Weekly output: Android + Chrome OS, Qualcomm’s AI vision, Microsoft cancels some IDF Unit 8200 services

This week’s trip to Hawaii and back for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit–with that company paying my airfare and lodging for its invitation-only event–reminded me once again of the vast size of the United States. And yet I was able to wake up painfully early Friday morning on Maui, take a flight to San Francisco, board a second flight from SFO to Dulles, and land at IAD in time to catch the night’s last eastbound Silver Line train from the airport.

9/25/2025: Google Teases Its Android PC Project Again. Qualcomm Says ‘It’s Incredible’, PCMag

I wrote an update to this post by PCMag’s U.K.-based correspondent James Peckham after seeing a Google executive share a few more details about this upcoming rebuild of ChromeOS on an Android foundation in Wednesday’s keynote.

9/25/2025: Qualcomm’s CEO Touts a Future Where AI (and Cameras) Are Everywhere, PCMag

It wasn’t until I was an hour into writing up Tuesday afternoon’s keynote early Wednesday morning that I realized how Qualcomm’s vision of AI acting upon the inputs of always-on cameras in smart glasses and cars unintentionally echoed the “always-on camera” branding it had briefly and unwisely picked for a human-presence detection system in smartphones almost four years earlier.

9/27/2025: What’s behind Microsoft’s canceling of some services to Israel’s military?, Al Jazeera

I didn’t get to sleep in Saturday morning after coming home around 2 a.m. Instead, Al Jazeera asked me to join this discussion recorded then about Microsoft canceling some cloud services for the Israeli Defense Forces after reporting by the Guardian and the Israel-based news outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call documented how the IDF’s Unit 8200 had employed those services to conduct a pervasive and invasive surveillance campaign against Palestinians. My fellow panelists: Taghreed El-Khodary, a Palestinian journalist now based in the Netherlands, and Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch. One of my contributions was reminding viewers of Microsoft president Brad Smith’s words at Web Summit 2018: “The tools that we’ve created, the tools often times that you’ve created, have been turned by others into weapons.”

#AI #android #BradSmith #ChromeOS #CristianoAmon #Gaza #GoogleOSes #IDF #Microsoft #privacy #Qualcomm #SameerSamat #smartGlasses #SnapdragonSummit #Unit8200

I’m not sure that the mass market shares the tech industry’s vision for smart glasses

One recent change among early-adopter circles was plain on the faces of many fellow attendees of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui this week: “smart” glasses with cameras, microphones, speakers and sometimes screens. But then my flights home Friday reminded me that for the overwhelming majority of people, “eyewear” means electronics-free glasses.

Qualcomm’s invitation-only conference–that company paid my airfare and lodging, as it did on my prior trips to cover it in 2021, 2022 and 2024–allowed me to get some brief face time with Snap’s Spectacles ’24, running newer software than the version I tried at last year’s summit. The event also treated me to a parade of tech execs testifying that smart glasses were the next big computing platform.

But despite all those optimistic assurances and my own earlier, brief tryouts of such smart glasses as Meta’s camera-enabled Ray-Bans and a prototype set of Android XR glasses, I remain unsold on the entire concept. So, it seems, do most customers: A Forrester Research survey released in September found that 79 percent of respondents had no interest in buying smart glasses.

On one hand, smart glasses with cameras, speakers and microphones are not particularly cheap–the Ray-Ban-branded models from the conglomerate EssilorLuxottica cost $379 and up–but perform worse than phones at taking pictures and playing audio.

Plus, they have the potential to annoy friends and strangers who aren’t keen on the possibility of surreptitious photography.

On the other hand, more advanced smart glasses with built-in displays could finally make hands-free augmented-reality overviews of the world a reality, but first somebody has to bring them to market at a not-crazy price. Snap’s Spectacles, which require a $99/month developer subscription, are not there; Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses, available starting Tuesday for $799, aren’t that much closer.

And somebody also has to solve battery-life concerns: What’s my motivation to strap a computer to my face, however stylish it might get, if that electronic eyewear will only run six hours on a charge and therefore need recharging much more often than my phone?

Meta championing this cause gives me further cause. That company has shown a history of careless indifference to the consequences of its actions, including repeated episodes of bad-faith behavior towards my own industry, that does not make me want to give it my money.

But Meta has also been so spectacularly wrong about consumer-electronics trends–topped by Mark Zuckerberg renaming Facebook to “Meta” and losing tens of billions of dollars on the delusional notion that people want to spend prolonged time in virtual-reality environments–that Zuck pushing smart glasses itself seems reason to eye the concept skeptically. Through dumb, software-free glasses.

#AndroidXR #ARGlasses #faceComputer #GoogleGlass #GoogleGlasses #Hawaii #MarkZuckerberg #meta #metaverse #privacy #Qualcomm #RayBan #smartGlasses #SnapSpectacles #SnapdragonSummit

#UneTassedetech☕️ #balado

En direct du #SnapdragonSummit et de la conférence #AllIn sur l'IA, on n'a qu'une question: est-ce que ça va marcher pour vrai, l'IA agentique? 🤖🤔🙄

Et plus 👇
🍏 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/le-snapdragon-summit-2025-et-la-conférence-all-in-sur/id1466835989?i=1000728447956
🎧 https://open.spotify.com/episode/0QFZIzsvY0xopamJMgBtXF
📡 https://www.985fm.ca/balados/456963/episode/726215/le-snapdragon-summit-2025-et-la-conference-all-in-sur-l-intelligence-artificielle-comme-si-vous-y-etiez

Google and Qualcomm are cooking up something big for PC users 🔥 Qualcomm's CEO has seen it in action and calls it "incredible." A unified Android experience across phones and PCs? 💻 Read the full story to discover what this game-changing collaboration means for the future of personal computing.

#Android #Google #Qualcomm #SnapdragonSummit #TechNews

https://true-tech.net/google-preparing-android-for-pcs/