We've compiled a top 10 list of our favorite iOS apps to hit the App Store in December 2017. The apps highlighted in this video include PinDrive, RAW Power, Sonic Runners Adventure, Who's In, GoToStage, Snowboarding Party: Aspen, Powder Project, Spire Music Recorder, Snakes and Daily Random Facts. Which app is your favorite?
We've compiled a top 10 list of our favorite Android apps to hit the Play Store in December 2017. The apps highlighted in this video include Taskful, Fluctuate, Icy Ropes, Mercury Icon Pack, Crypto Coins Watcher, CopyClip, Words With Friends 2, VectoRise Wallpapers, KISS Launcher and Orbia. Which app is your favorite?
HQ Trivia recently said that it'd make its Android app available to everyone by January 1st, and it looks like they just squeaked in under that deadline.
HQ Trivia is now available in the Play Store. The app is listed as "(Unreleased)", and so you may encounter a bug or two while using it, but now anyone with a device running Android 5.1 or higher can get the app.
Players of HQ Trivia can take part in a live trivia game show every day at 9:00 pm EST and weekdays at 3:00 pm EST. You're asked 12 trivia questions, but if you get one wrong, you're eliminated from that game. Get all 12 questions right and you'll win a piece of that game's real money prize, which is split between everyone that got all 12 questions correct. The prize amount varies with each game.
During its first months of availability on iOS, HQ Trivia became an extremely popular app. It typically has hundreds of thousands of people playing each game, and that number will likely grow now that it's available on Android. To give HQ Trivia a try for yourself, hit the Google Play Store link below.
It’s never easy to leave a job that has been good to you, even when you know it needs to be done. When I first started writing at PhoneDog in 2012, I had no idea what to expect. I had been a ghostwriter for a couple of years but had never consistently written for any one publication. I was excited because I loved mobile technology, but I was nervous because I didn’t know if I’d be able to convey that passion well enough into words. To be honest, sometimes I feel like I did; other times I go back and read some of the things I wrote and want to die.
Aside from the actual role of contributing editor, I loved working for PhoneDog because of the people. If I ever had a question or needed help, somebody was always around. The writers and managers at PhoneDog, past and present, are some of the nicest people I’ve had the pleasure of working with. They’ve worked with me through some trying times in my life, so it truly is a tough decision to leave.
With that being said, it is time for me to move on. Although I’m as surprised as anybody that I’ve been here for over 5 years (time flies), I always knew that PhoneDog was a temporary thing for me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to write about phones forever. Fortunately, within the past 5 years, I figured out what I wanted to do for a career and have been going to school to pursue a degree in the medical field. I’ve also developed a passion for volunteering.
I take away a lot from my time with PhoneDog, both positive and negative. It might seem like an easy job to write about phones all the time, especially if you’re passionate about the subject, but over the years it has become increasingly difficult to develop fresh opinions about mobile technology. I used to be able to write two articles a day, 5 days a week; lately, I’m lucky if I can write even one. Even then, I often feel like I’m grasping at straws. Then again, struggling with article ideas might be a side effect of having too much on my plate otherwise with another job, school, and a family to take care of.
On the plus side, I’ve developed a lot of good traits from the job. I’ve learned how to better multitask, manage my time, and work independently. I’ve had to develop a thicker skin and realize that I’m not always right and that it’s okay to make mistakes and own up to them. I’m pretty sure that’s all just a part of growing up, but I also think that writing for PhoneDog has helped with those aspects as well.
I want to thank the readers for reading my articles, whether you liked them or not. I appreciated the feedback I received, much of which put things into perspective for me and helped me become a better writer. I hope you’ll continue to support the content creators of this site as they are good people and put a lot of work into their content, whether it’s in written or video form.
Finally, I’d like to leave some parting nuggets wisdom:
I hope you all have a happy new year full of tons of cool tech, good times, and happy feelings!
In the smartphone market news cycle, we couldn't close out 2017 without some kind of controversy now could we? Considering we closed out 2016 with exploding phones, we had a high bar to reach! I don't think we quite got there, at least not in terms of pure spectacle, but the impact was certainly pretty similar. Just before we said goodbye to the year, we're talking about Lithium-Ion batteries, throttling phones, and companies communicating to customers.
All of that thanks to Apple, too, which is pretty crazy by itself.
The company had a pretty shaky end of the year, but I imagine it will be just fine moving forward. Apple is already offering cheaper battery replacements for older iPhones, and it'll update iOS to be a bit more detailed in its battery information. All of that's well and good, and it will probably be enough to pull Apple out of whatever cloud it currently finds itself in.
