Tuesday, 28 February 2017

Samsung Gear VR Controller

The Samsung Gear VR Controller is poised to give the popular virtual reality headset the one feature it’s always been missing: a VR remote.

It’s Samsung’s official Bluetooth controller that’s compatible with all Gear VR headsets, new and old, and it has over 70 compatible titles in development, according Oculus.

What it means you’re going to get a more familiar a VR gaming experience right away thanks to this palm-friendly controller.

You won't have to learn additional buttons besides the existing touchpad and buttons on the right side of the headset – it’s an exact mirror of what you already have on the headset. 

It has a circular touchpad, back button and home button. But it stealthy includes extra sensors including an Accelerometer, Gyroscope and Magnetic Sensor. 

Motion controls are going to make Samsung Gear VR games more interesting in the future. The controller itself feels like a cross between the Google Daydream View remote and the HTC Vive controller.

It our hand, it felt like a lightweight controller, even with the required two AAA batteries installed. But the buttons and the touchpad felt clicky and satisfying. We’re still waiting to use it with VR games to see how it performs in everyday gaming situations.

You’re not getting any additional buttons besides the existing touchpad and buttons on the side of the headset – it’s an exact mirror of what you already have in this regard. 

It has a circular touchpad, back button and home button. But it stealthy includes extra sensors including an Accelerometer, Gyroscope and Magnetic Sensor. That’s going to make Samsung Gear VR games more interesting in the future.

Early verdict

The Gear VR controller is the missing link we’ve really needed from Samsung's  virtual reality headset. It's going to make the VR experience more enjoyable.

The fact that the newer Google Daydream View has a remote only increased fan pressure of Samsung to release its own one-handed controller. It's here now, and we've played around with it. 

Its success or failure is going to come down to a few factors, including how many games – new and old – take full advantage of the motion sensors, and how the battery life holds up. It’s a bit surprising that Oculus went with two AA batteries, not USB-C like the Daydream.

We’re bound to hear more about the Samsung Gear VR Controller and the slightly refined Gear VR headset at Samsung Unpacked on March 29. That’s when we also expect to see the Samsung Galaxy S8 launch, so hopefully we'll see a price and release date for both.

MWC (Mobile World Congress) is the world's largest exhibition for the mobile industry, stuffed full of the newest phones, tablets, wearables and more. TechRadar is reporting live from Barcelona all week to bring you the very latest from the show floor. Head to our dedicated MWC 2017 hub to see all the new releases, along with TechRadar's world-class analysis and buying advice about your next phone.



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Samsung Galaxy S8 image leak gives us a clear look at the front of the Android flagship

Samsung Galaxy S8 event teaser

We’ve seen a few Galaxy S8 image leaks to date, but today we’re getting perhaps our best look yet at Samsung’s next big thing.

A new press render of the Samsung Galaxy S8 has been shared by Evan Blass. The image gives us a clear look at the front of the GS8, complete with its tall display with rounded corners. As has been rumored, there’s no home button here, suggesting that Samsung is indeed moving to on-screen navigation buttons with this device.

This leak also appears to suggest that the Galaxy S8 will have a curved edge display, as past rumors have suggested. Other features shown in this leak include a trio of buttons on the sides — presumably for the volume, power/lock, and the rumored Bixby assistant — and sensors up top that include an iris scanner and a front-facing camera.

While today’s leak doesn’t seem to reveal much in the way of new information about the Galaxy S8, it does reaffirm many of the past leaks while also giving us a clear look at the front of the device. We’ll have to wait until Samsung unveils the GS8 and GS8+ on March 29 before making any judgment about the phones, but the device shown here doesn’t look too shabby.



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PS4 Pro

UPDATED: Wondering how the PS4 Pro stacks up to the original PS4? Well, wonder no more! We've provided a comprehensive comparison of the two consoles here. 

Australian PS4 Pro review below:

The last couple of years has seen some impressive advancements in graphics technology on the PC gaming scene, with a steady proportion of gamers abandoning consoles in the search for higher resolutions and increased frame rates. 

And while those two elements certainly aren’t the be-all and end-all to enjoying modern games... they do help. This puts console makers’ Sony and Microsoft in an awkward position, the market having demanded the companies release their current consoles well into the 1080p era, but a good few years before the 4K and HDR (high-dynamic-range) television revolution really took off.

Enter the PS4 Pro.

The new console is in essence a supercharged PS4, with its headline feature being the ability to output content to 4K televisions. Not all of it will be native 4K, but Sony has also baked in a number of clever upscaling technologies to the new console.  

But is it worth the upgrade? The answer to that question will depend entirely on what kind of TV you own. 

The Pro is like a 2016 model iPhone then; it’s hands down shinier, faster and prettier than last year’s model. Likewise, the PS4 Pro is truly the best gaming console Sony has ever created. It’s capable of playing games in 4K HDR, sometimes at a higher framerate. And for that reason, if you haven’t purchased a PlayStation 4 already, the PlayStation 4 Pro is an excellent all-around system. 

If you have purchased the PlayStation 4 already, you’ll need to ask yourself a few questions before buying Sony’s new wares: Will you buy a 4K TV sometime in the next few years? How about PlayStation VR? How important do you find higher framerates and 500GB of extra storage? The answer to those questions might be ‘no,’ ‘no’ and ‘not very,’ and if that’s the case then Sony’s high horsepower system might not make the most sense for you, especially if you’re upgrading from an original PS4.

Whether or not the new console will offer benefits for you will vary depending on whether you already own a PS4 system. Do keep in mind that Sony’s system, while being a better for the core gamer, might not make sense as an upgrade due to certain deficiencies in the hardware – it’s certainly a shame that Sony has opted not to include 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player functionality, as that would’ve perfected it as the go-to 4K media device . 

Also, like the Xbox One S that launched a few months back, the Pro’s launch is a good time to reevaluate Sony’s PS4 platform, now approaching its third birthday. 

The platform has more games than it did three years ago, obviously, but new systems have also emerged: PlayStation Vue, PlayStation Now, PlayStation Music and, most importantly, PlayStation VR. We’ll take the time later to talk about how these systems shape the platform and help make the PlayStation 4 a great place to game. 

Finally, at the end of the review, we’ll talk about your best course of action going forward, even if that means picking up an original PS4 instead of a Pro.

For now, though, scroll down to see the design of the PS4 Pro.

Design

  • Slightly bigger than standard PS4
  • Additional 3.1 USB port on the rear
  • Upgraded Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

While we wouldn’t say the PS4 Pro’s design completely replicates the PS4’s, there are a ton of similarities – the first and foremost of which is the decision to keep the console a flat parallelogram. When Sony first unveiled the PS4 Pro, there were jokes that the system felt like two PS4s stacked on top of one another, but the second you pull the system from the box that observation becomes less of a joke and more of the reality of the situation.

Compared to the original PS4’s  27.5 x 30 x 5.3 cm package, the PS4 Pro will take up a bit more shelf space – 29.5 x 32.7 x 5.5 cm (W x L x H), to be exact. Because it’s both wider and taller than the original PS4, you’ll probably have to put the original on top of the Pro if you plan on keeping both. Along the same lines, it’s a fair bit heavier, too. However, unless you constantly move your console from one house to the next, we can't the extra weight will be a massive headache.

The system is encased in a matte black shell, similar to the one used on the PS4 Slim released last month, however this time around you won’t find rounded corners along the edges. The PS4 Pro is sharp in every sense of the word.

Another difference is the silver PlayStation logo that sits in the center of the top surface that adds a nice touch of elegance. The other minor difference is the power cable that the PS4 Pro uses a bulkier female connector to draw more power instead of the generic two prong cable Sony has traditionally supplied with every PS4. 

On the front of the console, you might notice that there are no touch-capacitive buttons. Sony’s decided to ditch the accident prone pads for a more traditional button that sits beneath the disc tray. The button is made from a sort of cheap plastic, which is scary, but it does the job just the same. The same is true for the eject button which sits in the same spot on the right side of the front face.

Let’s talk I/O for a second. There are two Superspeed USB 3.1 ports on the front panel and one in the back, used for syncing and charging controllers as well as connecting your brand new PlayStation VR if you’ve just bought one, and HDMI 2.0a, ethernet, optical audio and PlayStation Camera ports along the back next to the power connector. You won’t find an HDMI input port here like you would on the Xbox One, however Sony’s work around to its cable conundrum, PlayStation Vue, is an arguably effective one.

