Samsung will expand its mobile payment system, Samsung Pay, to include online payments in the new year.
The Korean electronics giant rolled out its answer to Apple Pay earlier in the year, enabling payments to be made using appropriately equipped Samsung smartphones. The Samsung Galaxy S6 was the first to enable such payments.
However, Samsung has broader ambitions for its payment platform. It's now got the likes of PayPal and other online payment systems in its sights, according to a new Reuters report.
Apparently, Samsung will expand its payment service in the US (where it launched on September 28) in 2016, allowing users to shop online using their Samsung phones.
It's sometimes easy to think of Apple as a miracle worker – the brand with a Midas touch. There's nothing the company can't turn to gold. But with the Apple Watch – its first foray into wearables, two years after Pebble smashed the market wide open – Apple faces its toughest challenge yet.
Apple has the opportunity to define the smartwatch – something that Android Wear, Pebble and Samsung have largely failed to do. But it's faced with the same challenges of screen size, battery life and user experience as everyone else – so can it work another miracle?
Apple Watch: Design
Whether you find the Apple Watch a terrific example of fashion blending with tech, or a square boxy abomination is a question of taste. But for our money, it's the best looking smartwatch made to date.
The build quality is superb, and the footprint of both the 38mm and 42mm watch is much smaller than you'd expect – and it goes some way to excuse the thickness of the design.
We tested a 38mm watch with a green silicon band – noteworthy because it's the cheapest of the line-up at $349. At 38mm the watch is rather dainty, and most men will certainly prefer the 42mm band, which also benefits from a larger battery.
Read this: Every Apple Watch design in one place
The main elephant in the room is that price tag. With a basic 42mm Apple Watch Sport clocking in at $399 and the main Apple Watch $599, it's a staggering premium even for Apple. And when you compare the price of thebest Android Wear devices – $299 for the Sony SmartWatch 3 in Steel or $349 for the LG Watch Urbane – it's hard to qualify exactly what you're getting for the extra money.
Part of the appeal is the 340 x 272 pixels, 290 ppi screen (390 x 312, 302ppi for the 42mm one), and while it's not quite as sharp as the Samsung Gear S, it's one of the most vibrant we've seen from any smartwatch to date and shows off the deep colour palette of watchOS 2.
The bands themselves are the first true indicator that you have an Apple product on your wrist. The silicon feels reassuringly weighty, and the unique design means the excess strap slips through a hole, so you don't get that accidental flapping that's all too common with cheap watches. What's more, the extra straps feature the same attention to detail. The Milanese number, which has been much lauded, fixes magnetically with a pleasing snap.
The straps are easily changeable using a typically Apple proprietary mechanism, but that means you can't use any old 22mm strap off the shelf – and Apple's straps are eye-wateringly expensive.
Essential reading: The best unofficial Apple Watch straps
Underneath is an optical heart rate sensor, which bulges from the rear, just out of sight. The whole thing is IPX7 rated, which means it's splashproof, but not waterproof – meaning you can shower with it if you must, but don't take it for a swim.
Apple Watch: Features
Two schools of thought have emerged in smartwatch design: less is more, which means filtering out digital noise; and more is more, which means giving you access to every conceivable feature.
The Apple Watch is all about more.
Answering the question "what does it do?" is a little like defining the iPhone. Yes, the Apple Watch is a smartwatch, but with the addition of its app store, it can do anything developers decree. And that's really exciting.
But for the benefit of the uninitiated, the Watch connects to your iPhone, and is effectively impotent without it. It uses that wireless umbilical connection to display any notification from your phone, flashing up anything from texts to WhatsApp messages, tweets, Instagram likes, Gmail alerts, calendar reminders, annoying SkyBet notifications and pointless push messages.
You can trim notifications and stop the less relevant ones from being displayed on your watch using the iPhone companion app, so in some way there is a filter. However, you can't dig further in and only allow messages from certain people or conversations onto the wrist.
