Author: Clinton

If you have been wanting to get your hands on a Samsung Galaxy Note8, today is your day.  Amazon has dropped the price of the 6.3″ phablet by a whopping $200.  Now you can get it with 64GB of storage for $749 in either the Midnight Black or Orchid Gray colors.  This is by far the lowest price so far on the Note8.

For those that don’t recall, the Galaxy Note8 is a  6.3″ device that renders at 1440 x 2560 resolution with an 18.5:9 aspect ratio.  Physically it is 162.5 x 74.6 x 8.6mm and weighs 195g.  In old money, that’s 6.39 x 2.9 x .34 inches and a weight of 6.87 ounces.   It is powered by the Snapdragon 835 SocC and has an eye watering 6GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage.  That storage can be expanded up to 2TB thanks to the MicroSD slot.

Google has notified G Suite domain admins of when the new Gmail experience will begin rolling out when it goes to General Availability (GA) next month.  Currently, for G Suite, the new Gmail experience is in the Early Adopters Program and organizations can chose to participate in the program – or not.  This is the same for consumer too, but that will be changing when the experience goes GA in July.

Once the new experience goes GA, admins will have the option to switch everyone over immediately, allow users to switch themselves, or have users wait four weeks before they are opted into the new experience.  The latter of these will be the default behavior.

After being rumored for much of this past weekend, Microsoft has confirmed their acquisition of software development platform GitHub.  The all stock transaction is estimated to be $7.5 billion with the Redmond, Washington company committing that development platform will remain open source.

And Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future.

The acquisition puts Microsoft in a strong position when it comes to software development in general and certainly a key player in the open source development community.

Over the weekend I posted about the special pricing running on the Google Pixelbook.  Now that special pricing has been extended on Amazon.  The online retailer now has the Pixelbook at the same $749 price you will find at the Google Store, B&H and other retailers.

The discounted price also applies to the Pixelbook with the Pixelbook Pen bundle too.  Right now that bundle is down to $831, which is $68 less than the best price on the Pixelbook only prior to this mark down from Google.

Over the weekend, I posted about the great deal the Google Store is running on the Google Pixelbook.  Now it seems they have put together a great deal on the Google Pixel 2 XL phone too.  Right now at the store you can pick up the flagship Pixel device for regular price but you get $150 in store credit to use later plus a Google Home Mini.  All you have to do is add both the Google Pixel 2 XL and the Home Mini to your cart and the price will be discounted.

While we all know that the Google Pixel 3 lineup is going to be coming later this year, that is no reason not to give the Pixel 2 XL a serious look.  It will be updated to Android R when it is released and you still get free Google Photo storage for two years too.  Oh, and it is a seriously awesome phone.

In what could prove to be the clearest sign yet that the personal assistant race is coming down to two horses, Microsoft appears to be set to allow both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant on the Xbox One.  The news, along with a supporting screenshot, came from the team over at Windows Central and points to users having the option to leverage the personal assistant of their choice on their Xbox One for controlling the device from their phone.

The news of this falls in line with other news that Microsoft is fundamentally shifting Cortana, their digital assistant, away from the consumer market and more toward the productivity side of things and not necessarily a personal assistant.  It appears that Microsoft is conceding to Alexa and Google Assistant.