But of course, there are questions about what happens next. After all, we all know that Li-Ion batteries are basically the default at this point. We use them because we have to. A worthwhile alternative hasn't been discovered just yet, so companies have to make bigger phones to stick bigger batteries in there, and make software tweaks to avoid taxing the juice too much.
Apple's idea wasn't a bad one. After all, you need the battery to use your phone. And even though Android manufacturers don't do the same thing, as long as they communicated the effort I don't think they'd be tarred and feathered for doing it. At least, I can hope that would be the case. Those same manufacturers (and Android in general) would probably let customers choose which to prioritize, though.
One idea, as stipulated by my fellow editor, was to bring back swappable batteries. In that piece, Anna writes up that Apple should probably be the company that uses replaceable batteries, and that's probably not a bad idea. But it's Apple we're talking about here so that probably won't happen. And while the other major companies out there have all primarily switched to non-replaceable batteries, I wonder if it would be impossible for some of them to go back to how things were.
I don't want to go back to plastic phones, though. The level of design quality that companies like Samsung, LG, HTC, and others have reached is something I don't want to get rid of, and if that would be the element to get traded out for replaceable batteries, I'd live with those encased pieces of technology.
We'll be stuck with Li-Ion batteries for a while longer. Just as we have been for years. And I've been thinking about Apple's reasoning for throttling older phones: Batteries get weaker and can't handle the same level of processes years later. Which is definitely true.
So I can't help but be curious, is this an issue for you at all? As my fellow editor noted in that aforementioned write-up, she admits that she doesn't keep phones long enough to see any major degradation of the battery. I can safely say that I'm the same way, even if I typically wait a bit longer to pick up a new phone than her these days.
What is the longest you've ever owned a phone and used it as your daily driver? Have you owned one long enough that you noticed steep declines in battery life on a regular basis? How did you alleviate the issue for you back then? Let me know!
"There’s something fascinating about miniature-sized versions of everyday objects. Even as a kid, I just loved tiny versions of things, evidenced by my once neighborhood-famous Kitchen Littles collection and boxed display of miniature trinkets that hung on my bedroom wall. As a Kansas City native, I was also fortunate enough to live near the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures (which has recently been renovated and is still a very cool attraction, if you get the chance). I come by it honestly. So, you can probably imagine the spark of excitement that ignited when I came across this Kickstarter for the Zanco Tiny T1, the world’s smallest functional phone.
Actually, I first experienced déjà vu when I was reading about it. You see, back in the day, there was another small cell phone making headlines that caught my eye as well: the Pantech C300. Unfortunately, that tiny phone was an AT&T (ahem, Cingular) exclusive and I didn’t use Cingular, so I was only able to admire it’s small, cute form from afar.
Not anymore, though. The Zanco Tiny T1 gives a girl with broken dreams hope again. Well, sort of.
The difference between the Zanco Tiny T1 and the Pantech C300 is that while the C300 was small and fully functional, it wasn’t so tiny that it was necessarily uncomfortable to use. As a flip phone, it doubled in size when in use. The Zanco Tiny T1, on the other hand, is a candybar style device – what you see is all that you’re going to get, which is a device that is “smaller than your thumb, lighter than a coin, and ridiculously cute”. Agreed.
Although it seems like the Tiny T1’s only purpose is to serve as a conversational piece or a gag gift, it actually can serve a higher purpose such as a backup phone, a phone for when you’re out exercising and a large smartphone isn’t as convenient to carry around, or a phone for when you’re out and you don’t want to risk losing your daily driver that likely cost hundreds of dollars. Of course, this is all dependent on whether your carrier still uses 2G networks or not, because that’s all the Tiny T1 can use (which makes sense, as all you can do is make calls and – surprisingly – text).
Unfortunately, such a cute device doesn’t come cheap, at least not as cheap as you might expect something that’s about the same size as a flash drive to cost. Early backers can back the Tiny T1 for £35, which equals about $47 in US currency, which includes a device once it launches. Whether the minuscule device, which lasts up to 3 hours of talk time and 3 days on standby, is worth that much is up to you; I’m probably just going to stick with the Nokia 3310, which costs about $13 more but can arguably do more (and still manages to serve as a decent conversational piece, albeit not as eye-catching as the Tiny T1).
I’d still consider the Tiny T1 worth a gander, considering how adorable it is and can fit virtually anywhere.
Readers, what are your thoughts on this unusual cell phone? Do you think you’ll be picking one up for yourself?
This time last year, one of the most anticipated events coming to mobile was the return of our beloved Nokia devices, free from the grasps of Microsoft who nearly ran its reputation into the ground and into the arms of HMD Global, a company comprised of former Nokia executives. But just because a company makes “a comeback” doesn’t mean that it will return to its former glory days without question; just look at BlackBerry or HTC, for that matter. Point is, it doesn’t always work.
