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(Continued from page 3) Initially, Google will provide this Android
more about this in a recent Yahoo! Finance arti- app capability on a few new Chromebook
cle; here is the link: releases during the third quarter of 2016.

However, during the fourth quarter of 2016
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/buy-chromebook they are expected to roll out this capability
-android-apps-200443448.html.
to many existing Chromebooks through an

Chromebooks have made significant inroads in automatic Chrome OS upgrade. Early
the educational marketplace and have also model Chromebooks are not likely to be
been well received by home users who have upgraded; however, most Chromebooks
ready access to the Internet and who are look- released in the last two years will be eligi-
ing for a simple, inexpensive device to handle ble.
mail, social media and Web-browsing. But, they
have suffered to an extent from the fact that, un- Stay tuned; I’m sure we will see quite a bit
like the Google Play Store, the Chrome OS more on this subject during coming
Store has a very limited number of apps. Since months!
these were the only apps that would run on a
Chromebook, this meant that owners who had
come to rely on a series of favorite apps on their
Android phone would in most cases not be able “I’ve fallen and I
to run those same (or similar) apps on their
Chromebook. Moreover, since Chromebooks Can’t get UP”
were designed with the idea that application By Randy D (the tech guy)
software would be stored in the Cloud, they re-
quired Internet access to do just about anything Many of us have heard this phrase before,
– even creating something simple like a letter. but now we are at that age where this can
really happen to us. There are many alter-
In recent years, Google has made it possible for natives to getting help and one that I have
users to store Google’s proprietary “office” soft- recently run across is the Frist Alert Big
Button Phone with Safety Pendant.
ware on their Chromebook, so users can now
create documents offline for future uploading to This phone features three one-touch keeps
their Google Drive account in the Cloud. How- for automatic emergency dialing, plus an
ever, for those dependent upon Microsoft Office emergence remote pendant to wear in case
software for business – or simply for ease in
sharing content with friends and family – “work-
arounds” are necessary that involve first creat-
ing the content in the applicable Google soft-
ware and then converting it to its Office counter-
part or creating native Office documents online
in a Microsoft OneDrive account. With the tran-
sition to allow Android apps to run on Chrome-
books, this all becomes much simpler. Mi-
crosoft has made key Office software compo-
nents available as free apps in the Google Play
Store, so Chromebook users will eventually be
able to create, print, store and transmit Office
documents in much the same way that they
would on a Windows PC.

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