The missing manual: Apple Watch super guide
You can also make calls from the Watch (the leg work done by your paired iPhone, although you'd never know) and reply to messages using your voice.
Other key features include tracking steps, standing time and daily activity, prompts to remind you to stand up regularly, and of course, the tracking of sports.
In short, Apple has built in all the features you'd expect from a smartwatch and let its developers create the experiences that give the Watch the opportunity to define the market. So far so good, but does it do those core things well, how good are its apps, and is it the best smartwatch to date?
This is where the test really begins.
Apple Watch: UI and interface
The joy of Apple's previous successful products, and the reason it's been so successful is simplicity. Your mum can use the iPhone. Your three year old can rack up thousands of dollars in micro-payments. It's so easy to use.
The Apple Watch? Not so much.
To conserve battery the screen turns off when the watch isn't in use. This is a common feature most smartwatches, but unfortunately, Apple hasn't nailed the gesture of turning on the screen when needed. It works okay when standing, but if you're sitting or lying down, the watch often fails to illuminate, which is pretty frustrating.
The long and short is that occasionally it's difficult to tell the time.
The control system also takes getting used to. The watch face is the main screen, as you'd expect and a tap on the Digital Crown takes you to that iconic spread of apps – just like the home button on the iPhone. You twiddle the crown oh so gently to zoom in and out of those apps.
Must have extras: Best Apple Watch accessories
Within apps, you can scroll through options and lists using your finger or the crown, and you tap to make choices. A long press (Force Touch) will bring up a context menu – it's a feature that's been lauded on the Apple Watch, but frankly has been a part of Android for years.
Using the Apple Watch requires a deft touch. The more apps you have, the more cluttered your screen will be, and that it requires concentration to hit the right one. Your finger will never feel so large and ungainly when trying to pick out that app you need. There's also strange lack of standardisation across the apps. Some have a long press option, some don't.
The most useful information is held in the Glances section, which is accessed by swiping up from the bottom when you're on the watch face screen. Here you can see battery life, calendar alerts, progress towards move goals among other things. You have to swipe through the cards to find the one you need, which can be a bit of a faff. What's more, if you're in the apps screen, you have to return to the watch face to use your Glances. Annoying. However, you can add or remove Glances and reorder them from within the iPhone companion app.
Apple Watch: Notifications
When notifications land on the watch, they're stored in a list, just like on the iPhone. Swiping down from the top enables you to recall them, and tapping one will open it up in full.
Smartwatch showdown: Apple Watch v Android Wear
This works well, but again, there's discrepancies in notifications. For all the 3,000 apps made for Watch, there are no dedicated ones (yet) for Facebook, Gmail or WhatsApp. That means for some notifications – Facebook in particular – alerts just tell you something has happened. Gmail and WhatsApp messages can be read, at least in part, but you can't read messages in full or reply.
More on that later.
While Apple has nailed the relatively easy task of getting notifications to your wrist, it does lag behind Google when it comes to preempting the information you need. We missed Google Now's cards, prompting you to go to your meeting, or telling you there's disruption on your way to work without you having to check manually.
You can reply to text messages and emails, using either stock replies or voice. Now watchOS 2 has enabled apps to use the microphone we wouldn't be surprised to see similar features come to Whatsapp and co soon.
Apple Watch: Taptic engine
One of the triumphs of the Apple Watch's design is the Taptic engine, which enables a different feeling for notifications. Rather than just buzz when notifications come through, the Apple Watch uses a series of different digital taps.
A notification feels like someone tapping your arm, rather than a dull buzz. And there's different feelings depending on the type of alert: left and right turns during walking navigation, move goals, standing prompts and of course Digital Touch. The latter is Apple's feature enables you to send heartbeats, sketches and taps to other Watch users – which is obviously a gimmick, but good fun for your first day with the Watch.
See also: Apple Watch v Pebble Time
The reality is however, that the Taptic engine is a huge part of the experience, and makes the watch feel so much more personal. The taps are much more pleasant to experience than a series of motorised buzzes you'll find on every other smartwatch out there, and it's the Watch's best example of that hallmark of Apple quality we've come to expect.
