Technology

Bloomberg Google is embarking on a wholesale revamp of its mobile phone strategy, debuting a pair of slick and powerful handsets that for the first time will go head-to-head with Apple Inc.’s iconic iPhone. Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Tuesday unveiled the Pixel and larger Pixel XL, the first phones that were conceptualized, designed, engineered and tested in-house. The Pixel handsets ...

  Relaxnews In the two years since Amazon.com Inc. released its Echo speaker, the household device has become a surprise hit — and a surprise threat to Google, as users turn to the Echo for information from the web. Now Google is trying to strike back. On Tuesday, the internet search giant introduced Google Home, a voice-controlled wireless speaker that ...

  Bloomberg Google has released a virtual reality headset that’s cheaper than other options in the market. During an event in San Francisco, the Alphabet Inc. unit introduced Daydream View, a headset and controller for viewing virtual reality media with a smartphone. At $79, the price is well below products from HTC Corp. and Facebook Inc.’s Oculus, which cost hundreds ...

  Bloomberg Kong Tse has seen first-hand how the global uproar over flammable Samsung Note 7 smartphones is playing out with consumers. The 26-year-old, who hawks devices in the warrens of Hong Kong’s Wanchai Computer Center, says sales of the company’s handsets have tumbled 30 percent since the controversy began, including the high-end S7 Edge. “Once betrayed, eight times avoided,” ...

  Bloomberg Li Ka-shing, the billionaire who made early investments in the likes of Siri and Facebook Inc., is examining startups involved in artificial intelligence and 3D printing to find the next company that could shake up the technology world. Through his charity, Hong Kong’s richest man has most recently been looking at investing in the field of carmaking via ...

  FRANKFURT / AP Carmakers are finding the Paris auto show, held in a city whose mayor wants to ban diesels to reduce pollution, to be a fine place to show off new zero-emission electric vehicles. Most prominently, Volkswagen will unveil a small electric car as part of its pivot from diesel to more electric models as it struggles to ...

  CHANTILLY / AP Airline pilots and air traffic controllers are on schedule to switch to text communications at most of the nation’s busiest airports by the end of the year, a milestone that holds the potential to reduce delays, prevent errors and save billions of dollars in fuel cost, says the Federal Aviation Administration. Controllers and pilots will still ...

  Relaxnews Twitter has released a new feature that allows all Twitter users to create their own “Moments,” made up of collections of Tweets connected by common subject matter. The feature was first introduced to the social platform in October 2015, originally curated solely by Twitter employees and certain publishing partners, but has been slowly opening up to the public. ...

  San Francisco / AP Facebook launched on Monday a “Marketplace” trading platform that lets users of the vast social network buy and sell goods with each other in a mighty challenge to the likes of eBay and Craigslist. The new feature puts Facebook — with a global base of 1.7 billion users — squarely in competition with local online ...

  Bloomberg Google has repackaged its cloud services and corporate software and hardware offerings into a new unit called Google Cloud, the internet search provider’s latest attempt to catch leaders in the sector Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The new group, run by Google executive Diane Greene, includes web-based work software such as Docs and Sheets, machine-learning and digital-mapping tools ...