Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 Launched Globally

Designed using 45 Million ear scans & real-life wear tests, Pixel Buds Pro 2 feature a twist-to-adjust stabilizer.

Powered by Google’s Tensor A1 chip that processes audio with ultra-low latency & adapts to your environment upto 3 Million/sec, providing Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) that is 2x as effective as the previous generation, with Silent Seal 2.0 for enhanced noise reduction.

Specifications:
• Custom 11mm dynamic driver
• Clear Calling, voice accelerometer
• Conversation Detection; wind-blocking mesh covers
• Transparency mode, active in-ear pressure relief
• Spatial audio with head tracking

• Bluetooth 5.4, LE Audio, Super Wideband
• IP54 rated; Qi wireless charging
• New Find My Device Network with a ringing speaker in the case

Battery life: 12hrs (ANC off), 8hrs (ANC ON)
With Case: 48hrs (ANC off), 30hrs (ANC on)
5mins charge provides 1.5hrs of listening (ANC off)

Priced at Rs. 22,900/ $229 / £219 / €249

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A good friend of our channel has made a Pixel 9/9 Pro group & channel.

If you're interested in the latest Pixel devices, feel free to join both!

@Pixel9SeriesChannel | @Pixel9SeriesChat

Google rolls out 16 KB page size supported kernel for Pixel 8 series with Android 15 QPR1 Beta 1

Till now, Android has been “built and optimized to run with a 4 KB page size.” But by adding support for a 16 KB page size resulted in “overall performance boost of 5-10%,” though at the expense of ~9% additional memory usage including:

• 3.16% Lower app launch times while the system is under memory pressure
• 30% more significant improvements for some apps
• Reduced power draw during app launch by 4.56%
• Faster camera launch with 4.48% faster hot starts & 6.60% faster cold starts
• Improved system boot time by 1.5%

With Android 15, Google has refactored the OS “from the ground up to support running at different page sizes, thus making it page-size agnostic.” Developers have to recompile their apps for 16 KB page size devices, but the “same application binary can run on both 4 KB and 16 KB devices.”

The 16 KB page size supported kernel is already available in Android 15 QPR1 Beta 1 for the Pixel 8 series. However, this requires an unlocked bootloader AND wiping your entire userdata partition unless it's already formatted in EXT4. That's because, EXT4 block size must be <= of the system page size, while with F2FS, it must be equal. F2FS must have a matching block size and disk block size, and otherwise would require you to wipe each time you toggle the settings, unfeasible for development.

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Here’s an early look at Google’s revamped Pixel wallpaper app in Android 15 QPR1.

The new version will make it easier to customize your home screen and lock screen.

You can see a demo of this new UI in my latest article for Android Authority.

YouTube Premium Gets Expensive in India

YouTube launched the YouTube Premium in India back in 2019 at Rs. 129 a month, after 5 years, the company has hiked the price of the premium membership to Rs. 149. The student plan which was launched for Rs. 79 per month now costs Rs. 89

YouTube Premium family membership, which was launched for Rs. 189 a month that lets you share the account with 5 more family members now costs Rs. 299, which is a 58.2% Hike.

Existing premium subscribers are getting an email to agree to the new price, if no action is taken by the next billing date in September, your subnoscription will end before the new price takes effect from the billing date after that in October.

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If you unlock the bootloader of your Google Pixel 9 as I did, AICore refuses to download the Gemini Nano with multimodality model, breaking core features of the Pixel Screenshots app, Call Notes, and AI weather reports in Pixel Weather.

Pixel Studio doesn't use Gemini Nano, so it still mostly works.

Not surprising, but Google doesn't want people snooping around and messing with these features/the model.

In the future, I'm betting a lot of these ML models will be run in VMs, further isolating them. In fact, that's one of the things that the Android Virtualization Framework team has pitched to developers - being able to securely run proprietary ML models in a VM. And AOSP has just added flags for assigning TPUs to protected VMs, so we're getting there.