Wireless Charging (started in UK)

Starbucks has announced that visitors to the coffee chain in the UK will be able to charge their mobile phones wirelessly. The initiative is being rolled out initially in 10 Starbucks cafes in the UK by the end of January. The free service is following a pledge made in the US to allow similar service beginning in San Francisco with a national roll out across 2,000 branches across the US.

Currently, there are two competing wireless charging standards available and Starbucks has chosen Duracell’s Powermat. The service requires users to plug in an adapter to their phone in order to charge it. The devices, which are ring-shaped, will be available to borrow or to purchase for £10 each. The adapters will be offered for the new lightning and old 30 pin Apple variants, along with those phones that use the micro USB standard.

In order for a phone to charge efficiently, they must be placed on specially equipped tables, which Starbucks are installing into the branches across the UK’s capitol city.

Microsoft Office Apps for Android Released

A few weeks back, Microsoft released a preview version of their Office for Android apps. The time has now arrived for the guys over at Redmond to bring the final versions to the Google Play Store. Now you can download the finalised versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint to your 7 – 10 inch Android tablet. If you do own a tablet that is 10.1 inches or larger, then you are going to have to pay $6.99 a month or more for an Office 365 subscription.

The basic system requirements for downloading the apps include minimum sized 7-inch tablet running Android 4.4 KitKat or above. The tablet must also have an ARM-based processor and 1GB

of RAM or more.

When you first launch any of the apps, you will have to sign up or log in to your Microsoft account. This is the only way that you can edit, save or print your documents. The apps are free, so most folks shouldn’t have an issue with this. As previously mentioned, if you need to have the subscription service due to your tablet size, then you will also receive Microsoft’s premium features such as tracking changes in Word and being able to view the “Presenter View” in the PowerPoint app; not to mention the ability to sync documents across devices.

The UI with the apps is nice, and all of the new Office apps have a similar layout in the home screen. Your recently opened documents will be placed on the left column and on the bottom of that left column is a link to open other documents.

The templates for your new documents will be on the right hand side. It is worth mentioning that Word and Excel will work in both portrait and landscape modes on your device but PowerPoint is strictly a landscape-only app. For storage you can save your files either on your device locally, on your Microsoft OneDrive account or at a SharePoint location. You can also save your documents to  your Dropbox account.

Microsoft have said that the previews for the apps generated more than 250,000 downloads across 33 languages in more than 110 countries. So I guess with those kind of figures the finalised versions of the suite will go down a storm.