Gadgetory

hello again ladies and gentlemen I'm Joe handy the Android authority app guy happy Google i/o everyone after the intro we'll take a much closer look at Google touch replacement called Google Hangouts so does everyone remember when we all thought this was going to be called babble toes for good times when you first open hangouts you'll be greeted with a fresh new interface it opens to your current conversations then you can slide to the right to start a new hangout which is the new lingo for starting a new conversation when you slide to the right you can see your most frequently contacted acquaintances and below that is everyone else in your circles if you're like me and have a lot of people circled this list can get pretty gigantic you can tell if a contact is online if their profile picture is slightly faded or fully clear slightly faded means unavailable while fully clear means the equivalent of the green dot in Google Talk once you open a conversation you can slide back to the left to get back to the active conversation list you can click on the plus sign the top to start a new hangout to archived conversations simply slide them off the screen these can be viewed later in the archived hangouts section next to the plus sign is the three menu button click it to access things like archived hangouts hangout invites from other people and you can even set notifications to news for a period of time so you don't get notifications for a while so if you were to say sleep set it for eight hours and Google Hangouts will not bother you until you wake up there's really nothing all that special about the settings menu essentially all you can do there is change your notification behaviors like ring tone and vibrate controls you can manage your blocked user lists from there and you can also set custom invites for your circles next we'll move on to functionality when you get right down to the meat and potatoes this functions more or less like Google Talk do you can add text conversations with people like before or you can initiate video chats the difference being that video chats are now Google Hangouts like on Google Plus instead of a video call on Google Talk if you want some dessert with your meat and potatoes google has included some new functionality too you can now have group chats during testing I was able to chat with most of the Android authority on air crew all in a single thread this is way better than Google Talk which didn't have this functionality at all also it would be downright irresponsible to not mention the emojis there are hundreds of them there are Smiley's and animals and dog poo and Dragons and little pictures of buildings so many oh geez and definitely something to have a lot of fun with in the Chrome extension you can make unicorns dance across the chat window sadly dancing unicorns is not part of the mobile app experience the last thing we'd like to mention is the ability to now send images directly over the app this functionality wasn't really there in Google Talk requiring people to post pictures elsewhere and then paste links now you can share right from your device just click the camera button next to the text entry box to do that overall the new Google Hangouts app is a big improvement over the old Google Talk method unfortunately we've seen a few launch problems my HTC one didn't get switched from talk to hangouts for a full day after I updated while my Nexus 4 updated right away there have been some other temporary issues reported - which is really dulled the excitement of the release however once these issues get ironed out there will no doubt be a more positive outlook on Google Hangouts the only potential issue is the SMS support which is still a toss-up we don't know yet if it'll get added but if it does iMessage be damned because there will be a new Universal message champion if you want to get it just update your Google Talk app to the new Google Hangouts or just go get it from the Google Play Store for those of you updating from the old Google Talk it may take a day or so for the new interface to pop up so key word here ladies and gentlemen is patience once again I'm Joe Hendy the Android authority app guy feel free to subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out our social media links in the video description you