you normally would, with almost none of the Kinect's angle and distance restrictions. Currently the Leap uses VGA camera sensors, and the workspace is about three cubic feet; Holz told us that bigger, better sensors are the only thing required to make that number more like thirty feet, or three hundred. Leap's device tracks all movement inside its force field, and is remarkably accurate, down to 0.01mm. It tracks your fingers individually, and knows the difference between your fingers and the pencil you're holding between two of them.

FINE-TUNED MOTION CONTROL CAN CHANGE MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY, GAMES, AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

Holz showed off a number of different use cases for Leap Motion's technology. The simplest thing it can do is simulate a touch screen, so you can interact with any display as if it were touch-enabled — we were slicing pineapples in Fruit Ninja in seconds, without a moment of extra development or additional software.

Developers that do take advantage of the Leap's SDK will be able to do much more, however, and the possibilities appear to be limited only by your imagination. All kinds of different apps are being developed: some could improving remote surgery, others allow easier navigation through complex models and data, and others might put you square in the middle of a first-person shooter. It's like holding the Mario Kart steering wheel, but on a whole new level.

Rather than mapping particular gestures (cross your arms to close the app, draw a circle to open a new window), Holz said developers are being encouraged to provide constant dynamic feedback. No one needed to be taught what pinch-to-zoom meant — it's the natural thing to try and do on a touchscreen, and as soon as you start pinching or spreading it becomes clear what happens. That's the paradigm for the Leap, Holz says: you should always be able to just do something, and the app or device should respond.

YOU CAN BUY A LEAP NEXT YEAR, BUT IT MIGHT BE INSIDE YOUR OTHER DEVICES TOO

Leap Motion's plans are huge (Holz mentioned a few times wanting to totally upend traditional computing methods) but the company's playing its cards close. The Leap will cost $70 when it's released — sometime between December and February — and Leap Motion is also working with OEMs to embed its technology into devices. The Leap is about the size of a USB drive, but Holz says it could easily be no larger than a dime, so adding it to a laptop or tablet shouldn't be difficult.

Developers are apparently beating down the company's doors for access to the technology — Holz said thousands of Leaps will be given away in the next few months, before it's released to the public. That's no surprise: after only a few minutes of cutting fruit, scrolling around maps and webpages, and navigating through huge 3D spaces, all without ever touching a thing, we're pretty sure we've seen the next big thing in computing.

The natural comparison to any motion control is Minority Report, an imagined future everyone seems to desperately want to come true. We asked Holz about the comparison, and if Leap Motion's technology meant we'd all have Tom Cruise's awesome PreCrime dashboard in the future.

"No," he told us. "It'll be even better."

Google I/O 2012 kicks off tomorrow, get your liveblog via Engadget!

Hey, remember that keynote last year where Google unveiled Ice Cream Sandwich before showing off Google Music and the Open Android Accessory standard and Android@Home before giving away 5,000 Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets? Yeah, it was quite a rush. This year we're expecting another new flavor of Android and maybe even a new Nexus tablet to boot. You won't want to miss it and, as always, we'll be there.

We'll be liveblogging every detail of the event straight to your browser courtesy of our exclusive liveblog viewer. Set your bookmarks right here for all the action then set those alarms for the time below.

Do The New iPhone Prototypes Have NFC?

Recently Apple announced Passbook, a new mobile wallet that will debut in iOS. Its existence prompted speculation that future iPhones will include NFC — and now 9to5mac is reporting that new iPhone prototypes feature the technology.

9to5mac has previously analysed data from two new prototype iPhones, codenamed N41AP and N42AP. But their latest investigation reveals that those same prototypes appear to have Near Field Communication (NFC) controllers directly connected to the power management unit (PMU).

Among the massive speculation about what the next iPhone will look like, the small inclusion of NFC perhaps seems trivial. But if the rumor turns out to be correct, it will see Apple poisitoning itself in direct competition with Google Wallet and another similar service unveiled by Microsoft last week.