One final point here: While the exterior is nice, Sony has spent more time working on the inside of the console. Inside you’ll find a larger 1TB hard drive, which is 500GB more than you’ll find on the original PS4 or the base model of the PS4 Slim. There’s also an improved Wi-Fi antenna that uses dual-band 802.11ac wireless and Bluetooth 4.0 instead of 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1. 

While the swapping out of a Wi-Fi antenna may not seem like a big deal, it helps the PS4 Pro download games faster. A 160MB game (Pac-Man 256) downloaded in under a minute on a 15Mbps connection – something that should have always been the case, but wasn’t, on the original PS4.

PS4 Pro controller

  • Minor changes made
  • Can be used in wired or wireless modes
  • Light bar added to front of controller

But a new system needs a new controller, and Sony is more than happy to oblige here. 

The controller that ships with the new PS4 Pro is the same one that will ship with all PlayStation 4 Slim systems going forward. 

It is, essentially, a very small iteration on the DualShock 4 you’ve been using for years. There’s a light bar built into the touchpad – a nice feature when you don’t want to turn the controller over in your hand to find out what player you are – but more importantly the triggers have been tweaked and it feels a bit lighter in the hand. 

Plus, as we pointed out in the PlayStation 4 Slim review, the controller can also switch seamlessly between Bluetooth and wired mode when it’s connected to the system via USB cable. While that might not sound like it’s a huge addition, for a pro gamer, that can be the difference between a win (and a pot of e-Sports prize money) or a loss.

Oh, and how does it stack up to the Xbox One S? Watch this video to find out! 

Performance

  • Simple, if slow, data transfer process
  • Limited benefits for 1080p TV owners
  • Looks great on a 4K TV
  • Substantial improvements for virtual reality titles

Once you have your new PS4 Pro hooked up, it’s time to turn it on and get it setup. Thankfully, setting up the PS4 Pro is still lightning-fast. You can cruise through the menus without breaking much of a sweat, inputting the most basic of information like which timezone you’re in, your Wi-Fi network ID and password and which language you’d like to use. 

But after the introductory information is set up, things start to slow down. You’ll need to download a 312MB patch to bring the included software up to version 4.05 which, depending on your connection speed, might take a while.

Then it will come time to transfer data. The process is relatively straightforward: hook both systems up to the same Wi-Fi network and connect them to one another via an ethernet cable and you’re good to go. We had about 158GB of data on our old PS4, and that took about an hour to transfer to the PS4 Pro.

We really liked how easy Sony made it to transfer the content from one PS4 to the next, and even though we had to wait nearly an hour and a half for the process to complete, when all was said and done it had everything from our old console, exactly the way we had it set up previously.

But let’s get to the meat and potatoes here: actual performance. As you might know, the PlayStation 4 Pro’s biggest draw is that it offers “enhanced performance” for 30 of your favorite titles – including all games released on PlayStation VR – as well as 4K HDR streaming from Netflix. 

Enhanced performance can manifest itself in different ways - one way might be that games will play at 4K resolution at 30 frames per second; another might be more detailed textures, or even the option to choose a higher framerate at 1080p resolution. It’s up to developers to choose how they want their games to take advantage of the upgraded processing power of the Pro in a feature Sony calls “Pro Mode.” 

As of today, there are currently 30 games that support Pro Mode in some way, shape or form. You can read the full list on this PlayStation 4 Pro Games round-up, but some highlights of the list include The Last of Us Remastered, The Elders Scrolls: Skyrim Special Edition, Titanfall 2 and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.

So what can you expect when you pop in some of these games? We’ve broken down the performance based on what screen you’ll be potentially viewing it on. 

Performance for 1080p TVs

Let’s start with the 1080p TV owners. Admittedly, the biggest draws to Sony’s mid-gen upgrade is 4K and HDR functionality, both of which you’ll be missing out on. But, what you will see a benefit on is the framerate of some of your favorite titles. In Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration, for example, you can expect increased refresh rates that make the action feel a whole lot smoother while textures get a bit of extra detail as well. 

We weren't completely blown away with what the PS4 Pro offers for 1080p TV owners. While higher framerates are a nice bonus, they’re just not enough of an advantage to warrant spending the extra cash. But Sony didn’t design the Pro for 1080p, it was designed for...  

Performance for 4K TVs

Here’s where things start to heat up a bit. With a 4K TV in your living room, old games start to take on a whole new light – that’s especially true if your TV is HDR-capable. Games like Infamous: Second Son have been given a facelift to utilise both technologies, making particle effects pop off the screen and contrast ratios spike through the roof. It's worth making especially clear here however, is that PS4 Pro isn’t capable of outputting native 4K for all games – every title that supports 4K Pro Mode at this point has been upscaled to that resolution. That doesn’t mean games won’t look absolutely incredible on your 4K TV – they most certainly will – however you shouldn’t expect them to look gaming PC quality just quite yet.

While that 4K resolution capability is undoubtedly going to be the Pro’s most attractive benefit, it’s the combination of 4K and HDR that really makes the biggest visual difference. HDR provides a much wider colour gamut, allowing for more realistic colour reproduction, incredible contrast and lighting improvements that instantly make games look more detailed and less hyper-real. Ever look at the sky in a game and see the sun peering through the clouds? Normally, the brightness of that scene maxes out, leaving the sun and cloud to be roughly the same colour. With HDR, that sun will pierce through with eye-scorching clarity, achieving whites that burn so bright, you’ll swear you were looking at the real thing. Of course, you’ll need an HDR-capable 4K TV to take advantage of these features.

Performance for PlayStation VR 

But there’s one last area that we wanted to cover here, and that’s how PS4 Pro enhances the PlayStation VR experience. Ever since its announcement, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Andrew House has touted the PS4 Pro’s ability to enhance PSVR games. We're happy to report that he’s absolutely right – games run noticeably better on this machine. PS4 Pro Mode titles feel like they’re not only better looking with more detailed textures, but they also feel a hair faster in terms of framerate on the new system. 

The bottom line? If you’re new to the Sony ecosystem and plan on buying a PlayStation VR alongside a console, you should definitely shell out for the PlayStation 4 Pro.

The PlayStation platform, three years on

  • Continued growth in services, including PlayStation Now, Spotify and 4K Netflix.

In the last three years, the PlayStation Store has grown into a fleshed-out, fully functional marketplace full of great content to purchase - with literally everything from super-niche indie darlings on there to big budget titles, movies and music available to purchase. 

Along with these items, a world of streaming content is available to you through  a wide variety of downloadable apps. The Australian PlayStation Store provides access to most of the major catch-up TV services, including SBS On Demand, ABC iview, 9Now and PLUS7, though TenPlay has yet to make an appearance. Foxtel Play is also available, allowing Pay TV subscribers to stream right to their console.

As for SVOD services, the granddaddy of the them all, Netflix, is available to download on PS4 Pro, and thanks to its 4K capability, you will be able to stream a growing numbers of TV shows and movies at 2160p. Other available services include Stan, AnimeLab, Quickflix and WWE.

I know what you're thinking: "the PS4 Pro is all about 4K!" That is indeed correct, however, aside from Netflix, the only other app offering 4K content at present is YouTube. Thankfully, the PS4 Pro version of the app lets you watch Ultra HD content at 60FPS, which is probably even more impressive than anything Netflix has to offer. 

When the Amazon Prime Video app eventually lands on the PlayStation Store in Australia, as it did years ago in the US and UK, it will add another 4K content source to the console. Until then, Netflix and YouTube is your best bet.

For the 4K/HDR TV owner, the PS4 Pro’s benefits speak for themselves. It offers high-resolution gameplay at higher framerates that you will notice and appreciate. 

However, for non-4K TV owners, especially those who don’t think they’ll end up with a PlayStation VR, the benefits are a bit murkier. Sure, you’ll still get a nice bump in framerates and better textures in 30-45 games. However, by and large the difference you’ll see is negligible. The PS4 Pro is just a souped-up PS4 after all.   

We feel a slight twinge of compunction when we say “It’s just a PS4,” as that implies that the system Sony made isn’t an already wonderful piece of technology. But because the original was so wonderful, we set the bar higher for PS4 Pro – a bar that I don’t feel like is totally met for the majority of gamers out there. The lack of a UHD Blu-ray player hurts the value of the system, and while we appreciate 4K/HDR capabilities on a select few titles, the system doesn’t scream “this is a must-buy” to us.

If someone asked us to summarize our opinions on the PS4 Pro in one sentence, we’d say: How much you’ll appreciate the console and its capabilities comes down to your TV.

