Google Kicks Off MWC With Grab-Bag of Android, Wear OS, Chrome OS Updates
BARCELONA—Google is once again refraining from taking up much floor space here at MWC, but it is making a bid at the start of the wireless industry’s biggest gathering to occupy a little more screen real estate on Android, Wear OS, and Chrome OS devices.
The company announced Monday(Opens in a new window) a set of new features coming to gadgets running those operating systems, with four of these updates rolling out now:
The Google Drive app for Android phones and tablets will support freehand annotation of PDFs. This has been fairly common among such desktop apps as macOS Preview and Mozilla Firefox, but mobile apps are different.
The Google Meet app–the new one, not the old one–can do noise cancellation on additional Android phones and tablets. This is separate from the “clear calling” noise cancellation Google has shipped for some Pixel phones.
The “Emoji Kitchen” feature of Google’s Gboard app will let you do additional mash-ups of emojis.
Chrome will let you expand the size of web-page content by as much as 300%, in keeping with an app-content-zoom feature coming to Android 14.
Other new features fall under a “Coming soon” heading in Google’s press release:
The Google Pay app will start showing more animations at the conclusion of tap-to-pay transactions, which Google says will include “some cheerful penguins and other characters.” They may not be as convincing as the small bribes Google has offered to users willing to correct its records about Pay transactions.
Chromebooks will be able to set up Bluetooth headphones with the Fast Pair quick-connect feature introduced last June, which we thought would drop later that summer.
Google Keep will ease note and to-do management with a new home-screen widget for Android
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