Author: n Ryan Whitwamn

Google announces second Android 16 release of 2025 is heading to Pixels

The update is rolling out to Pixels starting today.

Google is following through on its pledge to split Android versions into more frequent updates. We already had one Android 16 release this year, and now it’s time for the second. The new version is rolling out first on Google’s Pixel phones, featuring more icon customization, easier parental controls, and AI-powered notifications. Don’t be bummed if you aren’t first in line for the new Android 16—Google also has a raft of general improvements coming to the wider Android ecosystem.

Android 16, part 2

Since rolling out the first version of Android in 2008, Google has largely stuck to one major release per year. Android 16 changes things, moving from one monolithic release to two. Today’s OS update is the second part of the Android 16 era, but don’t expect major changes. As expected, the first release in June made more changes. Most of what we’ll see in the second update is geared toward Google’s Pixel phones, plus some less notable changes for developers.

Google’s new AI features for notifications are probably the most important change. Android 16 will use AI for two notification tasks: summarizing and organizing. The OS will take long chat conversations and summarize the notifications with AI. Notification data is processed locally on the device and won’t be uploaded anywhere. In the notification shade, the collapsed notification line will feature a summary of the conversation rather than a snippet of one message. Expanding the notification will display the full text.

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Samsung reveals Galaxy Z TriFold with 10-inch foldable screen, astronomical price

Samsung’s long-awaited tri-fold phone is launching in Korea this month, with a US launch early next year.

Samsung has a new foldable smartphone, and it’s not just another Z Flip or Z Fold. The Galaxy Z TriFold has three articulating sections that house a massive 10-inch tablet-style screen, along with a traditional smartphone screen on the outside. The lavish new smartphone is launching this month in South Korea with a hefty price tag, and it will eventually make its way to the US in early 2026.

Samsung says it refined its Armor FlexHinge design for the TriFold. The device’s two hinges are slightly different sizes because the phone’s three panels have distinct shapes. The center panel is the thickest at 4.2 mm, and the other two are fractions of a millimeter thinner. The phone has apparently been designed to account for the varying sizes and weights, allowing the frame to fold up tight in a pocketable form factor.

Huawei’s impressive Mate XT tri-fold phones have been making the rounds online, but they’re not available in Western markets. Samsung’s new foldable looks similar at a glance, but the way the three panels fit together is different. The Mate XT folds in a Z-shaped configuration, using part of the main screen as the cover display. On Samsung’s phone, the left and right segments fold inward behind the separate cover screen. Samsung claims it has tested the design extensively to verify that the hinges will hold up to daily use for years.

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Netflix quietly drops support for casting to most TVs

Netflix will only support Google Cast on older devices without remotes.

Have you been trying to cast Stranger Things from your phone, only to find that your TV isn’t cooperating? It’s not the TV—Netflix is to blame for this one, and it’s intentional. The streaming app has recently updated its support for Google Cast to disable the feature in most situations. You’ll need to pay for one of the company’s more expensive plans, and even then, Netflix will only cast to older TVs and streaming dongles.

The Google Cast system began appearing in apps shortly after the original Chromecast launched in 2013. Since then, Netflix users have been able to start video streams on TVs and streaming boxes from the mobile app. That was vital for streaming targets without their own remote or on-screen interface, but times change.

Today, Google has moved beyond the remote-free Chromecast experience, and most TVs have their own standalone Netflix apps. Netflix itself is also allergic to anything that would allow people to share passwords or watch in a new place. Over the last couple of weeks, Netflix updated its Android app to remove most casting options, mirroring a change in 2019 to kill Apple AirPlay.

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Google’s latest swing at Chromebook gaming is a free year of GeForce Now

GeForce Now Fast Pass is a new service tier exclusively for Chromebooks.

Earlier this year, Google announced the end of its efforts to get Steam running on Chromebooks, but it’s not done trying to make these low-power laptops into gaming machines. Google has teamed up with Nvidia to offer a version of GeForce Now cloud streaming that is perplexingly limited in some ways and generous in others. Starting today, anyone who buys a Chromebook will get a free year of a new service called GeForce Now Fast Pass. There are no ads and less waiting for server slots, but you don’t get to play very long.

Back before Google killed its Stadia game streaming service, it would often throw in a few months of the Pro subscription with Chromebook purchases. In the absence of its own gaming platform, Google has turned to Nvidia to level up Chromebook gaming. GeForce Now (GFN), which has been around in one form or another for more than a decade, allows you to render games on a remote server and stream the video output to the device of your choice. It works on computers, phones, TVs, and yes, Chromebooks.

The new Chromebook feature is not the same GeForce Now subscription you can get from Nvidia. Fast Pass, which is exclusive to Chromebooks, includes a mishmash of limits and bonuses that make it a pretty strange offering. Fast Pass is based on the free tier of GeForce Now, but users will get priority access to server slots. So no queuing for five or 10 minutes to start playing. It also lacks the ads that Nvidia’s standard free tier includes. Fast Pass also uses the more powerful RTX servers, which are otherwise limited to the $10-per-month ($100 yearly) Performance tier.

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Google’s new Nano Banana Pro uses Gemini 3 power to generate more realistic AI images

Google’s new image-generator model is available to try globally today.

Google’s meme-friendly Nano Banana image-generation model is getting an upgrade. The new Nano Banana Pro is rolling out with improved reasoning and instruction following, giving users the ability to create more accurate images with legible text and make precise edits to existing images. It’s available to everyone in the Gemini app, but free users will find themselves up against the usage limits pretty quickly.

