Google Meet video conferencing now available for free for everybody

Hangouts is among the few Google apps that remained elusive of Google’s impulse to kill apps. For quite a few years now, Google has been signaling its desire to shut down Hangouts but instead of an abrupt end, the tech giant is simply rebranding Hangouts and giving it a corporate tough by splitting it into Meet and Chat for video conferences and conversations, respectively. As one of the final (intended and metaphorical) nails into Hangouts coffin, though, Google recently dropped the Hangouts branding and instead named the two apps Google Meet and Google Chat.

Out of the two apps, Google Meet is more focussed on business clients since it competes with apps like Zoom and Skype. This is why Meet had only been available to users with G Suite accounts or via a subscription. But today, Google has announced that Meet will also be available for all Gmail users. You can now simply visit meet.google.com and host a new meeting or join an existing one. You can also add links to video conferences directly into Google Calendar invites.

Google Meet allows meetings with up to 100 participants. Additionally, you get features live captions and screen sharing. The only limitation to the free accounts is that meetings can only be 60-minutes long but that too applies only after September. Unlike G Suite users, free users will also not see direct shortcuts to Meet and Chat in Gmail itself.

From a security perspective, Meet may be able to woo some of the users vexed by Zoom’s privacy and encryption issues. You can either use Meet on any web browser or on mobile using its Android or iOS apps.

Google Meet (Free, Google Play) →

G Suite Essentials

Google also announced a stripped-down version of G Suite for small teams and businesses. The plan is called “G Suite Essentials” and it includes access to Meet’s more useful and advanced features like meeting recordings, dial-in numbers, and larger meetings. G Suite Essentials is free to use until September 30th and you can express your interest by filling up this form.

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Source: Google Blog

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After 25 years of educating developers and IT professionals, LearnNow has a library of content that any student can benefit from.

The resource is geared towards technical skills, with cutting-edge courses on programming, engineering, and cybersecurity. The training can help you master cloud computing staples like AWS and Azure, coding with Python and C#, and hosting with Linux and SQL Server.

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LearnNow lets you learn at your own pace, and all the courses come from top instructors. In addition, you can take a range of tests to sharpen your knowledge.

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Walmart is launching more cheap Onn tablets, this time with Android 10 on board

Over the last couple of years, the Android tablet market has seen a steady decline. Despite the fact that there are several players in the Android ecosystem, Samsung and Huawei were the only major manufacturers offering Android-powered tablets up until last year. This changed when U.S. retail giant Walmart entered the Android tablet space with its Onn tablets back in May last year. Walmart’s Onn tablets were the first tablets to ship with Android 9 Pie out of the box and they offered low-end hardware at quite an affordable price. It seems like Walmart saw some success with the initial release, as the company is coming back with another pair of tablets this year.

 

According to a recent report from TabletMonkeys, Walmart will be launching two new tablets as part of its in-house Onn brand next month. The higher-end Onn 10.1 will feature a FullHD 10-inch display, a 2.0GHz octa-core MediaTek MT8768WA chip, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of onboard storage. In comparison, the Onn 10 from last year featured a 1280×800 10-inch display, MediaTek’s MT8163 SoC, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of onboard storage. The new Onn 10 also packs in 5MP cameras on the front and back, with the entire package being powered by a battery rated for 10-hours of use on a single charge.

The cheaper Onn 8 features the same MediaTek SoC as the Onn 10 but includes a lower resolution HD display, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. Much like the Onn 10, the 8-inch tablet has 5MP cameras on the front and back, along with a battery rated for 10 hours of use on a single charge. Both the tablets will run Android 10 out of the box. It’s worth noting that we haven’t seen any devices with the MediaTek MT8768WA SoC in the past, so we can’t comment on the performance just yet, but the early benchmark results shared by the publication don’t instill any confidence. The tablets managed to achieve a single-core score of 731 in Geekbench 4, with the multi-core score going just as high as 3400. However, the poor benchmark results do make a bit of sense when you take the pricing into account.

Speaking of which, Walmart’s new Onn tablets will retail at $99 for the 8-inch model and $129 for the 10-inch model. As of now, Walmart hasn’t announced a release date for these tablets but we’ll update this post as soon as the tablets go on sale.

