Author: Clinton

Here in the United States, we are in the throws of election season.  In November the Presidential election happens along with some House of Representatives seats, Senate seats and countless local elections.  A fundamental right in the United States is the right to vote and regardless of where you stand on a particular candidate or issue, exercising that right is key to making the country work. As my father always told me, “I don’t care who you vote for, but vote.”  But figuring out where and how to register to vote can be tricky.  That’s where Google comes in and helps simplify things.  Now you can simply type in “Register to vote” in Google Search on your phone and all of the details on how to register for your state will be displayed.

Today, the Japanese firm SoftBank have announced that they have come to an agreement to acquire UK-based chip designer ARM Holdings for some $31 billion.  The acquisition will be an all cash transaction in which SoftBank will purchase 1,412 million shares of ARM.  The acquisition is a great one for SoftBank as ARM is unquestionably the dominant player in the mobile device chip market which continues to grow globally and with Internet of Things growth happening at the same time, the company is poised to be in an excellent position over the course of the next several years.

Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SBG, said: “We have long admired ARM as a world renowned and highly respected technology company that is by some distance the market-leader in its field. ARM will be an excellent strategic fit within the SoftBank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the “Internet of Things”.

Keep in mind that ARM does not itself produce chips.  Rather, they license the Intellectual Property of their designs to others to produce the chips.

For those who have Nexus devices, the July Security Update for Android is now rolling out via an OTA update.  The update, 2 of them this month, were released last week on July 6th along with factory images and OTA images that users could flash to their devices manually.  With Google now pushing the updates out to Nexus devices, users will get the update as they usually do each month.  If you recall, this month’s update was split into two parts.  The first update, dated July 1st, was more a general fix for Android while the one dated July 6th was more driver specific updates for specific devices.  Google’s stated intent was to get the first update out so all of their partners could update their devices quickly without having to wade through driver tests for things their their devices just don’t use.

Today’s Deal over at Amazon is a great one if you are needing to pick up an external power pack for your devices.  Today you can pick up the Anker PowerCore 10000 for $18.69, a savings of over 63% off the regular $49 price tag.  As the name suggests, this power pack has a 10,000 mAh battery in it so you can easily charge most devices three times before having to recharge it.  It has a single USB-A connector so you can use it with really anything out there:  MicroUSB, USB-C (A to C cable) and an Apple Lightening cable.  It is designed to work with any device and get you powered up and going again.  It also is in a small package.  This pack is slightly larger than a credit card so you won’t have a big, bulky battery to carry around with you.

For those of you who are Local Guides approaching Level 4, you need to get-to-gettin’.  Google has announced that if you unlock Level 4 by July 21st, you will still get the current 1TB of Google Drive storage for 2 years.  If however, you reach that level after the 21st, you will get 100GB.

We are changing the Drive storage benefit for Level 4 from 1 TB to 100 GB, so that we can continue giving Drive storage to all Level 4 qualified Local Guides. Existing Local Guides who were signed up before July 7, 2016 (12am GMT) can still unlock the original 1 TB offer if they reach Level 4 by July 21, 2016 (12am GMT).

The change is a disappointment for sure but has likely come to bare with all of the new Local Guides that are in play now (to be fair, Google did promote the heck out of it).  Still, the 100GB is in line with other promotions that Google offers.  Chromebook owners get a free 100GB of storage when they register their devices so this change is inline with other promotions.

For those of you who have installed the ClintonFitch.com app on your Android devices (and Thank You!), there is a new update out this morning.  The update, version 6.0.1 for those keeping score at home, is mostly aimed at improving performance on older devices.  If you have a device running on KitKat then you should see some stability and speed improvements with this new build.  Given that 33% of all of the installs of the app are on KitKat, that should be a big improvement for a good percentage of you.