Chrome OS Weekly S1 E9: Stadia Woes, Outlook Gets Google Service Integration, Google Assistant Gets Personalized News Updates, Google Store Black Friday Deals Preview
Stadia is finally here but it wasn’t the fairytale maiden voyage that we envisioned when the service was first announced during the early parts of 2019. Despite its huge promise, the streaming service that is supposed to revolutionize the industry is off to a very poor start.
To get you up to date on news about how Stadia’s first few days and other Chrome OS-related news you might’ve missed last week, here’s our weekly news update.
Stadia, First Few Days
The mich-awaited game streaming service from Google is off to a very poor start. Google is forced to deal with a very long list of mishaps with its newest juggernaut platform with many reporting not receiving the promised invite code for their Founders Edition purchase.
You only have to browse through threads on either the Stadia subreddit or Discord to get a sense of how frustrating people are since Google promised those early birds will get to receive their orders chronologically.
Several hours after the platform’s official launch, the mega-tech company released a statement addressing the issue.
Hi @everyone, We’re aware that some of you who pre-ordered Founder’s Edition may not have received your invite codes in the expected time-frame. The Stadia team is actively investigating this issue, and we’ll be back with an update as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. -ChrisFromGoogle
After several “we are sorry” posts from both the Google and Stadia team, (and about two days later) things began to work as they should as far as receiving invite codes are concerned.
As 9to5gooogle reported that those preordered Stadia between June 6th to 30th will have the charges deducted and order processes.
We can confirm that if you pre-ordered Founder’s Edition in June, and your form of payment has now been charged, your Stadia access code has been sent to you via email. We are now moving in sequence through the orders placed on or after July 1st.
We expected a few hiccups during the first days of Stadia’s launch –things were already looking bleak— it was after all a huge undertaking but Google dropped the ball with the invite code debacle and Stadia’s sometimes unfavorable reviews didn’t help either. We can hope Google will work towards improving the service as it promised it would.
Microsoft’s Email Client Gets Some Integration With Gmail, Google Calander, and Google Docs
No, hell didn’t freeze over and this isn’t the end of times as Outlook gets integration with some Google services. Microsoft and Google might appear to some as two archenemies — until recently, they have been in grueling browser war– but under the covers, Microsoft and Google have been putting aside their differences and shared in on some interesting projects.
The most recent of these collaborations involve Microsoft’s email client Outlook. Outlook, as it would seem, is getting a full integration with some of Google’s core platforms.
The Verge reported that a Twitter User named Florian was able to set up his Gmail services with his Outlook account.
The set-up process requires few steps after which everything from Google Drive, documents from Google Docs, dates from Google Calendar, and inboxes from his Gmail account automatically displayed within the web version of Outlook.
The collaboration seems to be in its early knockings with many reporting not being able to link Google services to their Outlook account even after following the steps mentioned by Florian.
Google Sends Cloud Print to The Afterlife
Between 2006 to 2010, cloud computing was the hot sort-after product in the tech industry as big cooperations like Amazon and Google began introducing their home-made cloud platforms.
It was also during this time that Google began rolling out several cloud-related products that included Cloud Print.
Despite its amazing potential — its inception coincided with the early adoptions of Chromebooks and Chrome OS in general– Google doesn’t seem to know what to do with Cloud Print and it hopelessly languished in Beta for what seems like forever.
Cloud Print doesn’t need Printers to be connected to the internet so long as they have been added to a Google account. Users can use either their smartphones or Chromebooks to print documents easily.
But last week, Google decided to do away with Cloud Print all together with the service scheduled to go offline on December 31, 2020. The company wants to prioritize other print platforms that much more in line with modern times.
Google Assistant Will Get Personalized News Feed
Google has been toying with how news is delivered through its voice assistant platform in a bid to make voice news delivery more convenient for the users.
News delivery especially relevant news delivery has become an important part of how the company does its business. Partnering with several high-profile news organizations, Google wants to combine the news they offer with its behemoth software capabilities to deliver relevant news to Google Assistant users.
The feature is dubbed “Your News Update” and the company will scan the audio source of these stations through the news being offered and match them with data it already has on you. Google will use powerful algorithms to predict news it thinks is relevant to you and deliver them in the form of bites.
Google Store Black Friday Deals Preview
Black Friday is a little over three days away and all major e-commerce platforms are including the Google Store are putting together deals for everyone.
Depending on what Google product you are looking to get your hands on during this year’s Black Friday shopping fiesta, you can save as much as $600 plus on hardware.
Here are some snippets of the amazing deals you should expect through the Google Store.
Get Stadia Premier Edition with Nest WiFi for $478/ $398
Save up $350 on any Pixel Slate Model
Get the Pixel 4 or Pixel 4XL starting from $599 and save up to $200
