Review: Nexus 5

Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

There was once a time when the Nexus badge on a device meant a truly unique Android experience that was months, and sometimes a year ahead of what most Android smartphones were pushing. Cutting edge features, impressive specs and the promise of Pure Google experience were a big draw to developers and alpha geeks alike.

This year's Nexus 5 smartphone, created by LG under Google's strict supervision is, in many ways, just the right device to represent the KitKat-powered future of Android. But boy, how things have changed.

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Google Now update includes Waze traffic updates, news card update, improved voice commands

Google has started to roll out new features for Google Now service. Engadget listed the availability of Waze traffic updates that emphasizes alerts relevant to your daily commute and an improved news update card that follows topics and people you’ve searched about or decided to follow. The “What to Watch” card includes more TV show and movie suggestions. You get notifications for store pickups; you can repeat reminders; and even get real-time rugby scores. Ars Technica also discovered that Google Now uses a more conversational approach to voice commands.

Evernote for Android gets home screen customization, PDF annotation

Evernote updates its Android app to upgrade the Page Camera feature, which auto-enhances photos of handwritten notes, as well as allow all users to view recently used notebooks and hide Business notebooks. Premium Evernote users get PDF annotation capabilities through Skitch integration and home screen customization, which lets them hide items from the menu.

Source: Evernote

SlideShow: Google's Moto G smartphone and first impressions

Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

The Moto X's younger brother, the Moto G, is Google's attempt at capturing customers in emerging markets and covering the feature phone void once dominated by Nokia.

The Moto G is an impressive smartphone which looks and feels very much like the Moto X except it is slightly heavier and thicker. Performance is surprisingly speedy for most functions and call quality is superb on the TELUS network.

The Moto G runs on Android 4.3 and features a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage space (around 5.2 GB of which is usable) although users automatically receive 50 GB from Google Drive. No contract price for this smartphone is $200 without a contract.

On the flipside, Moto G has no LTE connectivity, no NFC, one less microphone and lacks all the gesture-based controls, the Just Talk voice functionality and the active notifications that were showcased with the Moto X. You don't even get a wall adapter, just the USB cable to charge. Motorola has had to make choices on what to keep and what to feature and so far, it looks like they made the right choices.