Google is releasing a new Pixel phone this year, will still be a premium device

Google will release new Pixel and Pixel XL devices in 2017. While the original models were rushed to market (reportedly because Huawei dropped out of the project and HTC stepped at the last minute), the upcoming versions are expected to bring more Pure Android goodness plus add some user requested features like water resistance and possibly wireless charging.

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There are now 50 million Spotify subscribers

Spotify has hit another milestone in less than half a year. The music streaming service adds 10 million new paying subscribers in around five months, pushing them up to having 50 million users. To put it in perspective, Spotify spent less than half a year adding around half an Apple Music. Apple’s own streaming service hit 20 million in December, adding three million subscribers in three months.

This boost in subscribers for music streaming services underscores the changing consumer habits when it comes to music. More and more people it seems would be willing to pay a fee for all-you-can-access music instead of buying per song or per album. It would seem Spotify has the advantage at the moment, if these figures are anything to go by.

Source: CNET + Spotify

A typo caused the big Amazon Web Services outage

Mistakes happen to the best of us but it seems just one tiny “human error” has caused embarrassment for Amazon. As you know, the Amazon Web Services went down this week and disrupted many internet services for hours. It seems the error had been a typo. On Tuesday morning, an employee doing routine maintenance mistakenly entered the wrong command while trying to take offline “a small number of servers.” What was typed in took down a “larger set of servers,” including those that support two S3 subsystems. These subsystems have the data storage service used by a number of web-based services.

With these two systems offline, it took with it many services including the ones Amazon uses to update its own status page. And with the system not having been completely restarted “for many years,” it also took “longer than expected” to bring them back up. Amazon acknowledges and apologizes for the mistake and promises it has taken safeguards to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Source: Mashable

Rollout of Google Assistant starts today

Google announced at Mobile World Congress that it was bringing Google Assistant to non-Pixel devices. While they didn’t specify a timeline, it seems the wait is shorter than we think. It has started rolling out in the US for both Android Marshmallow and Nougat devices. Google even made a quick announcement on YouTube and Twitter for it. After the US rollout, Google Assistant will be coming to Canada, Australia, the UK, and German speakers in Germany. So it shouldn’t be too far off when you can install the voice-activated Assistant on your device.

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