Let’s face it: Smartwatches for Android haven’t been really great. I used to be all in on smartwatches, but after constant disappointment as an Android user, I gave up on the idea altogether. Wear OS devices are usually too bulky, slow, and/or have sucky battery life. And while Samsung largely addressed the battery life problem by going with its own Tizen OS devices, app support for Galaxy Watches has been lackluster....

Google has todayannouncedthat it is launching snippets on its Google Maps product, allowing you to easily share directions or places with their Google+ Circles. The +snippets feature will act very much like it does elsewhere in the product lineup. To share a +snippet, simply click the ‘Share…’ button in the Google+ bar at the top of the screen and whatever you’re seeing on maps will drop into a share box that allows you to publish it to Google+....

Wednesday at Google I/O, Google announced their new Chromebook line of computers, based on the prototype CR-48 development notebook and running Chrome OS. There will be models available from Samsung and Acer and they will be available on June 15th worldwide. Chromebooks have all day battery life, are available for use in less than 8 seconds and on the web almost instantly as well. The over 1 million apps available are automatically updated, every piece of data is encrypted and all of it is protected by the Chrome Sandbox....

The Google Cloud Platform team todayannouncedtwo big updates for mobile app developers. Google Cloud Endpoints, which helps developers build their own backend, has now moved to General Availability. At the same time, Mobile Backend Starter, the company’s one-click deployable cloud backend for Android and iOS, has gained support for large media files. Google Cloud Endpoints provides developers with a way to create, expose, and consume APIs served from App Engine. It’s a simple way for granting multi-client access to a shared Google App Engine backend:...

Google has just announced at theGoogle I/O developer eventthat it is to release a new Honeycomb update for tablets, rolling out devices today. The new release will include an enhanced task switcher (Google says you will never run out of memory, never be asked to quit something to run something else), resizable widgets (which means they are now stretchable horizontally and vertically). Devices can now act as a USB host for USB input devices, powering and interacting with controllers (including Xbox controllers), mice and keyboards....