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Source: TabletMonkeys

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The Motorola Edge+ is the first phone with Imint’s new Vidhance stabilization tech

Motorola finally unveiled the much-awaited Motorola Edge+ and Motorola Edge last week. In the past few years, the Lenovo-owned company had focused largely on selling budget and mid-range phones. The last true flagship from Motorola was the first-gen Moto Z, which was launched all the way back in 2016. Since then, there wasn’t any contender from Motorola that could go head to head against the likes of Samsung’s and Huawei’s in the premium segment. The Motorola Edge+ ends that streak and marks the return of Motorola in the flagship sphere. The Moto Edge+ offers top-of-the-line hardware including the best-in-class Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC and the powerful triple cameras consisting of 108MP primary, 8MP telephoto, and 16MP ultra-wide sensors.

Although the camera hardware is impressive as it is, it turns out the device is also equipped with several software-based features that further enhance the camera capabilities of the phone, especially the video performance.

Imint, a Swedish company that provides video enhancement solutions to smartphone OEMs, announced in a press release that they have collaborated with Motorola to integrate their video stabilization solution on the Moto Edge+, enabling content creators to shoot high-quality videos right from their smartphones.

“Our best-in-class Vidhance solutions, combined with the Motorola edge+ smartphone platform, empowers consumers to create video content previously reserved for professionals and high-end video cameras.”

Andreas Lifvendahl, CEO, Imint.

The Motorola Edge+ features four software-based video solutions: Vidhance Video Stabilization with Active OIS,  Vidhance Horizon Correction, Vidhance Dynamic Blur Reduction, and Vidhance Field of View Correction.

Vidhance Video Stabilization with Active OIS works by combining the optical image stabilization (OIS) with the electronic image stabilization (EIS) to reduce the unwanted motion blur resulting from sudden movements and shakes. By leveraging the onboard OIS and in-house EIS algorithms, Imint claims the Moto Edge+ is capable of shooting amazing videos with great stability even in low-light conditions. Vidhance Horizon Correction algorithm, on the other hand, lets you automatically level the horizon of a video in post-processing without ruining the stabilization quality. Vidhance Dynamic Blur Reduction helps minimize the motion blur caused by low shutter speed and abrupt movements. Vidhance Field of View Correction solution eliminates zoom artifacts that often result from when the camera is adjusting its focal length during the focus shifting.

These algorithms along with the capable camera hardware make the Moto Edge+ an excellent choice for content creators. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent these claims and improvements are effective in the real-world.

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#HDD HUAWEI Developer Day is Livestreaming on April 30th

Huawei Developer Day (HDD) is back, and this time Huawei will be focusing on the gaming industry – discussing the latest technologies, trends, tips and techniques. They will also share more about HMS Core, HMS Capability and AppGallery Connect, as well as topics that matter most to you.
The session will be held through a live broadcast, and you will have the opportunity to ask questions in their live Q&A.

How to Join in:
Visit this link and click the signup button to register.

April 30, 2020, Thursday
12:30-14:00 UTC+1

Sign up for HUAWEI Developer Day #HDD here

 

About HDD
HUAWEI Developer Day (HDD) is a platform built by HUAWEI Developer for in-depth communication with developers. It provides developers with the latest open capabilities and services and brings them the latest industry trends of mobile devices. With this communication platform, Huawei and developers will jointly create the ultimate smart experience for hundreds of millions of end users.

What is the Live Streaming about:
Develop:
-HMS Core for Your Games: Easy, Fast, Precise
-Unity Case Study
-Build Immersive Gaming Experience with HMS Capabilities
-Perfect World Games Case Study

Grow:
-Grow Your Game Business with App Gallery
-Huawei Provides Multi-Resources Support for Your Games
-Game of Thrones Case Study

Monetize:
-Monetize with Huawei Ads

#HDD Agenda for Game Developers：

Agenda for #HDD for Game Developers

 

We thank Huawei for sponsoring this post. Our sponsors help us pay for the many costs associated with running XDA, including server costs, full time developers, news writers, and much more. While you might see sponsored content (which will always be labeled as such) alongside Portal content, the Portal team is in no way responsible for these posts. Sponsored content, advertising and XDA Depot are managed by a separate team entirely. XDA will never compromise its journalistic integrity by accepting money to write favorably about a company, or alter our opinions or views in any way. Our opinion cannot be bought.

