Author: Clinton

The 4″ iPhone SE, based on the chassis of the iPhone 4 and 5 series, looks to be getting a significant update as soon as early as next month.  The news is exciting for those who love the compact iPhone SE as it hasn’t been updated since 2016.  While there is as much rumor as anything around the 2nd generation SE, it does look like a few things seem to be pretty solid.

First, spec-wise, it looks like the new SE is going to be powered by the Apple A10 SoC.  That is the generation found in the iPhone 7 series and a significant bump up in speed, performance and power consumption over the current SE’s A9 SoC.  It also looks like that the 3.5mm headphone jack is going to go the way of the Dodo.  Instead, it will have the same headphones that were introduced with the iPhone 7 series which connect via the lightening connector.

With Chrome 66 landing on all of the browser variants of Chrome this week, both desktop and mobile, the last update is with Chrome OS.  That is expected to happen next week on April 25th.  In the meantime, a fifth and likely final beta of Chrome 66 has arrived in the Chrome OS Beta Channel for those who have their devices in that channel.  The new build is 66.0.3359.117 (Platform version: 10452.69.0).

For those who have a machine in the Beta Channel, you should check for the update by typing chrome://help in the browser bar and clicking the Check for Update button.

Google has released an update to Chrome for iOS, bringing it up to Chrome 66 and bringing the ability to export your passwords from the mobile browser.  The update is already in the App Store and if you have Chrome for iOS installed on your iPhone or iPad, you likely already have received the update.

The new build brings the mobile browser up to speed with the Android version as well as the desktop versions by basing it on Chrome 66.  The ability to export passwords was actually in the iOS version in Chrome 65 but it had to be enabled through the changing of a flag in the browser.  In this update, it is fully supported and no flag changes are required.

Apple Pay, the tap-to-pay service for retail and app purchases, has expanded the number of partner financial institutions here in the United States as well as  five other countries.  The expansion comes just a few weeks after Brazil iOS users were added to the countries that support the service.

The expansion adds banks here in the United States as well as Canada, China, Italy, Russia, and Spain.  While the list of countries and banks supported by Apple Pay is substantially smaller than its main rival Google Pay, the expansion shows that Apple plans to continue to work with financial institutions and, in some cases, governments, for the service to work in other countries and with more banks.

G Suite is getting a small but time saving feature for admins who have corporate owned Android devices, or devices with a corporate work profile.  They will now be able to allow any app to be installed on those devices, saving the tedious work of having to whitelist apps one at a time.  It is a change that will be rolling out to all domains over the course of the new few weeks.

To this point, if a corporate owned or corporate work profile device needed to install an app beyond what the admin’s had whitelisted, they had to go and approve that app for that specific device.  As you can imagine, this can be time consuming if you have a lot of corporate devices.  Now admins can allow any app to be installed but, and this is important, end users will still only see the whitelisted apps in the corporate version of the Google Play Store first.  It is only when they search for an app that they will be able to find it and install it.

The Android Distribution Report for April has been released and it reflects a sizable gain for Android Oreo.  The latest version of Android, either the 8.0 or 8.1 builds, jumped 3.5% over the February report’s figures for the version.  It now is on 4.6% of all devices that went to the Google Play Store for the 7 day period ending April 16, 2018.  It is the biggest single jump for Oreo in the reports so far.

The gains have been helped largely lay the number of manufactures who have released the Oreo update for their devices.  Samsung, Sony, HTC, Nokia and OnePlus have all been updating devices in the two months since the last report.