Author: Clinton

With CES 2018 next week, we are already starting to see some pre-show announcements.  HP jumped on that bandwagon today by announcing updated version of their HP Chromebook 11 and Chromebook 14.

The HP Chromebook 11 G6 is black with orange trim, sports a 180° hinge and is powered by the 7th generation Celeron N processors.  It will come standard with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.   The updated HP Chromebook 14 G5 will have a slightly better processor option, can be configured up to 8GB of RAM and has 64GB of storage.

An incremental update to Chrome OS has been released by the Chromium team and is starting to roll out to devices.  The updated version is build 63.0.3239.116 (Platform version: 10032.75.0) and Google indicates that the majority of Chrome OS devices will get the update over the course of the next few days.

As is often the case with these midstream updates, there are not a lot of details available on what was addressed or fixed.  Rather, we simply get the generic “This build contains a number of bug fixes and security updates”.

Today’s Deal is on the powerful, 5.2″ Sony Xperia XZs.  The XZs is a revamped version of last year’s XZ and has, as you would expect from Sony, some pretty impressive specs.  Today, the XZs has dropped in price down to $399 on Amazon.  This is the same price Sony was selling the phone for during the holidays.

The Xperia XZs is powered by the Snapdragon 820 processor clocked at 2.2GHz, has 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.  That storage can be expanded and additional 256GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.  The XZs is IP68 rated against water and dust intrusion and, a not-so-common thing here in the US, it is a dual-SIM phone.  The display is a 5.2″ FHD and all of this is powered by a 2900mAh battery that is charged via a USB-C port and it supports Quick Charge 3.0 technology.

It has been a frantic week for Apple, Google and Microsoft as they have tried to deal with a serious CPU vulnerability in modern processors from Intel, ARM and AMD.  The security issue, which could allow for system memory to be read which could give access to passwords and other sensitive information.   The significance of this issue is that it requires an OS level update to fix.

For Google and Chrome OS, the fix is already out.  The Chrome 63 train for Chrome OS was released on December 15th and part of that update was fixing this issue.  The issue does not impact Chrome OS devices running ARM processors.  This is good news as it means a wide swatch of Chromebooks are already protected.

Google has announced the dates when G Suite customers will begin getting the new Google Calendar.  To this point, G Suite admins have been able to manually force the update on domains or to delay the release of the new Material Design calendar on their domains.  Now that is changing with several key dates coming up.

For domains that are in the Rapid Release schedule, users will start getting update next Monday, January 8th if their domain is set to automatic updating.  Users can still opt out, for now.  For those domains in the Scheduled Release bracket, you will get the update following Monday, January 15th.  Again, users can opt out for now.

Chrome 64, the next major release of the Chrome browser for Android and other devices, is currently in beta and likely will be for another month or so.  But that doesn’t mean that we don’t get a glimpse at what will be in the release.  When it comes to the Android build at least, we can expect to see a much improved Flags page.

For those who aren’t familiar, flags allow you to change granular elements of how Chrome functions on your phone.  You get to this page by typing chrome://flags in the omnibar and you can enable or disable specific features. Be warned however that they are experimental in many cases and can cause instability.  In Chrome 63, the Flags page got a bit of a makeover that made it much easier to read.  In 64, Google is going a step further.