We liked

4K resolution gaming, obviously. If you have the equipment, some of your favorite titles are going to look absolutely incredible on the PlayStation 4 Pro. Add to that High Dynamic Range capabilities (again, if your TV has it) and you have one of the best visual experiences on any console, bar none.

I also appreciated the two minor tweaks to the inside of the console itself – the larger 1TB hard drive and upgraded 802.11ac Wi-Fi antenna. Games are not only downloaded faster on this system but, thanks to an extra 500GB of storage, you won’t have to make the decision which games to keep and which ones you need to uninstall to clear up some room.

We disliked

If I ever find myself in a conversation with a Sony engineer, the first thing I’m going to ask about is the PS4 Pro’s lack of a 4K UHD Blu-ray player. I’ve tried to avoid the direct comparison to the Xbox One S throughout the review, but it completely boggles my mind that Microsoft – the company that once thought HD DVD would beat Blu-ray – now offers a 4K Blu-ray player while Sony’s does not. 

Beyond the 4K Blu-ray player, however, we were both surprised and disappointed that the PS4 Pro’s extra processing power only benefits specific games that have been specially coded by the developer to enable it, and that only 30 games will support it right out of the gate. That said, a catalog of 30 games is nothing to scoff at, and Sony has plans to bring that number up to 45 titles by the end of the year.

Final verdict

The PS4 Pro is truly a marvellous piece of machinery. It’s capable of so much and yet, disappointingly, there’s a huge swath of gamers who might not ever get to see it running on all cylinders simply because PS4 Pro Mode support is limited to 30 titles, many of which only benefit 4K TV owners. 

If you don't have a 4K, there's isn't much of a reason to pick up a PS4 Pro. Of course for those of you living in the breakneck world of the future where 4K HDR TVs are widely available, or if you plan on taking full advantage of PlayStation VR when you buy one, then the PS4 Pro is well worth its $559 price tag.

But if you're yet to make the jump to 4K or VR, then you might want to hold off on the PS4 Pro for the time being. 



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Google not planning new Chromebook Pixel right now

Chromebook Pixel official

The current flagship of Google’s Pixel family is the HTC-made smartphone, but the series actually began with a Chromebook laptop. Unfortunately for fans of that device and its follow-up, it doesn’t sound like there will be any new Chromebook Pixel models anytime soon.

Rick Osterloh, Google’s SVP of hardware, said that Google has “no plans” to make a new Pixel laptop. He added that the existing Pixel laptops that were on the market have sold out and that Google has no plans to make any more of them, says TechCrunch.

When they launched, Google’s Chromebook Pixel laptops were much higher-end than any other Chromebooks on the market, packing speedy processors and high-end touchscreen displays. The devices were also much more expensive than most other Chromebooks. They weren’t really meant to boost Chrome OS’s market share; instead, they were meant to show what the platform was capable of. And now it seems that Google is pleased with the current state of Chromebooks, because it sounds like the company is done with the Pixel laptop, at least for now.

Did you ever use a Chromebook Pixel?



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YouTube TV streaming service official with more than 40 channels, cloud DVR

YouTube TV official screens

There’s no shortage of streaming video services available today, and now we’ve got one more to add to the list.

YouTube TV is now official. The service offers live TV streaming from the major four networks — ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC — as well as ESPN, regional sports networks, and cable networks like MSNBC, Fox News, USA, FX, Disney Channel, E!, and Bravo. YouTube TV will also offer Showtime and Fox Soccer Plus for an additional fee. In total, the service will offer 46 channels.

In addition to offering all of these channels for streaming, YouTube TV has a way for you to save shows for rewatching later. The service includes a cloud DVR with no storage limit, meaning that you can record as many shows as you want simultaneously. Shows will be stored for nine months.

YouTube TV is launching soon in the largest US markets and will then expand to more cities. You can sign up here to find out when YouTube TV will arrive in your city.

YouTube TV channel lineup

Pricing starts at $35 per month with no commitment. That price includes six accounts, each with its own recommendations and cloud DVR. The service supports three concurrent streams at a time. Also included with a YouTube TV subscription is access to the YouTube Red Original shows.

When it comes to device support, YouTube TV will be available on phones, tablets, and computers. You can also stream to your TV using Chromecast.

YouTube Red seems to offer a nice selection of channels, including both the four major networks and other big names like ESPN, E!, and Fox News. There are other streaming services that offer similar channels, and in some cases larger channel selections, and so YouTube TV is using its cloud DVR feature to help it stand out.

The ability to save unlimited shows to a cloud DVR and have access to them on your devices sounds like a neat idea. Whether or not that’s a big deal to you will depend on how often you watch TV on the go, and we’ll have to wait until YouTube TV actually launches to see how the cloud DVR and the service as a whole performs.

Are you interested in YouTube TV?



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Top 10 Android Apps of February 2017!

We've compiled a 'Top 10' list of our favorite Android apps to hit the Google Play Store in February 2017. The apps highlighted in this video include Qwant, Writeaday, Countable, Rabbids Crazy Rush, Rival Gears Racing, Island Delta, 5 Minute Escapes, Tap Chat Stories, FastKey Launcher and Ango Icon Pack. Which app is your favorite?



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Why "simple" works well for new Nokia Androids

Nokia 5

Nokia is a strange phenomenon. While it’s not uncommon to hear people wishing for the doom and demise of some reputable brands like Samsung, Apple, and BlackBerry, Nokia frequently seems to be the mobile industry’s favorite comeback kid. Wildly successful in the era of simpler cell phones, Nokia has had a rough time adjusting to life post-smartphones. From Symbian to Windows Phone to Microsoft, the Nokia brand is now being licensed through HMD Global, who has already pleased crowds through nostalgic appeal with a reboot of the iconic Nokia 3310 handset.

While the 3310 reboot is all in good fun (and a decent pick-up as a first or backup phone), HMD Global made it clear this weekend that Nokia’s smartphone journey, however complicated it may have been, still isn’t over as the company unveiled two new mid-range Nokia Android smartphones alongside the announcement of a global release of the Nokia 6, which was previously an exclusive to China.

It’s interesting that HMD Global decided to offer such a vast array of mid-range devices as HTC recently revealed that they would be focusing solely on flagships specifically because the market for budget smartphones is so competitive; but as I mentioned, I think there’s a unique soft spot for Nokia, and that might be the key to making an otherwise risky venture work.

What I find appealing about the Nokia 6, 5, and 3 is that they’re simple and priced appropriately so. They all classify as mid-range and vary mostly in size and performance speeds; price tags don’t exceed $350; the devices run a “pure” version of Android, and HMD Global has stated that they are dedicated to monthly security updates. The phones also have a minimalist design with neutral colors.

Really, there’s nothing very pizzazz-y about these Nokia Android smartphones, and that might be a good thing. The phones are inexpensive, so feature-wise people probably aren’t expecting them to do much beyond the basics. Deciding to be as close to pure Android as possible couldn’t have come at a better time given last year was the first year that Google opted not to release a Nexus – a brand that had become known for being a cheap option for pure Android enthusiasts. It also falls in line with the very reason why people are nostalgic for the Nokia brand in the first place, which is simply that the brand was most famous during a much simpler time period in mobile. I mean, when the biggest show-stopper of Mobile World Congress in 2017 is a feature phone with a 240 x 320 display, a VGA camera, and Snake, going simple doesn't seem like such a weird idea after all.

HMD is bringing Nokia back with humble beginnings between its 3310 reboot, mid-range Android smartphones, and a focus on health with rebranded Withings smart gadgets (such as a smartwatch and smart scale) and revamped Healthmate app. Not much has been said regarding a potential Nokia flagship to take on the likes of brands like Apple and Samsung, but you know how the saying goes: Good things come to those who wait. Until then, the Nokia brand seems like it stands a good chance to make a high impact on the lower end of the market.

Readers, what are your thoughts on HMD Global’s strategy with the Nokia brand so far? Do you wish they would have started off with a flagship, or are you happy with the decision to focus on mid-range



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Xiaomi debuts Surge S1, its first in-house SoC, and the Mi 5c

Xiaomi Surge S1 processor official

Today’s a big day for Xiaomi, as the company took the wraps off of its first in-house system-on-a-chip (SoC).

The Surge S1 from Xiaomi is an octa-core 64-bit processor that tops out at 2.2GHz. There are four Cortex-A53 cores running at 2.2GHz and four A53 cores at 1.4GHz, as well as a Mali-T860 quad-core GPU.