Apple Watch: Fitness, sports and heart rate
A big push for the Apple Watch is in fitness and sports, and Apple has been keen to market the device to the millions who are interested in fitness trackers and sports watches.
As a general fitness tracker that counts steps and pushes you to your daily goals, the Apple Watch superb. The built in Activity app is one of the best we've seen in terms of design, and you can look at results on the Watch and iPhone app quickly and easily. Progress towards your Move Goal is clearly shown by coloured circles – one for standing time, one for activity and the other for movement.
Sports watch showdown: Apple Watch v Fitbit Surge
Unlike a Fitbit, the 'move goal' is measured in calorific burn rather than the number of steps, which is a sensible move, as it rewards you for getting out for a short run or more intense bursts of activity. You can change your goal from the Watch, and set a higher number of calories to try to burn off.
There's no sleep tracking built into the Apple Watch, presumably because you need to charge it nightly, but there are already third party apps in the App Store ready to fill this void.
While the Apple Watch is certainly somewhat of a Fitbit-killer, it's far from a complete sports watch.
Firstly, there's no GPS, which is a problem. You cannot accurately track runs without it. However, the Apple Watch can steal GPS data when running with an iPhone, so if you're willing to take both out, you're good to go.
Of course, there's hundreds of running apps for iPhone, and more on that shortly, but the Apple Watch has its own Workout app, that tracks runs, cycles, walks, indoor gym work and free exercise. When you start a session, the Watch will keep tabs on your heart rate, pace, distance and time, just as a running watch would do.
When you finish your run, it provides a simple text summary of the workout, but without any maps of your route, graphs of your heart rate zones, breakdowns of your pace. It's beyond basic. Your workout sits within the Activity app, the metrics are stripped out and it's not possible to compare sessions at all.
To illustrate the fact of how totally unfit for purpose the Apple Watch's Workout app is, we turned on a free workout, and sat at our desk for an hour. It reported that we'd burned 600 calories.
That said, the only really accurate part of our run tracking was the heart rate data, which stacked up against a Garmin chest strap admirably. While neither are scientifically accurate, both came back with similar data.
Apple Watch: Apps
Apple's selection of apps will arguably make or break the Apple Watch, and like so many products before it, Apple has provided a platform for developers to run with. And with the new watchOS 2 operating system in place which enables standalone apps that can access all the sensors and hardware in the Watch, it's in a strong position.
The line up of apps is now 10,000 strong although big name apps are only slowly filtering through. Google Maps has only just landed and features seriously limited functionality.
Our top picks: The best Apple Watch apps
Unfortunately it seems that Apple Watch apps are not made equal. Apple based apps work well on the Watch, and third party ones simply don't.
An example is Apple Map's walking directions, which use the Taptic engine to guide, which is a genuine wow moment. And despite the Workout app being flawed, it stays illuminated so you can check your run stats on the go.
On the other hand, CityMapper directions don't update live on the Watch screen and if you accidentally tap on the map shown within the app, you're whisked off to the Apple Maps app, with no way to return.
That isn't an isolated incident, and apps like Runkeeper – which basically just fire up the iPhone app and provide a mirrored display of the data – suffer the ignominy of the screen turning off and disappearing off into the background while running. A double tap of the Digital Crown will retrieve it.
Apps have improved under watchOS 2 both in terms of the variety and the speed in which they load. There's still a lot of work to do here, and developers aren't jumping on board as quickly as they have in the past.
Apple Watch: Siri and calling
Like Android Wear, voice is a big part of the Apple Watch, and of course, Siri is on-board. You press and hold the Digital Crown to summon Siri, and then ask questions, schedule meetings and the like. It works well, and the voice recognition works a treat – although the movement of bringing your Watch closer to your mouth can annoyingly dismiss Siri again.
Voice calling from the Apple Watch is also impressive, and in our test calls, recipients had no idea the call was made from the Watch. The only complaint was that the built-in speaker wasn't loud enough, which made calls in the car – an ideal time to use the Watch – hard to hear.
