Author: Clinton

At CES 2018, Huawei has announced that the Honor View 10 will be making its way to the United States in 2018.  The View 10 is currently Honor’s flagship device and will available in Europe and Asia starting today.  While a timeline wasn’t given on when the phone will hit the US, it appears to be in reasonably short order based on rumors.

For those that may not know the specs of the Honor View 10, they are pretty impressive.  The phone sports a 5.99″ IPS FHD display with a 18:9 ratio.  It is powered by Huawei’s Kirin 970 SoC, has up to 6GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage.  It has dual rear cameras of 16MP and 20MP while the selfie camera is a 13MP shooter.  All of this is powered by a 3750mAh battery.

The Chromebook parade continues in the hours leading up to CES 2018.  Acer, a long time manufacture of Chromebooks, has announced an updated version of the popular Acer Chromebook 11.  The 11.6″ display device will be available in April and will sport two models:  A touchscreen version (CB311-8H) and a non-touchscreen version (CB311-8HT).  Starting price will be around $250.

The updated Chromebook 11 will have the latest Intel Celeron processors although which ones exactly was not disclosed.  It will come with 4GB of RAM and either 16GB or 32GB or storage built into it.  It will also have dual stereo speakers and a HDR camera.

For the first time in many years, Google will be at CES in Las Vegas this coming week.  It is the first time the company has had any real presence at the massive electronics show since 2015 but it has been a lot longer than that since they have had a booth.  Not only will they have a booth, a massive one in the Central Plaza, but it looks like they are going to be heavily focusing on Google Assistant during the show.

The company made a blog post yesterday, highlighting the growth of Google Assistant and Google home over the course of 2017.  Assistant is now available on 400 million devices and in a doze different countries.  But the takeaway from the post was the last paragraph.

No matter where you are, the Google Assistant is here to help you make the most of 2018. And next week, we have even more things in store for the Assistant at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. If you’re at CES, stop by the Google Assistant Playground (Central Plaza-21) to check out some of our new integrations, devices, and the newest ways you can use your Assistant

It would appear that next week, we are going to see some announcements about Assistant and, potentially, some new hardware.

The Android Oreo based OxygenOS build for the OnePlus 5 is starting to roll out again.  The original update was released to a small group last week but was halted after a bug was found in the initial release.  OnePlus reworked the build, incremented it up to OxygenOS 5.0.1, and has re-released it.  So far, no issues have been reported.

The 5.x train for OnePlus’ Android builds, brings it up to Oreo as the base platform and the company has now released it for the OnePlus 3, 3T and 5.  Only the 5T remains in beta but that shouldn’t be for much longer.

As for changes, there are a lot in this update for the OnePlus 5.  The launcher has been updated, the camera now has portrait mode and there are a lot of overall system optimizations that are happening that should improve the stability and performance of the phone.

Nokia has announced that the second generation of the Nokia 6 is now available for pre-orders in China.  The mid-range phone has been rumored for several weeks with various leaks suggesting that an update to the phone would be coming in short order.  Those rumors were confirmed today with the announcement and the device’s product & ordering page going live.

Being dubbed the Nokia 6 (2018), this updated device has a 5.5″ Full HD display with 2.5D curved glass with Gorilla Glass 3.  It is powered by the Snapdragon 630 SoC, clocked at 2.2GHz, and coupled with the Adreno 508 GPU.  It has 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and will come with either 32GB or 64GB of storage.  You can expand that with the MicroSD card slot (also the SIM 2 slot) on the phone.

After being announced a few weeks back and virtually no device getting the update immediately, Chrome 63 is finally rolling out for Chrome OS.  It is an important release because it addresses the vulnerabilities outlined by Intel and Google earlier this week.  With Chrome 63, devices running Chrome OS will be protected.

Clearly users of Chromebooks and Chromeboxes need to update to this new build immediately.  You can do so by typing chrome://help in the omnibar of the browser and then clicking the Check for Update button.  The update will take about 5 minutes to download depending on your device & connection speed.  As is normal with Chrome OS, you will need to reboot your device to apply the new build.