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Amazon has set their sights on Netflix as the global expansion of streaming content providers continues.  Today the company announced that Amazon Prime Video is available in over 200 countries, up from 130 countries from the expansion earlier this year, and for several countries the new service is no additional cost to existing Amazon Prime memberships.  Like Netflix, Amazon has been pushing hard to make original content, the most well know of these currently being The Grand Tour, and with this expansion, more people will be able to see the show (legally).

For Prime customers in Belgium, Canada, France, India, Italy and Spain, you can start watching Amazon content through the Prime Video app at no cost today.  You just need to have the Prime Video app installed on your devices but you can also watch on primevideo.com if you want to view content in your browser.  For other countries, the add-on subscription will be $2.99 for the first six months then going up to $5.99 thereafter.

Google has been very clear and vocal that one of the primary goals of the new Google Pixel lineup of phones is to lure iPhone users away from iOS and Apple to Android.  While the success of the Pixel and Pixel XL looks strong and the phones are certainly attractive, users moving from one ecosystem to another as they would in this case have one big challenge:  Data migration.  Keeping all your calendar events, photos and videos and contacts are critical for migrating from iOS to Android.  To that end, Google has launched an all new Switch to Android site which outlines exactly what those who want to migrate need to do to assure all their content is backed up.  The key to all of it:  Google Drive.

The step-by-step site has users first download Google Drive onto their iPhone then use the new Backup Wizard built into the app to backup their Contacts, Calendar events, and Photos & Videos.  Once the content that you want to back up is selected, they are all backed up via Google Drive to the respective Google services.  Your contacts go to Google Contacts, your calendar events to Google Calendar and your photos & videos to Google Photos.  Because of limitations in iOS, in order for the backup to work, you must have Google Drive running and in the foreground on your iPhone (iOS doesn’t allow background syncs) and depending on how much data you have, this process could take several hours.  Obviously, use Wi-Fi to do this as it will speed things up (and be cheaper!).

One of the most common questions I receive about Google’s Project Fi is if it will work with phones other than the Google Pixel and Nexus phone lineup.  The short answer to this question is yes.  However, there are things that you have to consider in the process and you will have to have, at some point, a compatible Pixel or Nexus phone to activate your Fi SIM.  So really the answer is yes, but with a lot of hurdles to jump.

In this How To, I will go over the steps to get a non-Google phone to work with Project Fi including what you need to do to set it up, how to configure SMS/MMS and the limitations you will have with using Fi on a non-Google phone.  For this article, I’m using a Nextbit Robin but the reality is that the steps outlined here should work with any phone.

A couple of warnings before I get started.  First, there is no support provided getting your non-Google phone working with Project Fi.  They clearly advertise it as working with their devices only as the primary SIM card (you can get the data-only card working with some iPad models and other tablets).  Second, one of the big advantages of Fi is the ability to seamlessly switch between Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular.  In a non-Google phone, you will only get T-Mobile service.  If T-Mobile is not great in your area, keep that in mind.

With the ever increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the need for a proper programming platform is becoming ever important.  Google today announced Android Things, a platform that should provide a solid foundation for those who are developing IoT solutions as well as improvements to Google Weave.  Android Things, as the name implies, is based on Android so those who are already developing on the platform can quickly and easily pick up the coding skills for IoT.

Now any Android developer can quickly build a smart device using Android APIs and Google services, while staying highly secure with updates direct from Google. We incorporated the feedback from Project Brillo to include familiar tools such as Android Studio, the Android Software Development Kit (SDK), Google Play Services, and Google Cloud Platform. And in the coming months, we will provide Developer Preview updates to bring you the infrastructure for securely pushing regular OS patches, security fixes, and your own updates, as well as built-in Weave connectivity and more.

This should lower the bar for many developers to get into the IoT development game as they don’t have to learn a new code structure.  If you know Android, you inherently know Android Things.