Software : 'OK Google' voice commands go Android-wide with new Search app |
- 'OK Google' voice commands go Android-wide with new Search app
- In Depth: Appetite for destruction: HP's product testing philosophy
- Downloads: Download CCleaner: Clean up, clear out, and speed up a sluggish PC
- Google IO: Drive for Work delivers unlimited storage for low monthly price
- Google IO: Android for Work keeps office, home data separate on a single device
- Google IO: This is Google Fit, Mountain View's entrant in the health and fitness tracking race
| 'OK Google' voice commands go Android-wide with new Search app Posted:  Google's gradual roll out of voice commands across its range of mobile and web services has continued with an update that makes "OK Google" recognisable across the Android system. The Google Search 3.5.14 for Android update, allows users to summon the 'hotword' command from anywhere on their phone and tablet, even when the device is locked. Users can turn on the enhanced hotword detection by heading to Menu > Settings> Voice and toggling the settings. Early reports claim the new system wide integration, first rumoured in April this year, works well in testing. Audio HistoryAlso coming to the new Google Search app, which some users are already seeing, is a new Audio History tool to boost voice searches. The feature learns the sound of your voice and your pronunciation habits in order to yield more accurate search results. Droid-Life has posted this neat hands-on video showing off the new functionality |
| In Depth: Appetite for destruction: HP's product testing philosophy Posted:  How HP prepares its products for consumer abuseWe're all guilty of accidentally destroying electronics. Who hasn't dropped a tablet onto the ground, or popped the spacebar key out of a keyboard, or been burned by the warm cat urine we placed our fully charged laptop onto? Because we techno-geeks treat our electronics like unwanted stepchildren, our favorite manufacturers go through pain-staking processes to ensure that their products withstand (almost) any beating consumers inflict. To prove that there is no limit to the depths they'll go to test their products, HP flew a group of about 20 reporters out to their Houston, TX headquarters, where they painstakingly showed us how badly they destroy every component of their laptops, desktops, tablets, workstations and servers in order to perform quality control.
That's right, it's someone's job to crush, freeze, burn, shake and scuff your laptop before it hits the market. There's even a guy who tests the strength of the boxes your HP products go into by squeezing the fully constructed cardboard beneath the jaws of a 750-lb vice.
100,000 hours of testingFrom start to finish, your EliteBooks, ElitePads, ProBooks and Workstations go through more than 100,000 hours of testing. As I mentioned above, this testing includes destructive analysis that determines the limits of what your device can handle. At the first stage of testing, nothing passes (kind of like High School pre-calculus). No matter how tough you think your ElitePad is (an HP staffer dropped and stomped on one to set the tone for the day), everything that runs through HP's destructive testing will fail at some point. The earliest stages of testing include environmental analysis, which is done on the first prototypes the design team has assembled. This includes testing which determines whether or not Sir Richard Branson can bring his EliteBook into outer space. He can't. Most electronic devices require spinning bladders to cool down overheated drives. As the drives look for more air, the thin air of higher altitudes provides a weaker flow rate. As the air thins out, the boundaries between the spinning bladder and your hard drive decreases, which can lead to rubbing and grinding. However, HP says its devices should have no trouble working in Leadville, Colo., which is situated more than 10,000 feet about sea level, and is the highest incorporated city in the United States. Temperature and corrosion testing Beachgoers will be happy to know HP does extensive salt testing of each of its components to guarantee that devices and the pieces contained within them don't corrode or rust. Every piece that goes into your laptop or server is placed within a container for 100 hours at 95 degrees and 99% humidity. If rust or corrosion is evident after the 100 hours are over, the product automatically fails and must be resubmitted for testing. HP conducts a similar test for computer and server panels to determine how temperate directly affects devices. Your ElitePad or Notebook panels will be placed into a machine that cycles between 32 degrees and 212 degrees (with no humidity) to determine the maximum and minimum temperatures a device can withstand. Devices are run through 3000 hour-long cycles over a four-month-long period. At the end of the test, HP can determine the temperature at which something failed and how many cycles it took before HP could make a fix at that temperature. Page 2: Drops, shakes and cat urineKlutzes are given a ton of consideration at HP's testing facility. Devices, and the packages they come in, are independently dropped from 30 inches and higher to determine their breaking points. They're also put into a vibration analysis machine that shakes the hell out of your devices with 1000 pounds of vibration force. That's not to say you should go home and start using your Elite Pad as a Shake Weight. These tests are done to failure to determine what the breaking point is, not to guarantee that HP has created indestructible devices (they haven't). Should a device mysteriously fail, HP has a failure analysis team that can examine product components at the microscopic level to determine why a failure occurred. HP's library contains more than 80,000 compounds that can be analyzed in fewer than 10 seconds at 1000X magnification. HP can scan metals at the same rate at 10,000X magnification.
