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As announced and arriving just in time for the Pixel’s release, the Android 7.1 Developer Preview is now available for the Nexus 5X, 6P, and Pixel C. With Google customizing the software on the Pixel, there were some questions as to what’s exclusive to the new phones and what features are a part of stock Android.

After loading up the developer preview on a Nexus 5X, we’ve found some nice improvements to Android. Keep reading for our complete list of all the changes in Android 7.1.1…

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Filed under: Google Corporate

People have been asking Google for years to put a restart button into the power menu of Nexus devices. It's a feature most OEMs have been putting on their phones and tablets since the beginning. After first getting a good hint the restart option would appear on the Pixel phones, and actually seeing it appear in a shipping version, many people were left wondering if it would make the transition to older Nexus devices (at least those receiving Android 7.1).

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Android 7.1 feature spotlight: Nexus devices and Pixel C get a restart option in the power menu was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

There were some interesting features announced as part of the launch of Google's Pixel phones. While some are exclusives to the new handsets, others are a part of the new Android 7.1 Nougat. One of the headlining features for the new OS version is the App Shortcuts API, a way for apps to offer fast access to select screens and functions. If you've been looking forward to trying it out, the Google Now Launcher in combination with today's developer preview fully supports app shortcuts and there's already plenty of examples to try out.

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Android 7.1 feature spotlight: App shortcuts are supported in the Google Now Launcher was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Even though most devices some with at least 32GB of space these days, there are still plenty of times you run low and need to clear out some junk. In the Android 7.1 dev preview, there's a new storage cleaner that makes it easy to find the old stuff without all that tedious digging around in file managers. It can even automate the process.

The storage cleaner (or Smart Storage) is accessible from the storage menu in menu > Free up space.

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Android 7.1 feature spotlight: Smart Storage helps you make space by deleting old stuff was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 In a week where there has been much talk about a new phone vying to have world’s best smartphone camera, another device focused on photos called the Kodak Ektra is also making its public debut (after being teased earlier this month). Launching today in the UK and initially available only in Europe for £449 ($550), the Ektra is hoping to attract photo enthusiasts — in its case… Read More

 Imagine not being able to breathe and imagine that loss of breath coming out of nowhere. It’s a frightening position to be in, but one company, Propeller Health wants to help people head off asthma attacks and other respiratory conditions before they get to that point by watching every breath they take. Today the company announced the close of $21.5 million in Series C funding to… Read More

Mini things are fun. Sorry, I’m not willing to hear your counterpoint. So going with that indisputable fact, tiny gadgets are great, too, especially tiny phones. You thought Apple’s iPhone SE marked the return of bb phones? You might want to sit down. I have news. There’s a smaller phone. Maybe the smallest touchscreen phone ever? The Vphone S8 has a 1.54-inch display and one button. That button is a power button. It does come with three virtual buttons, too, but whatever. Google tells me the previous smallest touchscreen phone was this dual-SIM phone with a 2.45-inch display. We're not talking about that phone, though. We're talking about how tiny the Vphone S8 is. Tiny!

Vphone

The phone appears to have a speaker...

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The Nintendo Switch has finally been revealed. The three-minute trailer, above, gives us our first official look at the long-awaited console.

As rumored, the new console is a console-portable hybrid that will use cartridges rather than discs. In the trailer, a man lifts the core of the console from a home base station, attaches to controller accessories, and plays Zelda on the go. In a later sequence, the two controllers disconnect, and players play a multiplayer on the standalone screen. In another scene, four players play Mario Kart by sharing two controllers. A traditional wireless controller also works with the devices both in its console and portable forms.

The most fascinating part of the trailer shows e-sports players practicing...

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Wow! Maybe tighten down those bolts next time?

(Thanks, Tim!)

 LeEco is not a household name in the States. You don’t see their products in Walmart or Best Buy. Chances are you don’t know anyone that uses LeEco’s movie streaming service or a LeEco smartphone. LeEco hopes to change that. Today at an odd and overblown event, the company burst into the North American market with a bevy of services and products that’s set to take… Read More

Google Keep has become a nice little note taking app. While it lacks some of the features of more mature tools like Evernote, Keep is infinitely easier to use. Now, it's getting a feature it should have had a long time ago—pinned notes.

We first spotted this feature in a Keep teardown almost exactly four months ago. That's an awfully long time to sit on a fairly straightforward feature like this.

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New Google Keep update adds note pinning [APK Download] was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The Android Pay landing site (android.com/pay) has just been revamped with some more eye-catching elements. I haven't heard anybody complain that Android Pay's landing site is too drab, but this new site definitely looks quite a bit nicer. (You can check out the old one here.)

When you get to the site, you're hit with a splash of color, some "tap. pay. xxxxx." text, and a Nexus 6P or 5X demonstrating these actions (oddly, they didn't go with the Pixel or Pixel XL for this).