However, it's supremely easy to make a call by using the second button that brings up your regular contacts – and in select situations, wrist calling can be genuinely useful.
Ignore the hot air about 5G next year. Here's how the carriers will add more zip to your wireless connection.
We've all been there. You pull out your smartphone to check out the trailer for "Batman v Superman," and the loading icon spins. And spins.
Sometimes, the cellular network just can't keep up with your voracious appetite for Facebook updates, Snapchat messages and streaming video. Don't worry, though, the carriers are working on it.
You may have heard rumblings of 5G. In 2016, you're going to hear a lot more about it. It's the next generation of wireless technology, and it promises to make the current 4G LTE connection feel like you're standing still. How fast is it? Downloading -- not just streaming -- the movie "Guardians of the Galaxy" would take seconds with 5G, as opposed to minutes with
4G.
It's the latest hook that carriers plan to trot out as the wireless war for your wallet continues. This year saw intensifying competition as carriers cut prices, offered iPhones for pennies and threw more data at you. Next year could see more of the same, with renewed promises for better, faster service.
In the mix will be a discussion of 5G. Verizon Wireless plans to hold field tests next year, and AT&T has said it will be involved in the technology's development. Telecom gear makers such as Ericsson and Huawei are boasting of speeds that surpass anything you can get from a physical connection. But here's some advice to anyone who may potentially get caught up in next year's hype: Don't buy into it.
"It's a lot of hot air," said Roger Entner, a consultant for Recon Analytics.
The truth is that full-blown deployment of 5G isn't expected until 2020, when everyone in the industry can agree what the technology actually looks like. While early entrants like Verizon plan to offer some form of commercial deployment in 2017, chances are you won't be able to access it then.
Fortunately, there are a few other tricks the carriers will be using to amp up your connection speed or, at the very least, liberate you from a data traffic jam.
Adding more highways
Brace yourself for a little wonkiness. The industry's favorite catchphrase going into 2016 is "carrier aggregation," which is the technical term for tying multiple bands of spectrum. It's like adding another highway to allow for more cars, and then raising the speed limit so they can go even faster.
You could see a boost in speed with next year's network improvements.
This will enable your mobile device to access higher speeds from the networks. While carriers shy away from giving specific speed figures given the various factors, Entner said consumers on average could see a 20 percent bump once carrier aggregation is in play. The result: Photos download faster and movies stream with less buffering.
No. 4 US carrier Sprint, which has struggled with a reputation for poor service, goes further along that ledge. In markets where it uses the new technology, speeds jump 30 percent to 40 percent, according to Gunther Ottendorfer, head of technology for the carrier.
"You ain't seeing nothing yet," he said.
Borrowing Wi-Fi radio waves
Along the same lines as carrier aggregation is a technology called LTE-U. The U stands for unlicensed, as in the unlicensed spectrum employed by your Wi-Fi router. Under LTE-U, carriers would use that unlicensed spectrum as another highway to allow more traffic to your smartphone.
"The nice thing is that highway is quite big," said Michael Murphy, chief technology officer of Nokia Networks' North America business. T-Mobile said it plans to work with the industry to support LTE-U. In terms of using Wi-Fi, Verizon and AT&T will more broadly roll out Wi-Fi calling, which allows customers with spotty cellular coverage to make calls on a more reliable Wi-Fi network. AT&T said the feature, already available at T-Mobile and Sprint, is available on the latest iPhone. AT&T said it plans to add it on other devices soon. Verizon will push Wi-Fi calling to some Samsung smartphones starting this week, with more to come next year.
Back to 5G
While you won't see a 5G network next year, there will be a lot of work going on behind the scenes.
The effort going into upgrading networks, such as with carrier aggregation, is setting the foundation for the move to 5G. Companies like Verizon will also consult with industries, including agriculture and heavy machinery, to get their feedback on how a 5G network should work for them.
