ClintonFitch.com

Late yesterday it was announced that Google had signed an agreement with HTC for staff and intellectual property for $1.1 Billion.  The agreement means that, essentially, the HTC staff that have worked on the Google Pixel phones will become Google employees and the Mountain View company will be able to license the Taiwanese company’s IP, non-exclusively.

This is slightly different than what was expected early yesterday when it was assumed that Google would be buying HTC outright.

With this agreement, a team of HTC talent will join Google as part of the hardware organization. These future fellow Googlers are amazing folks we’ve already been working with closely on the Pixel smartphone line, and we’re excited to see what we can do together as one team. The deal also includes a non-exclusive license for HTC intellectual property.

The deal means that HTC will remain in the smartphone business as a manufacture and is expected to release their own flagship early next year.  But as for work with the Mountain View company, it appears that work is over as it is now in-house for the search giant.

The updated ASUS Chromebook Flip C101 is now available for pre-order from both ASUS directly as well as Amazon.  The 10.1″ WXGA Rockchip powered Chromebook is only $299, a great price point for a budget but well appointed Chrome OS device.

The display on the Chromebook Flip C101 renders at 1280 x 800 and is powered by the Rockchip 3399 OP1 processor and Mali-T860MP4 graphics processor.  It has 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM and 16GB of storage.  That storage can be expanded thanks to the MicroSD card slot but given that Chrome OS leverages Google Drive for storage, that may not be a big deal.

Today Google has made good on a commitment they Tweeted about a few months back:  There is now a non-Google Project Fi compatible phone.  The new Android One Moto X4 is available for pre-order starting today and takes full advantage of Project Fi’s ability to switch networks on-the-fly just like the Google Pixel and previous Nexus 6, 6P and 5X.

The Moto X4 comes with what Google is calling a pure Android experience and ships with Android Nougat.  An update to Oreo will happen before the end of 2017 and Google has indicated that the Moto X4 will be among the first phones to get the Android P update in 2018.

Following up on their iOS and web updates, Twitter has now begun rolling out a new Popular Articles feature in their Android app.  The update requires that you have the latest version of their app but this new feature is a cloud-side change that is rolling out to users.

The new Popular Articles feature is based on the interaction with articles from those that you follow on the service.  In other words, if a handful of those that you follow on Twitter like or retweet an article, it will show up in this new section.