Author: Clinton

To start your Monday morning & work week, how about a great offer from Amazon on the Samsung Chromebook 2.  This 11.6″ Chromebook was introduced in October of last year and up to this point has retailed for $249.99.  Today you can get it for $185.99, a savings of $64.00, while supplies last.  The Samsung Chromebooks have been some of the most highly rated units available for Chrome OS with this updated version of their original product receiving similar praise.  Sporting a 11.6″ HD LED 1366 x 768 display, the Chromebook 2 has 2GB of DDR3L SDRAM and 16GB of onboard storage.  It is powered by a 2.16 GHz dual-core Intel Celeron processor, has 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi support and has 9 hours of battery life.

Samsung Chromebook 2 – SALE $185.88 – Amazon

Owner of the unlocked variety of the HTC One A9 should start seeing the January Android Marshmallow update hitting their devices starting today.  The news comes from the companies Vice President of Product Management, Mo Versi, via Twitter earlier this morning.

HTC One (A9) unlocked owners! The Jan security updates and bug fixes is being updated via OTA this morning! Thanks.

— Mo Versi (@moversi) January 22, 2016

The update comes about 3 weeks after the update was released from Google as HTC continues to push to be one of the fastest manufactures out with Android Marshmallow updates.

Like almost any site you visit today, ClintonFitch.com has adverts powered by Google.  Those ads, simply put, help cover the costs of running the site (domain costs, hosting, etc) and get products to review.  While I have purposely kept the adverts low on the site, they are necessary to help me cover costs (and often they come up a little short each month) and I try to keep them to a minimum.  However, there is a way that you can support the site and get a nearly 100% ad-free experience.  Google Contributor.

Google Contributor is a subscription service that allows you to contribute $2, $5, or $10 per month and in exchange, you will see far few ads on the site.  In fact, because I run so few ads on the site already, at the $5 level you would be almost completely ad-free.  Mind you, there will be an advert from time-to-time because not all ads are from Google.  But a contributor is going to see far less

Ad-Free ClintonFitch.com

over time.

So why should you contribute?  It all comes down to budgets.  If you subscribe then I will know each month I can count on X amount of dollars coming in to the site.  That means I can plan for purchases for products to review, pay the monthly bills for the site, etc. As you can imagine, trying to budget on ad clicks is a bit tough as it fluctuates greatly from day to day, let alone month to month.  Basically you are helping assure that I can put relevant, consistent content on the site.

If you want to contribute, all you need to do is click on the Google Contributor badge over in the side bar.  You’ll be moved to the contributor site and will be walked through the process.  If you don’t want to contribute, no problem.  I appreciate you reading this post, visiting the site and clicking on an advert here or there to help the site.

Thanks!  Clinton

For some of you, the news that Kickstarter finally launched an Android app will come as a bit of a surprise.  If you haphazardly visit the crowd-funding service site, you probably didn’t even know there wasn’t an app despite there being one for iPhone users for a couple of years now.  Frequent visitors, like me, have felt the pain of not having a dedicated app because it meant that if I wanted to go check out some new projects and potentially help fund them, I was relegated to my browser.

No more.

The new app is now available in the Google Play Store and even though it is a 1.0 release, Kickstarter did a great job on the app overall.  You can search for projects to support in a wide range of categories and you can fund a project right from within the app itself.

Kickstarter – Free – Download Now

While Microsoft’s own mobile platform is struggling to survive, the company continues to pump out their apps for Android and iOS.  The latest, exclusive to Android, is Mimicker Alarm.  Aimed at helping those who need a little help getting going in the morning, this beautiful Material Design app requires users to mimic actions given to deactivate the alarm.  Those mimic games can include matching a color by snapping a picture, matching an emotion by taking a selfie or by repeating a tongue twister phrase out loud.

The app is powered by Microsoft’s Project Oxford API which is aimed at improving the understanding and recognition of emotion, computer vision and speech.  You can read more about the project here.

Mimicker Alarm – Free – Download Now

While the news has not come directly from Verizon, multiple sources are reporting that users of the LG G3 on the US-based carrier are starting to see Android Marshmallow come to their devices via an OTA update.  The original source of the news came from Reddit and the original poster included a screen image of the update on their device.  If this is legitimate, this is really good news on a lot of different levels.  First, it is reasonably fast for a carrier to get the update out.  It’s not great but it is certainly better than Verizon has done in the past on updates.

Second, and perhaps equally as important, the update appears to be Android Marshmallow build MRA58K which is the January 2016 update.  That means that this update to the LG G3 is going have the latest security updates from Google.