If the only thing available on the free tier is curated radio stations, would any significant number of Android users have bothered with it anyway?

Whatever you are actually talking about, you actually said Apple is only copying Android because of the conference scheduling. But Apple doesn’t have anything like Now on Tap, they have something like the old version of Google Now that had been around for a lot longer than the conferences were scheduled.

The features Apple is imitating weren’t announced a few weeks prior though, they’ve been around for a while. Proactive is just now getting to where Google Now was before I/O, it’s still behind the Now on Tap features that were just announced. Google Music, Spotify, Rdio, etc. have been around for years. Google Maps…

The good news is you don’t have to ever talk to Google Now or have it talk to you. But you can when it’s convenient.

One convenient thing for me is the traffic alert - it’ll always tell me the time it will take to drive home. It’s great during morning and evening rush hour commutes since I know a large deviation from the usual commute time means there’s an accident I should avoid.

I have a Moto X too - don’t forget being able to voice command to navigate to the location that was read to you.

The main issue is that it’s a totally different look at email, turning the “inbox” into a to-do list. Instead of emails being read or unread, emails are either done or not done, with the done emails being flushed from the main inbox but still searchable. As such, now your email inbox is just a list of the emails you…

NFC on the phone is only a marginal time saver, but in a perfect world it would be a great space saver. Google Wallet as it is now, and presumably Android Pay in the future, have the ability to save all your credit cards and any loyalty/rewards cards with bar codes. So in a future where every store has NFC payment…

I could be wrong, but IIRC from previous announcements this is more of a platform for payment apps than just a payment app. So if your bank or credit card company wants to build their own NFC payment app for Android that works just like Google Wallet, they’ll use the Android Pay API to do it. Plus it gives a new…

The “Get Link” option seems super convenient. No more setting up an album and adjusting privacy settings, it’s all done when you share the link.

I’ve only been on one cruise, but on that one we frequently left the ship when it was at port. It hardly seemed different than a large floating hotel, except that when you left the hotel every day you were in a new city. And even if you’re on a trans-Atlantic cruise or something, the top level and balconies are open…

“It’s better than no internet” doesn’t exactly strike me as a ringing endorsement.

One important detail was left out: A colored flair is attached to your username in all the submissions and comments in the subreddit. It’s grey for the people who haven’t pressed, and after you press the color depends on the time you pressed. Once you pressed, you are forever marked by the decision you made. The…

I’m not sure if they’ll fit in the storage pod, but the website says they take standard 13 gallon bags:

Do LG phones not come with an unlockable bootloader? As far as I know, Samsung phones (and most non-Verizon/AT&T Android phones) come with unlockable bootloaders, so rooting is normally as easy as unlocking the bootloader and installing root. That’s the way it was with my Moto X, my Galaxy Nexus, and my Droid…

I don’t have a G4 so I don’t know for sure, but generally all Android phones have been easily rootable as long as you don’t get a carrier subsidized version from Verizon or AT&T because those versions don’t come with an unlockable bootloader. So I’d be shocked if the non-Verizon/AT&T versions weren’t easily rootable.…

For now, the Chrome equivalent I've settled on is miniGestures

I tried T-Mobile prepaid for about 9 months when I didn’t want to have to deal with Verizon locked down phones, and “you notice how bad it is right when you need it” describes it perfectly. I was fine the vast majority of the time I was in a metro area, but those few time I went out of town were so annoying I couldn’t…

Technically correct, but irrelevant. Anyone that buys a Chromecast is going to have a least one smartphone, tablet, or computer in the house that they will be able to easily connect. But there are plenty of technically literate households that won’t have spare keyboards and mice just sitting around.

I gave 8pen a try for like a month way back when it originally came out - it was the first non-stock keyboard I used. Learning curve was very steep, but after about a month’s use I mostly remembered letters without looking and got decent at it. But that was right at the time Swype finally went on wide release, and I…