Gadgetory

sprint says it may keep to your phone contracts after all I'm Bridget Carey this is your scene that update the classic two-year phone contract may not be dead just yet but it is on life support Sprint is now clarifying that contrary to previous reports it has not made any official decision to stop offering two-year contracts to customers by the end of the year in the last episode of cnet update I talked about the imminent death of the two-year phone contract it's an offering where you get a new phone for a discounted price if you sign up for a two-year service agreement now both verizon and t-mobile are no longer offering those kinds of deals and they moved to a monthly payment plan option where you lease the phone and you pay for service separately The Wall Street Journal and CNBC reported that sprint was also doing away with two year contracts at the end of the year citing interviews with sprint CEO Marcelo Claure a but I spoke to a sprint spokesman who says that's not necessarily the case rather if the trends show that customers don't want contracts Sprint will ditch them but if customers do want contracts they make keep the option alive it's all a bit up in the air apparently but sprint salespeople are pushing customers to go with their monthly leasing option and so are eighteen t employees but both sprint AT&T they still offer the option of a classic contract if you still want it switching gears google unveiled a new product that it began selling this week but it's not a phone or a tablet or anything you wear it's a Wi-Fi router now Wi-Fi routers aren't exactly a sexy tech product category they are a headache to set up and you usually try to hide the ugly box somewhere behind the furniture which you shouldn't do because that weakens the signal but this google router called on hub is designed to be easier to use and it's not a box it has a cylindrical shape so maybe you won't mind displaying it out in the open for two hundred dollars this router has some high-tech perks you can manage it with a nap either iphones or android phones and that app will tell you how much bandwidth each of your devices are using you can also tell the router which device you want to have the most bandwidth so that Roku will get the best connection for all your netflix streaming of course google wants your internet service to be spiffy so you keep streaming up all that content but it also has another motivation behind solving Wi-Fi woes Google now smart home products under its company nest it makes smart home thermostats and home monitoring cameras and the more products we need to talk to our Wi-Fi we're going to need a central hub to manage it all in a reliable way like a control center for all your gadgets to communicate with one another amazon is also heading in this direction with its echo smart speaker and apple requires you to use the Apple TV as a hub for the full smart home theory experience that's it for this tech news update and you can dive in deeper at cnet com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget carrier