Gadget Ogling: Google Embraces a Hardware Future

The first smartphones Google has made by itself, Pixel and Pixel XL, are the first to bear Android 7.1 and the first to have the impressive Google Assistant built in. The Pixel has a 5-inch HD screen, while the Pixel XL offers a 5.5-inch QHD display. The phones have a quad-core processor and 4 GB of RAM. I like that the fingerprint sensor is on the back -- that would nullify the awkward fidgeting I deal with every time my iPhone fails to recognize my thumbprint -- and the inclusion of an analog headphone jack is extremely welcome.

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Cyanogen's Android Alternative Goes Modular

Cyanogen, the maker of an alternative version of Android, on Tuesday announced that it was going modular. Future releases of its open source firmware product will not support a full stack of the Android OS. The new modular setup will bring a slew of benefits to phone makers and developers, according to Cyanogen. "The new partnership program offers smartphone manufacturers greater freedom and opportunity to introduce intelligent, customizable Android smartphones," noted Cyanogen CEO Lior Tal.

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Tech Heavyweights Join Forces to Lasso AI

Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft last month announced the creation of the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit organization dedicated to formulating best practices in artificial intelligence and educating the public about the field. The group will invite academics, other nonprofits, and specialists in policy and ethics to join its board, which will represent corporate and noncorporate members equally. The partnership will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license.

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Yahoo Makes It Harder for Email Users to Jump Ship

Yahoo in recent days disabled autoforwarding for Yahoo Mail -- and in at least one corporate client's case, it disabled the webmail deletion feature. The autoforwarding feature "is under development," reads a statement on the Yahoo site. "While we work to improve it, we've temporarily disabled the ability to turn on Mail Forwarding for new forwarding addresses." There has been speculation that Yahoo turned off the autoforwarding feature to stem the tide of users quitting Yahoo Mail.

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All Systems Go for Andromeda

Although Google didn't drop any new details on the progress of Andromeda at its big Pixel event, that doesn't suggest any tempering of enthusiasm for the new operating system. Andromeda reportedly is a mashup of Android and Chrome, with features from Chrome having been ported into Android rather than the other way around. It's expected to show up next year in a new laptop, dubbed "Pixel 3." The project is known internally as "Bison." Google also plans to launch a Huawei-manufactured Nexus tablet that will run Andromeda.

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Google's New Fonts Chip Away at Written Language Barriers

Project Noto, one of Google's most ambitious undertakings ever, has reached a milestone. Noto now supports 800 languages and 100 writing scripts, the companies announced last week. Google and Monotype launched the open source initiative to create a typeface family that supports all the languages in the world, even rarely used languages. Both serif and sans serif letters with up to eight weights are supported, as well as numbers, emoji, symbols and musical notation. "Noto" is short for "no tofu."

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Google Resurrects Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

This almost sounds like a plot for a novel. Microsoft creates a successful strategy called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" and then promptly forgets it, resulting in a string of failures. Google, which up to now seemed happy to repeat Microsoft's mistakes, accidentally picks up a successful Microsoft practice and uses it against Apple -- likely taking out a number of its Android partners. When Microsoft was starting out, its most powerful platform wasn't Windows, which was almost an industry joke at the time -- it was Microsoft Office.

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