[achow]

Google seems to have made an official post on Reddit describing the feature set in detail:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb8xls/introducin...

[Edit]

And, the feature set references the 'AI mouse pointer' from this Deepmind blog..

https://deepmind.google/blog/ai-pointer/

[deckar01]

Wiggling the mouse is what people do involuntarily when the computer isn’t working right. They are setting themselves up for Gemini to be the uninvited Clippy, except this will send everything you are working on to Google to harvest data from.

[jeroenhd]

The video they show (which is probably exaggerated by cutting out LLM generation time) is pretty sci-fi. I don't know how it works in practice, but it looks fun to try out. If this could run locally, I'd love to have a feature like that.

Most people don't really seem to care about data collection when it comes to AI usage. A lot of people who will feed Gemini/ChatGPT/Bing/Claude/shady clusters across the internet for bargain bin prices/Mistral every detail of their lives will probably be fine with Gemini as long as it doesn't interfere unnecessarily.

[bel8]

It probably works similar to how Gemini works in Android for a while now.

You can point or select anywhere on the screen and it understands and searches the context. If you select a text block, even text inside an image, it allows to copy or search the text online. Otherwise it can search the image.

I use it often. It's intuitive and fast even on non-flagship phones.

I'd wager their A/B tests went well enough to warrant a port from phones to their new "Chromebook".

[jeroenhd]

Their video is completely different from what Gemini does now. It analyses mouse movements, like circling around things, underlining things with the mouse, pointing at things to indicate where they need to go. It's a lot like the interfaces you might see in sci-fi movies, where generic gestures are understood within context in a way that modern computers can't handle.

[bel8]

> circling around things, underlining things with the mouse

Do we use the same Android Gemini assistant?

Because the one I use does that and it has object detection smart enough to be intuitive. It usually gets it right when I point something on the screen. And when it doesn't, I can circle around the thing or just click again.

This Instagram post for example, it automatically highlighted the entire person, but I wanted to know about the shoes. I then clicked once on the shoes and it knew exactly what I wanted and gave me the info in about 2 seconds:

https://imgur.com/a/lHUeciy

This is useful to non tech savvy folks. Not just to us hackers.

[jeroenhd]

Google's Gemini features differ per region to a massive extent. There's a good chance privacy laws prevent Google from providing me with the same Gemini you use.

Object detection is mediocre at best. Circling things and using their AI editing features works, but the artefacts confuse Lens and other image parsing systems. Extracting objects from images usually mostly works, but it's not on par with what Apple had long before Google built it.

The difference remains that the Gemini app on Android requires activation. You cannot tap a button or click a link while you're on the Gemini screen.

The video isn't on the linked page anymore, but it's here: https://deepmind.google/blog/ai-pointer/ and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZNzfQLgGsA

It's an absolute privacy nightmare for most people, but if we ever get enough RAM and compute to run this stuff locally, I think this can actually make a new paradigm for user interaction, something with lisp machine self-customisability but for people who don't know anything about computers.

And if it doesn't work, it'll be the most horrific, messy, useless UI humanity has ever invented, and we all get a new funny meme to laugh about Google. Win-win!

[deckar01]

> Most people don't really seem to care about data collection when it comes to AI usage.

That assumes you intended to use AI. People are going to accidentally upload random private content to google.

[jeroenhd]

If you buy the Google Gemini AI Agentic Laptop or whatever they will market this as, you're going to want to try AI. What else is the point of buying a Chromebook, as nice and slick as it may look, when similar or even better alternatives exist.

[dmonitor]

It's the unofficial "where's my mouse pointer" macro

At least one DE I've used (MacOS? KDE?) even had it as an official macro that would make the pointer 10x bigger when you shook it

[crabmusket]

MacOS and KDE both do this. In KDE the pointer keeps getting larger the longer you shake it until it is truly absurdly huge.

[cevn]

This might be the new Compiz, my friends love seeing this effect on KDE.

[scblock]

KDE does that by default. Handy sometimes, funny sometimes.

[mkl]

If you keep on shaking the mouse, the pointer just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You can certainly find it when it is enormous.

[paxys]

It is deliberately designed for maximum accidental invocations so the managers and execs behind it can claim the large user numbers in their promo packets.

[dhosek]

Oh my goodness, the use cases are so… badly conceived:

> If a friend sends you a picture on your phone and you need to email it from your laptop, the file is just there — no need to email it to yourself.

So are there really people who will email a photo to themselves from their phone to… send the photo in an email?

Interesting to note that there is no mention of processor or operating system in that post. I’m guessing that it’s Android in a laptop form factor which I suppose might be something that some people would want, but I’m not one of them.

[array_key_first]

Getting files on and off of a phone is shockingly hard. Shockingly. It's even worse on an iPhone, if you don't have a mac. To get my photos from my iPhone to my PC, I had to first upload them to iCloud and then download them again. My phone and computer are, like, a foot away from each other but I had to send the photos across the country to some server and back just to look at them.

[engeljohnb]

Everyone emails themself stuff, that's normal. The weird part is how often will you ever need to email it specifically from your laptop, but it's already on your phone? If it's on your phone and you need to email it to someone, couldn't you just email from your phone?

