Author: Clinton

While it is far to early to call the Apple HomePod a failure, it is certainly clear that Apple’s take on the smart speaker is struggling to gain ground in the market.  According to a new report at Bloomberg, the company has cut orders of the smart speaker and stores are starting to have inventories of the device pile up as they simply can’t get them sold.

The HomePod has been available for roughly ten weeks now and has managed to land about 10% of the smart speaker market.  That is a distant 3rd behind Amazon Echo (73% of the market) and Google Home (14%).  These figures are according to Slice Intelligence.

Apple Music, the subscription music streaming service from the Cupertino company, is doing exceptionally well.  In an exclusive report at Variety, the company shared that the service now has 40 million subscribers world wide.  Perhaps even more of an indicator of the health of the service, it is outpacing Spotify when it comes to month-over-month growth.

Right now Spotify is gaining about 2% each month in new subscribers, which outstanding growth.  But Apple Music is growing at a staggering 5% each month.  The service, like Spotify, is helped by the fact that it works on both Android and iOS phones.

Today’s Deal over at Amazon is a great opportunity to pick up a huge external power pack for your phones and tablets without dropping a lot of cash.  The RAVPower 22000mAh Power Pack is available today for $37.39, a savings of 70% off the regular price of $99.99.  The pack, despite its huge battery, is relatively small at roughly the size of an iPhone 7 Plus and has 3 USB ports for charging three devices at the same time.  In fact, you can get 5 charges of your Galaxy S7 out of this RAVPower pack and an amazing 9 charges of an iPhone 6S.  Each port of the pack can output 2.4A of power and uses RAVPower’s iSmart technology for fast, smooth and safe charging of your devices.

Google is in the process of rolling out a revamped Admin tool for G Suite administrators that makes it much easier to manage users on their domain.  The new look, which will take up to 15 days to roll out to all domains, makes it easier to see what settings a user has enabled and what features are available to them should the admin grant the privileges.

To this point, finding a particular setting of a user in G Suite hasn’t been overly difficult but it involved multiple clicks and diving into different menus.  This new card style look brings current settings front-and-center and makes it easy to determine what settings or features are available to that particular users without all of the clicking about.

It is a day that everyone knew was coming.  Today the Google Store stopped selling the original Google Pixel and Pixel XL.  Not only was it removed from the main store, but it was also removed from the phone options list for Project Fi, Google’s MVNO.

The 2016 Pixel phones were breakthrough devices in many ways, bringing a completely reimagined launcher, a stunningly good camera (rated the best at the time of its release) and, of course, all the pure Android goodness that Google intended.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are coming and you can full expect a slew of them by the time we reach the end of 2018.  Google, Apple, Microsoft and Firefox have all committed to having support for PWAs, which are web sites that run like mobile apps on your phone or laptop.  Now Google has upped their game with Chrome OS and PWAs.

In the Chrome OS Canary Channel, the pre-alpha channel for the platform, you can now install Progressive Web Apps natively so they run just like a Chrome app on your Chromebook.  It is great news because it means that more-than-likely, by the end of summer, we will see PWA support natively in the Stable Channel.