And it still might not work out for Nokia, despite HMD Global going all in during its first year back with a solid five-phone lineup, with three more purportedly on the way in early 2018. The company is ambitious, to say the least.
So far, I think it’s working out well. The lineup is solid and includes devices of all types, from the low-end Nokia 2 to the high-end Nokia 8, with mid-range options like the Nokia 3, 5, and 6, filling in the middle. The prices also reflect the “something for everybody” idea the company appears to be going for, with the Nokia 2 costing a mere $99. Even the Nokia 8 can be purchased for less than $500 – far cheaper than many flagships in 2017 cost, some of which top an astonishing $1,000 after taxes.
The momentum is there. The prices are good. You even get “Pure Android”, which is something not many manufacturers use, but it will be interesting to see if that momentum will be enough to keep the Nokia brand going through 2018 and beyond.
I think the reveal of the Nokia 9 will be a telling sign of what’s to come. There are two things I think the 9 will need to truly compete with top-tier flagships: a bezel-less display and a headphone jack (along with the typically expected flagship specs, that is). Bezel-less displays quickly became a hot commodity throughout 2017, but the feature was still so new that I believe consumers were willing to overlook devices that still had larger bezels, simply because they’re still used to having phones look like that. Next year, however, I’m not as confident such a decision would hold up well next to an extensive lineup of bezel-less devices.
Removal of the headphone jack has alarmingly become more commonplace over the past year as well. It’s weird because to me it seems like simply including one would make for an easy selling point. No special connections, no dongles, no problem, right? Apparently, it’s not as cut-and-dry as that, though, and rumors state that the Nokia 9 may very well be missing the headphone jack. And maybe it’s just the people I hang around with, but I don’t know a single person that has been legitimately happy that the headphone jack is going the way of the Dodo.
On the other hand, even if the 9 somehow turns out to be a total flop, all is not lost for a Nokia success story. I’m still impressed with what that the Nokia 2 offers for $99 (it even has Android Oreo), and their mid-range devices are pretty great for a good price as well. A company does not need to have a wildly popular flagship to succeed in the mobile industry (see: Moto). In fact, I would say that mid-range options would suit most people’s needs more often than not. I could easily see Nokia becoming a common household name again on the low to mid-range end of things, but I wouldn’t mind seeing them succeed in the flagship range as well.
I hope for the best for Nokia, and they have had a solid start to their resurgence in mobile. I am still disappointed things didn’t work out for the brand on Windows Phone, because the Nokia Lumia devices were basically the only reason I ever wanted to check it out. Android is a much more competitive platform, but I think the Nokia brand still has enough spark left to make an impression over the coming years.
Readers, what are your opinions on Nokia’s return to mobile this year? Do you think the brand will see continued success in the new year? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
Apple said earlier this week that it would offer discounted battery replacements for older iPhones that had their processors slowed, and that the cheaper replacements would begin in late January 2018. Turns out that they're going to be available even earlier than that.
Apple is offering $29 iPhone battery replacements starting today, December 30th. "We expected to need more time to be ready," Apple said to TechCrunch, "but we are happy to offer our customers the lower pricing right away. Initial supplies of some replacement batteries may be limited."
These cheaper battery replacements are available to customers with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced. The offer is available worldwide through December 2018.
These battery replacements typically cost $79, so this is a pretty good deal for anyone with a qualifying device. If you've got an iPhone 6 or later and you feel like your phone has been getting slow lately, you may want to visit an Apple Store and see if you can get a fresh battery put into your device.
Hola is an interesting free VPN which takes an unconventional approach to preserving your online privacy.
Unlike the competition, Hola doesn't rely on a fixed network of managed servers. The company describes itself as more of a "peer to peer" VPN, where browser traffic is routed through its users. Your traffic will pass through the computers of others who've installed the service, and some of their traffic might pass through PC.
This has some advantages. There are no fixed routes or destination servers, making it more difficult for sites to detect that you're using a VPN. It also keeps costs down, as there are no servers or bandwidth bills, allowing the basic service to be offered for free.
One potential issue is that you're allowing Hola to use some of your system and network resources. But the company says it only uses devices when they're idle, and connected to an electricity source. Even then, it claims "the amount of traffic that Hola passes through a peer on its network per day on average is less than a 20 second YouTube clip." That doesn't mean much without knowing the resolution, but if we take it as 720p, that could be 4-5MB.
Maybe a more significant concern is that any Hola user could effectively become an exit server for someone else. If they're sending spam, hacking or doing anything else dubious, your IP address could become the one associated with that action.
