At Google’s I/O developer conference held last week, Google introduced a series of light apps for people using low bandwidth connections in developing countries, to be rolled out later this year, reports Gizmodo. Along with this, Google Maps and YouTube will work offline on Android phones. In Google Maps, users will be able to view features like the destination address, phone number, opening hours, reviews, turn by turn directions along with voice directions (for saved routes) offline. YouTube will also receive similar offline support through an archiving tool. The feature will let users save a video for offline viewing for up to 48 hours. Websites on Chrome will get a ‘Network Quality Estimator’ (NQE), which will analyse the user’s network connection in order to optimise search results and subsequent landing web pages to load faster, giving higher priority to text and information over data-intensive images. The NQE will, in effect, change the rendering of web pages on a slow connection in order to make the web pages usable and fast. Google gave an example of the Times of India’s mobile site where it had replaced the images with placeholders on slow net connections but retained navigation and logo links. Users would also get an option to load the images if they choose to view them. Chrome for Android is also likely to get offline capabilities where users would be able to save visited web pages for later offline access. According to a FoneArena report, Google had introduced data compression and…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...