Main event of Google’s 6th annual Google I/O developer conference, the keynote ended successfully after full 3-hours of new announcements, bragging, and showing off. I didn’t attend the conference or watch the live stream but, it looks like I haven’t missed much. Although, I wish I was there because TNW says that Google gave away free Chromebook Pixel for all attendees. Bummer.
The Google I/O 2013 was mainly focused on two things, Android and Chrome because apparently Google believes “people are increasingly adopting phones, tablets and newer type of devices.” No surprise there. So here are some of the coolest announcements and big unveils made at the big event.
Android brag and Google Play upgrades
According to Google, Android is now running on 900 million devices, there have been 48 billion app downloads and also mentioned that 2.5 billion apps are being installed every month. Because of this great achievement, the company has focused a lot on improving Android services.
Google Play received a major upgrade with its’ new ‘Music’, a monthly music subscription service and the Google Play game services, which allows users to save games on the cloud resume from other devices and do much more.
Google+ and Chrome
Google+ received a major interface bump yesterday, which made it look a lot like Pinterest, along with 41 new features. We’ll talk more on that later. Google also showed off the next-gen video codec VP9 for Chrome which brings faster video-streaming performance and revealed that Chrome now has over 750 million active users.
Google also rolled out its’ new cross-platform chat app ‘Hangouts’.
Maps and Search improvements
Both desktop and mobile versions of Google Maps received updates including a personalized and improved interface for desktop. Google also previewed the next generation of Google Maps, which brings improved tailored suggestions and “life traffic incident reporting”.
Google Search also received the ability to set reminders by voice and Google showed off its’ new feature “spoken answers” that speaks out the answer when you ask Google a question.
There were a lot of announcements made at the big event including Larry Page’s keynote on “the importance of technology” and many more unveils but, these are basically the best things talked about during the Google I/O 2013 keynote.
Full keynote is now up on YouTube, you can watch it after the jump.
[Via: TNW / Google Blog]
(All the images, trademarks, logo’s shown on this post are the property of their respective owners)
Roshan Jerad Perera