You can avoid this problem by upgrading to Hola Premium, which doesn't share your bandwidth with other users.
If you can live with its basic principles, though, Hola's core service is free for non-commercial use, and that's the product we're reviewing here.
Most VPNs route your traffic through their own servers, providing at least the possibility that they can log what you're doing. Hola's model of routing data through its users might seem a better way to protect your privacy, but it's not quite that simple.
Here's an interesting section from Hola's security and privacy FAQ:
"Hola’s architecture allows Hola to see the origin and destination of each request, thus if our network was abused, the abuser's information may be passed on to the authorities. This makes Hola unattractive to abusers. Some VPN networks ... don't see both ends of the connection, and are therefore much more attractive for these uses."
The company says it can trace every request on the network, its source and destination, in a way that isn't always possible with regular VPNs.
Hola's privacy policy further reveals that the company collects a substantial amount of "anonymous information" about service usage.
Data recorded includes your “approximate geo-location, hardware specifications, browser type and version, the date of the Software installation, the date of your last use of the Services, your operating system type, version and language, registry entries, your URL requests, and respective time stamps.”
The firm continues: “We do not make any efforts to reveal your identity through this information. We may also collect information that will help us understand whether your device is used at a given moment so that we will not send it any requests.”
This information isn't linked to an account, and the company says it doesn't try to make the link, but it's still a lot of data. And there's more. Hola maintains server logs, too, and this is what they include:
"Log Data may include information about your device such as: your IP address, browser type, webpages you visit, time spent on those pages, access times and dates, and the unique identifier generated for your device (if you use the Services from your mobile device then such an identifier may be your mobile number). We use such data in its aggregated form and is not combined with any Personal Information."
Again, the company is saying that data is "aggregated" and "not combined with any personal information". But it also says that data could include something which directly relates to you – your mobile number. Even if the logs aren't linked to your account originally, further analysis might be able to link at least some of this information to people.
How much does any of this really matter? If you're not doing anything online that might provoke someone to try and track you down, then it probably won't affect you at all. But if anonymity is your top priority and you're looking to reduce even the possibility of monitoring, Hola's logging policies should be a concern.
Hola installs as a browser extension, instantly adding its logo to the Chrome address bar. There's no immediate need to adjust or configure the service, and the simplest option is to continue your browsing as normal.
If a site blocks you, clicking the Hola icon displays a list of source countries you can choose, often with the most appropriate at the top. Choose a region and Hola connects you to the site via users in that country, hopefully solving the problem.
Does this work? Well – sometimes. We were able to access Comedy Central and BBC iPlayer without any difficulty, but YouTube videos left us watching an endlessly spinning wheel, and Netflix just displayed its standard ‘proxy detected’ error message and refused to stream anything.
Click the Hola icon again and you're asked whether the service worked. If it didn't, a Fix It button reloads the page, presumably using another IP address in the same region. This occasionally worked for us with smaller sites, but made no difference to YouTube and Netflix.
The Hola FAQ has lots of ideas on how to fix problems: disable and enable the extension, force the browser to reload the page, clear your browser cache and cookies, disable other extensions. Or indeed it’s suggested that you uninstall and reinstall Hola, make sure your browser is up-to-date, and optionally disable your firewall and antivirus to see if they're to blame. But although these might help in a few situations, they're not going to get you into Netflix or other sites that are specifically targeting the service for blocking.
Hola does have other benefits. Open the full app from your start tab and it displays tiles for popular streaming, news, search and other sites. Click Hulu, Spotify, Sky Sports or whatever else looks interesting and Hola opens that site using the most appropriate country.
This approach makes life very easy as there's no need to manually switch countries, or worry about regions at all. All you have to do is pick a site, and Hola takes care of everything else. If the service unlocks your favorite sites, this could save you a lot of time.
Windows users can optionally install a standalone desktop version of Hola. Tap an icon in your system tray and a specially configured version of Chromium appears, with Hola pre-installed, and you can browse and unlock sites as usual. Installing a new browser just to run Hola seems like overkill to us, but it might be worth a try if you can't get the service working on your existing setup.
It's always difficult to get a useful measure of VPN performance, but Hola takes this to a whole new level. There's no fixed network of servers to assess, the route your traffic takes will change every time – and your hardware, browser type and setup could influence the results in unexpected ways. Hola works so differently that synthetic benchmarks may not give you meaningful information about the service, anyway.
For this review, we replaced our regular benchmarks with a more straightforward task: streaming 4K video from YouTube and other sites. Playback ran smoothly at all times, without any buffering, quality or other issues. A network traffic monitor confirmed that we were consistently downloading at 20-30Mbps, and there's no reason to think that's the limit – Hola probably has more to give. We may not be huge fans of Hola's peer-to-peer approach, but there's no doubt it delivers in terms of speed.