Also included with the Surge S1 is a 32-bit high-performance DSP for voice processor, a 14-bit dual ISP for enhanced image processing, a dual noise reduction algorithm for reducing noise and preserving image detail in low-light photos, an upgradeable baseband and programmable modem, and support for VoLTE call. Xiaomi says that the Surge S1 scored a 64,817 on the Antutu 6.0 benchmark, which rates it above Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625 and MediaTek’s Helio P20.

Xiaomi launching its own SoC is a big deal. Designing its own chipset frees Xiaomi from relying on other companies for processors, especially as the company gets better at making its own chipsets. Other major smartphone makers that produce their own SoCs include Samsung, Apple, and Huawei.

Xiaomi Mi 5c black

Also announced today is the first phone to include the Surge S1. The Xiaomi Mi 5c is packing a Surge S1 along with a 5.15-inch 1920x1080 display with 1.66mm-thick bezels and 2048 brightness levels. Xiaomi is also touting the Mi 5c’s 12-megapixel rear camera, which features 1.25µm pixels for taking in more light when capturing photos as well as HDR support.

Other features of the Xiaomi Mi 5c include an 8-megapixel front-facing camera, 3GB of RAM, 64GBN of built-in storage, a front-mounted fingerprint reader, USB-C, dual SIM slots, and a 2560mAh battery with fast charging support, all crammed into a metal body. Xiaomi also says that the Mi 5c will receive a Mini Developer ROM update with Android 7.1 in March.

The Mi 5c will sell for RMB1499 ($218 USD) and will be available in black, gold, and rose gold color options.

Xiaomi Mi 5c colors



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Up to three new BlackBerry phones coming in 2017

BlackBerry KeyOne hands-on review

The BlackBerry KeyOne won’t be the only new BlackBerry-branded Android phone in 2017.

TCL is planning to debut up to three BlackBerry Android phones in 2017, TCL Communication CEO Nicolas Zibell has revealed. Zibell didn’t divulge much else about his company’s BlackBerry plans, but a source speaking to CNET claims that TCL is prepping a full-touch BlackBerry that’s similar in style to the DTEK50 and DTEK60, though TCL will likely ditch the DTEK brand.

While BlackBerry may not be the smartphone giant that it once was, the “BlackBerry” name still carries a lot of weight. That’s why it’s not surprising to hear that TCL is planning to use that name to launch more devices.

It remains to be seen what the third kind of BlackBerry that TCL might release in 2017 will look like, but with a keyboarded model in the KeyOne, we could see a higher-end full-touch device and then a more affordable one to complement it.

Zibell also teased that TCL might resurrect the Palm brand, which TCL bought in early 2015. (TCL doesn’t own webOS, though; LG does.)

When asked about the Palm brand, Zibell said, “We don’t do things by mistake. Stay tuned.” He then added that TCL is focused on BlackBerry this year, though, so we may not see a new Palm-branded device from TCL until 2018.



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Top 10 iOS Apps of February 2017!

We've compiled a 'Top 10' list of our favorite iOS apps to hit the App Store in February 2017. The apps highlighted in this video include:



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Google Apps for Work (G Suite) 2016 review

Apple's new iPhones may have USB-C connectors instead of Lightning

iPhone 7 Plus hands-on review

Five years after making the switch from a 30-pin connector to Lightning, Apple may soon make another change to the way that you charge your iPhone and connect it to accessories.

Apple will abandon Lightning in favor of USB-C with its 2017 iPhone models, says The Wall Street Journal. The new phones will include a “USB-C port for the power cord and other peripheral devices instead of the company’s original Lightning connector,” says the report.

No other details are given, but if true, this would be a big change for Apple. The Cupertino firm has used proprietary connectors with all of its previous iPhone models, but the switch to USB-C would mean that the 2017 iPhone models would use a connector similar to many other smartphones and other devices, including the Google Pixel and the LG G6.

This is still very much a rumor, but there is a chance Apple could make the switch to USB-C. The company spent five years with its 30-pin connector before switching to USB-C, and with the iPhone 7, the Lightning port has been around for five years, too. Of course, it’s also possible that Apple is simply prototyping a USB-C iPhone model and will ultimately decide to stick with Lightning.

Today’s WSJ report also claims that Apple will have three new iPhones in 2017: two models with LCDs like other iPhones and a third with 10th anniversary iPhone 8 with a curved OLED screen. This model will reportedly cost at around $1,000.

Finally, it’s rumored that Apple will abandon the physical home button on its 2017 iPhone models.



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Microsoft Office 365

[Editor's Note: What immediately follows is a rundown of the latest developments and features Microsoft has added to Office 365 since this review was last updated.]

February 2017

  • Microsoft has updated Visio Pro for Office 365 with a database reverse engineering tool that allows you to easily create a visual representation directly from source data.
  • Office 365 benefited from the introduction of a security analytics tool which rates your current security configuration, and makes suggestions on possible improvements.
  • The Office team announced that the OneNote REST API now supports application-level permissions.
  • Excel got new features based on Power Query technology, including support for the percentage data type, along with a new OLE DB connector.
  • Microsoft released Office Training Roadmaps which help businesses keep track of training programmes for the various productivity apps.

January 2017

  • Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection got several new features for tighter email security, namely URL Detonation and Dynamic Delivery.
  • Microsoft graced Office 365 with a new Setup section on the navigation menu, which provides convenient and easy access to all setup-related settings in one location.
  • Office 365 was crowned king of all productivity apps by Okta, outdoing second-place Salesforce.com by a factor of 1.3 to 1 as 2016 came to a close.
  • Microsoft brought in a raft of new courses from LinkedIn Learning to the Office Training Centre, with over 20 offerings on working with Word and PowerPoint.
  • StaffHub, a nifty new app which allows for the management of shifts for deskless workers, became available for Office 365 users with a K1, E1, E3 or E5 plan.

December 2016

  • A new OneDrive for Business admin centre began rolling out to release customers, with general availability promised for early 2017.
  • Microsoft laid out its grand vision of how the firm intends to integrate Teams (its Slack rival) with Microsoft Planner so working across the two is a seamless affair.
  • Microsoft made the Accessibility Checker more easily found across all Office 365 apps, and introduced automated alternate text descriptions in Word and PowerPoint.
  • An official guide on the ‘preferred deployment practices’ for Office 365 ProPlus was released, including advice on preparing the ground, and maintenance afterwards.
  • New statistics emerged from data protection firm Bitglass showing that Office 365 is twice as popular as Google’s G Suite.

November 2016

  • Office 365 users got the benefit of real-time co-authoring in PowerPoint, as well as in the Word app.
  • Office Lens received a couple of new features, including the full integration of Immersive Reader, and a new tool called Frame Guide to help the visually impaired.
  • Outlook Customer Manager arrived in Office 365, enabling businesses to track and manage – and hopefully grow – their customer relationships.
  • Microsoft reintroduced Access, its heavyweight database software, to Office 365 Business and Business Premium customers.
  • Microsoft officially took the wraps off Teams, the firm’s Slack rival that leverages the whole gamut of Office 365’s apps and services.

October 2016

  • Excel 2016 got new features based on Power Query tech, including an improved web connector and enhanced Query Editor, as well as Query Parameters support.
  • Microsoft introduced the ability to create (and collaborate on) Office documents from within a Yammer group.
  • In an earnings report, Microsoft announced Office 365 user numbers: 85 million active commercial users, and 24 million consumers.
  • A batch of new apps were revealed for Office, including an app for invoicing, and tracking expenses, along with one for keeping tabs on your business’ web presence.

September 2016

If you want to see older news and developments pertaining to Office 365, then check out the Archives page at the end of this review.

Otherwise, now move on to Page 2 for our full review and detailed look at what Office 365 offers, and how it can help you become more productive.

Darren Allan contributed to this article

It's been a long time since Office just meant Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint (plus Access - remember that?). In fact, there's a confusingly wide range of tools and services under the Office umbrella.

In the last few years, Office 365 has established itself as the definitive business cloud service bringing together those familiar productivity services, plus an ongoing range of new features.

Apps

There are personal and business versions of Office 365 – home users get the latest version of the Office desktop and mobile applications plus email with Outlook.com and extra cloud storage with OneDrive, along with free Skype minutes every month. If you want to edit documents in Office on your iPad, or using the mobile Office apps on a Windows 10 PC, you need an Office 365 subscription.

Office 365 Personal is for a single user and allows one download of Office. Office 365 Home Premium costs $99.99 per year (£79.99, AU$119.99) for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher.