[bombcar]

Biggest use case is needing to send a work email but only having the photo on your phone (and you don't have work email on your phone).

[carlosjobim]

Why don't you have your work e-mail on your phone or on a phone?

[dymk]

MDM profiles that I’m not going to install

[lojban]

Have you tried using the Gmail app? It's missing a whole bunch of features. For example, you can't even insert hyperlinks with custom text. For images, I often don't want to send an image at its full resolution. Rescaling images is a task that's much easier to do on a laptop.

[engeljohnb]

In that case, have I got a laptop for you...

[xp84]

Oh, I use use AirDrop to myself for this. Yes, given my photo library syncs to iCloud, just opening Photos seems like it makes sense on a fast WAN which I sort-of do have, but of course, iCloud syncs only happen when the device decides the mood is just right, and can't be triggered manually, because I guess that would just be 'clutter' in the UI.

[Marsymars]

What drives me absolutely nuts about AirDrop is that it's only device-to-device even if devices are on the same WAN.

My wife and I have home offices at opposite sides of the house with hardwired desktops and Wi-fi APs, but we can't AirDrop to each other as we're out of range for it.

[koziserek]

there's an equivalent functionality in Tailscale clients

[kps]

KDE Connect may work for you. (You don't have to use KDE.)

[swat535]

Photos taken on iPhone are automatically synchronized with iCloud.. I guess you can just go to iCloud.com and download them on your PC?

If you want to send a photo to your friend from your iPhone, just click on the photo and click the "share" button, then you have many options, including sending it via Email..

What am I missing?

[array_key_first]

The synchronization is opaque - more than once I checked for photos and they weren't uploaded yet. Also downloading stuff is very, very slow compared to wired transfers, and logging into Apple anything on your web browser is a huge pain in the ass.

[jeroenhd]

That's mostly an iPhone problem. Plugging in an Android phone still works, and wireless exchange with QuickShare also works on most devices. With Google reverse engineering Airdrop, I hope they can get the Android <-> macOS experience to finally work correctly soon as well.

[chalupa-man]

Plugging in an iPhone still works as well, I plug my iPhone into my Windows PC and it pops up with the filesystem automatically in Explorer, and the photos are right there in the DCIM folder.

[catlikesshrimp]

It is a solved problem https://f-droid.org/packages/com.ismartcoding.plain/

There is also localsend, but plainapp needs to run in only one device.

[extraduder_ire]

I've been using pairdrop.net (fork of snapdrop, which got bought out) a lot recently. Only needs a web browser on either end, and doesn't take any prepwork.

Can be self-hosted, if that's a concern.

[asimovDev]

I remember in late 10s I could just connect my iPhone to a windows machine and the photos folder would be right there, mounted, with the typical iOS filenames for each picture. Is this a false memory? Maybe I was on a Mac and just forgot?

[daemin]

I'm pretty sure you can still do that, you can at least with Android phones, but it does require a physical cable.

[deltoidmaximus]

It works on my bargain basement Moto G that way

[bsimpson]

My only real use of Google Keep is as a cross-device clipboard.

[adolfojp]

LocalSend works really well across platforms in a LAN, no uploading to some server required.

[mavamaarten]

I'm super techy but I admit that I just use Signal to send me a "Note to self" whenever I need a file from my phone on my computer quickly. For images I just use immich, but texting myself is honestly the quickest way for files because the experience is indeed terrible.

[flal_]

Same here with the Telegram "Saved Messages" ( the same stuff as Signal's )

[dmonitor]

I personally just have a discord with myself as the only member. With their webhooks API you can even automate the PC side.

[nnm]

I emailed myself many times to transfer some files between phone and computer. I would say at least once every week.

[zeroonetwothree]

You can just use Dropbox or equivalent.

[dredmorbius]

My recent-ish experience with Android and video is that emailing video doesn't actually, you know, email the video, but rather links to it somewhere in Google's Cloud ... where the recipient cannot actually access it.

(There's a longer backstory, but this is, suffice to say, frustrating.)

[HarHarVeryFunny]

They should have just said "USE it on your laptop", not email it.

I all the time use my phone as a camera (esp. for coin photography) than e-mail the photos to myself as the most convenient way to get them on my desktop where I can edit them with GIMP etc.

[unholiness]

I just open photos.google.com and grab them. No need to fiddle on my phone.

When on wifi, the photo backup upload starts immediately. If it doesn't (possibly due to your settings, this used to be my issue) you can manually open the photos app and tap the backup now button.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I'm not sure if that's an option for me, since I'm not using the regular camera app - I'm using Halide which is better suited to macro (coin) photography.

Google Drive would be another option to transfer, but would be more work (about same to "share" as email, but less convenient to access on desktop).

The e-mail way is actually quite convenient since on the desktop you can just download all the photos you sent in one go - they appear as a zip file that you can then just extract to your working directory, rather than having to save one at a time.

[projektfu]

It will work if you ask Photos to back up halide's files.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I just found a free app that makes it even easier: LocalSend

You install this on your phone (iphone or android), as well as on your computer (linux, windows or mac), then you can send files directly between any of these as long a they are on the same local network.

