Sur-Pies! Google shocks world with sudden Android 9 Pixel push Google today somewhat unexpectedly started rolling out to the masses its latest version of Android – dubbed Android 9 Pie. This major build of the mobile operating system is right now being released to Pixel devices as well as the Essential Phone. Google says other Android devices will get the update over the course of this …
So my 'setting'... is that my surroundings, ambient light, etc.-- in the classical literary sense? I hope so... otherwise this is kind of like a weird way to say "have a user-settable setting which sets something in some way which is predictable or not depending on how much the current batch of smart features gets in the way and/or breaks outright"
Now, back to trying to find a proper VNC server so I can still use SMS while my phoneinternet antenna box is out on the roof.
Generally ambient settings will be fine. However, there are possible improvements. For example, when I'm using my S5 to navigate I do need to ramp up the brightness manually. But there are other apps that can probably have the brightness dialled down even further. And I can imagine things like colour temperature (great if you've got an OLED screen) being set less rigidly than is currently the case (according to the clock).
All in all maybe nice to have but you probably (and probably shouldn't) notice.
"...suggest a route to work during your morning commute."
In my case, I could go one of three routes: the obvious 10 minutes choice, the much worse 30 minutes slower and longer route, or the insane 2 hours loop. No choice really, unless a fuel tanker is on fire.
I wonder what fraction of workers actually have a choice of several comparable route options.
I'll second this even though I no longer drive. Back when I could still see to drive I used a satnav system to help plan routes to unfamiliar locations. One time for shits & giggles I asked it to plan my route to work. Work was a ~10 minute drive up a main thoroughfare, find a parking space, & ~2 minute walk through the building to my section. I was rather amused & disgusted when the satnav announced that I had a 30 minute drive via the freeway, estimated ~15 minutes to park in the parking garage (which my building didn't have), & a 5 minute time to walk into the building. It ignored the fact that my work was located on the same main street at the end of my block, was five stop lights away, & only had a smallish lot for the employees to park in. I decided to get rid of the stupid thing as an utter waste of electricity. =-/
Shadow, I'll second that. One of my more twisted amusements on medium to long journeys (250 to 2500 KM) is to use a tree carcass map or mere human memory to choose a route, then set the car nav going. The obsession some brands have with obscure dirt or nonexistent tracks in Queensland is fascinating. And yes, obligatory nitpicker, avoid unsealed roads is _always_ set along with choose fastest or easiest routes. So far I have yet to see any route that is better than what I pick using intuition or guesswork. OTOH, in bigger cities the same unit is usually very useful. YMMV :-)
I digress. So is the new Pixel a bigger data slurper or is that even possible ?
At Denarius... I switched to a paper based Thomas Brothers map for exactly your reasoning. Find the destination before I need to leave, plan a main & a backup route, write them both down on a 3x5 card, & use the card taped to the dash while driving. No stupid voices blathering on about alternate routes, faster paths, or more direct means of reaching my destination. (If I want to listen to The Voices then I'll start driving again now that I can do more damage!)
To add insult to injury, the satnav often tried to tell me that I could take the metro train from the station across the street from my house (true) to the station just a block away from my work building (false), except that the next train station in that direction was a good ~20 minute drive too far. And my friends wondered why I went back to paper maps... *Sigh*
As for getting back on topic, you must be new here. =-)p Hahahaha... Cheers!
Personally, I've generally found Google Maps to be pretty good - I travel to two or three cities a month for various things, and it's proven very useful for both getting me to the city and then navigating around via public transport.
Except in Sofia, where public transport timetables don't seem to have been added to Google Maps. Still, I got a lot of walking done that weekend ;)
One thing that's definitely improved over the last few years is the traffic-jam alerting; these days, I suspect it's more timely than the Highways Agency's system, and a big red mark on your route is a lot more useful than the standard "A1234 closed at junction 22b" roadside warnings which generally mean absolutely nothing to anyone who hasn't taken the time to memorise the whole of the UK's transport grid.
