Google’s developer conference I/O has become the company’s largest product show in recent years, presenting a wide range of innovations. The Pixel Tablet, Google’s first tablet since Nexus, is a smart display and tablet in one device. The Pixel 7a, Google’s new smartphone, hardly differs from its slightly older sibling, and the surprise Pixel Fold is Google’s first clamshell phone, thinner than the competition and with different software. The conference also focused on AI, with Pathway Language Model, PaLM, coming out in a second version, and Google’s bard becoming multilingual and multimodal.
Google also revised its “Find my Device” service, connecting more than a billion Android devices around the world to a tracker network that can find misplaced devices, even if offline. Helion Energy, a US startup, announced its intent to generate electricity from nuclear fusion in five years, with Microsoft as its first customer. A Chinese reusable spacecraft, after 276 days in space, landed, marking an important breakthrough in research into reusable space technology.
The pandemic shifted Germans toward card payments, and a study from the EHI trading institute shows there are no signs of a trend reversal back to cash.
