Google has announced a slew of new features for Android, Chromebook and Wear OS that are designed to improve connectivity, productivity and accessibility. The announcement was timed to coincide with Mobile World Congress (MWC), which is currently taking place in Barcelona.
More productivity on your devices
Say you’re planning a big event, or perhaps just the weekly shopping list. Starting soon, the Google Keep single note widget will help you swiftly manage your notes and check off to-do lists right from your Home screen. This widget displays reminders, background colors and images added to notes from the Keep app while also syncing with your smartwatch, so you won’t miss a beat.
And if you have your Wear OS by Google smartwatch handy, Google Keep is introducing two new shortcuts that can help you create notes and to-do lists with a simple tap on your watch face.
Use a stylus or simply touch the screen to annotate PDFs in the Google Drive app for Android. Try different ink strokes to provide notes or feedback freehand (handy for marking up photos and visual plans), or use the highlighter tool to save important text neatly on your tablet or phone. Then hide, undo, delete or save a new copy of your annotated documents.
Audio enhancements
The company revealed that Fast Pair will soon be able to connect new Bluetooth headphones to a Chromebook with just a tap. If a user has already set up headphones with their Android phone, their Chromebook will automatically connect to them as well. Further, Google Meet will soon be offering noise cancellation on more Android mobile devices to filter out background sounds when talking during a meeting.
Customize your Android
You can now easily increase the size of content on Chrome — including text, images, video and interactive controls — by up to 300% to suit your vision preferences while still preserving the page layout. This includes the ability to set your preferred content size as a default so you don’t have to change it every time you open up Chrome. Try it today within Chrome Beta via Settings > Accessibility, before it officially rolls out in March.
In addition, Wear OS is getting two new sound and display modes that are designed to improve watch accessibility. Users will soon get access to mono-audio mode to help limit disorientation caused by split-audio. New color-correction and grayscale modes will give users more choice for their watch display.
And lastly, Wear OS 3+ will introduce two new sound and display modes to improve watch accessibility. Mono-audio can help limit disorientation caused by split-audio, while color-correction and grayscale modes give you more choice for your watch display.