Though admittedly, the first thing I do when configuring a new phone is to turn the vocal guidance off!
And my friends wondered why I went back to paper maps... *Sigh
Not having paper maps for various areas I'd want to visit, I've had to rely on Google Maps or Mapquest. First rule of thumb with online mapping is to immediately add 25% to the estimated travel time in order to get something closer to *actual* travel time. The other problem, which I have yet to find a solution to, is to print READABLE driving directions. Directions printed in 10-point type like they do is hard enough to read when sitting at your desk. Absolutely impossible to read when you're driving. I have *REPEATEDLY* asked the dimwitted Googleheads to make a large-type option (we're talking 22-24 point type here) so they can be quickly and safely read while driving, but I think that's well beyond their programming ability. And because of the way they format their page, you can't simply paste into a word-processor to fix it.
So we expect these dimwits to make Android do what *WE* want? Yeah, not gonna happen.
Well I could use the bus to get to work which takes about forty minutes to complete the journey. That's the journey time by bus and doesn't include the wait for the damn thing to turn up. Or I can take the underground (metro/subway/tube etc.) and be there in twenty. Not much of a choice and I don't think Google are going to find a faster route.
A few years ago, in a home not so far away...
The time taken to walk to the bus stop from home, wait for the bus, travel via bus to the CBD (Central Business District, "downtown" I think it is called in USA), get off the bus, walk to the next bus stop, wait for the next bus, travel to somewhere near my office, get off the bus, walk the rest of the way, was about an hour. The time taken to walk to my office from home, was about an hour. I usually walked, unless the weather was lousy.
I have a long-time satnav gripe relating to their insistence on trying to get me onto toll roads - even when I'm already on a perfectly good parallel or close trunk road already. This seems to be irrespective of settings like quickest vs nearest or even 'avoid toll roads'.
I largely gave up on satnav years ago - dead tree 'n' ink for me, thanks - except for the tiny bit at the end of the journey, if I'm unfamiliar with it. If I must use it, I have found Navigator generally excellent with the free maps of Europe - loaded locally, so there's issue with connectivity.
> onefang: bus routes
Back when I used to work at a technology park, there was one bus which trundled between the local town and the park. Said bus route had two large loops along the way, to service some large housing estates.
The bad thing about this was that it meant the average journey time was about 40 minutes. The good thing was that if you missed the bus, you could start walking back to town in a straight line and have a reasonable chance of catching it back up at the end of the first loop ;)
Ironically, having moved back to the big lights, things haven't changed - the quickest way to get home is to walk down to the main bus station and hop aboard there. Or for bonus comedy points, I can wave my bus-pass to get on one bus, hop off at the start of it's loop, walk down the hill and then catch the bus *before* the one I was just riding.
Time travel and UK bus schedules. It's all a bit wibbly-wobbly...
Ugh. Google Navigation has already tried to kill me by INSISTING on taking I-4, which is the pretty deadly local interstate.
I specifically selected a route avoiding it and set off... only to have it go "faster route detected" and switch back. Several times.
I had to pull over and turn off cell data to stop it.
I specifically selected a route avoiding it and set off... only to have it go "faster route detected" and switch back. Several times.
Ah, but we derive such entertainment by taking a different road when we know there's an area we want to bypass, and seeing how many times it has to say "recalculating". We can just imagine the system inside the GPS getting more and more irritated with us (yes, we're well aware it's way less sentient than Hatsune Miku, but it's family entertainment in the car).
I love Google maps as a Sat-nav. It's good /and/ entertaining. Half way through France with its terrible pronunciation of French names, switch phone to French. Half-an-hour or so of two different voices (one French accent, one English) spouting a magnificent version of "lets parlez français" till it settles down to French. I assume some cache confusion, or delay in downloading the voices. Relieves the long trek across France.
