News & Reviews:   Google

Covid-19 is here to haunt us in 2020. Just today, Italy has come to a decision of locking down the country as 9,000 and more people have been diagnosed with the virus. Not only Italy, but the cases in our country have also been increasing recently. Now, Google is trying to do something to help out the situation, as it is calling businesses to update their status on Google Maps to let the public know if they are affected.

Based on data compiled by Bank My Cell, it seems that Android smartphones tend to depreciate up to 59.41% which is more twice compared to Apple which depreciates the lowest at only 25.98% after one year. But that’s not all, the value of both the devices will drop up to 45.46% and 71.41% for Apple and Android smartphones respectively the following year which is quite steep.

Yesterday, we reported on Google has deleted all the apps of the AnTuTu benchmarking platform from Google Play Store due to repeated policy violations by its parent company Cheetah Mobile. But today, Antutu has clarified the company is not related to Cheetah Mobile.

For those of you who are familiar with our smartphone reviews, you'll notice we typically use Antutu Benchmark as one of our aggregate benchmark tests. It's an app meant to find out how well a device's chipset handles a variety of different smartphone use cases. But guess what? The app has disappeared from the Google Play Store.

Today, Google have announced that Google Assistant can now read whatever news articles aloud. Known as "Read It", the update will roll out later this year and soon Android users will be able to command Google Assistant to do so and it's fluent in 42 languages. All the user has to do is just say "Hey Google, read it" or "Hey Google, read this page".

The coronavirus outbreak has now penetrated even more countries out of China recently which does not just rise the health concern but fake news is also spreading out rapidly. Today, Google has seemed to be hiding all the apps that are related to the coronavirus.

Waze has recently introduced the Waze Beacon which is a battery-operated electronic that transmits real-time traffic data to devices in locations where GPS signals could not be received such as a tunnel. The aforementioned beacons are not exclusive to Waze as they can be used by any application that requires location data.

New features are added to Google Chrome all the time but the one that's revealed recently seems more interesting than most. According to folks at Android Police, Google is testing out a new picture-in-picture mode for Chrome that is connected to the new media controls.

The COVID-19 virus is sure doing a "good job", but not so much for the tech industry as it has forced another big company to cancel out an event. This time, the Google I/O won't be happening followed by their Cloud Next event in San Francisco. The Google I/O was supposed to be held in mid-May 2020.

Just in time for the Pokemon franchise birthday 24 years ago, Google has released the official Pokemon of the Year results a few hours ago. Started from 14 February, users around the globe were able to vote for their favourite Pokemon and to our relief, Pikachu didn't take the top spot as it belongs to Greninja, a water-type started from Kalos. Apart from that, the company also released the Top 30 Pokemon of each region!