If your EliteBook mysteriously breaks and HP wants to determine what has happened, they will break the device down into microscopic components to see where the error occurred. An excellent real-life example is the man who told HP that a brown liquid at the bottom of his notebook burned his hands right before his notebook short-circuited. The man sent the computer to HP, which conducted a microscopic analysis to determine that the brown liquid was the man's cat's urine. HP does not actively test for cat urine, nor are any of their devices urine-proof (human or otherwise). SkynetPerhaps the most interesting room within HP's testing facilities, the Robot Room, is where HP conducts battery button analysis, keyboard and touchpad resiliency, and laptop hinge analysis. This room, which looks a lot like Skynet Labs, contains a robot whose sole job it is to press down on your power button and touchpads to determine how many presses the buttons can withstand before malfunctioning, as well as how many presses the buttons can withstand before their coats of paint wear away.
Laptop hinge analysis requires a robot that opens and closes your laptop 25,000 times over the course of seven days to determine whether or not the HP's 32 types of hinges will break when combined with a specific chassis.
My favorite machine in the room simply presses down on screens to determine the weight at which your ElitePad display will shatter. When I was standing in the room the pressure from a five-pound barbell was barely altering the pixels on the ElitePad's display.
Keyboards: the Navy Seals of computingYour keyboards go through the most rigorous testing (consider them the Navy Seals of computing). These bad boys sit inside a machine that rapidly presses down on each key 20 million times over the course of a month. Most keyboards don't make it all the way to 20 million, but it's important for HP to determine which keyboards are most resilient so that they can constantly improve upon design to one day reach 100% success at 20 million punches. For all of you enterprise users, HP spends 133 thousand hours testing each of its software platforms before they are released to production. They test every aspect of the software, from performance to security to speed, and then they test every single piece of hardware that comes to life because of the software (such as chips, screens, fingerprint scanners, etc.). Once the entire system is stable, HP will then run the software through partner systems to ensure that integrations don't backfire. This is a nine-month process, end-to-end, during which HP tries as hard as possible to not have to recall thousands of software licenses from its Fortune 500 clients. If your tablet stops working, that sucks. If HP's Client Security software licensed by a 20,000 person enterprise fails, well that's a whole 'nother level of disaster. Deafening quiet after a day of chaosFinally, after a long day of watching things crack, snackle and pop, we were brought into the electromagnetic semi-anechoic chamber, which tests the power, and direction of the radio frequency delivered by your device.