I have two routes I can take out of the village towards work, a choice of two options where they join back up and, on one of the options there, a choice of going through an estate (shorter but only 30mph) or down the side of it at 40mph. So a genuine 5 options (and actually lots more once in town). They're all around 5-6 miles and 10-15 minutes.
I wonder what fraction of workers actually have a choice of several comparable route options.
(I'm going to get downvoted a lot for this...) - not a lot, but some.. commute is Stratford (London) -> St Pauls/Blackfriars area
* Tube, central line to St Pauls, walk
* Tube, central line to Mile End, District to Blackfriars, walk
* Tube, jubilee to London Bridge, walk
* Tube, jubilee to West Ham, Hammersmith & City to Barbican, walk
* High speed to St Pancras, Thameslink to City Thameslink, walk
* Train to Liverpool St, walk
* Train to Liverpool St, Circle to Farringdon, walk
* Train to Liverpool St, bus
* DLR to Poplar, DLR to Bank, walk
* Walk
If there are no problems, you take the quickest route - but this is London, there are always problems (not least the lack of air on the central line), so a planner which actively reads delays and tells me which of the 7 ways between 25 and 55 minutes duration is the way home tonight. Sometimes you just try and get closer to the destination and see whats working in 20 minutes time...
Well I think it's a given that most people know their way to work and all things being equal it is the quickest/easiest route for them, which doesn't change.
The point of this though is to deal with the outliers, and get you to work quicker on those days where something happens - traffic, closure, raptor invasion etc.
It's actually pretty handy, assuming it can accurately include public transport as well as roads to cover both types of commute - you want to stand at a closed station like an idiot because you 'already know' the quickest route?
I know my way to work very well, but I can take 3 main routes which all roughly take the same amount of time but have many more little alternative tweaks. The traffic can vary so massively from day to day, a 35 minute journey on a Wednesday could easily be a 60 minute journey on a Thursday, just 'because'. So, I ALWAYS set a route to work to show traffic conditions and then use my own knowledge of country lanes to pick the best option based on where traffic is worst.
Apple Maps showing an over-view of the whole journey that auto zooms in to the map as the journey progresses is ideal. I don't need turn by turn, just traffic indications.
So, anything which does this is a good thing.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned waze - it's much more focussed on the driving experience than Google Maps. The community call in of hazards ahead works well to alert you of weather, traffic and other "things to be aware of" (eg lurking boys in blue). It's prediction of trip time is usually within a few minutes, even on a journey of hundreds of km. And it will re-route you around road closures and very bad traffic conditions - saved me a few times when the M25 gets randomly shut in the wee hours with no hint of a diversion route.
I have three or four distinct routes I could take to work, all take about the same time.
More, when you take in other alterations over short sections.
Google maps does a good job at directing me onto the least congested.
The only thing it doesn't realise is that I have cloned the access token for the back entrance to the business park, which cuts a good 10mins off of my 1h commute which is only accessible through one of the main routes....
I've recently been using Waze, I tired it originally on a 3G phone and found it to be useless but with a 4G phone much better (YMMV - a friend who recommended it said he had not trouble with it on 3G)
I've not been able to contribute much back though as I don't like touching the screen while driving - too distracting. I guess it is monitoring my speed, location and progress though.
I wonder when and how it is going to be monetized. Quite like it though so far.
Spying implies illicit use. I find it laudible that people want a better personal service but are unwilling to tell google what your preferences are.
Waiter : "ready to order"
Dumbass: "yep"
Waiter : "what would you like"
Dumbass : "lol, I ain't telling you, that's private !!!!"
"Spying implies illicit use."
If data is being collected about me without my knowledge and consent, then I'm being spied on regardless of what that data is used for.
"I find it laudible that people want a better personal service but are unwilling to tell google what your preferences are."
I think you're talking about two different groups of people. I absolutely don't want "personal service" in this sense, and I am entirely opposed to companies spying on me.