It was a very different story with our final privacy tests. Doileak.com found Hola was allocating IP addresses in our requested locations, but our real IP was available via multiple HTTP request leaks, and there were DNS leaks, too. That probably won't matter for simple browsing and unblocking sites like BBC iPlayer, but if anonymity really matters, Hola shouldn't be on your shortlist.
Fast, free and user-friendly, Hola is an excellent tool for unblocking some streaming websites. But it didn't work with Netflix or YouTube for us, and multiple logging and privacy issues mean the service can't match the safety or anonymity of a real VPN.
We've already seen the Nokia 8 get its Oreo update, and we know that the Nokia 6's update is close. Now we've got more details on another Nokia phone's Oreo update.
The Nokia 2 will be updated to Android 8.1. That's been confirmed by Juho Sarvikas, HMD Global's Chief Product Officer, who recently explained on Twitter that the update will include many of the memory management improvements used for Android Go.
Hi! It will receive Android Oreo. 1GB RAM devices will be supported on 8.1 release where many of the Android Go memory management improvements will be integrated. Nokia 2 performance will only get better over time!
— Juho Sarvikas (@sarvikas) December 28, 2017
There's no telling exactly when this update will be released, as Android 8.1 was only recently released to Google's Nexus and Pixel phones. Still, this is exciting news for Nokia 2 owners. The Nokia 2 is very much an entry level device, and sometimes those phones don't get much in the way of significant software updates after they launch. That won't be the case with the Nokia 2, though.
All things considered, Apple was having a pretty good year for the majority of 2017. It launched a new iPad at the beginning of the year, launched iOS 11 without any major issues, and welcomed the iPhone X into the fold. The company earned plenty of flak for the notch on their newest flagship smartphone, sure, but it weathered that storm and apparently everyone is okay with it now.
But then things started to snowball.
It started with an issue in iOS, which saw autocorrect doing some crazy things when someone would type in the letter "I". And then there was another autocorrect issue, where those who typed in "it" would see their word changed to "IT." There were other issues, too, including a major security flaw with HomeKit devices. Apple was so pressed to get fixes out that it ultimately released iOS 11.2 on a Saturday, a big change from routine.
And then there was macOS's big security flaw, where it was discovered that someone could gain administrator access to a Mac without actually needing to input a password. That was a big one, to say the least, and while Apple was quick to patch it, the security flaw never should have existed in the first place.
So then we get to December and here we are with Apple managing to prove conspiracy theorists right, years later. Apple has already admitted (and apologized, kind of) that it implemented a feature in its iPhones last year that will throttle the processor in the device based on battery degradation. So as the battery life decreases, the iPhone will try to avoid random shutdowns and overtaxing the processor by throttling performance.
(Apple is also getting backlash for its flagship retail store in Chicago, Illinois, because it's all downhill for the company before the end of 2017.)
I don't want to pile on here, but I am going to say that I can understand where Apple is coming from -- at least based on what they've said up to this point. They aren't trying to force obsolescence so customers upgrade sooner -- they're actually trying to make it so people can use their iPhones longer.
But if someone is angry about this situation, and, honestly, if they don't want to believe Apple's stance on this because of the way they handled it, I don't think that's too crazy. You basically have to choose whether or not this is something to be mad at Apple for, and either way you land is the right spot.
As my fellow editor put it, saving the battery by throttling performance isn't necessarily a bad thing -- but Apple needed to be open and honest about it. Right now they're backpedaling and forced to make changes to the way they handle battery replacements. They're even adding battery information into iOS (after they took out at-a-glance battery information on Macs, which is funny). They've had to make these drastic changes because they got caught, and because they chose not to communicate with its customer base.
So, I'm curious. If you are an iPhone owner, how do you feel about Apple right now? Are you mad, and considering switching? Or is this just another thing you'll ignore because it ultimately didn't bother you, or affect you? If you aren't an iPhone owner, are you happy your chosen company (probably) doesn't slow down your phone as the battery degrades? Let me know!
Hot on the heels of Verizon's Moto Z2 Force receiving its Oreo update, another carrier version of the Motorola flagship is getting Android 8.0.
The T-Mobile version of the Moto Z2 Force is now being updated to Android Oreo. T-Mo hasn't officially updated its Moto Z2 Force support page with info on the update quite yet, but users on the Reddit, XDA, and T-Mo forums have all received the over the air (OTA) update.
As for what's included, T-Mobile Moto Z2 Force owners can expect Oreo goodies like picture-in-picture, which will let you watch video while performing tasks in other apps. Also included are the December 1, 2017 Android security patches.