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OEMs have been getting better at rolling out Android Security Patches

Back in 2018, researchers from Security Research Labs (SRLabs) published a paper highlighting how several Android OEMs were declaring Android Security Patch levels but weren’t actually incorporating all the necessary patches on their devices. The paper caused quite a stir in the Android community and Google subsequently launched an investigation into each device with a noted “patch gap.” It seems like Google’s investigation has had a positive effect on the Android patch ecosystem, as a recent report from ZDNet points out that Android OEM patch rates have shown significant improvements in the last two years.

The report cites the latest analysis released by SRLabs that takes into account official firmware builds released up until 2019. SRLabs has been tracking these builds to determine how quickly OEMs are updating devices with the latest Android Security Patch Level after Google publishes the monthly Android Security Bulletin. The firm crowdsourced the data from users who had their SnoopSnitch application installed and they identified around 10,000 unique firmware builds with patch levels from 2018, along with 7000 unique firmware builds with patch levels from 2019. Based on the data collected, SRLabs released the following information:

OEMs missed implementing half as many patches in 2019 as they did in 2018. SRLabs refers to this as the “rate of missed patches”, which for 2019 was below 0.4 and for 2018 was 0.7. This value is the average of all missed patches per OEM. They only counted critical and high severity patches in this determination.

Monthly security updates were delivered to users about 15% faster overall, decreasing from an average of 44 days to an average of 38 days. To get these results, SRLabs approximated the difference between the build date of each firmware and the patch level date of that firmware.

Android ecosystem is still fragmented, as many OEMs have to apply security patches to many different Android versions. In addition, many users are still using devices on unsupported EOL versions. SRLabs found that only 30% of unique uploads in 2019 were from users running Android 9 Pie or newer.

OEMs tended to patch their most widely deployed Android versions faster than their less-widely deployed version. For Samsung and Xiaomi, that was Android 7.1.1, while for ASUS that was Android 9. Some OEMs, like Google and HMD Global, patched their devices incredibly quickly. SRLabs attributes this to the fact that these OEMs use vanilla builds and also release fewer devices than some of the others. If you’re interested in learning more about how monthly Android security patch updates work, you can check out our detailed explainer by following this link.

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Source: SRLabs

Via: ZDNet

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MediaTek Dimensity 1000 is the first smartphone SoC to support AV1 hardware decoding

Paying attention to a codec while listening to your favorite track or watching a movie on one of the many streaming services out there might not be your cup of tea, unless you discover how a specific codec can indirectly help you save a considerable amount of data while binge-watching Netflix. Yes, we are talking about the royalty-free AV1 codec that is now being used by Google as well in order to improve the quality of the video calls in Google Duo.

Android 10 also supports the AV1 codec since beta 1, while Google Chrome comes with a dedicated AV1 decoder since the Chrome 70 update back in October 2018. The hardware-accelerated decoding scene, however, remains quite unoccupied, as none of the current-generation Snapdragon, Exynos, Kirin SoCs are capable of decoding AV1. The situation is improving, though, as the recently announced MediaTek Dimensity 1000 claims to be the first smartphone SoC to feature a built-in AV1 hardware video decoder, capable of handling AV1 video streams up to 4K resolution at 60fps.

A 7nm high-end SoC with an integrated 5G modem, the Dimensity 1000 aims to bring MediaTek back to the flagship SoC market. The AV1 decoder module of the chipset should play a vital role to minimize the CPU usage and consecutively lowering the power drain on phones like the Chinese variant of OPPO Reno3 and the upcoming OnePlus Z during media consumption, compared to other flagships. According to Mediatek, the Dimensity 1000 platform is soon going to be able to stream AV1 encoded YouTube videos.

Dr. Yenchi Lee, Assistant General Manager of MediaTek’s Wireless Business Unit, commented the following in this regard:

“Industry reports state that the video streaming market is likely to expand at a CAGR of 19.6% and touch $124.57 billion by 2025, and it is one of the principle drivers of 5G services. MediaTek is leading the way in enabling effective video streaming with AV1.”

One could always play back AV1 streams using software decoding, but the process is quite resource-intensive and could lead to higher battery drain on devices with other SoCs without a hardware decoder. MediaTek’s Dimensity 1000 not only outshines its competitors in this domain but the integrated 5G modem in a single chip also gives it an edge over the Snapdragon 865 and the Exynos 990. According to Matt Frost, Director of Product Management of Google Chrome, the inclusion of an AV1 decoder in the Dimensity 1000 should greatly influence the way to develop next-generation codecs. We are certainly interested to see how other chip-makers start incorporating a hardware AV1 decoder in their future products over the coming months.

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