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Google has quietly added a new 2TB storage tier to Google Drive.  The new storage level is $19.99 per month and fills the wide gap that was between the 1TB and the 10TB offering Drive offer previously.  The new tier can be added to your account via the Drive Android app or on the website.  If you already pay for Google Drive storage, you can upgrade your account via the app or web and you will be partially charged for the remaining time on your billing cycle.  The access to the extra storage however goes into immediate effect.  The new tier is available now and you should see it on both the app and the site to sign up.

The addition of the new tier will certainly help those users who need more than 1TB but not the massive – and expensive – 10TB option.  Price wise, the 2TB plan is competitive with other cloud storage solutions and, of course, since Drive ties in nicely with other Google apps, it is convenient.

Remember that if you store Google G Suite files (Docs, Sheets and Slides) and uses High Quality on your Google Photos uploads, those don’t count against your storage quota.  Things like Gmail attachments, PDFs and Microsoft files do count against it.

Last Summer, Google started allowing users who have 2-factor authentication enabled to get notified and approve account access via a pop-up on their phone.  The feature is deadly handy as it saves a lot of time over having to go over the Google Authenticator app and type in a six digit timed code.  To this point, that pop-up provided basically a yes or no option but didn’t really give you any details other than someone was trying to sign into your account.  That’s changing for the better as Google rolls out an update behind the scenes to improve the details you get when an authorization request is made.

First, if you don’t have 2-factor authentication enabled on your Google account, you can do that by going to myaccount.google.com.  Navigate to Sign in Options and enable it.  After that, you can add your phone to your account as being a device from which you can give authorizations in addition to the Google Authenticator app.  Once you have it enabled, when you try to sign in from another device with your Google account, you will get a prompt on your phone to approve it.

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 $364 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.

Big changes are coming in the latest update to Google Sheets for Android, web and iOS.  There are some nice formatting options that are coming to the app but probably the bigger news is that the Android app will have mouse support for the new breed of Chromebooks that run Android apps.

From a formatting perspective, Sheets will now have the ability to rotate text (this is found under Format>Text rotation) to make your spreadsheet cleaner and more visually appealing.  For example, you could rotate column headers 90-degrees so that they are vertical instead of wide across the column top.  This means you can make those columns more narrow.  Add to that, finally, the ability to format numbers in Accounting style.  This is one of those “why wasn’t it there before?” features but hey, it’s here now.  Under Format>Number>Accounting, you can change your numbers into this format for easier and more consistent reports on budgets and other financial spreadsheets.

Rounding out the formatting updates are new border styles.  There are several new border styles in the app that have various thicknesses and double borders.  These are all found under Toolbar>Borders>Border styles.

The big changes though and probably the more exciting ones for most are the changes to the Android (and iOS app) app for Sheets.