News & Reviews:   Google Malaysia

So a lot of things happened this week. First, there was Computex 2019 with ASUS showing a wide range of products - a new ZenFone 6 Edition 30, ZenBook Edition 30 laptop and a Prime X299 Edition 30 motherboard for its 30th Anniversary, a ZenBook Pro Duo with two functioning 4K touchscreens, new VivoBook S14 and S15 with a 5.65-inch ScreenPad 2.0 display, two new portable monitors (ZenScreen Touch and ROG Strix XG17), ROG Swift gaming monitor, a new Glacier Blue skin for ROG gaming laptops in the near future, and many more. 

The Trade War between the USA and China still going on, the chain effect has hit across the nation. Our Prime Minister voiced out on the matter, saying Malaysia will still use Huawei technology; Huawei has also prepared to file a lawsuit against the US Government for bullying, a number of Malaysian restaurants are showing support for Huawei smartphone users, and for some reason, the Mate 20 Pro is back on the Android Q beta program. 

And on other news, Apple Malaysia has just announced a new iPod touch with AR capability coming soon to Malaysia from RM899, Pokemon Masters is also set to be released on our mobile devices this year, and finally, OPPO Reno 10X Zoom was announced for RM3399 (which to be honest, is kinda expensive comparing with the Xiaomi Mi 9 for having similar tech specs minus the 60x zoom feature for just RM1699, now you tell me which one makes more sense). 

Not too long ago, Google had announced that they will be shutting down Youtube Gaming app at the end of March but that didn’t happen. At least, not yet. Now, the company has announced that they will be officially shutting the doors to the gaming streaming app on the 30th of May.

Trade wars have always been brutal and the current trade war between the United States and China is potentially about to leave many Huawei users disappointed. Huawei’s business with Google has been suspended and among the services affected include the transfer of hardware, software and technical services. TL;DR: Huawei users would potentially lose access to popular Google services such as Google Play Store, Gmail and Youtube.

Google has just shared their plans to push more ads onto its mobile platforms. The ads will be made more accessible for the audience so that they may find more information about the product easily. This feature is named Discovery ads and will be out on both Android and iOS globally later this year.

Saudi Arabia has always been known as a country that places harsher restrictions on women to the point that they cannot be anywhere without knowledge or consent from their guardian. It has come to a point where an app called “Absher” has been used to track women’s locations in the country.

As per tradition, various Chinese New Year videos are made and released to the public by different companies to wish their customers a festive season. It can be near tear-jerking, or funny, but most importantly - very heartwarming. So if you're a mood for a CNY video spree, we have gathered a bunch of them thanks to the help from Google Malaysia.

Google Lens is probably smarter than you as it now can recognize over a billion items. The AI-powered tool is trained to read more product labels in order to recognise names and products. In addition, it gains data from photos taken on various smartphones.

NewsBytes #27 - Celcom billing system maintenance, new Grab Chief Tech Officer, Google and Adobe conference, Canon PhotoMarathon, KL Major Talent Line-up

Today, Google is proud to present a new feature for Google Maps called Motorcycle Mode. As the name suggests, this feature is designed to help Malaysian motorcyclists to get around with better navigation and traffic across the country. And it's free, obviously.

Google was recently reported joining the Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) as a promoting member. They join Dell, Intel and many other tech industry brands. While you can check out what USI styluses would bring to Android, we're more interested to see if the join by Google means that Android devices may all be able to use USI active styluses.