That's good value if you share it with the family; up to five people in the same household can have their own installations of Office on their PC or Mac at the same time (for the Office programs that run on a Mac).

When the next version of Office comes out, you'll get it on the same subscription, and you'll get new features as they become available. If you're at college or university (or you teach at one) you're eligible for Office 365 University on a four-year subscription for $79.99 (£60, AU$99) that you can use on up to two PCs or Macs.

Office 365 for business

Microsoft offers three tiers for businesses with less than 300 seats. Office 365 Business Essentials allows you to use online Office apps only (no desktop applications) plus 1TB of online storage per user and a 50GB Outlook inbox with email, calendar and contacts for £3.10 ($5, AU$5.50) per month per user on an annual contract.

Licence

Office 365 Business offers Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher and Lync, with a subscription licence for each user to run them on up to five PCs or Macs at once. You still get the online storage but no email services. Office 365 Business Premium combines Office 365 Business and Business Essentials; all the applications, plus email and storage.

Download Office

Enterprise business users get a full collaboration service with Exchange email, SharePoint document storage, Skype for Business unified communications, OneDrive for Business storage sync and sharing, Yammer enterprise social networking, Delve for tracking what your colleagues are working on, and Groups for ad hoc collaboration.

All that, alongside an increasing list of new services like GigJam (for sharing just parts of documents so you can have the right information available in a meeting) and Planner (a simple planning tool for groups), plus a subscription to the Office 2016 desktop and mobile applications, which includes early access to new features.

Delve

There are several different plans, depending on what mix of services you need. The E5 plan, for example, includes rights management services for encrypting documents and choosing who can see them and how long they're available for, Delve Analytics for tracking how people are spending their time, Power BI for graphical data analysis and business intelligence, and the Office 365 video portal for publishing video inside your company.

In the year since Office 2016 was released, Microsoft has continued to add new features to both the Office 365 service (which you expect in a cloud service) and the Office 2016 applications (which you might not), as well as the mobile versions of the apps for iOS, Android and Windows, new apps like Sway for 'digital storytelling' (that's somewhere between making a mobile app and designing a website), and the Office Online web apps.

That includes new admin features like the new look portal, customising sign-in pages, improved encryption controls, self-service password reset, plus a deal to use Wix to build websites after SharePoint public websites were removed.

New features arriving

The Office Online apps get regular updates, including new features plus integration with other cloud services like Skype and Dropbox – Word and PowerPoint now have the Format Painter for transferring formatting from one section to another, and Excel Online has more number formats, more features in Pivot tables and a high contrast view for accessibility.

Office Online updates

The mobile apps keep adding features like Find and Morph transitions in PowerPoint, or ink annotations in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You can record audio in OneNote for iOS and on the web; that's better than OneNote on Windows 10 Mobile where audio recordings cut off after a minute.

Because Office 365 is a subscription service, the familiar desktop applications get new features. Word is about to get a spelling and grammar checker that uses machine learning to understand your writing, and a Researcher tool for easier searching for facts and quotes.

PowerPoint has gained several new transitions, a Designer tool that comes up with new looks for your presentation (very much like Sway) and a way to summarise your presentation with Zoom. Excel has new functions and charts and shape recognition when you draw on-screen, plus many more connectors for getting data into Power Query, while Outlook lets you '@ mention' people in email the way you would on Facebook or Twitter.

Office Online

But the changes also include removing some useful features. Changing the Save As options in Office 2016 has been particularly painful, and Office 365 no longer allows you to temporarily stream Office 2016 to a PC that you want to work on, if the Office Online versions don't have the features you need. Desktop Outlook is going to get the Focused Inbox that's so popular in Outlook for iOS and Android – but it will replace the Clutter feature in Exchange Online that files emails you're not likely to be interested in. Clutter worked in every client that you can read Exchange email in, including on older devices (especially Windows Phone 8.1), whereas Focused Inbox will only work in the latest versions of Outlook.

The enterprise Office 365 service is also where Microsoft tries out new features that will appear in the on-premise server products, like the new SharePoint 2016. Exchange Server 2016 is based on the latest version of Exchange Online, which has been available on Office 365 for some time (and you can buy some Exchange Online features to use with your own Exchange Server, like Exchange Online Protection spam and malware filtering).

Service health

SharePoint 2016 catches up with existing Office 365 features like chatting while you're collaborating on documents stored in OneDrive for Business, and will get newer features gradually. Improvements like the new document library experience, and the suggestions in the new iOS SharePoint app of what sites you should look at, are already showing up in SharePoint Online and will appear on premises once they've been tested in the cloud.

In the past, Skype for Business hasn't had the full unified communications features of the on-premise version because PABX integration is harder in the cloud, but Microsoft has been signing up partners like BT to offer voice services for Office 365, as well as creating cloud-only features like Skype for Business broadcast meetings for very large numbers of users (which will soon include real-time live translation and captions).

As you'd expect, you manage Office 365 mainly through the browser (although you can use PowerShell commands if you need to change settings in bulk). The admin portal is getting a major redesign that will soon become the standard way to manage the service.

Admin Centre

The previous interface had a minimalist, low-contrast, 'Metro' style that wasn't particularly efficient, with key tools relegated to a list of links at the side of the page and a dashboard that always showed the setup features even when you'd been running the service for years.

Extras

Now there's an expanding menu on the left with ten sections for managing and monitoring the Office 365 service, each of which expands to let you click straight into the specific area you need. This also makes room for features like Groups that have been added to the service over the years, which show up in their logical place (along with the traditional role-based groups).

As you navigate through the different sections, the tools are also grouped logically, and when you click on the details for a user or a group, all the information pops up in a window, with the most common commands (like resetting a password or deleting the user) at the top.

Dashboard

The home screen that replaces the former dashboard is far more useful – and you can even customise it. There are 'cards' for common tasks, from managing users to downloading the Office clients, and you can rearrange them, delete any you don't need quick access to, and add others.

Edit admin centre

The admin interfaces for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business and Yammer are now much easier to find as well; they have their own section on the menu, which also links to the new Security and Compliance centre, and to Azure Active Directory (even if you don't buy any of the premium AAD services, using Office 365 automatically creates an Azure AD for your business, but in the past it hasn't been obvious how to get to it in order to carry out any management).

You'd expect Azure AD to open as a separate site, because it's a separate service. It's slightly more confusing that the Security and Compliance centre opens in its own browser tab, but has the same design as the Office 365 admin centre.

Security and compliance

This new portal brings together all the security tools for the service, from assigning permissions to admin users, to managing devices, setting up alerts for user and admin behaviour and choosing how spam and malware in email are handled. All that sits alongside the tools for setting retention policies, running ediscovery searches and archiving content, and details of how Microsoft secures the different Office 365 services.

And it's downright annoying that all the admin portals for the Office 365 services still open in different tabs. Plus they still have the white-space-heavy, hard to navigate interfaces that are basic rather than simple, in which it can be hard to find the tools you need quickly (and Yammer has its own design again). We'd like to see them move to the new portal design too; the current mix of interfaces feels fragmented and confusing.

Yammer

It might even make sense for more of the settings to move to themed admin portals the way the security and compliance options have, rather than matching the admin options for the separate on-premise Office servers. Key settings from the Exchange, Skype for Business and SharePoint services are already duplicated in the new admin portal; if they're all you need, you'll never need to use the full service portals at all.

Rooms and equipment

Getting started

Setting up Office 365 is fast – provisioning an E3 or E5 tenant takes only a few minutes – and it's straightforward for a small company, especially if you're migrating from Exchange Online. You can start the wizard to walk you through setup – including connecting to the domain you're using for email addresses, or buying one if you don't already have one – straight from the purchase screen, or you can come back and work through the individual steps later.

You can set up users by connecting to your on-premise Active Directory by importing details (from a CSV file, for example) or by creating users one at a time (that's most suited to a small business); and when you create individual users you can assign licences as you go. If you want to pick and choose who gets which features, you can allocate licences individually for Office 2016, Office Web Apps, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Exchange and any other services.

There are other settings that you can change if you want, but not so many that things get confusing. You can customise the Office 365 theme, set the password expiry policy, choose whether you get new features when they're generally released or try them as soon as they're in preview (and that can apply to all users or just the more advanced users that you pick individually), turn on multi-factor authentication, set the policies for Azure Rights Management if your plan includes this document encryption service, and choose whether users can search Office 365 content using Cortana, or use Office Online to work with files in other cloud storage services like Box.