If Apple follows its usual release patterns, then we won’t see an actual iPhone 5 until October. Will it feature NFC? Maybe, maybe not. But you can be sure that, if it does, Apple’s take on mobile payment could be enough to force the concept into the mainstream. [9to5mac]

Nexus 7: This Is Google’s New Nexus Tablet,  

Jelly Bean on board.

Wondering what Google’s flagship I/O Conference announcement this week should look like? Wonder no longer. It’s a 7-inch Tegra 3 tablet running Android Jelly Bean

As rumoured, Google’s going to announce a 7-inch, Nexus-branded tablet called the Nexus 7. According to the leak, it’s built by Asus, with a 1.3Ghz quad-core Tegra 3 processor, GeForce 12-core GPU and 1GB of RAM with two different storage variants: 8GB and 16GB.

The Nexus tablet will also feature NFC and run Google Wallet (probably only in the US) and Android Beam.

The screen is an IPS display with a 178-degree viewing angle, running a resolution of 1280 by 800. The device will also sport a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera. The battery will also give you 9 hours worth of operation.

The 8GB model will set you back $US199 and the 16GB will cost $US249. No word in the document on local prices.

The leaked document also says that the device will be the first to run Jelly Bean, the new version of Android. Details are scarce on Jelly Bean, but the slides tell us that Google will handle operating system updates from now on, which could address the fragmentation problem. We aren’t sure if this statement means that Google will handle all handset updates from Jelly Bean onwards, or if it just means it will handle it for the Nexus 7 going forward. Based on the various arrangements with other manufacturers and telcos around the world, it’s likely to be the latter. We’ll know more come Google I/O.

Update: The document says that the Nexus 7 will run Android Jelly Bean, but makes no mention of the version number. We understand that the device will be version stamped with Android 4.1, rather than leaping ahead a generation and stamping it as 5.0. Wired had suggested after spotting a leaked benchmark that this would be the case.

Rumours about Google working on a Nexus-branded tablet with Asus have been swirling for a while. Even as far back as May, a report emerged of a super cheap Tegra 3-powered device was coming at the Google I/O developer event, which is now only days away.

The first clue was when Asus demonstrated the awesome cheap and wonderfully cheerful Eee Pad MeMO 370T at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, before delaying the unit indefinitely.

Since then, rumours about a home-grown tablet from Google have been few and far between, but this is the first time we’ve seen anything official regarding specs.

Apple has already played its announcement cards around iOS 6, Microsoft has announced Surface and Windows Phone 8, and Google risks being left behind without its own bespoke tablet product. June is one hell of a month to be following what’s new in tech.

Priced at sub-$US200, the Google’s Nexus 7 will become Amazon’s biggest problem post-launch, threatening the market share of the hugely successful Kindle Fire. The Fire runs a highly modified version of the Android operating system and prevents users from wandering outside the customised Amazon environment. The Nexus brand, however, has always been associated with the purest form of the Android operating system Google has to offer, meaning that it’s likely going to be a better experience. Google is also banking on the fact that the screen is better than the Fire’s, with a higher resolution and 10-point touch capability.

Of course, this could all prove to be an elaborate fake. We’ve seen them before and we’ll see them as long as there’s a rabid tech-loving public that will queue up around the block for value this good.

We’ll bring you the news as we hear it about this tablet, and if it really is the Nexus 7, I’m looking forward to this year’s Google I/O. 

New Khoisan name for Cape Town

Cape Town - It may take some getting used and some Capetonians will probably have difficulty getting their tongue around the Mother City’s new name: //Hui !Gaeb.
This Khoisan word means “where the clouds gather”, reported the Weekend Argus.
The name change was proposed by the Khoisan community as they gathered for a memorial service for their traditional leader, Dawid Kruiper, who died earlier this month.

Tania Kleinhans of the Institute for the Restoration of the Aborigines of SA said after the city name change was proposed in honour of Kuiper, she had approached fast food chain Nando's, in recognition of their recent controversial TV ad on diversity.

