Posted byby Tim
March 22, 2013

Supposed Google Babble Screenshots Leak, Easy to be Skeptical of

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This morning, screenshots of what is being called Google Babble are making the rounds. An anonymous tipster has been leaving the pictures in a few inboxes, with no additional info given. From what we can see right off the bat, it looks like a pretty rough version of Google+ Messenger, with some new features thrown in such as sharing from other Google services (Drive, YouTube, Keep), real-time voting, and embedded picture viewing, which is already a part of G+ Messenger.

Below, we went ahead and re-uploaded the picture with a few of our notes, since these screenies screamed red flag as soon as we saw them.

As you can see, we have a few concerns over these shots, but then again, we tend to overly criticize anything like this that crosses our desks. For starters, we wanted to point out there is some over-“pixelization,” some border lines are not even close to being even, and that the overall placement of some things is just a complete mess. For example, the settings button inside the sharing center is so tiny, not even Tinkerbell could press that.

We know prototype builds of apps are sometimes wonky, given we played with Google Play 4.0 and that was not the smoothest running thing we have ever seen, but even that was way better looking than this thing.

Personally, if Google is working on a unified messaging service, this doesn’t look “good enough” for me to get excited.

Via: 9to5Google

Cheers everyone who sent this in!

Report: Google Smartwatch Being Developed by the Android Team

According to a report out of the Financial Times, Google is indeed preparing to enter the smartwatch arena. As unsurprising as that sounds, since every other major tech company has been rumored to be working on some sort of smartwatch product, it's the particular team given the task of developing it that caught our interest. FT claims that the Android team will indeed be leading the charge on the project "to act as an extension to the smartphones using that operating system." Their sources also claim that this project is separate from what Samsung is doing, which would make sense since they are completely separate companies...moving on. If you haven't figured it out, the smartwatch is the new frontier for tech companies just as tablets were a couple of years ago. Now that smartphones have found themselves in the pockets and purses of so many, and the iPad still reigns supreme in the tablet space, it's time to look for what's next. Wearable computing appears to be the hot topic of the moment, so to hear that Google's Android team has been given the job is hardly surprising. It is exciting, though.

Official: HTC One Coming to North America Before the End of April

Official word out of HTC this morning gives us the newest timeline for the arrival of the HTC One. The device will arrive next week in the UK, Germany and Taiwan. It won't see the rest of Europe, most of Asia-Pacific, or North America until some time before the end of April.