The update is version OCX27 and weighs in at 937.5MB.
If you've got a T-Mobile Moto Z2 Force, keep an eye out for your Android Oreo update in the coming days!
When news broke out yesterday of Apple’s decision to reduce out-of-warranty battery replacements by $50, making the $79 fee a more palatable $29, I felt pretty okay with it. There was some backlash about the battery replacement not being completely free, which is understandable, but if we’re being completely honest, a $29 battery replacement is actually quite kind of Apple, relatively speaking. In that regard, I don’t think there’s too much of a reason to be upset.
However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any reason to be upset. Every comment section on any website reporting this news was filled with a lot of backlash, much of which was warranted. Backlash about the batteries not being free, backlash about which phones qualify for the $29 replacement (iPhone 6 and above), and backlash about Apple probably making money off a problem that they themselves created. The one point that really got me was that this “fix”, however cheap or expensive you might consider it, comes a little too late for many. People have already upgraded their slow iPhones to something else at this point, and those phones are likely long gone when they could have been saved.
I like iOS. I like the iPhone. But I am not happy with Apple right now, and I wasn’t even directly affected. If I still owned my iPhone 6 and found out mere weeks or months after upgrading that the only thing I needed to make it perform normally again was a $30 battery replacement (or heck, even a $79 battery) as opposed to a however many hundreds of dollars it costs to upgrade to something else, I would be pretty upset.
I tend to upgrade my phone every 6 months because phones are kind of my hobby. I enjoy seeing what different phones have to offer, so something like this doesn’t really affect me. I never keep a phone long enough to know what a true slowdown is. But most people aren’t like me and would prefer to hang onto their investments for as long as possible, and considering iPhones are some of the most expensive phones out there, it’s easy to understand why so many people are upset.
Any other time, a $29 battery replacement would be nice. But it’s only available for less than a year (late January 2018 to December 2018) and it’s only available for certain iPhone models. Even those who already upgraded to something newer like an iPhone 8, 8 Plus, or X likely won’t be able to take advantage of this, which seems like it might pose a problem in the future when people’s iPhones slow down and they remember this incident again.
I get the need for the update for older iPhones. At the end of the day, preserving the battery – the very thing that makes the phone operate – is more important than preserving the speed. But if a battery replacement was all it took to restore the performance to normal, then people should have had the information and the option to do that before the release of new iPhones. It just doesn’t seem like the best solution they could have come up with.
For those who want to preserve their older-than-iPhone 6 devices and were left out of this offer, iFixit has reduced the price of their do-it-yourself battery replacement kits for iPhones as old as the 4S, with prices ranging from $24.99 to $29.99. Of course, this takes a little bit of handiwork on one’s part as oppose to Apple’s professional installation, but it’s an option (and likely worth the investment if the alternative is to upgrade to a new phone).
For anyone who has been using smartphones for many years now, you may have used a variety of different platforms in that time. There was a stretch there where we almost had an embarrassment of riches, as far as options were concerned. Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and webOS were all readily available, and, in each case, there was at least one phone worth using to enjoy those mobile operating systems.
It's honestly a little sad to see that we've had our options whittled down to just Android and iOS at this point.
I think it's possible that Microsoft just decides to jump back into the mobile space in 2018 (or later) and launches a Surface Phone, naysayers ignored. While it might not be likely --the company has a pretty solid thing going for it right now with apps and services that hold no platform allegiance-- I wouldn't completely count them out. So maybe we get Windows 10 Mobile back on store shelves in the near future.
What we probably won't get is webOS, though, and I'll tell you right here and now that I'd be willing to throw money at that phone (as long as it was a high-end flagship device worth it, of course). There are moments where I'll be using my Android phone or my iPhone and I'll just wish I could go back to using the Palm Pre 2, or just webOS in general.
Using the iPhone X hasn't alleviated that wish, either. Yes, iOS is now very similar to webOS, but it's still a very Apple implementation. There's no . . . flair to it, I guess. Gestures are great, but webOS had that wave launcher for quick app access. That was legitimately pretty awesome. Swiping up and pausing for a moment on the iPhone X just brings up the standard multitasking window we've seen for a little while now.
Still, using gestures to get around on the iPhone X does harken back to webOS and it is cool. But I would very much like to see a webOS comeback, to be perfectly frank. Not just because I want webOS back, either. But because I think we should have more than two primary options for mobile operating systems. Android, even with its custom user interfaces and manufacturer-specific features, is still Android when it's all said and done. And iOS is, well, always iOS.