Nano Banana Pro is part of the newly launched Gemini 3 Pro—it’s actually called Gemini 3 Pro Image in the same way the original is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, but Google is sticking with the meme-y name. You can access it by selecting Gemini 3 Pro and then turning on the “Create images” option.

Nano Banana Pro: Your new creative partner.

Google says the new model can follow complex prompts to create more accurate images. The model is apparently so capable it can generate an entire usable infographic in a single shot with no weird AI squiggles in place of words. Nano Banana Pro is also better at maintaining consistency in images. You can blend up to 14 images with this tool, and it can maintain the appearance of up to five people in outputs.

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OnePlus 15 review: The end of range anxiety

OnePlus delivers its second super-fast phone of 2025.

OnePlus got its start courting the enthusiast community by offering blazing-fast phones for a low price. While the prices aren’t quite as low as they once were, the new OnePlus 15 still delivers on value. Priced at $899, this phone sports the latest and most powerful Snapdragon processor, the largest battery in a mainstream smartphone, and a super-fast screen.

The OnePlus 15 still doesn’t deliver the most satisfying software experience, and the camera may actually be a step back for the company, but the things OnePlus gets right are very right. It’s a fast, sleek phone that runs for ages on a charge, and it’s a little cheaper than the competition. But its shortcomings make it hard to recommend this device over the latest from Google or Samsung—or even the flagship phone OnePlus released ten months ago.

US buyers have time to mull it over, though. Because of the recent government shutdown, FCC approval of the OnePlus 15 has been delayed. The company says it will release the phone as soon as it can, but there’s no exact date yet.

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Google unveils Gemini 3 AI model and AI-first IDE called Antigravity

Google’s flagship AI model is getting its second major upgrade this year.

Google has kicked its Gemini rollout into high gear over the past year, releasing the much-improved Gemini 2.5 family and cramming various flavors of the model into Search, Gmail, and just about everything else the company makes.

Now, Google’s increasingly unavoidable AI is getting an upgrade. Gemini 3 Pro is available in a limited form today, featuring more immersive, visual outputs and fewer lies, Google says. The company also says Gemini 3 sets a new high-water mark for vibe coding, and Google is announcing a new AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) called Antigravity, which is also available today.

The first member of the Gemini 3 family

Google says the release of Gemini 3 is yet another step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). The new version of Google’s flagship AI model has expanded simulated reasoning abilities and shows improved understanding of text, images, and video. So far, testers like it—Google’s latest LLM is once again atop the LMArena leaderboard with an ELO score of 1,501, besting Gemini 2.5 Pro by 50 points.

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Google will let Android power users bypass upcoming sideloading restrictions

Google will preserve sideloading for power users, but it hasn’t decided how that will work yet.

Google recently decided that the freedom afforded by Android was a bit too much and announced developer verification, a system that will require developers outside the Google Play platform to register with Google. Users and developers didn’t accept Google’s rationale and have been complaining loudly. As Google begins early access testing, it has conceded that “experienced users” should have an escape hatch.

According to Google, online scam and malware campaigns are getting more aggressive, and there’s real harm being done in spite of the platform’s sideloading scare screens. Google says it’s common for scammers to use social engineering to create a false sense of urgency, prompting users to bypass Android’s built-in protections to install malicious apps.

Google’s solution to this problem, as announced several months ago, is to force everyone making apps to verify their identities. Unverified apps won’t install on any Google-certified device once verification rolls out. Without this, the company claims malware creators can endlessly create new apps to scam people. However, the centralized nature of verification threatened to introduce numerous headaches into a process that used to be straightforward for power users.

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Google is rolling out conversational shopping—and ads—in AI Mode search

Conversational shopping is Google’s first big swing at monetizing AI Mode search.

In recent months, Google has promised to inject generative AI into the online shopping experience, and now it’s following through. The previously announced shopping features of AI Mode search are rolling out, and Gemini will also worm its way into Google’s forgotten Duplex automated phone call tech. It’s all coming in time for the holidays to allegedly make your gifting more convenient and also conveniently ensure that Google gets a piece of the action.

At Google I/O in May, the company announced its intention to bring conversational shopping to AI Mode. According to Google, its enormous “Shopping Graph” or retailer data means its AI is uniquely positioned to deliver useful suggestions. In the coming weeks, users in the US will be able to ask AI Mode complex questions about what to buy, and it will deliver suggestions, guides, tables, and other generated content to help you decide. And since this is gen AI, it comes with the usual disclaimers about possible mistakes.

AI Mode shopping features.

You’re probably wondering if there will be sponsored shopping content in these experiences, and that’s a big yes. Google says some of the content that appears in AI Mode will be ads, just like if you look up shopping results in a traditional search. Shopping features are also coming to the Gemini app, but Google says it won’t have sponsored content in the results for the time being.

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Google says new cloud-based “Private AI Compute” is just as secure as local processing

New system allows devices to connect directly to secure space in Google’s AI servers.

Google’s current mission is to weave generative AI into as many products as it can, getting everyone accustomed to, and maybe even dependent on, working with confabulatory robots. That means it needs to feed the bots a lot of your data, and that’s getting easier with the company’s new Private AI Compute. Google claims its new secure cloud environment will power better AI experiences without sacrificing your privacy.

The pitch sounds a lot like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. Google’s Private AI Compute runs on “one seamless Google stack” powered by the company’s custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). These chips have integrated secure elements, and the new system allows devices to connect directly to the protected space via an encrypted link.

Google’s TPUs rely on an AMD-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that encrypts and isolates memory from the host. Theoretically, that means no one else—not even Google itself—can access your data. Google says independent analysis by NCC Group shows that Private AI Compute meets its strict privacy guidelines.

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