The Google I/O event was held today at San Francisco. The event started at 9am and the event was shown live online. At the beginning, Sundar Pichai, the senior vice president of Android, Chrome and Google apps started praising Android and Chrome. He thanked the developers for achieving 900 million Android activations this year.
Google announced three new APIs namely Fused location provider which utilizes only 1% battery each hour; Geo-fencing to locate entering geographic locations; and Activity Recognition to find out what users are doing. Google Cloud Messaging now makes possible upstream messaging.
Android Studio mainly designed for pacing up code building was announced. There will be new additions to the Google Play Store. Soon, you will find a dedicated section where tablets will be listed. Google Play Music All Access will allow users to listen personalized music across twenty-two top genres. It will create a never-ending list of music which will work like a radio station. It works like Pandora. The service is priced at $9.99 per month and is available with 30-day trial for free.
The unlocked Galaxy S4 will be available on sale for $649 with AT&T and T-Mobile. Every attendant at Google I/O received a free Google Chromebook Pixel. Google announced that Android users will now be able to shop on mobile in three simple steps. Google Play for Education will be a new section on Google Play mainly aiming at school users.
Google+ is all set to receive an upgrade of 41 new features. They are aiming at revamping the user experience such as auto tweaking of photos, highlight function that will show the best photos from a set of photos, 15GB storage space to backup your photos and data and many more.
Google Now will allow you to create reminders. Lots of new places have been added to Google Maps. The updated maps will be available to the users this summer.
Larry Page went on stage and talk about development of a self-driving car. He spent some time with the audience in answering their queries related Google’s venture in hardware, Google Fiber, Google Glass, increasing the number of women in tech field and many more. As you can see, Google I/O was a well anticipated event but sadly there were no big announcements except a few little ones.