I’ve been turned off smartwatches for a while now. Whether it was their poor battery life and uninteresting design, I’ve found I much prefer the simplicity and elegance ofmy analogue timepieces. Since the pandemic though, things have changed. In order to get out the house and avoid screens, I now walk about 10km a day, time I use to catch up on audiobooks and podcasts. Thing is, I’d like to do this while leaving my phone at home....

Google appears to be mashing up a tasty new feature for the Google Assistant. As spotted byAndroid Police, the company is readying a feature codenamed ‘Guacamole’ that will let you talk to the Google Assistant without actually having to say ‘Hey Google.’ At this point, it’s not just a leak or rumor — several people have noticed the Guacamole right in their Assistant settings, including yours truly. Tapping on this setting leads to a menu called ‘Voice shortcuts’ with a subtitle that says one can “skip saying ‘Hey Google’ for help with quick tasks....

Over the past 25 years, the name “Google” has become synonymous with the idea of searching for anything online. In much the same way “to Hoover” means to use a vacuum cleaner,dictionaries have recognized “to Google”as meaning to undertake an online search using any available service. Former competitors such asAltaVista and AskJeevesare long dead, and existing alternatives such as Bing and DuckDuckGo currently pose little threat to Google’s dominance. But shifting our web searching habits to a single supplier has significant risks....

We’ve all been there before: we need to send a file from our phone to our laptop or vice versa, only to find that it can still be a surprisingly clunky process even in 2022. While most of us will resort to sending ourselves an email or uploading a file to cloud storage, Google is apparently working on a way to make it easy and intuitive to send files to yourself....

Eureka! A research team featuring dozens of scientists working in partnership with Google’s quantum computing labsmayhave created the world’s first time crystal inside a quantum computer. This isthe kind of newsthat makes me want to jump up and do ahappy dance. These scientistsmayhave produced an entirely new phase of matter. I’m going to do my best to explain what that means and why I personally believe this is the most important scientific breakthrough in our lifetimes....