You just select your photos, click on "share", then select LocalSend and it'll show you the list of destinations to choose from (wherever you are currently running LocalSend), click on one and you're done!

On the receiving side you can select the directory where files will be transferred to, and if you set "Quick Save" option to "Favorites" then you can make your phone a favorite to avoid being prompted whether you want to accept each file it is sending.

So, it's literally just: select photos, share->LocalSend, click on destination

[olsondv]

It’s a poor example. Recently, I did have to email myself photos taken with my phone to access them on my laptop. Would be nice if they were automatically synced. It’s work phone and laptop so I could have gone through OneDrive or Box but just as inconvenient as email.

[dmix]

These are usually targeted at kids and newbies. My mom would 100% appreciate that feature for photos and pdfs. She still struggles with files on Windows and managing files are even less clear on chromebook.

[famouswaffles]

Yeah I and i suspect a lot of others email myself little files all the time because surprisingly that's the most convenient way to get those files quickly from phone to laptop.

[overgard]

I do that all the time with my iPhone and my windows machine, sadly. Still not a particularly compelling feature, just speaks to how sad our modern ecosystem is.

[zeafoamrun]

I feel like very much not the target market for this. Tokyo Vintage Shopping Trip? LOL

I got mad when I bought a Chromebook thinking it was a cheap laptop I could install any OS on only to find it was boatloader locked and the model I bought hadnt been cracked yet. Say nothing of all of Google's recent practices with Android. This whole thing just sounds like the plague.

[varenc]

Looks like their Reddit post has a formatting error?

   ...as computing shifts from operating systems [to intelligence systems](TKTK)...

`[text](link)` is the syntax used to create a link. But since `TKTK` isn't a valid URI, it doesn't render a link. My guess is TKTK is placeholder and they were supposed to fill it in before posting on reddit... but forgot?

edit: hah, maybe someone from Google saw my comment. This has now been fixed and TKTK replaced with https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb83gy/making_and...

[vages]

TKTK is a common placeholder for something that should be filled in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_(publishing)

[entropicdrifter]

Looks like the link got fixed.

I'm really enjoying reddit just completely roasting the entire concept in the comments.

[robotresearcher]

I bet this is an LLM output mistake that escaped human proofreading.

I had an instance of it this morning: Claude proposed a shell command containing a URL and it used this format, which is broken in context.

[sunaookami]

Posting an official announcement of an AI-powered laptop on Reddit were the users there tend to have a hard Anti-AI stance is certainly something.

[WarmWash]

I haven't been around reddit much for a few years, but in the past at least, /r/android was one of the best tech communities on the internet. It was even better than the iPhone subs for iPhone discussion.

I mean if you think about it, the type of person to own an android phone and care enough about phones to join a community is pretty much guaranteed to only be a tech geek.

[pharos92]

"We’re working with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first Googlebooks."

A disaster from the first step.

[somebehemoth]

AI mouse pointer is definitely not something I wanted to think about today. A recent HN post implored vibe coders not to modify the mouse pointer and now we get this from Google.

[mFixman]

> Example: Point at a date in an email to instantly set up a meeting, find good spots to meet up, or draft a reply.

This is actually a good use case for AI. My university sends a lot of newsletters with several events in free text format; all I want is to be able to select one of them, have an LLM parse the title, date, location, and category, and put it in my calendar.

Still, I'm sceptical this will work. Samsung phones supposedly have this same feature, and it works 1/10 of the times. Pasting it to ChatGPT and tell it to add the events to my calendar works fine, but the bottleneck is always the project managers in charge of the UI. Of course, having a small local model and being able to choose my own right-click items like I could in 1995 would be an actual solution.

[utopiah]

Damn... ~1min in he verbally asks to put the 2 ingredients on the list.

Like... my dude that's way even slower than drag&drop the text on a light right next to it!

Same later on about changing the calendar appointment from whatever to 8pm... he is behind a desktop with a mouse, just input the number or click on the arrows to adjust.

I bet some people will mention that those are "just" simple to understand examples or that it's great for accessibility ... but it's not. It's not reliable enough for complex cases and not reliable enough for accessibility. So... yes JUST basic examples that are slower than other means.

PS: I did prototypes using voice and pointing in XR and yes that paradigm IS powerful, it's just being multimodal.

[IshKebab]

> It's really easy to access your phone’s files right from your Googlebook's file browser.

Yeah but what about Windows Explorer? They've been passively blocking SMB access forever at this point (by disallowing ports below 1024).

I would not be surprised if Googlebook's file browser goes via the cloud.

[getpokedagain]

Is magic pointer a joke. That's what the right button has been for for ages.

[nmeagent]

Well, that AI mouse pointer idea is one of the most horrifying things I've seen in quite awhile. Hard pass, do not want, do not trust anyone involved.

[pimlottc]

“Hey google, do something with this. Huh, I guess that’s fine.”

[dormento]

Yeah... "Google, please do the thinking for me, it hurts!" :(

May chaos take the world!