Tag Archives: google

“Did Real Tone get worse?” That was one of my criticisms of the Pixel 8A when I reviewed it a few months ago. Google’s midrange smartphone packs a wallop for $500, but Real Tone, the camera feature designed to produce more accurate skin tones, especially for people of color, was …

Late summer is when our thoughts typically turn to pastoral pursuits. Long drives along the coast. Wine tastings. County fairs. Smartphone launch events. Wait, smartphone launch events? Those usually happen in late September and early October. Yet here we are talking about new phones and mobile gadgets in mid-August, on the …

The unassuming house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been empty for only a couple of years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google a decade previous. Here was the garage once packed …

Demand for graphics processing units or GPUs has exploded in recent years as video rendering and artificial intelligence systems have expanded the need for processing power. And while most of the most visible shortages (and soaring stock prices) relate to top-tier PC and server chips, mobile graphics processors are the …

Larry Page and Sergey Brin never liked hanging with reporters. “Larry can be a very sensitive and good person, but he has major trust issues and few social graces,” a former Google PR person once told me. “Sergey has social graces but doesn’t trust people who he thinks don’t approach …

We love our TVs, we need our TVs. But for the aesthetically-minded among us, incorporating a TV into our home décor can be…a challenge. Samsung answered this dilemma with The Frame TV. The brand’s line seamlessly turns TVs into works of art when turned off, plus, this spring, Samsung launched …

There is no wilder time than the present to build a company around artificial intelligence. The server bills are astronomical, for one. Also, the market for talent is red hot, and you’ll end up paying through the nose for good people. Even if you do get funding, staff up, get …

In late July, OpenAI began rolling out an eerily humanlike voice interface for ChatGPT. In a safety analysis released today, the company acknowledges that this anthropomorphic voice may lure some users into becoming emotionally attached to their chatbot. The warnings are included in a “system card” for GPT-4o, a technical …

Unbox a new phone in the US and it's almost certain to have Google as the default way to search the web. Federal judge Amit Mehta on Monday ruled in favor of the US Department of Justice that the contracts Google uses to secure that position violate fair competition laws. …

Nine years have passed since Google introduced the third-generation Nest Learning Thermostat, but the wait for the fourth-generation model is finally over. Today, the company unveiled its latest smart thermostat. It arrives on the same day as a next-gen version of Google's iconic Chromecast streaming dongle—now called the Google TV …