Category: News

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Microsoft FINALLY brings Tablet Optimized Office Apps to Android!

After we saw a demo of an iPad running Office apps, Android fans wondered, rather vocally, when we would also get to take part in the business grade festivities.

Oh sure we had an Office Phone app for basic viewing, editing, and formatting, but it lacked proper tablet support.

Microsoft office word document for android tablet app somegadgetguyAll that changed yesterday when Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and Powerpoint tablet apps were finally approved on Google Play. Each service is an individual app, and downloading the apps is totally free. When not linked with an Office 365 subscription, the apps function as viewers, and wont allow you to edit docs or spreadsheet. Though with unlimited cloud storage coming to OneDrive with an Office 365 subscription, it’s not a bad value when compared to other cloud storage solution.

Linking to Office 365 opens up a full world of document and presentation creation and editing, very similar to what we saw on the iPad version. The full toolsets of Office are included, with advanced formating and formula support, and are well optimized for touch screen use. Tied directly into Office Online, OneDrive, and can be linked to DropBox, it’s a fairly robust ecosystem for sharing and collaborating.

Microsoft office excel for android tablet app somegadgetguy

As they’re beefy services, the download sizes are pretty large. Expect all three apps together to clock in at around 370MB. There’s also an issue with compatibility. Most of the tablets I ave lying around are not yet approved to install the apps. No Asus Transformer, no NVIDIA Shield, even the newer Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 was a no go, so my first impressions were performed on a Nexus 7.

Still it’s a great collection for Android, and now Windows Tablet and Phone fans can start the waiting game as we should see touch optimized Office apps arrive with Windows 10.

Microsoft Word on Google Play
Microsoft Excel on Google Play
Microsoft Powerpoint on Google Play

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FCC Public Advisory: Blocking Personal WiFi Hotspots is Prohibited

marriott hotel logoAn interesting story has been developing in the use of WiFi hotpots in hotels.

The FCC fined Marriott hotels for blocking their customers from using their own WiFi, powered by phones and MiFi’s using 3G/4G data connections. The fine amounted to $600,000, and Marriott petitioned the commission, asserting that blocking customers was a way for them to better protect the security of the networking solutions they were offering.

The FCC responded with a public advisory yesterday reaffirming their previous stance:

Personal Wi-Fi networks, or “hot spots,” are an important way that consumers connect to the Internet. Willful or malicious interference with Wi-Fi hot spots is illegal. Wi-Fi blocking violates Section 333 of the Communications Act, as amended.1 The Enforcement Bureau has seen a disturbing trend in which hotels and other commercial establishments block wireless consumers from using their own personal Wi-Fi hot spots on the commercial establishment’s premises. As a result, the Bureau is protecting consumers by aggressively investigating and acting against such unlawful intentional interference.

Continue reading “FCC Public Advisory: Blocking Personal WiFi Hotspots is Prohibited”

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IBM to Set Record for Corporate Layoffs Next Month, Over 100 Thousand

ibm logoAnd if they break that record, as they’re expected to, IBM will be taking the layoffs crown from…

IBM

In an age where companies are rushing away from the kinds of server and data solutions IBM has traditionally offered to focus on “cloud” things, International Business Machines is looking to cut a quarter of its 400,000 employee workforce. They’re scrambling to catch up with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in a hyper competitive services market, and one has to wonder how they’ll do that paying for an incredible number of severance packages, and with customer confidence likely taking a hit.

While the company sells mainframes, something you would think would be necessary for a cloud economy, that hardware only makes up about 10% of IBM’s business. Continue reading “IBM to Set Record for Corporate Layoffs Next Month, Over 100 Thousand”

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Microsoft Windows 10 Announcement: OS Updates, XBOX Gaming Cross Platform, and HoloLens Augmented Reality!

Back in September we got our first look at the next version of Windows. It was a somewhat underwhelming affair, detailing the next steps Microsoft will take to retain their lead in corporate computing, and the gist of that announcement was focused on how to make their current version of Windows feel more like their last version of Windows.

But there’s a whole wide world of devices out now, and manufacturers are starting to deliver on hardware that blurs the lines between consumer tablets, laptops, desktops, and workstations. Microsoft windows 10 keynote announcement somegadgetguy (1)Taking the stage, Terry Myerson, Executive VP of Operating Systems, thanked the Windows Insider participants for their interactions with the Windows 10 BETA. Microsoft is working hard to make this version feel like it’s been built from a community perspective.

The focus moving forward is on ecosystem and tying data and devices together. Being able to move seamlessly from device to device with data and apps intact, for both business and consumer solutions, creating a “global” platform. Continue reading “Microsoft Windows 10 Announcement: OS Updates, XBOX Gaming Cross Platform, and HoloLens Augmented Reality!”

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AT&T World Connect Delivers Unlimited Calling to Mexico

ATT logoFollowing their acquisition of Mexican carrier Iusacell, AT&T is updating their World Connect international calling package.

World Connect still costs an additional $5 per month per line, and calls to Canada are still 1¢ per minute, but now all of your calls to Mexico will no longer have additional minute charges.

This update includes calls to landlines or cell phones, so if you’re making a lot of calls down south (Mexico is the most called country from the United States), this could be a handy way to save a little cash on your international communications.

Full PR below.

