Google now cards in Europe (for European users)

[petvas72]

Is it just me or are Google Now cards not that useful, especially if you live in Europe?

I live in Germany and I have enabled all services that Google Now wants, but the cards I get are boring and mostly a duplicate of the things I already have in other apps as widgets.

My calendar appointments: I have a widget for that, so I do not care if Google Now can display them.
I do not use GMail, so I do not benefit from Google Now Cards related to content found in GMail.

The news items I get based on my search strings are rarely interesting.

I would also like Google Now to display currency information, weather from multiple locations and be more clever in general, but for the moment I am not that impressed. I also do not need Google Now to tell me when I have to leave for an appointment. I use mostly trains to commute (but work mostly from home), so I know when I have to go.
I can see Google Now being more useful when being in a foreign country and/or city, but for most of the time and my usage scenario, I just do not see the point.

Also sport scores is something that Google Now fails for me to impress me. I have added two favorite soccer teams and yes, it can show me live scores. Most of the times though I watch the games live. I can see this being useful if I am on the road, but then I have other apps that handle sports scores much better, like livescore.com.

I understand the value of having an at a glance view of your most important data, but if these data are duplicates of information you already have as widgets, then where is the value? Add to that the battery drain. With Google Now cards on I get around 4 hours on screen time. With Google Now cards disabled I am close to 5 hours!

 

[bjrosen]

I don't think you are being decimated against, Google Now in the US has a very limited list of topics to choose from, basically sports, stocks, weather and news about Nexus devices. The sports is limited to professional teams and major university teams which in the US are practically professional. There is also general news which it seems to figure out from your browsing of other news sources., maybe the Google News app or maybe everything It also displays up coming events from your Google calendar. If you use GMail it looks like they comb through that and give you cards about things they have no business knowing about. For example today there was a notice that an invoice was due, I had gotten an e-mail about invoicing a client, Google saw that and then created an event based on that and then displayed it as a Now card.

 

[petvas72]

Now on tap was activated for Germany today, so I wanted to try it and see if it is any good. Enabling on tap means to also enable Google now cards, so now I have them enabled again. I will close monitor battery life with it enabled. Today I got five hours on screen time without Google now cards. Up until now I was getting around 4 hours, so this is definitely something to consider. On tap seems nice though and I will use it. Let's see how it affects battery. I disabled traffic news and displaying my calendar information. I use it only because of on tap..

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