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The BBC has finally, finally released the BBC iPlayer in America.  The iPlayer app is one of the best apps from the BBC and it gives users the ability to listen to radio and other content from the UK broadcaster on their Android phone.  Having lived in the UK for many years, the iPlayer app was my go-to app on many a train trip across the country to keep me up-to-date and for other content.  Now that it is here in the United States, you have the option now to listen to the BBC great news coverage and content for free.

The Microsoft Office suite of apps for Android – Excel, PowerPoint and Word – have all been updated today with several new features and improvements.  Perhaps the biggest new feature across all three apps is the ability to store your files on an SD card on your device.  To this point you could only save your files in your device’s main storage.  That can be problematic for those who do a lot of file editing on their devices, especially those with low storage devices.  This new feature, which is across all three apps, should help solve that problem.  There is nothing special you as a user have to do other than tell the apps to store on your SD card.  Your device, however, must be running Android Lollipop or later to take advantage of this feature. All three apps now also give you the ability to annotate files.  You can use a stylus or your finger to write, draw or highlight.  These new tools found in the Draw tab, a new tab in each app.

Today’s Deal over at Amazon is on the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua.  This 5″ Android phone is down to $149 over at Amazon, a savings of over $50.  The phone is unlocked and is compatible with GSM carriers here in the US (AT&T and T-Mobile), it has 16GB of storage which can be expanded thanks to the MicroSD slot and is water IP68 certified against dust and water.  That means this phone is dust and water proof up to 1.5 meters deep for up to 30 minutes.  Powering the Xperia M4 is the Snapdragon 6.15 processor clocked at 1.5GHz with 2GB of RAM installed.  Perhaps the deal clincher for some readers will be the fact that Android Marshmallow is available for this phone.

With Android Nougat now only weeks away from release, developers are starting to prepare their apps for support of the release.  Google is no exception and the latest update to their clock and alarm app, Google Clock, is squarely aimed at getting it ready for Nougat.  The update, which is in the Play Store now, also works on Lollipop and Marshmallow but a lot of the focus is on Nougat to be fair.  In fact, the first thing noted in the Release Notes is support for Nougat.  With that support comes support for multi-screen, the new feature that will come in the release that allows you to view more than one app at a time.  Google Clock will support that natively so you can setup timers or alarms while working on with another app.