Continue reading “AT&T World Connect Delivers Unlimited Calling to Mexico”

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Sprint Sends Letter to FCC in Support of Title II Reclassification

sprint logoMaybe a surprising way to wrap a week full of Net Neutrality news, but the country’s fourth place carrier yesterday sent a letter to the FCC explaining its position on reclassifying the internet as a common utility under Title II.

They’re stance? It probably wont affect their products and services much.

Now to be sure, the letter does support a “light touch” regulation, where the FCC through forbearance might opt out of regulating certain aspects of the wireless industry, and give “mobile carriers the flexibility to manage our networks and to differentiate our services in the market”.

Of course, drawing that regulation line is a sticky subject between Title II supporters and opponents. Still it’s refreshing to see a carrier buck current industry trends to point out that it’s entirely likely reclassification might have only a small impact on the way broadband business is currently handled, and drawing on the history of the wireless industry, would probably be a positive move for the industry in allowing more competition.

When first launched, the mobile market was a licensed duopoly. This system was a failure, resulting in slow deployment, high prices and little innovation. In 1993, Congress revised the Telecommunications Act to allow new carriers, including Sprint, to enter the market. This competition resulted in tremendous investment in the wireless industry, broader deployment, greater innovation, and falling prices. It is absolutely true that this explosion of growth occurred under a light touch regulatory regime. Some net neutrality debaters appear to have forgotten, however, that this light touch regulatory regime emanated from Title II common carrier regulation, including Sections 201, 202 and 208 of the Communications Act.

Well done Lil’ Yellow. You can read the whole letter from Sprint’s Chief Technology Officer, Stephen Bye here (PDF Download).

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Lawsuit Claims Apple is Falsely Advertising iPhone Storage and Why This Isn’t That Big a Deal…

Filed on Tuesday, a class action lawsuit claims that Apple is misrepresenting and falsely advertising how much storage is available in the iPhone and the iPad. Far be it from me to to defend on Apple on a situation like this, but the media covering this story has blown a fairly common practice wildly out of proportion. The filing itself reads like it was written by someone who lacks basic knowledge of math and technology.

This is a problem we’ve been dealing with since the advent of home computing. How do we accurately report how much space is on our device?

The main issue comes down to the discrepancy between advertising and how computers are actually programmed. To grossly over simplify, you are allowed to advertise a megabyte as being equal to 1 million bytes, and a gigabyte as being equal to 1 billion bytes. Makes sense right? All those metric-y words? This is known as “decimal notation”.

But that’s NOT how your computer utilizes storage. Your computer stores info via binary powers of 2. Your computer treats 1,048,576 as a megabyte and 1,073,741,824 as a gigabyte.

So if we do a little math, the outside of the box claims the iPhone has 16GB, in that it has sixteen billion bytes on board. But iOS will use that in binary compatible chunks. Those same 16 billion bytes will be reported to the operating system as 14.90 GB out of the box before you slap an OS on the device. Have a “32GB” phone? The OS will report that as 29.80GB when it’s totally empty.

The larger the pool of storage, the larger the chunk of data you lose via this advertising hijinkery. Have you cracked open a hard drive recently? Sure you can buy a box which claims to 4TB packed inside, but your computer will report that as 3.64TB. You didn’t “LOSE” this data, you did receive 4 trillion bytes, but your computer doesn’t use a storage device like that. It has to cluster them, so it looks like you’ve lost some 360GB, when you haven’t.

This practice is so common that pretty much every hard drive and flash memory manufacturer has some link in their respective FAQ’s that explains this very phenomenon. Here’s Seagate’s for example.

apple iphone ipad storage class action lawsuit chartThe chart being used in this class action suit is conflating the difference between decimal notation (1MB = 1,000,000 bytes) and binary notation (1MB = 1,048,576 bytes) to make it look like Apple is trying to do something nefarious, and to make it look like iOS has eaten up significantly more space than it actually has.

If we want to talk about bloat, I think Samsung customers have more reason to complain as the first batch of “16GB” Galaxy S5’s were delivered with less than 10 binary gigabytes available to the user depending on carrier. Samsung took more than 30% of the available storage for the OS, pre-installed apps, and partition.

What I hate most about this situation is that it forces me to defend Apple here. We do have an issue with how products are advertised, and it’s a problem we’ve had since the first storage devices were built into PC’s. What’s not going to help us explain this situation to consumers is screwing up the math being used to demonstrate the problem.

The problem here isn’t with Apple being “stingy”. It’s with an entire industry and how it advertises its products.

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KickStarter Watch: Andromium Wants to Turn Your Phone Into a Desktop PC

We keep seeing the promise of this never completely fulfilled. Docking a phone into a tablet or a laptop shell. Running custom versions of Linux to reorganize the UI for a more PC like experience when plugged into a larger screen.

andromium demo image

Kickstarter project Andromium thinks they have the solution for using your phone as the brain of a home computing environment. A simple cradle connects to PC peripherals, and custom software borrows the more successful elements of OSX and Windows for a familiar PC look.

With our phones becoming more and more powerful, the idea of a ubiquitous data experience doesn’t seem too far fetched, and the lead designer of this project was formerly a Senior Engineer at Google. The project already looks like it’ll be compatible with several Samsung phones, with more handsets to follow. Best of all the dock doesn’t look like it’ll be prohibitively expensive if the project is funded with an expected retail price of $39.95.

Andromium (Kickstarter)

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