The improvements to Google+ for Android continue to roll and the latest update once again addresses a lot of bug fixes and improvements. News of the new 7.3 version came via Google’s Luke Wroblewski on his Google+ profile and outlines a significant number of changes that are happening in the social network & community app. The update has been pushed to the Google Play Store but it may be a day or two before all users see it on their devices.
Spotify has announced that starting this year they will be moving their back end cloud platform to Google Cloud Platform globally. The move comes as the streaming service has continued to grow rapidly and the data center requirements and hardware have become painful to manage. The post from Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure, Nicholas Harteau, was candid in their reasons for the move.
But in a business growing quickly in users, markets and features, keeping pace with scaling demands requires ever increasing amounts of focus and effort. Like good, lazy engineers, we occasionally asked ourselves: do we really need to do all this stuff?
For a long time the answer was “yes.” Operating our own data-centers may be a pain, but the core cloud services were not at a level of quality, performance and cost that would make cloud a significantly better option for Spotify in the long run. As they say: better the devil you know…
Recently that balance has shifted. The storage, compute and network services available from cloud providers are as high quality, high performance and low cost as what the traditional approach provides.
Wireless charging is one of those technologies that seems to have a love-hate relationship. Some people, me included, love it and find it handy to not have to plus in my devices to charge them. Others find the slower charging and sometimes positioning your device Just. Exactly. Right. on the pad to be too much of a pain. I won’t be spending this review trying to convince anyone to use wireless charging but for those who do, or want to try it, and have a Qi (pronounced “Chee”) compatible device, the Anker Wireless Charger is an excellent option for your charging needs. At only $12.99 on Amazon (regularly $59.99), it is an excellent value and performs exceptionally well.
As expected and announced, the new Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are now available for pre-sale from AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon. All four of the carriers started taking orders today with an anticipated delivery date no later than March 11th. All of the carriers have the 32GB version of these devices as Samsung has made no plans to sell the 64GB versions here in the US. While the prices for the devices varies a little, all of them have financing plans available to get you the new phone without having to necessarily come up with $600+ dollars today.
While Microsoft’s own mobile platform may be struggling to survive, the company continues to develop apps to satisfy their “mobile first” mantra. The latest app from the company, Hub Keyboard, is designed for Android with the purpose of making your life easier when it comes to moving content around on your device. With a built in clipboard and the ability to quickly send information to Office 365 apps, the keyboard is aptly names as a hub for all of your Microsoft app needs on Android.