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Android Pay gets a new, more stylish landing site was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Researcher Yarden Katz scraped the database of Intellectual Ventures, a giant business that buys up patents, but produces nothing but lawsuits (previously), and discovered that IV claims ownership of nearly 500 patents that were created at public expense by researchers employed by public universities, and another 100 or so patents filed by the US Navy. (more…)

In this wonderful animation, billionaire Russian physicist and investor Yuri Milner explains his effort to launch tiny probes, powered by 12 foot solar sails, on an interstellar mission to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, within two decades. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are on the board of Milner's group, called Breakthrough Initiatives. The project builds on decades of work by scientists Carl Sagan, Louis Friedman, and Bruce Murray who pioneered solar sail technology through the Planetary Society, the fantastic citizen-funded space advocacy and research organization they co-founded in 1980. Indeed, Friedman is an advisor to Milner's Starshot effort.

For more on solar sailing, check out the Planetary Society's LightSail project and their blog post earlier this year about Milner's far out project.

So the Google Pixel embargo dropped today, and if you haven’t noticed, it’s getting pretty good reviews — including from us. One of the nicer touches that Google added with the Pixel in this writer’s opinion is a wide variety of stock wallpapers to choose from. It seems that the wallpaper picker is pulling some of them from the web, but some others — the ones you see below — are actually found in an APK that ships with the Pixel…

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Filed under: Google Corporate

The first teaser trailer for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 just dropped, and it looks like the whole gang is back: Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), and even Tiny Groot (Vin Diesel).

It's hard to glean anything about the movie’s plot from the teaser. Gamora is seen running and jumping through the air with one of her deadly blades, while her half-sister Nebula (Karen Gillan) is sporting some new headwear. Yondu (Michael Rooker) is finally sporting a badass red mohawk, much like his comic-book counterpart. And lots of blue-faced aliens are flying through the air, and looking none too pleased about it.

"the first movie’s wry sense of humor is...

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Swiss "writing instrument" manufacturer Caran d'Ache and watchmaker MB&F collaborated to create the Astrograph fountain pen, an otherworldly pen with the astronomical price of $20,000. There will only be 99 of them produced and each includes a small, magnetic astronaut. Do not chew the cap.

This writing instrument is fitted with an ink pump, but may also be used with cartridges. The pen nib is made from rhodium-plated 18-carat gold, available in size M...

The rocket-shaped pen body is rhodium-plated and either highly polished or sandblasted matt, or plated in ruthenium anthracite. The chequered pattern is made from anthracite lacquer...

The base of the "engine" is plated with ruthenium. The stabiliser legs, the joints and miniature ladder are polished, sandblasted, satin-finished and rhodium-plated.

The Astrograph (via Uncrate)

Back in August, Google Now was testing a Dashboard tab that showed cards and info from other services. As part of the latest beta version of the app, a new ‘Upcoming’ tab shows cards related to “what’s happening soon and nearby.”

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Filed under: Google Corporate

A playlist is one of the best gifts you can give yourself.

Playlists — where emotions lurk in every shadow and the mysterious alchemy of memory is constantly bubbling and brewing! Playlists — where you can cut the filler tracks and go all killer, all the time. Playlists — not only remind you of your past selves but existential roadmaps to your future self.

The secret to best consuming music, I believe, is the playlist, formerly known as the mixtape, and before that known as “all the songs dad knows how to play on the harpsichord.” But if you’re like me, playlists are a bit messy, clogging up your Spotify like a mysterious clump of dog hair in your shower drain. How did they get here? And how can I clean this up?

Here are some tips for...

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Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Featured App

AccuBattery

Today's roundup is presented by AccuBattery from Digibites.

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23 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last 2 weeks (10/3/16 - 10/17/16) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Somewhere Over The Rainbow has never sounded this exquisite.

When Google announced the Pixel a few weeks ago, the company sounded extremely confident in the phone’s camera. Brian Rakowski, Google’s vice president of product management, called the camera “best in class,” and backed up that claim by revealing that DxOMark — which rates the quality of smartphone and DSLR cameras — had given the Pixel’s camera an 89, the highest score ever awarded to a phone. “This isn’t only the best camera we’ve ever made, it’s the best smartphone camera anyone has ever made,” Rakowski said.

That’s some big talk, especially considering how thoroughly Apple and Samsung have dominated the smartphone camera space over the last few years. When we pitted the latest phones from those two companies against each other in...

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 At the heart of Google’s new Pixel smartphone is a piece of software that would be your companion: Google Assistant, the spiritual successor to Google Now and the sum of the company’s work in AI and machine learning, given a voice and a central perch in the new Pixel Launcher software that makes this phone’s version of Android unique in the mobile galaxy. In the spirit of… Read More

We capture lots of digital photos and videos, but we don’t have a lot of ways to display them in the real world. We can back them up to the cloud, but once we do, there’s really no where to show our photos off. You can make a slideshow or something but seriously, who wants a slideshow? You can upload them to Facebook, Flickr, or Google Photos to share with friends, but again, this really doesn’t get us anywhere. If you want to sit down with your parents and show them photos from a trip or your kid’s first smile, a shared folder might not work. A new digital photo album, Joy, is designed to fix that problem. It’s a Full HD, 13.3-inch touchscreen that can be controlled through a companion iOS / Android app. It doesn’t have ports and relies...