Learning from me? Can it learn to shut off all the worthless shit I don't want or need? Can it learn I would like to UNINSTALL some (or many) of those apps, or barring that at least pretend they aren't there? Can it learn that if I have an app disabled *or* marked to not auto-update to not show it in my list of available updates? Can it learn that all apps are banned from repeatedly checking for updates every five minutes, like some OCD child, unless I have explicitly given them permission to do so? Can it learn that if I have decided some app has no business asking for particular permissions the OS should lie to the app and let it believe it does?
Can it learn that, if I need *root* access in order to do certain things, I should have that readily available without having to apply for a Papal Dispensation to unlock my device? Sure, I'd accept (and expect) elevated privileges should require a specific command to enable them; maybe we could come up with a silly-sounding command to enable the elevted level, a made-up word like "sudo" could work...
Pie will come to your Pixel in the next couple of weeks without your intervention. If you want Pie now, you need to opt into the Android Beta Program to get an OTA update:
https://m.androidcentral.com/how-get-android-pie
There's also a side loading method for Pixel phones if you don't mind a bit of command line.
So, they promise to prioritize battery power to display ads, leave the brightness as you've set it, monitor your actions to round off your marketing profile, show you ads for other apps when there is any excuse, and to use any text you might select to display contextual ads. Wow.
I think I might buy me a new phone just to get a slice of that pie...
Probably not.
Apart from actually getting the updates when they are released. I could (on a 6s, coming up on 3 years old) have access to the iOS12 beta, should i so wish.
I will have access to the full release on the day it is released, as will devices as old as the 5s (5 years old?) and the iPad mini2. Even the last iPod touch will get it.
Are we any better off from the meaningless spying? maybe, slightly, but probably not.
little bits of applications shown in context of other apps. I can see why it sounds enticing, but let's see how long before it fails in one of two ways:
- either it's an even-more-walled garden that G sells like ad space to "trusted" parties, so miraculously, my BongCineMaster ticket app won't integrate because G only likes (i.e. is paid by) GaaFlixDeluxe for movie tickets
- it's some sort of self-registration-by-app thing, and we get a cute new vector for ads and malware.
'As a Brit (from Yorkshire, specifically) the word "Pie" evokes thoughts of savoury dishes like pork pies, chicken pie, etc.'
I believe that in USA "pie" is another word for pizza. Though they also have apple pie. In Australia, we agree with the Brits, especially the good old Aussie meat pie, AKA mystery fun bag. We also have apple pies and fruit pies. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, would feed a family.
I habitually have to turn up phone brightness (my Sony is almost unusable in bright sunshine) and I habitually use CCleaner to hibernate FB, Play Store, Amazon Prime, my most used apps! What sort of psychopath will I be turning my next phone into?!?
And as far as Google Maps, I recently had to use it offline (download a section of our fine capital city), because I'd run out of data and only had hotel WiFi. Only to find it was useless, as it hadn't actually downloaded any side streets and pedestrian areas needed on my "walking tour" of London one afternoon!
If you want offline maps I can recommend both Here and OSMAnd. Here is very fast and has great navigation if you're driving, OSMAnd has all the details (and more) and is what I use when cycling, but there are plenty of other apps that use Open Street Maps.
Open Street Maps is great in areas it covers well, but there are lots of areas that it doesn't cover well. If you use an OSM based nav system, and you are going to an area you're unfamiliar with, you probably want to check how good OSM is for the area you'll be in.
I'm immediately wondering if malware can be created to train it to disable security features by giving false haptics, camera and mic inputs etc. That would be fun for them to patch, does anyone fancy re-programming the neural net? Or block swathes of features instead. Age-old functionality versus security blah blah.
Wondering if Raspberry Pi Foundation should sue, or at least be asking Google for a hefty donation here? The BBC article even features a number of red fruit android-themed pies (one of which I'm still trying to decide whether it's meant to be raspberry or strawberry)
Even if they had the same name, there's no confusing an OS for a piece of hardware, so no. In any case, Pi and Pie are spelt differently, mean different things and the former uses a picture of a raspberry and not a slice of pie.
