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T-Mobile has announced an agreement with Leap Licenseco, an AT&T subsidiary, to acquire a section of A-Block 700 MHz band for extended LTE in the greater Chicago area.  Although the deal has to be approved by regulators, once it is complete, it will give the carrier extended LTE bandwidth in the top 10 major metro areas in the United States.  For those not familiar with the 700 MHz block, it is what allows the carrier to get LTE into remote places as well as into buildings in urban areas.  This is represented by Band 12 on their network when you access it on your phone.

Twitter and Spotify have teamed up to give you a pretty cool way to share music from the streaming service to your timeline.  Starting today, you can link to a Spotify track on your timeline and it will generate an audio card where your followers can listen to the track for 30 seconds.

You’ll want the volume up for this #SummertimeSoundtrack. Tweets with @Spotify tracks now play in your timeline! 🎧https://t.co/93avzwiQbs

— Twitter (@twitter) May 26, 2016

The idea, of course, is to attract your followers who aren’t using Spotify to join the service but it is also a great way to sample a song to decide if you want to purchase it.

The Skype team over at Microsoft have released a dramatically improved version of the voice and video communications app for Android.  The new 7.0 version of the app is hitting the Google Play Store now and if you already have it installed, you should see the update hit your device via an OTA over the course of the next few days.  The big improvement in this new update is the new Material Design inspired UI on tablets.

We’ve redesigned the tablet UI from the ground up, bringing a number of material design inspired elements.

The app also has a Floating Action Button (FAB) that makes it much faster to start a conversation or call with Skype app.  That FAB is in both the tablet and phone versions of the app.

The Microsoft Android team has been busy.  Earlier this morning I told you about a major update to the Next Lock Screen app for Android.  Now the Office team has rolled out an update to the Android versions of Excel, PowerPoint and Word.  All three of the updates are now in the Google Play Store and you should be seeing them hit your devices at any point.  The big news in these updates is the addition of the Tell Me feature in the apps.  If you aren’t familiar with Tell Me, you probably have it and don’t know it.  If you run Office 2016 on your PC or Mac, at the top of any of the apps there is a search box titled “Tell me what you want to do”.  Type in what you are wanting to do in any of the apps and it will give you instructions on how to do it.  It is far faster than trying to dumpster dive into the menus of the apps.  That same feature is now available in the Android versions of the apps so you can quickly figure out how to do something without having to search around.