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When it comes to flagship devices in 2018, there are certain expectations you have in that device.  It is going to have a solid display, likely 18:9.  It is going to have solid performance, excellent battery life and cameras that give you those great shots every day no matter the conditions.  That is a significant list of demands and few phones fully meet all the criteria.  But the latest flagship from Huawei, the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, does so brilliantly.

Building on the solid foundation of the Mate 8 of 2016 and the Mate 9 of 2017, the Mate 10 Pro is an evolution of all the things Huawei has learned on their phones.  While this is evident under-the-hood with their updated, AI-driven Kirin SoC, it is also in the more visible parts too.  EMUI 8, the company’s take on Android Oreo, is everything that the previous version where not.  In other words, it is intutitive and solid.  I actually like EMUI now.  Add to that an impressive dual camera configuration with Leica optics and you will get stunning photos from the phone too.  It is a pretty complete package that is fun to use.

Recently I was sent a Huawei Mate 10 Pro by Huawei USA to review and after using it, I can easily recommend it for those of you who are looking for a flagship phone.  At a price of $799, it is certainly in the flagship price range but you’ll find very few compromises with this phone.

Following Verizon and T-Mobile, the Samsung Galaxy S8 on Sprint is now getting updated to Android Oreo.  The update began rolling out yesterday and should be landing on the Galaxy S8 and S8+ on the network over the course of the next few days.

For those of you who have the Galaxy S8, you are looking for build G950USQU2CRB9 while those of you who have the S8+, you are getting build G955USQU2CRB9.  Both updates come in at just over 1.5GB in size so you will certainly want to download them via WiFi when you get the notification of it being available.

If your organization has Hangouts Meet or Chrome for Meetings hardware, there is a new update rolling out to you.  The Chrome 64 update for these hardware solutions has been released, taking you up to build Stable Channel Chrome OS release but has the Huddly firmware which is updated to 1.2.10.

For those that aren’t familiar with these two solutions, they are physical hardware packaged solutions that run on Chrome OS designed for conferences and meeting rooms.  They are available to G Suite customers in the Education, Business and Enterprise versions of the platform.

The rebranding exercise last week from Google on Android Wear was an important one, if nothing more than superficial.  Now known as Wear OS by Google, the flavor of Android designed to run on watches, the name change reflects many things that have been changing with the Android naming convention over the past few months.

But the problems for Wear OS are far deeper than a simple name change can fix.  Sure, Google can address the iPhone user market who, they report, is one out of every three Android Wear user today. The fact is, a premium Wear OS watch experience needs to happen and it needs to come from Google.  Just as they have done with phones and Chromebooks, a Google “Pixel Watch” would unleash all the potential of Wear OS to the masses.  But there are big obstacles in the way that have to be addressed.  If there is a company that can sort it out, it is Google.  The question is if they want to do it.