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Google Express has added Target stores to their growing list of retailers starting today.  Now when you open the Express app on your phone, you will have the option to show Target for a wide range of products from the big box retailer.  You can also associate your Target REDcard, their discount program, with Express to get discounts and free shipping.

Target is available only in the United States and only in the lower-48.  Hawaii and Alaska are not included.  As with other retailers, Target will provide free, 2-day shipping on orders over $35.

This is the second major US retailer that has joined Google Express in the past few months.  If you remember, Walmart recently joined the service.

When the Google Pixel 2 lineup was released a couple of weeks ago, the new phones, like the first generation, were announced to have free uploading of original quality photos to Google Photos.  For those not familiar with Google Photos, original quality photos normally count against your Google Drive quota (which is leveraged by Photos) but compressed, high quality photos, don’t count against it.  Normally for photos under 16MP high quality is a great option because it is pretty lossless.

After the release of the Pixel 2 phones, it was noticed that the original quality uploading for free ended in 2020.  It cause a lot of confusion:  What happens to my photos I’ve uploaded already?  Do they get deleted?  Do they get compressed?  Thanks to an APK tear down by the Android Police team, we have a clearer answer.

Google has announced support Movies Anywhere, the service that allows you to synchronize your movies across multiple devices along with movies that you have purchased from other digital stores.  The concept behind Movies Anywhere is to give you one repository for all of the movies you have bought from Apple’s iTunes, Amazon Prime, Vudu and now Google Play.

Today, we’re taking it one step further by adding support for Movies Anywhere, allowing you to bring together your movies from Google Play, Amazon, iTunes and Vudu into a single library that you can access on any of your devices, regardless of where the purchase was originally made.

The addition of Google Play is a real win for consumers as you don’t have to go to multiple places on your devices or try to remember where you purchased movies in the past.  They all show up in one app now.

Chrome OS has come a long way in 6 years that it has been around.  The platform has infinitely more features and functionality, has a robust ecosystem of extensions and now Android apps, and is no longer a “cheap” OS for “cheap” hardware.  It has grown up, a lot.

But if there is one area that it still has lagged when comparing it to the likes of MacOS or Windows 10, it has been in the User Interface.  Yes it has changed a bit, most notably with the introduction of a task bar in 2012, but fundamentally it has always been a browser-based platform with a clunky but functional UI.  But that changed in a big way this week with the released of Chrome OS build 61.

Build 61 brings the most dramatic changes to the User Interface to date.  It brings an all new app launcher, significantly improved support for Android apps and a much more polished lock screen.  These many not sound like big ticket items but these changes bring the platform as a whole more into the mainstream look of an Operating System and out of the “geeks only” look that the platform has had to this point.  It also points to the never ending work that the Chromium team within Google perform to not only keep it as a secure and reliable OS but also bringing features that users are expecting in a desktop or laptop platform.  With more improvements on the horizon, this new look UI will only improve over the course of 2018.