Month: March 2020

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  The Pixel 4 is getting some new features. (Be warned that this is a gif-heavy gallery.) [credit: Google ]

Android's March Security Update is starting to roll out, and with it Google is announcing the second-ever "Feature Drop" for the Pixel 4. Feature Drops are a new update scheme that sees Google leverage its OS development skills into quarterly mini-updates for the Pixel line. This quarter the Pixel line is getting new emojis, the scheduled dark mode feature from Android 11, faster access to Google Pay, and several other features.

The Pixel 4 is currently on Android 10, which comes with Unicode Emoji 12.0. The Pixel 4 is getting an emoji update, but this isn't 2020's Unicode Emoji 13.0, which should be out along with Android 11. The Pixel is getting Emoji 12.1, which as the name suggests, this is a half-step between 12 and 13 that accelerates the release of some Emoji 13 features. As Emojipedia details, it includes 23 new gender-neutral emojis like "a gender-neutral fire fighter, astronaut, person in wheelchair, judge, and more. With skin-tone support included, the tally equals 138 additions." Additionally, there are new skin tone combinations for the "couple" emoji that weren't supported in Emoji 12. Google says there are 169 new emoji in this update.

The Android 11 Developer Preview introduced a scheduled dark mode that could turn on at sundown and off at sunrise, and that feature is being backported to the Pixel 4 on Android 10. There's also a new feature that goes in the complete opposite direction—a high-brightness mode. The Pixel 4 has a pretty undersized battery, and higher-brightness won't help, but sometimes you're outside and really just want to see the display.

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  Hello, darkness, my old friend. [credit: Valve ]

On Monday, three weeks before its retail launch on Windows PCs, Half-Life: Alyx received its most revealing look yet. This new video series, weighing in at 10 minutes, is an incredible summary of the upcoming VR game's three pillars: puzzles, action, and creeping dread.

I can confirm that this footage is spliced from various moments through the campaign, with only one scene, labeled "Gameplay Video 1," taking place within the game's earliest section. Based on what I've learned from multiple sources, this video series has been very carefully curated, because it focuses more on how Alyx's VR movement and beat-by-beat gameplay will look and feel, as opposed to spoiling its storytelling or more complicated puzzles.

The three-part series has one huge component in common: the Gravity Gloves. This new control system appears to work exactly as I'd learned ahead of last year's reveal:

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

Until now, Waymo (formerly the Google self-driving car project) has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet. While the company enjoyed a limited amount of autonomy, CEO John Krafcik still ultimately reported to Alphabet brass. Waymo has never published its own financial results, but it's widely believed that Alphabet has absorbed billions of dollars of losses as Waymo has refined its technology.

Now Alphabet won't have to bear the financial burden alone. Waymo says that for the first time it has raised funding from outside investors. The total fundraising round is $2.25 billion—though some of that money is coming from parent company Alphabet. Other investors include Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Waymo is following in the footsteps of two of its biggest rivals—GM's Cruise and Ford's Argo. Cruise has raised more than $3 billion in three rounds from Softbank, T. Rowe Price, Honda, and parent company GM. The Honda investment has helped cement an alliance that could lead to Honda adopting Cruise's self-driving technology for its own vehicles.