Emerging tech, such as virtual reality, could stand to benefit from the technology as well. First, there needs to be a common set of standards that everyone can work with, though, including how the hardware will talk with the networks.
"When we're designing a new system and architecture, we are stretching tech as far as we can," said Sheila Burpee Duncan, who works with Ericsson's business unit radio team. "That's why we need to try out the tech early."
Microsoft adds two new apps to Office 2016: Sway and Delve. But while Microsoft's newfound focus on collaboration makes real sense for businesses, home users should also consider Microsoft's free...
Office 2016 is a major upgrade, but not in the way you’d first suppose. Just as Windows 10 ties notebooks, desktops, phones and tablets together, and adds a layer of intelligence, Office 2016 wants to connect you and your coworkers together, using some baked-in smarts to help you along.
I tested the client-facing portion of Office 2016. Microsoft released the trial version of Office 2016 in March as a developer preview with a focus on administrative features (data loss protection, multi-factor authentication and more) that we didn’t test. I’ve been using it since the consumer preview release in May. Microsoft seeded reviewers with a Microsoft Surface 3 with the “final code” upon it. That’s a slight misnomer, as the Office 2016 apps upon it used the same version that Microsoft had tested with the public, with a few exceptions: Outlook was pre-populated with links and contacts of a virtual company to give reviewers the look and feel of Delve, Outlook’s new Groups feature, and more.
Office 2013 users can rest easy about one thing: Office 2016’s applications are almost indistinguishable from their previous versions in look and feature set. To the basic Office apps, Microsoft has added its Sway app for light content creation, and the enterprise information aggregator, Delve.
Collaboration in the cloud is the real difference with Office 2016. Office now encourages you to share documents online, in a collaborative workspace. Printing out a document and marking it up with a pen? Medieval. Even emailing copies back and forth is now tacitly discouraged.
MICROSOFT
Microsoft says its new collaborative workflow reflects how people do things now, from study groups to community centers on up to enterprise sales forces. But Microsoft’s brave new world runs best on Office 365, Microsoft’s subscription service, where everybody has the latest software that automatically updates over time. And to use all of the advanced features of Office, you must own some sort of Windows PC.
You could still buy Office 2016 as a standalone product: It costs $149 for Office 2016 Home & Student (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote) and $229 for Office Home & Business, which adds Outlook 2016. Office 365 is $7 per month for a Personal plan (with one device installation) and $10 per month for a Home Plan, where Office can be installed on five devices and five phones.
If you subscribe to Office 365, it’s a moot point; those bits will stream down to your PC shortly. Windows 10 users already have access to Microsoft’s own baked-in, totally free version of Office, the Office Mobile apps. It’s those people who fall somewhere in the middle—unwilling to commit to Office 365, but still wavering whether or not to buy Office—who must decide.
My advice to an individual, family, or small business owner: Wait. If you’ve never owned Office, the free Office Mobile apps that can be downloaded from the Windows Store onto iOS, Android, and Windows Phones are very good—and include some of the intelligence and sharing capabilities built into Office 2016. Microsoft’s Office Web apps do the same.
There’s no question that Office 2016 tops Google Apps, and I haven’t seen anything from the free, alternative office suites that should compel you to look elsewhere. But Microsoft still struggles to answer the most basic question: Why should I upgrade? That’s a question that I think Microsoft could answer easily—and I’ll tell you how it can, at the end.
Before that, here’s what works, and what doesn’t, in Office 2016.
Excel: Still indispensable, now more helpful
Microsoft can’t mess too much with Excel, which is the most indispensable component of Office. Entire professions essentially live on Excel as their everyday tool.
Like modern calculator apps, however, Excel must meet the needs of a disparate group of individuals: statisticians, financiers, and data scientists, to name just a few. One new feature (also available in PowerPoint and Word) stands out: a small box in the ribbon that says, ‘Tell me what to do.’
The ‘Tell me what to do...’ feature cuts right through any confusion in Office 2016
.
