Google I/O, the company's big annual developer conference, is almost upon us . But the company isn't waiting until then to reveal what it has in store for Android. There was just far too much news on that front to squeeze into the I/O keynote, so Google revealed the details in the latest edition of The Android Show today. And, my goodness, were there a lot of details to reveal. From Gemini Intelligence and new laptops in the form of Googlebooks to an AirDrop-related update and Instagram editing tools in Android, Google had plenty of announcements to make. So, without further ado, here's an overview of everything Google announced during The Android Show: I/O edition.

Googlebook Is Google's New AI-Powered Laptop Platform Built on Android They won't replace Chromebooks, but Googlebooks have an Android-centered operating system, AI-first features like the Magic Pointer, and a promise of desktop-grade apps. Almost exactly 15 years since Google introduced Chromebooks and ChromeOS --which ushered a wave of cheap, functional, web-based laptops that would come to dominate the US education market--the company has announced a new laptop platform called Googlebook. It's built around artificial intelligence and Android, and while it isn't replacing Chromebooks, it could give the company a more meaningful foothold in the premium computer market. Google announced the platform on The Android Show on YouTube, where it also detailed new features coming in Android 17 and Gemini Intelligence (you can read more about that here). Google is purposefully not sharing the operating system's name yet (it was codenamed Aluminium OS internally); Googlebook is the platform, and Dell, Acer, Asus, HP, and Lenovo have all signed up to produce Googlebooks coming later this fall.

You'll soon be able to generate your own widgets or ask Gemini to finish a booking in Chrome on Android. The Google I/O annual developer conference is around the corner--May 19--but in what is quickly becoming a tradition, Google announced new features for Android and Gemini a week early. The news came on Tuesday via the second-ever Android Show on YouTube . This livestreamed presentation helps Google spread out the cavalcade of updates from the often jam-packed I/O keynote. The Android Show focused on new features in Android 17, the next version of Android coming later this summer, as well as several updates to the Gemini assistant experience. It continues the theme set last year by Sameer Samat, president of the Android ecosystem, of turning Android into an "intelligent operating system."

GameStop has built up a stake of 5% in eBay and is offering to acquire the company at $125 a share. GameStop has built up a stake of 5% in eBay and is offering to acquire the company at $125 a share. GameStop's $55.5bn bid for eBay rejected as'neither credible nor attractive' Online marketplace takes into account uncertainty around US video games retailer's financing proposal The board of eBay has rejected the US video games retailer GameStop's surprise $55.5bn bid (£41bn) for the online marketplace, describing the proposal as "neither credible nor attractive". Earlier this month, GameStop made an unsolicited bid for eBay, publishing a letter on its website outlining a half-cash, half-stock proposal. This was despite the US games company - which became a global household name during the meme stock craze of 2021 - being worth far less than its takeover target.

'There's a misconception that the AI vulnerability race is imminent. The reality is it's already begun,' said John Hultquist at Google's threat intelligence group. 'There's a misconception that the AI vulnerability race is imminent. The reality is it's already begun,' said John Hultquist at Google's threat intelligence group. In just three months, AI-powered hacking has gone from a nascent problem to an industrial-scale threat, according to a report from Google .

For screenwriters like me--and job seekers all over--AI gig work is the new waiting tables. In eight months, I've done 20 of these soul-crushing contracts for five different platforms. My name on the platform is ri611. I work as an AI trainer. I assess whether a chatbot's tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying. I identify patterns in pictures of furniture; search the internet for group photos of strangers whom I'll eliminate from the portrait, one by one. I trawl through bizarre videos so I can annotate and time-stamp the barking of a dog, the moment a stranger walks past a window, the precise millisecond a balloon pops. I generate anime sex scenes and decapitate young women, coax LLMs into giving me recipes for bombs made of household items, and generate invites to a reprise of January 6 at the White House, all as part of a red team whose purpose is to test safety precautions and probe weaknesses. I work for companies with names like Mercor and Outlier and Task-ify and Turing and Handshake and Micro1. In my "other" career, I am a Hollywood writer and showrunner. I create prime-time TV, usually featuring a middle-class white lady having the worst day of her life, with some salt-of-the-earth police interference to raise the stakes. You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC.

SoftBank will partner with South Korea's Cosmos Lab and DeltaX to enable mass production of large-scale battery cells from the fiscal year starting next April. SoftBank Group's mobile unit said it plans to begin large-scale battery cell manufacturing at its plant in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, to address growing power demand for AI services. SoftBank Corp. will partner with South Korea's Cosmos Lab and DeltaX to enable mass production from the fiscal year starting next April, the company said in a statement Monday. The aim is to output energy storage systems at a scale of one gigawatt-hour per year, SoftBank said, which would make it one of the largest facilities in Japan, according to data from BloombergNEF. SoftBank could scale up to a capacity of several GWh, Bloomberg reported last month.

TikTok has rowed back on an AI feature which incorrectly summarised some videos on the platform, including claiming a celebrity was fruit. The company's'AI overviews' recently began appearing beneath content on the platform to describe what a video was showing, or provide more context. While only rolled out to some users in the US and the Philippines, the feature's incorrect and bizarre AI-generated summaries of TikTok content - seen beneath videos of celebrities like platform star Charli D'Amelio - have been shared widely. According to TikTok, its experimental summaries have been tweaked to only suggest products similar to those shown in videos. The changes were first reported by news outlet Business Insider .

Meta's AI agent plans reportedly include an OpenClaw competitor that can shop on Instagram Meta's AI agent plans reportedly include an OpenClaw competitor that can shop on Instagram Last week during Meta's earnings, Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is working on new AI agents for people and businesses on the company's platform. Now, we know a bit more about what those plans entail, thanks to a new report from . The publication reports that Meta is working on an OpenClaw-inspired agent currently dubbed Hatch. It sounds like the company intends for Hatch to work within its own apps, including agentic shopping on Instagram, as well as with outside services. The company has tested Hatch on simulated versions of third-party services like DoorDash, Reddit and Outlook, according to .

SpaceX backs Anthropic with data centre deal amidst Musk's OpenAI lawsuit Anthropic has reached a deal to tap the computing resources of Elon Musk's SpaceX, marking a detente with its one-time critic and a boost for both companies in the high-stakes artificial intelligence race. Under the agreement announced on Wednesday, Anthropic will use the full computing power of SpaceX's Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and will give the Claude chatbot maker 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month. That's enough electricity to power more than 300,000 homes - as the Dario Amodei-led company seeks to boost the capacity of its Claude Pro and Claude Max AI assistants for subscribers. The tool allows AI systems to review work between sessions, spot patterns, and update files that store user preferences and other context. Available as a research preview, "dreaming" comes with software for managing agents, or AI programmes that perform tasks with little human involvement.