“We love the advert, because it is based on facts. It is not about racism, xenophobia or diversity. It shows that we are the original people of SA,” she said.
Nando’s had apparently enthusiastically agreed to sponsoring billboards to advertise Cape Town’s new name, which would from next week be seen on the N2 and in the city centre outside the Castle.

Remembering Alan Turing at 100

Alan Turing would have turned 100 this week, an event that would have, no doubt, been greeted with all manner of pomp -- the centennial of a man whose mid-century concepts would set the stage for modern computing. Turing, of course, never made it that far, found dead at age 41 from cyanide poisoning, possibly self-inflicted. His story is that of a brilliant mind cut down in its prime for sad and ultimately baffling reasons, a man who accomplished so much in a short time and almost certainly would have had far more to give, if not for a society that couldn't accept him for who he was.

The London-born computing pioneer's name is probably most immediately recognized in the form of theTuring Machine, the "automatic machine" he discussed in a 1936 paper and formally extrapolated over the years. The concept would help lay the foundation for future computer science, arguing that a simple machine, given enough tape (or, perhaps more appropriately in the modern sense, storage) could be used to solve complex equations. All that was needed as Turing laid it out, was a writing method, a way of manipulating what's written and a really long ream to write on. In order to increase the complexity, only the storage, not the machine, needs upgrading.

His name will also, no doubt, spark familiarity as part of the Turing test, betraying his pioneering involvement in the field of artificial intelligence, proposing that much debated question, "can machines think?" It's a question (albeit modified into the form "can machines do what we can do?") he sought to solve, offering a way of measuring a computer's intelligence relative to the human variety. Turing's concept, based on a party game called "The Imitation Game," has become synonymous with the concept of determining the humanness of artificial intelligence.

Turing's gifts manifested themselves at an early age, showing tremendous promise in the fields of math and science, in spite of his teachers' focus on the humanities. A great intellectual breakthrough occurred at the tender age of 16, upon being introduced to the works of Albert Einstein. He laid out the basis for what would come to be known as the Turing Machine just ahead of his 24th birthday, tackling German mathematician David Hilbert's rather unwieldy "Entscheidungsproblem."

By 26, Turing was performing cryptanalysis for the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) at the Bletchley Park estate in Buckinghamshire, the epicenter of the UK's decrypting efforts during the war, and the home of many of the country's most brilliant minds of the era. The gig led to the design of the bombe, a machine used by the allies to decipher Enigma machine-encrypted German military messages in World War II. Hundreds of the devices would be deployed during the war.

Turing continued to develop cryptanalysis methods throughout the war, taking on the German naval Enigma and lending his name out yet again, this time to Turingery, a method of codebreaking developed at the GCCS. Turing's Delilah, a secure, portable communications device was not perfected in time to be adopted for use during the war, though the computer scientist would tap into his knowledge of the field to help develop the secure speech system SIGSALY for Bell Labs.

After his pioneering work in artificial intelligence in the '40s, Turing switched focus yet again

After his pioneering work in artificial intelligence in the '40s, Turing switched focus yet again, exploring morphogenesis, the study of the development of an organism's shape through biology. It was the field he was fixated on at the time of his death by poisoning. In 1952, Turing, then in his late 30s, was convicted of indecency due to his relationship with another man, sentenced to hormonal treatment that amounted to chemical castration. The sentencing also found Turing stripped of his security clearances, in spite of having been one of the UK's great war heroes. Just ahead of his 42nd birthday, Turing was found dead.

Much of Turing's praise has, sadly, come posthumously. In 1966, the Association for Computing Machinery established the prestigious Turing Award for contributions to computing. 1998 saw the addition of a commemorative plaque added to his birthplace, and three years later, the mathematician was memorialized in Manchester, sitting on a park bench, holding an apple (thought to be the conduit for the poison that ended his life). In 2009, more than half a century after biting into the apple, a petition with a thousand signatures made its way to then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who formally apologized for the government's "appalling" treatment of one of its most brilliant minds, adding, "you deserved so much better."