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Today’s Deal over at Amazon is on the Microsoft Office 365 Home subscription.  Normally $99.99, it is down to $84.99 at the online retailer.  The Home edition of Office 365 allows you to install the Office suite of apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote – on up to 5 PCs or Mac (any combination) and also comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage for your files and photos.  That 1TB of storage applies to all users on the subscription so each will get 1TB.  It’s a pretty sweet deal on the flagship Office offering from Microsoft.

If you already have a subscription, you can still take advantage of this deal.  When you get the subscription card shipped to you, just go to your Office account and add it to your existing subscription. This will just push out your renewal date another year.

Add to this, with the Home subscription, you get full access to the Android and iOS versions of the Office apps.  These apps are free on both platforms but to get all of the features, you have to have a subscription.

Today’s Deal is on the physical subscription card being shipped to you (it’s Prime eligible so it won’t cost you anything if you are a member) and not on the download version.  That version is still $99.

Check it out at Amazon

As expected, Google released the January Android Security Update patches yesterday for the Google Pixel phones and Nexus devices.  The full system images and the OTA images have been released to the Android Developer site already so users who have these devices should start seeing the OTA update come to their phones or tablets over the course of the next few days.  For those who want to manually flash, you can do so with these factory images.

The new build versions are as follows:

• Google Pixel XL – NMF26U or NMF26V (for Verizon owners)
• Google Pixel – NMF26U or NMF26V (for Verizon owners)
• Pixel C – N4F26I
• Nexus 6P – N4F26I and N4F26J
• Nexus 5X – N4F26I and N4F26J
• Nexus Player – NMF26R
• Nexus 9 (Wi-Fi) – NMF26R

Notably the Nexus 6 is not on this list nor is the Nexus 9 LTE version.  The Nexus 6 should be getting Nougat 7.1.1 next week but it is unclear why the Nexus 9 LTE did not get updates yet.

WhatsApp has announced that effective in 2017, support for several legacy mobile OS versions has been or will be eliminated.  For Android, Eclair (version 2.1) and Froyo (version 2.2) are on the list.  What this means is if you are running a device with Android 2.1 or 2.2 (which begs the question, why?) you will no longer get support from WhatsApp for any issues.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that the app on your phone will quit working, just that future updates may not be available (highly likely).

Android wasn’t the only OS impacted.  Support for BlackBerry OS and Blackberry 10 was dropped as well as Nokia Symbian S60 and Windows Phone 7.  Here is the complete list:

• BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10
• Nokia S40
• Nokia Symbian S60
• Android 2.1 and Android 2.2
• Windows Phone 7
• iPhone 3GS/iOS 6

As you can see, all of these are rather old mobile OS builds.

CES 2017 kicks off today and the announcements of new products and devices are already starting.  Lenovo announced the Amazon Alexa powered Lenovo Smart Assistant today, a competitor to Amazon Echo and Google Home.  The cylinder shaped device looks somewhat similar to the Echo but has a bit more aesthetic appeal.  The top half of it is white with a 360-degree microphone and speaker combination on the top of it.  The bottom half is more similar to Google home with the woven overlay that is available in several colors.

The Lenovo Smart Assistant is powered by the Intel Celeron N3060 process, has one 5w speaker and one 10w speaker for audio.