Google Nexus
The Nexus is a series of Android smartphones produced by
Google in co-operation with selected hardware companies. The purpose of the
Nexus phones is to offer a "pure Android" experience, in which the
phones come free of carrier or manufacturer modifications and with an
unlockable bootloader to allow for further development and end-user
modification. Nexus phones are considered the "flagship" Android
devices. The Galaxy Nexus, the latest in the series (as of 2012), is one of the
few phones recommended by the Android Open Source Project for Android software
development.
Nexus One
The Nexus One was manufactured by HTC and released in
January 2010 as the first Nexus phone. It was released with Android 2.1 Eclair,
and was updated in May 2010 to be the first phone with Android 2.2 Froyo. It
was further updated to Android 2.3 Gingerbread. It has been announced that
Google would cease support for the Nexus One, therefore not updating the device
to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Nexus S
The Nexus S, manufactured by Samsung, was released in
December 2010 to coincide with the release of Android 2.3 Gingerbread. In
December 2011, it was updated to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Galaxy Nexus
The Galaxy Nexus is the latest Nexus phone and was
manufactured by Samsung. It was released in November 2011 (GSM version, US
Released on Verizon 12-15-2011)
to coincide with the release of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Upcoming tablet
According to CNET, on December 2011 Eric Schmidt said
"In the next six months we plan to market a tablet of the highest
quality".
Galaxy Nexus, the latest "Google phone"
Google Translate is a server-side machine translation
service, which can translate between 35 different languages. Browser extensions
allow for easy access to Google Translate from the browser. The software uses
corpus linguistics techniques, where the program "learns" from
professionally translated documents, specifically UN and European Parliament
proceedings.[156] Furthermore, a "suggest a better translation"
feature accompanies the translated text, allowing users to indicate where the
current translation is incorrect or otherwise inferior to another translation.
Google launched its Google News service in 2002. The site
proclaimed that the company had created a "highly unusual" site that
"offers a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without
human intervention. Google employs no editors, managing editors, or executive
editors." The site hosted less licensed news content than Yahoo! News, and
instead presented topically selected links to news and opinion pieces along
with reproductions of their headlines, story leads, and photographs. The
photographs are typically reduced to thumbnail size and placed next to
headlines from other news sources on the same topic in order to minimize
copyright infringement claims. Nevertheless, Agence France Presse sued Google
for copyright infringement in federal court in the District
of Columbia, a case which Google settled for an
undisclosed amount in a pact that included a license of the full text of AFP
articles for use on Google News.
In 2006, Google made a bid to offer free wireless broadband
access throughout the city of San Francisco
along with Internet service provider EarthLink. Large telecommunications
companies such as Comcast and Verizon opposed such efforts, claiming it was
"unfair competition" and that cities would be violating their
commitments to offer local monopolies to these companies. In his testimony
before Congress on network neutrality in 2006, Google's Chief Internet
Evangelist Vint Cerf blamed such tactics on the fact that nearly half of all
consumers lack meaningful choice in broadband providers. Google currently
offers free wi-fi access in its hometown of Mountain View, California.
One year later, reports surfaced that Google was planning
the release of its own mobile phone, possibly a competitor to Apple's iPhone.The
project, called Android, turned out not to be a phone but an operating system
for mobile devices, which Google acquired and then released as an open source
project under the Apache 2.0 license.Google provides a software development kit
for developers so applications can be created to be run on Android-based phone.
In September 2008, T-Mobile released the G1, the first Android-based phone. More
than a year later on January 5, 2010,
Google released an Android phone under its own company name called the Nexus
One.
Other projects Google has worked on include a new
collaborative communication service, a web browser, and even a mobile operating
system. The first of these was first announced on May 27, 2009. Google Wave was described as a product that
helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. The service is Google's
"email redesigned", with realtime editing, the ability to embed
audio, video, and other media, and extensions that further enhance the
communication experience. Google Wave was previously in a developer's preview,
where interested users had to be invited to test the service, but was released
to the general public on May 19, 2010,
at Google's I/O keynote. On September
1, 2008, Google pre-announced the upcoming availability of Google
Chrome, an open source web browser, which was then released on September 2, 2008. The next year, on
July 7, 2009, Google announced Google Chrome OS, an open source Linux-based
operating system that includes only a web browser and is designed to log users
into their Google account.
In 2011, Google announced that it will unveil Google Wallet,
a mobile application for wireless payments.
In late June 2011, Google soft launched a social networking
service called Google+. On 14 July 2011, Google announced that Google+ had
reached 10 million users just two weeks after it was launched in this
"limited" trial phase.After four weeks in operation, it had
reached 25 million users.