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Today’s Deal is on a great phone that I reviewed a few months ago.  The Sony Xperia X Compact has a lot of punch in a little package and right now, it is on sale for $349 at Amazon.  Normally this 4.6″ phone is $499, so this is a healthy amount of savings.  It is powered by the Snapdragon 650 hexa-core processor.  It has four 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53 cores &  two 1.8 GHz Cortex-A72 cores.  The processor is coupled with the Adreno 510 GPU which provides good graphics performance.  The X Compact has 3GB of RAM onboard and has 32GB of built-in storage.  That storage can be expanded up to an additional 256GB thanks to the Micro SD slot that is built into the SIM tray of the phone.

Display wise, the Xperia X Compact has a 4.6″ IPS LCD display that renders at 720 x 1280.  That gives you 319 ppi which is low compared to other devices out there.  I caution readers to consider that this device has a much smaller display so 319 ppi is actually very comfortable on this screen size.  Indeed for comparison, the iPhone 6 had 329 ppi so we aren’t talking about a massive difference from even larger devices.  The display is protected by Gorilla Glass 3.

Over the weekend, Google pushed a behind-the-scenes update to the Google Play Store.  Now, once the update hits your account, you will see a new Free App of the Week section in the store.  Now you will be able to download a normally pay-to-play app at no charge.  It is certainly not a new concept but it is great to see Google getting on board with such programs.  Apple has had this for some time now while Amazon likely has the most aggressive free app model with their Amazon Underground.  There you can not only get apps for free that you normally have to pay for but also get free in-app purchases.  The Google offer does not give you free in-app purchases.  Those are still on you.

This week’s free app is Card Wars from Cartoon Network.  Normally it is $2.99 but for the rest of this week, it is free.

Google has sent notifications out to G Suite customers that in starting next week, a warning will show up in Google Hangouts that SMS will no longer be supported.  That support will end on May 22nd.  The notification and change is part of the overall strategy of Google to move their G Suite customers to the new Google Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat while leveraging Android Messages for SMS on Android devices.  For consumers, the focus is on Google Allo and Duo to meet these communications needs.

For those readers who are on Project Fi (I am one of them) or using Google Voice, this change does not impact you.  This change only impacts G Suite customers who are using carrier numbers to send and receive SMS messages.  This fits along with what Google told me earlier this month at the Google Next Cloud event in San Francisco.

After a limited rollout nearly a year ago, Instagram has rolled out two-factor authentication to all users.  The new security feature can be enabled through settings and once it is done, it will require that you authenticate not only with your password but with a SMS code sent to you phone.  This will only be required if you log out of the app and not every time you use it (assuming you keep yourself logged in).

Two-Factor authentication is something I highly encourage readers to enable on all their accounts, especially social networks.  It significantly cuts down on your risk of your account being compromised.  Yes it is a pain to have to deal with but it is better than the alternative.