Latest Andru Edwards Videos
Google’s WeatherNext 3 Redraws the Forecast Every Hour
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Science, Artificial Intelligence,
The forecast you checked at breakfast was probably built from a picture of the atmosphere taken several hours before you looked at it. That lag is baked into how traditional forecasting works, and it is the thing Google DeepMind went after with WeatherNext 3, announced Thursday and already wired into Search, the Gemini app and Google Maps.
The big change is cadence. The previous version put out a new forecast every six hours. This one does it every hour, pulling in live geostationary satellite imagery as it arrives instead of waiting on the usual analysis cycle. Google calls the result "roughly five times sharper than our previous model."
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XREAL’s Aura Glasses Showed Up at IFA With Everything But a Price
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Displays, Google,
Every couple of years somebody straps a display to your face and tells you the laptop is finished. XREAL's Aura is the 2026 version of that pitch, and it turned up at ShowStoppers during IFA in Berlin this week running Google's Android XR. It still has no price and no ship date more specific than "fall."
What happened in Berlin was a demo. XREAL announced nothing at IFA. The glasses were shown as Project Aura alongside Google at I/O back in May, then got their real name, a full spec sheet, a content lineup and a reservation page at AWE in June. Berlin was one of the first big consumer shows where a general audience could put them on, which is worth something. The news itself is three months old.
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The Google TV Streamer Costs $150 Now, and Google Isn’t Saying Why
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Home Entertainment,
The Google TV Streamer launched in 2024 at $100. It costs $150 on the Google Store today. Same box, same 4GB of RAM, same 32GB of storage, same remote, 50 percent more money.
Google did not announce this. No blog post, no new product page explaining a new value proposition, no statement. The number on the store listing changed, Best Buy's listing changed with it, and if you had one sitting in a cart you found out by looking.
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Walmart Starts Taking Apple Pay Today, After Eleven Years of Saying No
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Google,
You know the specific flavor of checkout-line dread where you reach the terminal, hover your phone over the reader out of pure habit, and nothing happens? At Walmart, that has been the default for over a decade. Today it stops being the default.
Walmart is switching on Tap to Pay at select Walmart and Sam's Club locations starting August 24, which means Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Wallet, and any contactless card finally work at the biggest retailer in the country. The company says every U.S. store and club gets it by the end of 2026, with fuel stations following by mid-2027.
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Fitbit Data Can Finally Write to Apple Health, Twelve Years Late
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Wearables, Google,
If you wear a Fitbit and carry an iPhone, you've spent the last twelve years running a small, annoying errand. Your steps and sleep lived in one app. Everything else your phone tracked lived in Apple Health. Getting them into the same place meant paying for a third-party bridge and hoping it didn't break. That errand is finally over.
Google Health version 5.05 landed on iOS this week, and buried in the release notes is the thing people have been asking for since 2014: you can now share your exercise records, sleep, vitals, steps, and more from Google Health into Apple Health. It works for Fitbit trackers and the Pixel Watch, since Google Health replaced the old Fitbit app back in May.
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Samsung’s Galaxy Glasses Skip the Screen and Bet Everything on Gemini
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Google, Artificial Intelligence,
The whole fantasy of smart glasses has always been the same one: a computer on your face that nobody else notices you are wearing. Samsung's new Galaxy Glasses, shown off at Unpacked, take that idea about as far as it will go. They leave out the one thing you might assume a pair of smart glasses needs, which is a screen you can see through.
Instead of putting anything in your field of view, the Galaxy Glasses lean entirely on cameras, audio, and Google's Gemini assistant. This is the first pair built on Android XR, the platform Samsung and Google have been teasing for what feels like ages, and it is aimed squarely at the Ray-Ban Meta crowd rather than anyone still waiting on Iron Man overlays. You look at something, you talk to it, and it talks back.
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Gemini 3.6 Is Google Buying Time in the AI Race
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Google, Artificial Intelligence,
Every few weeks, one of the big AI labs drops a new model and asks you to care. Google's latest ask is Gemini 3.6, and the honest pitch is sitting right there in the release: it is cheaper to run than the last one. That is it. That is the headline feature.
Which is not nothing, if you are the person paying the bill. Google calls 3.6 its workhorse model, the one meant to balance quality against cost, and it does deliver real savings there: up to 65% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash in some cases, and about 17% fewer overall. Tokens are how these models get billed, so fewer tokens means a smaller invoice for the companies wiring Gemini into their apps. For everyone else, it is the kind of improvement you feel in a spreadsheet, not in a conversation.
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Samsung Put Google’s Research Brain on Your New Foldable. Does It Belong There?
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Google, Artificial Intelligence,
NotebookLM has quietly become the app that power users swear by, the thing you open on a laptop that already has thirty tabs fighting for space. It reads your sources, connects the dots, and answers questions about them. So here is the odd part of Samsung's latest Galaxy Unpacked pitch: that tool, now rebranded Gemini Notebook, comes preloaded on phones you fold in half.
The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Z Fold 8, and Z Flip 8 all ship with it built in. On paper that sounds like a real upgrade over yet another chatbot shortcut. In practice, it raises a simple question worth asking before you get excited: is a deep-research desk tool something you actually want to reach for on a phone?
Google Search Wants to Finish the Job: AI Mode Now Talks to Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Internet, Artificial Intelligence,
For as long as any of us have used it, Google Search has been the place you go to figure out what to do next. Where to eat, what to buy, how to fix the thing under the sink. Google now wants it to be the place you actually do those things. This week it started rolling out new connections in AI Mode that wire Search directly into Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music, so the answer and the action finally live in the same window.
The pitch, in Google's own words, is to "reduce the steps between planning a task in Search and completing it in another app." In practice that means you can plan a backyard barbecue in AI Mode, watch it turn the menu into a grocery list, and push those ingredients straight into an Instacart cart without opening a single new tab. It is a small convenience with a big ambition behind it, and it tells you a lot about where Google thinks Search is headed.
Google’s Gemini 3.5 Pro Is Stuck, and the Reason Is Uncomfortably Human
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Software, Artificial Intelligence,
Back in May, on stage at I/O, Google told everyone Gemini 3.5 Pro was basically a month away. It is now the back half of July, the model still is not here, and the reason is the one thing Google would least like to admit out loud: its flagship AI cannot write good enough code yet.
That is the short version of a Bloomberg report, built on interviews with ten current and former employees, that has quietly turned into one of the more revealing stories in AI this year. Google tweaked the training data late last month to sharpen the model's coding chops. The results, per one person, were disappointing. So instead of shipping, Google is holding the line and reworking, which is the right call and also a slightly alarming one.
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