Articles by Jerry Hildenbrand

Google already knows everything, so I love the way Chrome keeps track of things I can never remember.

Ever visit a site that you are registered at but can’t remember your password and didn’t drop it into a password manager for some reason (like because you were just lazy, maybe)? You find the link that says you forgot your password and click it, dig through Gmail to find the email that was sent, then click through to create a new password vowing you’ll put it into your password manager this time.

I love it when a thing works so well it seems like magic.

Or if you use Chrome, whether the browser on another system or on one of the best Chromebooks, you just enter the first letter of your login and the rest gets automagically filled in. Man, do I love that stuff.

Yes, it tells me that Google is keeping track of things I type like user name and passwords unless I have opted out. You probably see an option somewhere if you start using Chrome with a brand new Google account and you…

It may be an older model, but to me, it’s well worth spending a little more over the latest higher-end Chromebooks.

It is a great time to buy a Chromebook. There are models to fit every budget and whether you buy a very inexpensive one or one of the best Chromebooks, you’ll have a good experience doing what Chromebooks do best — acting as a portal to the internet.

Some of what we’ve seen so far for 2021 looks to be pretty great, especially if you’re in the market to spend a little more and buy a higher-end model. Acer, ASUS, Samsung and other companies have seen that there are people willing to spend more than $300 on a Chromebook so they have taken things up a notch or two to offer better specs and a better level of build quality that comes with spending more money on a computer.

I wanted to start by saying that, and that I think that many of the new crop of Chromebooks do things better than the Pixelbook Go does. I wish my Pixelbook Go had a higher resolution screen without bu…

When it comes to looking for an alternative laptop to Windows or macOS, then you’re going to want one of the best Linux laptops. There may not be as many options running the Linux operating system as the competition as most of the big-name computer manufacturers aren’t making Linux laptops, so it’s helpful to know exactly what smaller companies have available. Thankfully, there are some great options from smaller players who have great reputations when it comes to standing behind their products. But there are also a few that come from those bigger companies, who also make some of the best laptops and best Chromebooks.

Pure Power

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8

Staff Pick

Lenovo is targeting the enterprise power user who wants Linux with this powerhouse. The Windows version is already one of the best laptops overall, so why not get the best but with Linux? With a 10th-gen Intel Core i5, up to 16GB of RAM, up to a 1TB SSD, and Fedora 32, this is a developer’s dream machine. The…

Digital privacy is the next Big Tech battleground. Google can strike the right balance and come out ahead — but will it?

Some of us are more concerned about our digital privacy than others, but no matter how you feel about sharing your information online, this area is where the next Big Tech wars are going to be fought. We’re already seeing how companies like Apple are just going hard in the paint and giving options to share nothing while others like Facebook merge even more tracking into WhatsApp. Both are doing it wrong, but Google could do it right.

As someone who is concerned about digital privacy (both mine and yours), part of me loves how Apple is moving in for the kill. The App Store has privacy nutrition labels (such a bad name) that tell you what an app could do and settings that allow you to completely sandbox an app you’ve installed so only Apple gets a peek at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. And yes, Apple needs some data like that to keep improving its p…

Fixing the latest bugs and exploits in Android every month.

Google has detailed the latest Android Security Bulletin and released the fixes for Pixel devices.

These are exploits and other security concerns that affect Android as a whole. Issues with the operating system, kernel patches, and driver updates may not affect any particular device, but these need to be fixed in the Android base by the folks maintaining the operating system code. That means Google, and they’ve detailed the things they have improved for this month.

Updated factory images for Pixel devices that are supported are available, and over-the-air updates are rolling out to users. If you don’t want to wait, you can download and flash the factory image or OTA update file manually, and here are some handy instructions to get you started.

How to manually update your Pixel

The company that made your phone uses these patches to send an update out to you.

These changes have been released to the people making Andr…

Best answer: We don’t see new Chromeboxes as often as we do Chromebooks, but new models are likely to release later this year. Still, Chromeboxes available right now make for an awesome desktop experience.