The return of webOS would shake things up, and it would get even more interesting if Windows 10 Mobile scrambled its way back onto the stage, too. So I guess maybe I want a webOS and Windows 10 Mobile comeback, both platforms seeing plenty of developer support (this is still the hardest part to achieve, and probably why these futures won't happen) and some fantastic hardware that adopts the design cues of this year and beyond.
It's all a pipe dream, though. Good thing Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, LG, Huawei, and so many other companies are putting out some great hardware and software, because, all things considered, we probably are still living in a time where our smartphones riches are overflowing -- even if there are only two mobile operating systems to choose from these days.
What do you think? Would you like to see webOS and/or Windows 10 Mobile make a big comeback in the years ahead? Do you have any fond memories of using either platform? Let me know!
One day after HTC and Motorola said that they don't slow down phones with old batteries like Apple does, LG and Samsung have chimed in on the matter as well.
LG and Samsung have said that they also do not slow down phones with aging batteries. LG said that it "never will" do that, while Samsung offered a lengthier statement explaining that it ensures extended battery life using "multi-layer security measures".
Here are the statements that both companies sent to Phone Arena:
LG
"Never have, never will! We care what our customers think."Samsung
"Product quality has been and will always be Samsung Mobile's top priority. We ensure extended battery life of Samsung mobile devices through multi-layer safety measures, which include software algorithms that govern the battery charging current and charging duration. We do not reduce CPU performance through software updates over the lifecycles of the phone."
Owners of HTC, Motorola, LG, and Samsung devices are likely pleased to hear that their companies don't alter the performance of their phones as the batteries inside them age. We still haven't heard from big names like Google and Sony, but now that more companies have come forward on the matter, maybe that'll change soon.
Some VPNs struggle to make themselves stand out from the crowd, but VPN Proxy Master isn't one of them. The website boasts that it's the "world's fastest free VPN", and with a reported 60 million plus users it seems likely that it's doing something right.
Network size isn't a service highlight, with servers in six locations only: France, Germany, Netherlands, Singapore, UK and US. Still, we've seen free products with less.
The free service has plenty of ads. There are animated icons begging to be clicked, full-screen video ads which demand you "wait 5 seconds to skip", another ad embedded in the Disconnect dialog – and unexpected notifications if you've left the service turned off.
There's no support for torrents, and the apps warn you that any torrent use could get your account deleted. This could be a hassle for some, but it's no real surprise for a free service, and at least it means there's more bandwidth left for everybody else.
Plus points include instant access to the network, with no signup, no usernames, and no need to hand over your email address or other personal details.
There are no annoying bandwidth restrictions, either. You can use the service as much as you like.
If you need more, upgrading to the paid VIP service drops the ads and gets you access to faster servers and more locations (Canada, Germany, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea). Monthly prices are steep at $11.99 (£9.60), but choose the annual plan and this plummets to $3 (£2.40). There's an entirely free seven-day trial, and you can get an extra seven days for every friend you invite to use the service.
The VPN Proxy Master website doesn't have a clear link to its privacy policy, but fortunately it's listed on the download pages for both the Android and iOS clients.
The company claims it runs a ‘no log’ network, stating: "We do not collect any information regarding the websites you visit or the IP addresses assigned to you when you access the VPN Master Private Network, and with respect to our VPN service, we do not collect any data stored on or transmitted from your device, including any data that applications on your device may transmit through our network."
This is essentially the ‘we don't log what you're doing online’ statement made by just about every VPN, although there's a welcome extra detail. There's no logging of outgoing IP addresses assigned when you connect to the service, a trick which could help trace an internet action back to your account.
Another clause might rule out some session logging: "...any browsing information or other similar information relating to your online activities transmitted by you to our servers when using VPN Master is cleared after your VPN ‘session’ is closed."
This could mean VPN Proxy Master isn't recording the bandwidth used in a session, although it's hard to say for sure.
There's scope for the service to be logging your incoming IP address, and we'd like to see this explicitly discussed in the privacy policy. But whatever the company might collect, free plan owners don't have to hand over an email address or other details, so there's little to connect any action back to you.
Be very, very careful when searching for VPN Proxy Master on your mobile app store. There are a host of other apps which use very similar names and logos, presumably hoping you'll not notice and install them, instead. Ideally, follow the download links from the official app site, or otherwise look for an app called ‘VPN Proxy Master- Free Security’, with the developer listed as VPN Proxy Master.
Once you've located the right store page, everything else is easy as there's no need to create an account or hand over any details. All you have to do is install and open the app as usual.
The interface is almost as simple. A big ‘Go’ button automatically connects you to the fastest server, or you can get specific and choose your preferred location from a list. Server load indicators help you make the best selection, and you're also warned if a server is full (at least one of the three US servers was always marked as full during our review).