Groups

There's more work to do if you have email accounts on other services that you need to import data from (there's an import option where you can upload data or even ship drives to Microsoft if that would take too long), and if you're a large business that needs to mix on-premise servers with Office 365 you'll need to plan which users have accounts where and how you sync between your AD and the cloud service. But you don't have to be an expert to get a small business online with Office 365.

Ever since Exchange 2013, the web version of Outlook has had the same features and interface as the Outlook client – it's also what the Exchange Online admin centre is built on, and you can just mark a user as an administrator. This removes the need for an Exchange mailbox to administer Exchange, so you don't have to waste a mail licence and storage quota on a shared mail admin account. You can also give different administrators limited permissions; if someone only needs to use the compliance or discovery tools, they won't get access to mail flow and user settings.

The admin centre is crammed with features, organised into around a dozen categories. Previously complex tasks, like setting up a federation trust to make free/busy times in user calendars visible or setting up shared mailboxes for call centres, are far simpler and you are guided through important steps (like giving users the right permissions to access the shared mailbox).

Exchange admin

Public folders are still available, by popular demand. Like everything else in the new Exchange Online, they're simple to set up with helpful error messages that make clear what you've done wrong and how to fix it.

There's also a helpful balance between enforcing policy and users getting work done. The data loss prevention tools in the Enterprise version of Exchange Online let you set up rules to stop people emailing personal information like credit card numbers (with a smart check that employs the same algorithm used to issue credit card numbers, rather than just looking for any 16 numbers in a row).

But users can also override most of these policy warnings by filling in an explanation and confirming they know the message will be logged. The information can be encrypted to keep it safe until the manager approves the explanation.

The tips reminding users of the policy show up in Outlook clients, and Outlook webmail. But if you send a message from your smartphone that breaks a policy, the rule can forward the message to your manager or mail you to confirm that you meant to break the policy.

Malware report

But while the ultra-minimalist, white-space design is well organised, and will be familiar to Exchange Server admins, it doesn't match the style of the new Office 365 portal. There is also quite a lot of overlap – many tools from the Exchange Online portal also show up as links in the main portal to the auditing, mail flow and information protection tools (spam and malware protection and data leakage policies that block or warn users who are trying to send details like credit card numbers in email). These open the tools in either the Exchange Online or Security and Compliance portals.

Spam report

There are also some settings you might expect to find in Exchange that are in the main Office 365 portal, like choosing whether users can share their calendars with people outside your organisation.

Like Exchange Server, you can use Exchange Online for mobile device management by setting policies that will apply to any smartphone, like forcing the user to turn on encryption and set a PIN, and even setting how often they have to re-enter it.

Office 365 also includes Microsoft's Intune MDM service which adds extra features like detecting whether devices are jailbroken, and letting you mark emails and documents that can only be opened in approved mobile apps, like Office, and only saved in specific locations. You can also selectively wipe devices, removing business data but not personal photos and information.

MDM

The Exchange tools for managing mobile device access are still in the Exchange Online admin portal, which is where admins who are used to Exchange Server will expect to find them. The Intune MDM features are in the Security and Compliance centre – and yet again, that opens a new browser tab, because it has its own interface.

OAW for device admin

This is the kind of duplication we expect Microsoft to clean up as it continues to improve the Office 365 admin UI, and the disparate interfaces shouldn't distract from the fact that you're getting a powerful mail system with all the options you need. And if you don't need to delve into those options, you can be up and running quickly with a rock solid mail system. Exchange Online remains one of the crown jewels of Office 365.

If you've used Office 365 before, you'll remember the admin portal for the unified communications service formerly known as Lync was distinctly minimal, with very few settings you could change. As Skype for Business gains more features, there are correspondingly more options and controls, but it's a far cry from the complexity of the on-premise version; this is one of the services where being in the cloud makes unified communications dramatically simpler.

Now that Skype for Business can connect to Skype, you can control that integration, as well as allowing or blocking calls and chats with Skype for Business users outside your company, and choosing whether the Skype Broadcast service is available for creating large public online meetings. Again, the controls for external connections are duplicated in the main Office 365 admin portal – for many businesses, they're the only settings you might want to change, so you might never need the full admin centre.

Manage skype

You can also set the defaults for notifications and privacy mode and add your own boilerplate to meeting invitations. You can include your company logo, links to support, any legal terms and conditions that apply to meetings, or a few lines of text you wish to be included in all invitations.

Skype for business custom

You can use Skype for Business for dial-in conferencing, with or without toll-free numbers, so your users can phone in rather than using the Skype for Business client – that's included in the E5 Office 365 plan, or you can buy it as an add-on. You can also use PSTN Calling to call standard phone numbers and receive calls from anyone, not just other Skype for Business users (again, that's included in some plans but not in others – confusingly, there's a version of the E5 plan that has it, and another that doesn't).

Skype IM

You can even use Skype for Business as your PBX – as well as making and receiving calls, you get PBX features like transferring calls, having several phones ring when a call arrives, putting your phone on 'do not disturb' except for a few key contacts, playing hold music and handling voicemail. Again, you need the right licences.

The admin centre also includes a handy list of tools for troubleshooting, and a very minimal set of reports.

Lync Online was already an impressive HD videoconferencing system with excellent tools for online meetings. The Skype integration makes it a great choice for letting your customers and partners reach you without the cost of a phone call, and if you add the dial-in conferencing, PSTN calling and PBX tools, it's close to being a cloud service that offers a full unified communications system. But buying all those options as separate add-ons, some from third-party communications providers, does make everything more complicated than we'd like.

For a while, SharePoint Online was the red-headed stepchild of Office 365. The name didn't even appear in the list of apps – users just saw links to OneDrive and Sites – and the ribbon-based interface felt dated and out of step with the rest of Office 365.

But cloud competition like Box and Dropbox hasn't killed off SharePoint, and even though the personal cloud storage of OneDrive for Business is still part of Office 365, Microsoft has just given SharePoint itself a major refresh that updates the key features for document sharing and collaboration, and adds far better mobile support.

SharePoint Online also connects to the new services Microsoft has been adding to Office 365 like Groups and Planner, making the collaboration options feel more coherent.

SharePoint new

Sites for personal and shared team use and document libraries are still at the heart of SharePoint – document collections can now be as large as 25TB, and there's a new document library experience that looks much more like OneDrive, or a blog.

Team Site

Team sites automatically show popular documents and details of who in the team has been working on what, and there are new tools for creating pages on the site as if you were writing and publishing a blog – so you don't need to create HTML or use a separate publishing tool any more. Just pick web parts – images, events, links, videos, Yammer feeds – and drag them into place.

SharePoint Team Sites

Some Office 365 plans include the SharePoint Video service, for uploading and streaming videos. This is going to be replaced by the Azure Streams video service, though not until the new service has all the same features as the existing one.

Office video formats

All the existing options for customising SharePoint are still available. You can include language translation services for sites and documents, and for structured tasks you can add workflows designed in Visual Studio and have them hosted on Azure, or you can create a Flow or a PowerApp on Azure that lets you configure workflows that connect other services – like Salesforce or Dynamics – to SharePoint.

If you need the same kind of full-trust managed .NET code that lets you customise SharePoint on your own server, you can put that on Azure. As a multi-tenant cloud service, SharePoint Online has to protect users from each other's potentially performance-hogging code, so this is a sensible approach. But many of the features you'd once have built that way are available as apps written in HTML and CSS that run on SharePoint: you can get blogging tools, mapping tools, address checking tools and more – and admins can choose which apps are available in the SharePoint Store and who is allowed to buy more.

Plus SharePoint 2016 adds a new extension framework based on common JavaScript frameworks like React and Angular, where the code runs on the client device, not on the server. That's still in development, but it brings SharePoint up to date with the latest web development technologies.

SharePoint Home

SharePoint also has a new way of controlling access. Admins can still grant and block access to SharePoint sites, but team sites work with the new, self-service Groups feature in Office 365. Anyone can create a group of colleagues and the group automatically gets a team site with a document library, a shared calendar and inbox, a Skype for Business chat room that you can also get as email, along with a OneNote notebook, an always-on Skype conversation you can drop in and out of, and the new Planner task management tool.

It works the other way round, as well; make a team site or add colleagues to Planner and you create a group.

Planner is like a simple version of Trello – you create a card for each task, assign it to someone and save it into different 'buckets' that you use to organise your plan. It doesn't have much in the way of notifications yet, but Microsoft is adding features quickly.

