News & Reviews:   Google

The latest Google Chrome update on Android has brought a useful feature that lets users preview a link. It looks like the feature is enabled via a server-side update to version 89 of the browser. With it, users can just preview a web page without leaving the current web page that they're on.

This morning, we noticed that some of our Malaysian media content creator friends receiving an email from YouTube. It appears that the company will begin deducting US taxes from June 2021 from payments to creators outside of the country. How much? According to the email, it may go up to 24% of the creator's total earnings worldwide. 

You might not realize it, but you would often get a message about accepting cookies when visiting a certain website. That's about to change as Google is moving away from third-party tracking cookies and what this means is that the company won't track you anymore, or even "build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web”.

A few days ago, there was news about Samsung developing folding displays for OPPO, Xiaomi, and Google. Here, we found a leaker that confirmed Google is planning a foldable Pixel smartphone and it is going to be unveiled at the end of the year or early next year.

It was reported that many smartphone manufacturers are releasing their own folding smartphones this year including OPPO, Xiaomi, and even Google. Now, we have received an update claiming that there's finally progress as Samsung Display is reportedly developing the folding displays for the mentioned companies.

If you bought a phone with a 4K screen, like the Sony Xperia 1 II, then you're going to get more use out of it. YouTube has had 4K videos for quite some time, but HDR was never available on mobile devices. However, it looks like that's about to change with an update for Android.

It's not unusual for companies to come to sudden decisions. But the employees at the games development studio for Google Stadia were caught off guard a major one. Just a week after being praised for making great progress, the division was shut down.

The current Wear OS allows users to install third-party apps that are also installed on users' smartphones. However, it looks like this feature is going away as Google is trying to emphasize the presence of Wear OS apps on the Play Store. It is said that the new plan will take effect starting from 10 March.

While the Android 11 update is still in the process of being rolled out to older smartphones, the alleged screenshots of Android 12 have appeared online showing us how the next-gen UI (User Interface) design will look like. The screenshots were published by XDA Developers and they are said to be from an “early draft” of documents Google distributes to Android partners.

Other than presenting a recap on what we search for in a year, Google has sorted out the top 10 trending searches for the first month of 2021 in Malaysia. Furthermore, it is also presenting the search interests for Chinese New Year surfaced from Google Trends to show how excited Malaysians are for the upcoming celebration!