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The Chromium team has released an update to the stable channel of Chrome OS for most devices that brings several security improvements and other enhancements.  The big news in this release is the support of Material Design in the Chrome browser built into the OS.  The update you are looking for is build 50.0.2661.91 (Platform version: 7879.66.0) or 50.0.2661.94 (Platform version: 7978.69.0). depending on your device.  Also, this release is not available for the Pinky 11.6″ Chromebooks and Asus Chromebit.  No word on when or if those devices will receive the update.  If you have a compatible device, the update is already being pushed out by Google now and you can get it by going to Settings>About Chrome OS and check for an update.  The update will require a reboot of your Chrome OS device.

Over at Amazon, you can pick up a great deal on Office 365 Home Edition from Microsoft.  Right now if you order the card version (meaning they ship you a card with your access codes), you can get it for just $76.09.  That’s a savings of $24 over the regular $99 price tag.  Keep in mind too that this is the Home edition so you can install Office on up to 5 PCs or Macs (or any combination) with this one purchase.  The license gives you access to download both the offline versions (the Office apps you are familiar with like Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Excel & Access) as well as the online versions of these apps plus a few more, like Sway, online.  Across 5 PCs or Macs, this breaks down to just $15 a year for each computer to have Office.  Yep, it’s a pretty good deal.  From an Android perspective, if you have Office 365, you get access to all of the mobile versions of Microsoft’s apps for free too.  These will be completely unlocked when you sign in with your Office 365 account.

Google has just released the factory images and security bulletin for the May 2016 Android Security Update.  Those who want to manually flash their Nexus devices to the latest build can get the images to do so while those who want to wait until the OTA is available will have a few more days or weeks to wait.  The update is a fairly big one with 25 fixes for security issues.  Once it is available via an OTA, it is highly recommended that users download it and apply it to their devices.  Of the 25 updates in the release, 6 were marked as critical and mostly focus on elevation of permissions or remote code execution.  Most users will never see these issues but Google and those who help them “bug hunt” continually work to close any potential issues before a customer encounters them.

Google has been tinkering with the Google Play Store behind the scenes and that has lead to the addressing of two annoying and sometimes confusing issues.  The company is rolling out an update that fixes the download size indicator when you are viewing an app’s details and the download progress bar when you download the update.  So what’s the big deal here?  For some, this will be a no big deal but for others, this was a real annoyance.  The first issue was on the update size for an app you have installed.  Before now, the Google Play Store would show only the full size of the download.  Unless it is a comprehensive redo of an app, an OTA update is usually a fraction of that size.  So take Gmail for example.  The app itself is 40MB and the latest update was only about 6MB.  Before this update, you would see the update size as 40MB, not 6MB, so it would lead people to believe that these update were taking up a huge amount of space on their devices.  The reality is that it wasn’t but this not-so-clear download size didn’t help matters.