Groups 2

Groups also have the kind of connectors you might have seen in Slack. You can connect a Twitter feed or a variety of services like GitHub, Trello and ZenDesk to a group to get alerts – so you could follow the hashtag for the product your team works on, or see customer support issues in the group.

You can search across all the sites you have access to and when you find a useful document, you can follow it as if it was a friend on Facebook. Results include automatic recommendations based on what the people you're connected to are working on, and your previous behaviour. That's based on the Delve feature, which analyses what documents your colleagues are working on that are relevant to you – you can see that in the Delve service but the information will now show up in SharePoint too.

Search is smart: search for 'marketing deck' and results will include PowerPoint presentations (that don't have the word 'deck' anywhere in the contents), with particularly relevant slides highlighted in the results.

The SharePoint newsfeed is still available if you want to use that to keep track of what's going on. This looks very much like Facebook or Twitter – you can follow people, sites, projects, hashtags, documents and events, and you'll see in the activity stream when someone does something new or makes a change (you can filter the stream to make it more manageable). You can also preview documents and videos straight from the Newsfeed, or turn any item into an action that becomes part of your task list.

Customise SharePoint portal

You use Twitter-style @ names to mention people and you can see when other people have mentioned you (you get an email as well as seeing it on the Newsfeed, so you don't have to update feverishly to stay on top of work). Also, you can post your own updates to everyone or just the team you're working with.

Customise SharePoint portal 2

But now that the Yammer social network service is available to all Office 365 customers, you can switch to using that instead. It's a much more powerful tool for collaboration that's getting regular updates – and again, it's going to integrate with Groups soon, so a team can choose to collaborate through Yammer or the other Groups tools.

Yammer design

You can view and edit documents in the Office Online web apps, and you can preview file types you can't edit, like Visio. Sharing documents – with colleagues or up to 10,000 external partners and customers who don't need to have SharePoint themselves – is also much simpler. Click on the sharing icon and type in names or email addresses, choose whether they can view or edit – or copy an obfuscated URL you can send in an instant message or put in a blog post.

Shared documents are marked by an icon you can click to see who you're sharing with (and you can stop sharing a document when you're done collaborating). Many Office 365 plans include Azure Rights Management Services, so you can control not just who can see a document but what they can do with it, turning off the printing and copying functions for confidential information.

SharePoint started out as a way to share document libraries and create workflows. It's now a flexible collaboration tool for ad hoc groups as well as a formal, centralised information store, with mobile apps as well as simple web publishing.

The SharePoint Online admin centre reflects that. There's a long list of settings that lets you control apps, connections, rights management, collaboration and whether users get new features and the new OneDrive for Business interface.

For many smaller businesses, that's all you need and you can hide the other controls. But if you need them, there's a full set of configuration options for everything from InfoPath to the taxonomy for how documents are indexed, in an interface that SharePoint Server administrators will find familiar (although it's going to confuse anyone starting with the new Office 365 admin centre).

OneDrive and OneDrive for Business

Microsoft uses the same name for its business and consumer cloud storage services: OneDrive and OneDrive for Business are now more similar than they used to be – in particular they use the same sync client, which fixes a lot of problems with OneDrive for Business – but they're still different services.

OneDrive is Microsoft's consumer cloud storage service, which gives users 5GB of free storage with the option to purchase 50GB for $1.99 a month (£1.99, AU$2), plus Office Web Apps. If you buy Office 365 Home, Personal, or University, you get 1TB of OneDrive space.

OneDrive for Business is the cloud storage service that's part of the business Office 365 plans (and also available as part of on-premise SharePoint Server), with either 1TB or 5TB of storage per user, depending on which plan you choose.

Office 365 tenants also get SharePoint Online, which includes 10GB of secure cloud storage with an extra 500MB per user, and the option of paying for up to 25TB of storage in total. You can choose how the SharePoint space storage is allocated between users and control how they use it, like limiting who they can share documents with or forcing them to encrypt confidential documents using rights management software.

OneDrive for Business, which is confusingly labelled OneDrive in the Office 365 portal to fit on the ribbon, lets users store their own working documents privately. If you're familiar with SharePoint, you can think of it as like the storage in My Site – and documents can still have workflows or be checked in and out.

OneDrive in office 2016

Users can also share documents with specific people – inside or outside the company – by clicking the three dots next to the file name and choosing Share, or from the properties and preview pane for the file. This interface has been updated a couple of times but it's still easy to share documents and see who has access.

Users can choose whether each person they invite can edit or just view the document and whether or not they need to sign in (it's possible to choose whether to enforce sign in globally). It's very clear if a document is shared and with whom, and you can stop sharing a document at any point. OneDrive for Business storage is part of SharePoint and you can apply policies to it in the same way.

OneDrive share

If you want to share a document in OneDrive for Business with everyone (including those to whom you give the URL of your OneDrive for Business), you can move it into the Shared with Everyone folder by default.

If you want to make it available only to a specific group of people, you can put a document into the library for a Team Site instead. That uses the SharePoint tenant storage and you can get those files onto a PC by opening them from SharePoint Online, opening the document library in Explorer (from the ribbon on the SharePoint site) or syncing the document library as a list in Outlook. Team mailboxes also save information into the SharePoint library.

Although the range of storage and sharing options in Office 365 sound confusing, in practice they make a lot of sense. Users get the option to stick to SharePoint shared document libraries or use something that looks like popular free cloud storage services – but which gives you control and security.

Sharing documents is simple and users can easily collaborate (they can even edit the same document simultaneously, in the Office desktop applications or the Office Web Apps) but again, you have tools to control this.

When it first came out, Office 2016 had excellent integration with OneDrive, on both Mac and Windows, letting you browse your online folders and see the folders you'd used recently right on the Backstage menu. A recent update stripped that out on Office 2016 for Windows, replacing it with a very slow dialog that doesn't show any recent folders at all – and doesn't even show you what the file name will be. It's a definite step backwards.

All apps

What else is in Office 365?

Depending on which Office 365 plan you choose, you'll get a range of new apps and services. All the plans include Sway, a new authoring tool that uses machine learning to do a lot of the layout work for you, creating responsive layouts that work on smartphones as well as desktop web browsers.

Business plans include the Planner service, as well as GigJam, a collaboration service that lets you share specific pages inside a document – you can just cross out pages and paragraphs you don't want colleagues to see. It's an interesting idea that needs a lot more work to be really useful.

Delve Analytics

The E5 plan includes the Power BI cloud service that lets you visualise information in charts and dashboards, and an extra tool in Delve called Analytics that analyses your working habits to tell you how much time you spend in meetings and email compared to your colleagues, to help you make the most of your time.

There are also related Office services you can add to Office 365, like Project Online, which is a full-fledged portfolio project management system.

Office recent changes

Expect Microsoft to keep adding new services to Office 365 – like the ones it plans to create from LinkedIn.

Office 365 is hands-down the best way to buy Office, whether you're a consumer user wanting the Office desktop apps with all the latest features, or a business that needs email and collaboration tools without the hassle of running your own servers. Yes, you pay a monthly fee, but you keep getting new features as well as useful cloud services.

We liked

The new Office 365 admin centre is a real improvement, making it easy to find features that used to be tucked away inside specific services

Exchange Online is one of the best business email systems around, and no-one knows how to run it better than Microsoft. Skype for Business has gone from VoIP meetings in the cloud to something that can be a full unified communications service – if you're prepared to pay for all the conferencing and telephony services you need to make it work. And SharePoint is getting a much needed refresh, plus the formerly infuriating OneDrive for Business is now both usable and reliable, and Groups give teams a simple way of working together on projects.

We disliked

Overall, the Office 365 admin interface remains disparate and disjointed; Microsoft needs to do more work here. In part, that's due to the overlapping tools, from the formal systems that replicate the server options larger businesses want – especially if they're migrating to the cloud – to the simpler, ad hoc tools based on Groups that are more approachable but also sometimes lack features. Whatever you need, you can probably do it with Office 365 – if you can find out where and how.

If you want the latest features and improvements, you need to opt-in to try previews – but that can mean losing useful options as well, like the confusing changes that make the Save As dialog slow and unwieldy in Office 2016. If you don't get features in preview, it can still take a long time for them to reach all the Office 365 tenants once they're supposed to be available.

Final verdict

Office 365 is a reliable service that integrates email, document sharing and conferencing almost seamlessly with the latest desktop versions of the Office software – which now get regular updates and extra features – and is evolving new cloud tools and services like Sway and Planner.

