While most people think of tethering as creating a Wi-Fi network from your phone's cellular data connection, Android also supports sharing its internet connection over USB or Bluetooth. Those options can be helpful in edge situations (e.g. using your phone as a Wi-Fi adapter for a PC without wireless support), and now there's another choice with Android 11: Ethernet tethering.
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While you might assume that the relatively few people who use a Chromebook as their main computer are more likely to have an Android phone than an iPhone, it would still make sense for Chrome OS to be capable of tethering to an Apple device for the purpose of data sharing. That isn't possible at present, but it could be coming soon.
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Last month we spotted that Instant Tethering — a feature which allows your Chromebook to easily ride your phone's data connection when Wi-Fi isn't available — was appearing on at least a handful of non-Pixel/Nexus phones. It would appear that was an early test, as today Google is formally announcing that Instant Tethering is rolling out to 15 new Chromebooks and 30 new phones.
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The mobile hotspot on your phone can be super useful, but it's also a little tedious to get it set up when you need it. There's a new feature rolling out as part of Google Play Services 10.2 that makes it much easier. It's essentially automatic with a feature called Instant Tethering. Not everyone will have it right away, though.
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T-Mobile's bombastic CEO John Legere does not mince words. Following an impromptu Periscope broadcast on Sunday, he's published an open letter on the T-Mobile website that lays out his plan to go after those dirty, rotten data thieves. You know the ones—people who use their unlimited data lines to get unlimited tethering data, bypassing the 7GB cap. Legere seems deadly serious about this, and there's a full FAQ detailing what Tmo is doing about it.
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A new leak points to big changes about to hit T-Mobile, and these are the good kind of changes. According to TmoNews, the carrier will be adding mobile hotspot to all active plans (even prepaid) on June 12th. It will also boost some hotspot caps and stop using hard caps entirely.
Google is making the best of allowing enthusiasts and 3rd-party developers early access to the next release of Android, and the result will be a less buggy release when L finally hits the grand stage. While new issues are reported each day, there's a lot of progress showing up on the Issue Tracker. Just yesterday, a burst of 18 bugs were marked as 'fixed,' following a 2-week gap without any obvious activity.
Among the many fixes, both major and mundane, we can see a lot of attention has gone to the networking and wireless protocols, sensor-related problems, and a fair number of visual tweaks.
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Asus has lately become the king of anime-style transforming electronics, with their Transformer tablet line and Padfone devices. It looks like Google is paying attention, at least when it comes to conceptual hardware. US patent 8,649,821, granted to Google in February of this year, describes a laptop with a built-in and detachable cell phone, with the two working in tandem for various functions. While Android and Chromebooks aren't specifically mentioned in the patent documentation, it's easy to assume they were on the engineers' minds, since it was filed in September of 2012.
The basic idea is that the laptop can borrow the cell phone's wireless connection for on-the-go Internet access, as well as use the removable handset as a speaker and microphone for VOIP calls and other obvious functions.
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Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) aren’t the sexiest topic out there, but they are a pretty vital part of daily operations for almost every major company and many small businesses. VPNs are used to securely connect a computer, tablet, or phone to a company's private network over the Internet, thus allowing people to work remotely while ensuring strict authentication and enforcing administrative policies. Even some power users are apt to set up a VPN if they want to make their home networks accessible while they're on the road.
During the development of Android 4.4 KitKat, the time came to spruce up some of the lower-level pieces that are responsible for creating and managing VPN connections.
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