Best right now: HP Chromebox G3 (From $589 at HP)
Cheaper but still great: ASUS Chromebox 3 (From $285 at Amazon)

Chromeboxes are safe, secure, and easy desktops

Unlike a laptop, a Chromebox is always plugged in and has a fan to keep things a little cooler. That means they can run a little hotter and a little harder than the same components would inside a laptop. It also means that today’s Chromeboxes are going to handle whatever Chrome can throw at it — including Android apps and Linux apps — just fine for the foreseeable future.

But what about tomorrow’s Chromeboxes? Manufacturers are releasing new Chromeboxes for 2021, but there’s no need to wait for the next-gen unless you’re looking at the very low end or high end when it comes to a specific model.

As someone who o…

Chrome OS comes on two types of devices: laptops called Chromebooks and desktop machines called Chromeboxes. While the best Chromebooks are more widely known and more diverse in their options, Chromeboxes are a relatively small market where you have one option from each of the major manufacturers that gets updated every few years. 2021 is a good year to be a Chromebox user, as we’re getting updates to the three most popular Chromeboxes on the market. They’re still slowly trickling out right now, with the HP Chromebox G3 being the most available of the three next-gen Chromeboxes.

Best Overall: HP Chromebox G3

HP was one of the first to announce its next-gen Chromeboxes, and it was also the first to start selling it. HP’s Chromebox G3 and Chromebox Enterprise G3 are powered by Intel’s 10th generation processors, though there is a Celeron option for the budget-conscious. To accompany those processors, HP includes up to 16GB of DDR4 RAM and up to 128GB of storage — though, for the …

Washing machines and TV sets make for a better bottom line than phones do in today’s environment.

You might not remember it, but there was a time when LG was an Android powerhouse making the best Android phones money could buy. Phones like the LG G2 owned the high-end while cheap and powerful phones like the Optimus G delivered more bang for the buck than anything made today. Pick almost any phone made by LG during that period and you saw three things:

This phone is tough as nails.
This phone is hella fast.
The version of Android LG built for this phone was trash.

Now, LG is probably done building phones because there is no money to be made by doing it. Some folks from the company say no, others have more information about it all, and other companies are even ready to buy. Whatever happens, it will mean the death of LG as we know it today.

This isn’t really surprising if you look at which phones sell, how they are sold, and why people buy them — and you see LG losing in every…

My dad always used to tell me that being alive was supposed to hurt sometimes.

Usually, I take this tiny corner of my internet and talk about whatever cool things in the technology world caught my attention. We had a couple of those things happen this week, too. Like the Galaxy S21 which I think will be one of the best Android phones you can buy, especially once we see those inevitable sales and price drops in a few months. But I’m not going to write about any of those things today. I’m going to write about misery.

I know that we all go through something heartbreaking once in a while and that I’m not special, but this felt like the worst week of my life. A family member and her husband committed suicide. She had been in and out of rehab, and yes, she died from an overdose, but the notes left no doubt that this was not an accidental overdose.

A lot of people take their lives every day and this particular double-suicide isn’t any more significant than any other, except this one was …

The unpopular opinion: Exynos chips only exist so Samsung can save a lot of money.

The Exynos 2100 looks to be Samsung’s best mobile chip yet.

It features ARM’s Cortex-X1 core with three other Cortex-A78 cores and four less power-hungry A55 cores to play nice with your battery. It also has ARM’s Mali-G78 GPU for 40% better graphics than the last generation, a tri-core NPU for better on-device AI, is 5G-ready (both Sub-6GHz and mmWave), and is built on Samsung’s 5nm process tech to save even more battery.

Expect to see it in all of Samsung’s best phones — including the imminent Galaxy S21 — throughout 2021. In a world where nobody bothered to care about the chip inside their phone and how much better one specific brand can be than everything else, this would be great and everyone would be satisfied.

Here’s the thing though. We do care that one brand of chip has marginally better AI reaction times, takes better photos, has better 3D graphics, gets better battery life, and kicks…