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AOPEN has announced a new Chrome OS powered tablet, the Chromebase Mini.  The 10.1″ tablet does indeed look like a mini Chromebase and is aimed at the enterprise and retail markets but with a price point consumers can afford.  If you haven’t heard of AOPEN, they have been working with Chrome OS for a long time.  Most of their work has been around digital signage that runs on the platform but they have also had commercial grade Chromebox devices for a while.

The Chromebase Mini has a 10.1″ display that renders in 1280 x 800, has multi-touch support and is powered by a quad-core Cortex A17 processor running at 1.8GHz.  It has 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage build it along with a Full HD Webcam that shoots at 2MP.

If Evan Blass is right, and he usually is, we can expect Android Wear 2.0 to launch on February 9th.  Evan took to Twitter in the wee hours of this morning to tell everyone to mark their calendars and get ready for the release.

Mark your calendar: Android Wear 2.0 launches on February 9th.

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) January 17, 2017

If you don’t follow Mr. Blass on Twitter, take a minute and do so. He is deadly accurate on most rumors and leaks and is a great source of information.

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 $379 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.

Good news for those who have the unlocked variant of the HTC One A9.  Android Nougat is coming your way!  HTC’s Mo Versi, VP of Product Management, took to Twitter yesterday to announce that starting last night, the unlocked phone would start having the latest version of Android pushed to it via an OTA update.  The announcement comes after the HTC 10 started – then stopped – getting the Nougat update and it comes nearly six months after it was released by Google.

HTC One A9 Unlocked Owners! We have received technical approval on the Nougat OS update, and OTA will begin tonight!

— Mo Versi (@moversi) January 16, 2017

The update takes the One A9 to version 7.0 with the latest security patch for that build.