Ever wonder why your blender doesn't disrupt your Orange is the New Black stream? It's because guys in semi-anechoic chambers tested the immunity of certain radiofrequencies to guarantee the signals coming to and going from their devices. The room is 36 feet wide and 45 feet long, and the quiet is so deafening it's almost hard to imagine that just outside its doors a motherboard is being burned, a workstation is being dropped, and an ElitePad is being stomped on. |
| Downloads: Download CCleaner: Clean up, clear out, and speed up a sluggish PC Posted:  If you've owned your PC for a while, you'll know that it's just not as fast as it used to be. Where opening programs used to be quick, there's now a noticeable lag in performance. Where it used to start up in less than a minute, you can twiddle your thumbs for nearly three. And it's only going to get worse. The more software you install, the more data you create, the more new files you download… It all starts to clog up your PC's hard disk, slowing down performance. Yes. You can get rid of unwanted applications, trim your start up software and defrag your disk. But hundreds of files will still remain - a scatter of digital debris that you can't often see. What you need is the digital equivalent of a robotic vacuum cleaner. Something that you can switch on and simply leave to clean up your messy PC while you do something more important. And of all the software available in TechRadar Downloads, Piriform's CCleaner is by far the most popular. Smart system optimisationKey to this popularity is the fact that CCleaner doesn't charge you £20 for a half-hearted bit of disk-sweeping. This free software analyses your PC (or those areas you specify), identifies unnecessary or redundant files, unwanted .DLLs, old cookies, unused fonts, invalid shortcuts and leftover installer apps, then sucks them all into oblivion. With your permission, of course. CCleaner isn't heavy-handed about its task. It's clever enough not to delete login details and won't erase anything that is crucial to the smooth running of your system. Nor will it cause you to lose any data. The program will always show you what it plans to do and ask for an 'OK' from you before it gets to work. If only all software was as honest and courteous. There are many PC optimisation packages available on the Internet that claim to 'improve performance' and 'make your computer faster'. CCleaner delivers. Try CCleaner for free today
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| Google IO: Drive for Work delivers unlimited storage for low monthly price Posted:  Enterprise users received a nice shout-out at Google IO this year with the introduction of Android for Work and a new suite of Google Drive options offering unlimited storage for as many users as needed. Google Drive reported for work during the conference with the launch of a new unlimited storage offer for corporate and enterprise customers priced at only $10 (about UK£6, AU$11) per user monthly. With the ability to store files up to 5TB in size, Google Drive for Work now includes additional audit reporting and security features as well as the ability to sync, open and edit Microsoft Office files without the need for conversion. This removes a long-standing pain point for Drive adoption. Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai announced Drive now has more than 190 million active personal and business users monthly. Those folks should be pleased to learn the new Drive for Work offering is available worldwide today. Just the factsGoogle Drive for Work promises end-to-end data encryption with advanced features including API auditing for developers, eDiscovery for Google Vault search across all stored content and security certifications for specific industries such as health care. One tiny footnote for small businesses with fewer than five users: That "unlimited" storage offer will actually be 1TB per user for the same price, which is still a heck of a deal all things considered.
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| Google IO: Android for Work keeps office, home data separate on a single device Posted:  The days of carrying separate devices for work and pleasure may soon be a thing of the past when Android L arrives later this year thanks to the platform's new-found ability to separate data on a single handset or tablet. Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai shifted Google IO 2014 from Android running on Chromebooks back to the forthcoming Android L update, which promises to make life easier for corporate employees currently carrying more than one smartphone. "As a user, you can have one experience, and both your personal applications and your corporate applications can live on the same device. All your personal data is isolated from your corporate stuff, and vice versa," Pichai announced on the IO stage. Dubbed Android for Work, the new initiative is intended to help enterprise and corporate customers deploy devices to employees with minimum hassle. A certification program will help in this effort, and it launches in the fall. Made for workThanks to a set of new APIs and what Pichai calls "underlying data separation," Android L will allow a more seamless user experience for home and work applications, with a separate app planned for similar functionality on older devices. These APIs require no modification to existing apps, works with bulk deployment of apps and takes advantage of Samsung's Knox platform to maintain full security for sensitive corporate data. With more than 190 million active users monthly, Google Drive is also receiving some welcome work-related improvements thanks to Drive for Work, an unlimited storage option featuring encrypted data priced at only $10 (about UK£6, AU$11) per user per month. Along with the announcement of the Google Slides mobile app for Android and iOS, Pichai also introduced native editing support for Microsoft Office documents, meaning no more format conversion when going from Word to Docs.
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| Google IO: This is Google Fit, Mountain View's entrant in the health and fitness tracking race Posted:  Google wants you to stay healthy, though of course it wants you do so using its solution to your fitness needs. Enter Google Fit, a new platform to "help users keep better track of fitness goals" announced during the IO keynote Wednesday. The platform relies on a single set of APIs "to manage data on apps and sensors" coming in from various devices, including wearables. Partners like Nike+, Adidas and RunKeeper will utilize the Google Fit platform to keep people on track of their fitness goals. Google is opening the platform to developers so they can incorporate Fit into their fitness-app routine. The SDK will go live in a few weeks' time. Google Fit's announcement comes a few weeks after Apple announced HealthKit for iOS 8. HealthKit works in much the same fashion: gather data from various health and fitness sources (in Apple's case, mostly apps), and translate that info into digestible data snacks for consumers. Which tech titan's fitness platform reigns supreme? Since neither is available to the public yet, it's hard to say.
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