It's simple enough for small businesses and also has powerful options for larger companies, who will find that the savings from putting commodity IT in the cloud, while still being able to integrate with on-premise servers through Active Directory and hybrid Exchange deployments, make the combined subscriptions for server and desktop products very attractive.

You do need to pick the right plan though – there's a confusing number of them, all with slightly different features. This means you don't have to pay for services you don't need, but it also makes it hard to point at Office 365 and know exactly what you'll get.

Microsoft has officially released Office 2016 for Windows and it is available for consumer customers (Office 365 Home and Personal) immediately for download. Mac users have already been able to download Office 2016 for a few weeks already.

Office 365 will likely keep its name and could be joined by Windows 365 as Microsoft will apparently add a subscription option to Windows 10, and it has trademarked that name. Amongst the flurry of features added to Office 365 in recent times, the ones worth highlighting are:

Microsoft acquired Sunrise, a popular calendaring app for touch devices, which is likely to be incorporated into Office 365. Calendaring has been one of the areas where Microsoft hasn't devoted as much resources as many would have expected especially with the rise of mobility.

Microsoft also bought Acompli (which it almost immediately turned to Outlook), LiveLoop for to prep ip PowerPoint and 6Wunderkinder for its popular to-do-list application.

The company also announced that it was giving away 100GB of free storage for a year to existing Dropbox users to lure them away from the popular cloud storage provider – which incidentally is a close Microsoft ally.

That bonus is on top of a 100GB giveaway of OneDrive storage for two years if you subscribe to its Bing Rewards scheme. Your files will be read only after the subscription ends unless you buy a top-up and if you want to get a cheap one, Ebay seems to be the place to go with plenty of deals available for Microsoft Office 365 Personal available for less than £40.

Okay, let's move on to the most recent developments over the past couple of months. Microsoft recently announced that it has updated Office 365 for Exchange Online, so that users will no longer have their emails automatically deleted after a period of 30 days. Previously, deleted items were shifted into the Deleted folder before disappearing from there after 30 days, but the new update allows the system admin to change this period to a different length, or simply to set all emails to be kept indefinitely.

Also on the email front, Microsoft has just updated Office 365 to allow users to send email attachments which are far, far bigger than was previously possible. In fact, attachments can now be six times as large, with the new size limit being 150MB (whereas Office 365 users were limited to 25MB before – that said, note that the 25MB limit will remain in place unless the administrator actually changes things).

Video content is an arena Redmond is moving to cover with its subscription Office suite, as well, with the creation of the Office 365 Video portal that allows businesses to distribute videos internally. This is a free additional service which is currently in the process of rolling out globally for Office 365 enterprise users, in order to provide a fully integrated solution for video sharing within an organisation with security in mind. Office 365 Video employs an HTML5 player so it can work across all devices from mobiles to desktop computers, although Microsoft is also producing an app for iPhone users.

Furthermore, Redmond has bolstered Office 365 with the addition of mobile device management (MDM) again free of charge, at least for those on commercial plans. System admins will be able to use these features to manage access to data over a range of devices and platforms, from smartphones upwards and on Windows Phone, Android and iOS.

This will put in place measures such as the detection of jailbroken devices, and will allow for security policies to be set up to ensure that certain business emails or documents can only be accessed on approved devices. A selective wipe feature will strip corporate data off a device running Office 365, without touching any personal data on said piece of hardware.

Another major move on the security front which has only just happened is Microsoft and Samsung's announcement of an agreement, following settling their legal arguments over Android, whereby a version of the Office 365 suite will come to Samsung's Knox. In other words, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and OneDrive for Business will be included wrapped up in the Knox container.

Redmond has also just changed things with Office 365 so that documents can now be exported in the Open Document Format (ODF), to bring the suite in line with UK government guidelines on document sharing.

OneDrive

Recent news

The following is a list of updates to the Office 365 suite going back from August to the beginning of 2016:

August 2016

  • Microsoft is going to more tightly integrate Office 365 and Windows 10 by implementing an 'Office Hub'that offers easy access to your documents from within Windows.
  • Office 365 saw the introduction of a Service Assurance Dashboard which provides a range of details on privacy, security and compliance controls, including third-party auditing.
  • Microsoft said that the rollout of the overhaul of Outlook.com, which brings fresh Office 365 features to users of the webmail service, has been further delayed.
  • Office 365 Education introduced a raft of new features including Microsoft Classroom, School Data Sync, Microsoft Forms, and Learning Tools.
  • Microsoft brought some new ink effects to OneNote, and also the ability for the app not just to convert a handwritten equation to text, but also to teach you how to solve it.
  • Two new Visio apps popped up: Visio Online Preview which allows users to view and share Visio diagrams with only a browser, and the Visio for iPad app.
  • Various accessibility updates were applied across Office 365, including tweaks to make Narrator (the screen reader) a better experience in Word, Outlook and SharePoint.

July 2016

  • Microsoft highlighted two major new features coming to Word – Editor and Researcher, which help with proofing/editing, and citing sources respectively.
  • A new service arrived in the form of Microsoft Bookings, which gives Office 365 business users a hub web page that allows customers to schedule appointments.
  • Microsoft announced that Office 365 now has 23.1 million subscribers.
  • The free preview version of Microsoft Stream was launched, a YouTube-style service for businesses which will eventually become the de facto video experience in Office 365.
  • The Secure Productive Enterprise offering was revealed, bundling Office 365, Windows 10 Enterprise (in its new E3/E5 cloud-based form) and Enterprise Mobility + Security suite.
  • Redmond released a free videoconferencing tool for SMBs, noting that Office 365 business subscribers get similar facilities on a much grander scale via Skype for Business.
  • Microsoft revealed that later in 2016, Office 365 users will get a preview of an automatic live translation caption service for Skype Meeting Broadcast supporting 40 languages.

June 2016

  • Microsoft Planner was rolled out to Office 365 users worldwide, an app which lets you tackle project management in a fresh and user-friendly fashion.
  • Microsoft made a number of tweaks to Sway, its 'digital storytelling' app, including upping content limits so you can use more photos, videos and so forth in your Sways.
  • Outlook received some new features to help users better manage their travel plans and track the status of package deliveries.
  • Excel got a new set of Power Query features designed to make working with and getting the most out of your data easier.
  • A new Office 365 admin app was pushed out with a more slickly designed interface that makes important information easy to spot at a glance.
  • A new SharePoint mobile app was also launched for iOS offering quick and easy access to your company's portals, sites and resources when you're on the go.
  • The preview version of GigJam – a collaboration app inbound for Office 365 that allows users to easily share all manner of content – was made available to all comers.
  • Office 365 was struck by a major ransomware attack that exposed some 57% of its 18.2 million subscribers to phishing attempts.

May 2016

  • Office 365 Business was enhanced to allow co-editors to chat in real-time when collaborating on documents stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.
  • Accessibility improvements, including a new high contrast theme, were applied to Office 365 to make it easier for the visually impaired to work with the apps.
  • Microsoft tweaked security for Office 365, with Exchange Online Protection getting safety tips that give warnings about suspicious emails.

April 2016

  • Office 365 received a front-end facelift with a new welcome page designed to be more helpful and intuitive.
  • Redmond bolstered the capabilities of Microsoft Graph, meaning that going forward developers can build better and smarter apps powered by data drawn from Office 365.

March 2016

  • A new admin centre arrived on Office 365 boasting powerful search functionality and enabling easy access to in-depth reports.
  • Office 365 Connectors were introduced, allowing apps and services to be hooked up to Office 365 Groups, so notifications from said apps automatically get sent to the Groups shared inbox.
  • Office 365 became the only non-Apple accessory offered to those purchasing iPads online.
  • Google expanded its Identity Platform, which is made up of a number of solutions including Google Sign-In, to cover Office 365.
  • And as March ended, we discovered that according to one study, Office 365 is the king of all business web apps.

February 2016

  • A ton of improvements were applied to Excel including new functions to make building common calculations an easier process, and deeper integration with Power BI.
  • Outlook also got some attention with a new system that lets users easily archive messages, and a new Groups section was added to the ribbon.
  • We saw a leaked pilot web page that indicated Redmond's incoming premium email service, Outlook.com Premium, will be free for Office 365 users.

January 2016

  • Microsoft extended its Office Insider preview program, which allows the curious to test early builds, to include Mac users.
  • Redmond introduced new inking features for the Office for iPad apps, allowing for scribbling on documents with a stylus or your finger.


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