The free version has plenty of ads, including annoying full-screen pop-up video types with timers to prevent them being closed immediately. They mostly appear when you're performing some app task, though, so if you just leave VPN Proxy Master running in the background you're unlikely to be hassled.
VPN Proxy Master's Google Play page says it "encrypts data using OpenVPN protocols (UDP/TCP)". That sounds great, as OpenVPN is fast and secure, and experienced users will appreciate the control over how OpenVPN works – but we stumbled across a problem. We couldn't see any option to switch protocols or see what protocol you're currently using, and when we checked our device settings, the app seemed to be using a regular Android connection rather than OpenVPN.
Curious about this, we sent the company a question via its official email support address. We asked: "Your Google Play page says the app supports OpenVPN TCP and UDP, but it looks like it's using a regular connection. Which protocols do you actually support?" The app tagged a footer onto our email making it clear that we were using an Android device in the UK.
A couple of days later, this reply arrived (we've not edited it in any manner):
“But we do not want to lose you as our good friend, if it is ok, we would like to tell you the following ways:
1. You may need to cancel the subscription at first, and about this problem, please contact with Apple's official customer service, or use the link (http://ift.tt/2DxuCkL) to cancel it. We have no right to cancel vip for IOS users. We apologize for the inconvenience again.
2. If you want to download our product, i would like to introduce the other products for you:
VPN Master http://ift.tt/2fKiOQc
Turbo VPN http://ift.tt/2DwfWCo
Hot VPN http://ift.tt/2CmqJj9
VPN Robot http://ift.tt/2wy2IFg
Snap VPN http://ift.tt/2CmLXx7
VPN Monster http://ift.tt/2DwwB8Z
Master Pro http://ift.tt/2Ckzyd7
But now we could not provide in China and with Chinese, hope you can understand us, thanks.”
That's a very long way from being helpful, but it's useful as a measure of the support you can expect from VPN Proxy Master (nothing at all). It's also interesting to see how the reply appears to suggest all these other apps are also "our product", even though the app pages have several different developer names: Express Limited, Chen Lan, Li Chen, All Connected. How are they connected, and who is really behind the service? Your guess is as good as ours.
During early testing, we noticed an odd issue with the free UK server, which our checks suggested was actually in Germany. That's not very helpful if you need to access a UK resource.
Performance was disappointing in our tests*, especially for a service claiming to be the world’s fastest free VPN. Our best European speeds reached an acceptable 16Mbps, but UK to US connections managed an unimpressive 10Mbps and Singapore peaked at 4Mbps.
The service did better at site unblocking, allowing us access to Netflix, YouTube and Comedy Central. BBC iPlayer was the only service VPN Proxy Master wouldn't allow us to access, which is not surprising when its UK server isn't actually in the UK.
Would upgrading to the commercial VIP plan make any difference? A 'Try Free VIP' tab looked promising, but tapping it just gave us a ‘Sync VIP Information, please wait a moment’ message that stayed unchanged for the next 30 minutes, and the following two times we tried it. Eventually we found a second 'Try' option in the Upgrade screen, and that worked immediately, setting up an automatic subscription but not taking any payment for the first seven days.
Getting rid of the adverts was an immediate relief, and the upgrade also allowed us to choose locations from the Faster Server tab. Two of these were conveniently labelled as 'for Netflix', so hopefully you won't have to try multiple servers to find one that works.
Our streaming tests ran as before, with all our test sites accessible except BBC iPlayer. There was a different reason, though: the VIP server labelled as being in the UK appeared to be in the US. (Sigh).
Our performance checks also showed little change. The best European servers averaged around 15Mbps, while US locations typically managed 10Mbps. That's usable, but nothing more.
The review ended on a positive note, at least, as we ran through our privacy checks. Ipleak.net, doileak.com and other websites didn't reveal any DNS or other leaks.
VPN Proxy Master isn't as fast or as capable as it pretends, especially with the UK server which isn't in the UK, but let's be realistic – there aren't many other free VPNs that can unblock Netflix and give you unlimited bandwidth. In that respect, it’s worth a try for mobile devices.
*Our testing included evaluating general performance (browsing, streaming video). We also used speedtest.net to measure latency, upload and download speeds, and then tested immediately again with the VPN turned off, to check for any difference (over several rounds of testing). We then compared these results to other VPN services we've reviewed. Of course, do note that VPN performance is difficult to measure as there are so many variables.
[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.]
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
July 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The following is a list of updates to the Office 365 suite going back from August to the beginning of 2016:
August 2016
July 2016
June 2016
May 2016
April 2016
March 2016
February 2016
January 2016