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Uber drivers in London will have to pass an English language proficiency exam to obtain a license, under new rules announced by Transport for London (TfL), the city's transportation agency. Unlike an earlier proposal, which would have applied to Uber drivers from non-English speaking countries, the rules announced this week apply to all drivers for UberX and Uber's black car service.

TfL, which oversees London's private car services, buses, and subways, defended the rules as necessary to ensure public safety. "It is essential for public safety that all licensed drivers can communicate in English at an appropriate level," the agency said on its website. "Communicating with passengers to discuss a route, or fare, as well as reading,...

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At long last, almost 8 years to the day the first Android phone went on sale, Google is launching a smartphone for which it designed the hardware, software and cloud ecosystem itself: the Pixel. No longer will the tech giant be entirely dependent on other companies to present Android in its best light, in hardware that varied wildly but never was built from the ground up to be the best physical instantiation of pure, Google Android.

I wrote last year and last week about why it makes sense for Google to become, like Apple, a vertically integrated hardware maker. I believe this is the right move. I believe it will shake up the industry. But the question is: how did Google do? How good is the Pixel?

the Pixel is very, very good

After...

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The verdict is in on Google's impressive new Pixel and Pixel XL phones, and one of the bright spots is the camera. We'll have an in-depth comparison between the Pixel, the Galaxy S7, and the iPhone 7 very soon, and in our full review Dieter Bohn says "if you wanted to agree with Google and call this the best smartphone camera, I wouldn't argue with you."

"The results on the Pixel are very, very good," says Dieter. "I put it in the same ballpark as the iPhone 7 and the Galaxy S7 in most situations, which is not something I expected to say going in."

Clearly, this is by far the most competitive Google has ever been in mobile photography. But the Pixel phones, on paper, don't have cutting-edge hardware, relying on an f/2.0 lens without...

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In July, Polish law enforcement officers arrested Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents, who’s been held in a local prison ever since.

While awaiting the start of extradition hearings, Vaulin’s U.S. defense team has asked the Illinois federal court to dismiss the entire case.

In a detailed memorandum, lead counsel Ira Rothken argues that the U.S. Government’s allegations of criminal conduct are flawed. Assuming that Vaulin is indeed the site’s founder, he didn’t commit any crimes.

KickassTorrents (KAT) was merely a torrent search index, the defense explains. It provided a search function for torrent files which in and by themselves do not contain any copyrighted content.

“Websites like KAT are devoid of content files. Instead, KAT is nothing more than a search engine, no different in any material way from Google and other popular website search engines, except that KAT indexes BitTorrent files,” Rothken writes.

“Thus, at its core, the indictment merely alleges that visitors to KAT may take advantage of KAT’s automated search processes to search for and locate ‘dot torrent’ files. Such files contain textual information assembled by automated processes and do not contain copyrighted content.”

If KAT’s users downloaded any infringing content, this would occur away from the site on their local computers, beyond KAT’s control. Merely downloading a torrent file by itself is not an infringing act.

The fact that torrents themselves are not illegal means that operating a torrent index can’t be classified as a direct copyright infringement, according to the defense. As such, torrent search indexes don’t commit any criminal acts.

“The fundamental flaw in the government’s untenable theory of prosecution is that there is no copyright protection for such torrent file instructions and addresses. Therefore, given the lack of direct willful copyright infringement, torrent sites do not violate criminal copyright laws,” the memorandums reads.

It is possible to hold torrent site operators liable for “secondary” infringements committed by their users, as we have seen in the past. However, this is only possible under civil law, Vaulin’s defense team argues.

Congress has declined to include “secondary copyright liability” in criminal legislation. As such, the indictment accuses Vaulin of a crime that doesn’t exist.

“The indictment would make defendant responsible for infringements committed by former visitors to KAT who are acting in an entirely different online context. In the global connected culture, such elastic expansions of criminal exposure cannot be permitted to stand absent overt action by Congress updating the Copyright Act,” the defense notes.

Vaulin’s legal team further points out that the indictment fails to specify any copyrighted media that was downloaded or infringed in the United States. In addition, the money laundering claims are moot since these are based on the criminal copyright infringement claims.

In summary, the defense says that the U.S. Government’s claim of willful direct criminal copyright infringement for operating a torrent site fails. As such, they ask the federal court to dismiss the case in its entirety.

“Any theory that a torrent search engine could be held responsible for the offsite infringing acts of its users would be a theory of civil secondary copyright infringement. Such a civil theory is not an offense against the United States and fails as a matter of law.”

“Any and all counts that are dependent on criminal copyright infringement, including the conspiracy and money laundering counts, must fail. For all the reasons set forth above, the Court should dismiss the indictment,” Rothken adds.

The KAT case shows a lot of similarities to the criminal proceedings against Kim Dotcom, for whom Ira Rothken is also the lead counsel. Both cases center around questions of whether the defendants be extradited for secondary copyright infringement charges.

The U.S. Government is expected to counter these claims during the weeks to come, after which the court must make a decision.

The full memorandum of law in support of the motion to dismiss is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.