Google’s messaging systems have quickly become a mess – with the launch of Google Chat a decade ago they had a pretty decent headstart. But they quickly branched out into different channels with the launch of Google Voice, and later the Hangouts feature in Google+.

Google Talk was luckily built on the Jabber standard until now, meaning that you could quite easily integrate it with many different clients across many platforms. But Google never launched an official Google Chat client outside Android – until now. The new Google Hangouts app is meant to bring Talk, Hangouts video chat and Google Voice together into one product.

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We have seen a leaked promo video in the past, and now it has finally been made official. Google Now is available on iOS, compatible with iPhone and iPad. We first saw it with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean but it is now available to the hordes of iOS users.

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Even though the Nexus 7 has almost been around for a year, a revamped version was released more recently and we put it through its paces. At such a low price point, the Nexus 7 is a premium device for very little money. We think it’s the best 7-inch Android tablet by a country mile, but how does it compare to something like the iPad Mini? Check out our video review below. (more…)

Everyone and their gran has a mobile payment startup from Square to Paypal to Google to everyone. The logic is why carry your cellphone and wallet when you can just carry the cell and pay for everything. You know what I think about this: it’s a dumb idea.

Why Saul, why are you saying that progress is bad? Don’t you want to just carry one device?

You know what: carrying a credit card isn’t actually that much of a hassle. The truth of the matter is that I need a wallet for my drivers license and various other cards so it’s hardly as though I am going to carry less. Maybe with Apple’s Passbook to control my loyalty type cards I could eventually solve this issue but the truth of the matter is that I don’t care.

I’m not the only one that thinks this:

Bill Ready, CEO of Braintree, which powers the credit-card handling portion of various websites, “is that mobile doesn’t solve a huge pain point for either the consumer or the merchant on in store payments.” In other words, none of these methods makes life that much easier. It’s true that mobile wallets could allow for all kinds of new features, from helping shoppers keep track of their spending to giving retailers new ways to reward loyal customers; but technologies tend to catch on fast only when they solve a pressing problem. Those that merely make life a bit better take time for people to adopt.

A credit card is tiny, it pays for anything around the world and people should spend more time getting parking machines to accept credit cards than a cellphone replacing a slice of plastic with a slab of plastic.

Source (Quartz)

Google’s Nexus 7 16GB is now available for purchase in South Africa, at R2999 at select retailers. The Nexus 7 is the first tablet in Google’s Nexus line of devices and the lead device for Android 4.1, called Jelly Bean. The Nexus 7 is a pretty great buy if you are looking for a more compact tablet that is running the latest and greatest Android version.

Jointly developed between ASUS and Google, Nexus 7 is the world’s first 7-inch quad-core tablet, built to bring consumers the best of Google and ASUS in a slim and portable package that fits perfectly in the hand. Nexus 7 brings together ASUS’ world-class “design thinking” philosophy and the latest version of Google’s innovative Android platform to deliver the ultimate portable computing experience at an irresistible price.

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Google just launched a new feature for touch screen phones that allow users to do searches by simply tracing the letters on the screen. This will work on Android and iOS devices, and that includes tablets as well. The user has to manually activate it though:

1. Open up Google Search on your device.
2. Go to Settings (bottom of screen for phones, top right for tablets)
3. Enable Handwriting.
4. Click done.

You can switch handwriting mode on or off by clicking the little button on the bottom right.

The page should show a quick demo, and thereafter you simply start writing. It is remarkably accurate in our experience – and there is almost no delay while it figures out what you write. We must be honest though – it is not something we will use every day, because we still find typing faster.

Is it something you will use, or is it simply a nice to have feature?

For a long time, the only major file syncing service with a decent cloud backup option was Dropbox, and its cross platform compatibility across all your devices made it a firm favourite. Google was always rumoured to be readying “GDrive”, but it just never appeared. But a few days ago Microsoft announced that they are finally bringing Skydrive syncing clients to other platforms than Windows, so it was only natural that now was the perfect time for Google to also jump into the file syncing pool.

Google Drive is free, and users will get 5GB of cloud based storage for free. Google of course has the advantage of having pretty decent editing tools available in the shape of Google Docs, and Google Drive will also have some pretty great collaboration services as well. For example – if you share and collaborate on a document, you can keep track of comments from other editors in the document, regardless of the type of file, be it video, photo, PDF etc.

Just like Dropbox, you sync your Google Drive across devices, and your stuff is also safely stored in the cloud, in case anything happens with it. But Google’s Search speciality makes the cloud storage even more powerful – using OCR (optical character recognition), Google can scan your documents for all their included text, and then you can just search for text. Very much like Evernote.

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Apple’s stock price jumped up quite a bit in the last few days (up to $493), which now makes it worth $456 billion, which is worth more than the two other computer superpowers, Microsoft and Google, combined.

Google’s shareprice is currently trading at 189.9 billion, after it took a 9 percent knock on recent missed expectations for earnings and revenue. Microsoft’s Windows division took a 6 percent revenue drop to $4.7 billion, but the rest of the company did very well. This is also thanks to the Xbox division which has finally turned profitable for Microsoft.

Now Apple’s market cap has grown tremendously, part in thanks to the iPhone business, which is alone worth $222 billion. Think about that for a second – the iPhone business revenue is now worth more than Microsoft. And this from a product that did not exist 5 years ago. This makes this interview with Steve Ballmer even funnier – watch his reaction after he gets asked what he thinks of the iPhone:

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