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T-Mobile announced during a press conference that they plan on expanding their 700 MHz spectrum by nearly 250% over the course of 2016.  The news is great for T-Mobile users and Project Fi users (which leverages T-Mobile) as it should give them more LTE coverage in more remote places and better coverage in urban areas.  For T-Mobile, this spectrum is their LTE Band 12 and the lower frequency allows for LTE coverage in buildings and remote areas.

In the conference, T-Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer, Neville Ray stated that just over 300 million of the companies Points of Presence (POP) out of the 700 million will be licensed for the 700 MHz in the coming year, greatly expanding the company’s LTE cover in the United States.  If you remember, T-Mobile acquired the spectrum back in 2014 and have been slowly expanding it since then.  Currently there are 185 million POPs in T-Mobile’s inventory that support this spectrum.

The Chrome OS teams has released a bug fix and security update to the platform that all devices should see in the coming days.  The new stable build is version 47.0.2526.110 (Platform version: 7520.67.0) and while no details were given on what specifically was addressed, we can safely assume that it is a build all users should upgrade too as soon as possible.  The update comes about a month after the last update to the platform on December 15, 2015 which is about the normal cadence for releases.

In the announcement, Google states that all devices will be seeing the update in the next few days.  That means if you have a Chromebook, Chromebit or Chromebase, you should see the update regardless of manufacture or model.

In the flurry of updates that happened to not just Google apps but apps in general for Android at the end of last year, one big change came to Google Maps.  The app gained the ability to have offline maps available, something that competitor products had enjoyed for a long while yet for whatever reason, Google had not yet supported it.  That has changed now and in typical Google fashion, they have made it very easy to create offline maps.

Why would you want offline maps?  Simple really.  No matter which carrier you use for your mobile service, you will undoubtedly hit a dead zone where you have no coverage.  I experienced this over Thanksgiving when I drove from my home in Denver to ski in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.  There is a good 50-odd miles stretch that has absolutely no mobile coverage.  I did not have it with Project Fi (which meant there was no T-Mobile or Sprint in the area) and my wife had no coverage on her iPhone with AT&T.  This scenario is exactly where offline maps become important, especially if you know you are going to have to make some road changes to get to your destination but aren’t exactly sure where those are going to happen.

For this How To I’ll show you how easy Google has made it to create offline maps in Google Maps and how the app works with them.

Chinese manufacture Huawei has become a dominant player in the global Android phone market but has struggled to gain traction here in the United States.  That has changed a little bit with the launch of the Huawei built Nexus 6P and the company is looking to capitalize on that success.  2016 the company is planning on making a significant push into the US market and it will be lead by their new 6″ phablet device, the Mate 8.

The Mate 8 was announced last month in China but yesterday at CES 2016 it was announced it was going global.  It mighty impressive specs that make it a true flagship device for the company.  While it won’t launch immediately here in the US – it will be in Europe, South America and Asia first before it hits the US and UK – it will be here by the end of the 1st quarter.  To start, it has a 6″ Full HD 1080p display, is powered by the Huawei Kirin 950 Octa-Core processor running at 2.3Ghz and has an ARM Cortex A72 co-processor running at 1.5Ghz.  It will come in two variants as far as RAM and storage are concerned.  The base model will come with 3GB or RAM and 32GB of storage while the upper end will have 4GB of RAM and 64GB of Storage.  Interestingly, the upper end model will also support dual SIMs while the base model will be single SIM.