Which is probably why Google where happy to have Android Key Lime Pie eighteen months after the first Raspberry Pi.
Not sure it's that clear cut here. Pi and Pie may be spelt differently, but they're homophones and Raspberry Pi was always clearly a pun on raspberry pie with a mathematical tilt. It's not called raspberry 3.14 or raspberry 3 arctan 3^(1/2). As for confusing a piece of hardware with an OS, I think most people have heard the term "android phone", google even sell one themselves. Android Key Lime Pie is quite a bit different from Android Pie. I'm not saying google have set out to copy RPF here, but if you don't defend trademarks against infringement you lose them, and this is pretty close.
It seems doubtful to me. The key for a trademark infringement isn't that there's similarity between marks. It's if someone could reasonably buy one thing thinking it was the other. In this case, it's hard to see how that would happen.
The purpose of trademark is to prevent consumer confusion. In this sense, it's less an "intellectual property" thing and more a "consumer protection" thing.
The purpose of trademark is to prevent consumer confusion. In this sense, it's less an "intellectual property" thing and more a "consumer protection" thing.
Not really, otherwise what's the justification for companies being able to sue over infringement? Trademarks exist to stop people trading on the reputation of others, which has both a business protection aspect and a consumer protection aspect. Consumer protection laws protect consumers, if a product isn't fit for purpose it doesn't really matter what company you bought it from in that respect. If you thought you bought it from a reputable company, but it was actually counterfeit, then the counterfeiter has taken business away from them by taking advantage of their better reputation and damaged that reputation.
It seems doubtful to me. The key for a trademark infringement isn't that there's similarity between marks. It's if someone could reasonably buy one thing thinking it was the other. In this case, it's hard to see how that would happen.
Both are basically small format computer devices. You might argue that Android is an OS, but most consumers will find it on a device, you don't buy an Android Pie CD or download. Say I now come along with a cheap android IOT platform with an app that lets you do some simple scripting to send out messages in response to signal on a couple of pins, and sell this on eBay as a Tweety Pie, what's RPF's position now? Has that position been weakened because of Google's product name?
"Trademarks exist to stop people trading on the reputation of others, which has both a business protection aspect and a consumer protection aspect."
I believe that we're both saying the same thing here.
"Both are basically small format computer devices."
Yes, but that fact alone doesn't mean anything. What is meaningful is the potential for consumer confusion.
What if I didn't use Lyft. Would I be able to specify Uber, or my local taxi company?
What if I don't want the thing suggesting a new way to work, or what to try in my lunch box?
The problem I have with this, is that instead of letting me live my life, these technologies risk tying me into google's partners for services and interfering with my life, instead of letting me live it.
Obviously, the devil's in the details as to how much of this stuff can be turned off, of course. But I'm very sceptical.
"The problem I have with this, is that instead of letting me live my life, these technologies risk tying me into google's partners for services and interfering with my life, instead of letting me live it."
You can always ignore it, or feed it bogus info and laugh at it's silly results.
I really don't get this predicting game. Windoze tries it all the time. I expend more mouse clicks undoing what it thinks I want to do next than if it just pissed off and let me do my own thing. The arrogance of these system designers astounds me. We're free thinking, creative humans, not machines. Give us stuff that helps, not hinders. Just get out of our way.
I thank you ;)
I hate it. I'm still running a custom Jelly Bean ROM (ViperOne) on my 3.5 year old HTC One M9. Even this old version bundled in a load of this predictive shit I'll literally never use.
I've had to install Greenify (rooted) to manage apps running in the background (i.e. disabling everything that sucks battery when the screen is off!) as well as disabling auto-updates on everything possible (big battery drain). I get about a day and a half out of it with moderate use, which isnt bad for a 3.5yr old handset with a sealed in battery!
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