The ‘tell me’ box is essentially a search box, much like Bing. But while Bing or the Smart Lookup feature adds context around the phrase in question, the ‘tell me’ box cuts through the numerous menus and submenus. If you’d like to know how to justify a group of cells, for example, you can begin typing ‘justify a group of cells.’ Excel will begin making suggestions that change as you continue typing. You can also choose to look for help on that specific topic, or do a Smart Lookup search instead. What the ‘tell me’ box does, though, is simply to do what you tell it to.
That’s both good and bad, in my book. While ‘tell me’ takes you directly to a command, it doesn’t tell you where that command is located. So if you want to perform that command again, you’re none the wiser.
I’ve typically thought of Excel, like PowerPoint, as an offline application. Not any more. Not only does it make more sense to post a link to an online workbook that others can use and manipulate, the complexity of these documents means emailing them back and forth simply isn’t practical. Instead of interacting with a document, Excel users now have a virtual workspace. I was also a little shocked to notice that Excel loaded only a handful of templates if I wasn’t connected.
MARK HACHMA
The look and feel of Excel 2016 remains largely unchanged from previous versions.
Under the hood, numbers wonks are going to find lots to like in Excel 2016, with pivot tables that can handle dates, plus new charts and graphs that emphasize business intelligence—the new watchword for Excel. Excel 2016 also adds the ability to forecast results, extrapolating revenue growth, for example, a few years down the road. You’ll also find Power Query, an Excel feature that lets you pull in “live” sources of data from databases and Web pages, or your own corporate data. I rather like a feature that allows you to write equations by hand—handy on the Surface—although the recognition algorithm is still a little wonky.
MARK HACHM
You have to write equations with a bit of care (note how Excel misinterprets the number ‘5’), but this new feature works pretty well. It learns from context, so if you keep writing it may self-correct errors.
I’m not sure why Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map—all tools that make up Microsoft’s business intelligence vision—are off by default (you can enable them in the Settings menu). It’s also not clear whether Microsoft was able to to fix a bug that prevented Power Queries from being updated on the older Excel 2013 by the release date. What you’ll probably be happy to find is a hefty number of preformatted templates that allow you simply to plug in numbers, rather than creating a template from scratch.
Note that Excel (and PowerPoint) use staggered, turn-by-turn, quasi-real-time collaboration. I’m told, however, that changes are coming to each of these apps to enable Word’s real real-time collaboration.
Word: More context, for richer documents
Word is the other tentpole application in Office, and it, too, is reassuringly the same for the most part. Microsoft’s particularly keen to sell users on one new feature: Smart Lookup, also known as Insights.
Right-click a word or phrase in Word 2013, and a limited number of options pop up: a small formatting window, as well as options for spelling, linking the phrase, and checking grammar. In Word 2016, you get more—including options to translate the word or phrase, find synonyms, and so on.
A comparison between Smart Lookup and the Wikipedia app. Note that the attribution is automatically appended via Wikipedia .
With Office 2016, Smart Lookup takes the Review > Define command from Word 2013 and supercharges it. With both the old Define and the new Smart Lookup, a right-hand pane provides additional information. But whereas Define used Bing to explain the word in question, Smart Lookup provides context: the definition, plus content from Wikipedia, Bing Image Search, Bing’s Web search, and more. You can cut and paste text from Smart Lookup, or drag an image into the body of the text.
It would be nice for Word to allow you to right-click and copy text from Wikipedia into your Word document; it would be even better if it automatically added it and added either a footnote or a hyperlink back to the source document. Sadly, nothing like that is available.
It’s somewhat weird, then, to discover that feature in Insert > Wikipedia, a Wikipedia app for Word that was built into my preview copy of Word 2016. Highlight a word or phrase and click the Wikipedia app, and a more robust version of Wikipedia opens up. Even better, any image that appears in the pane can be clicked once to add it to the text, with attribution (and license info) automatically appended. It also searches on any text you highlight as you’re writing or editing. These are all nice touches.
Not so nice is the portal to the Apps for Office store, which has not been updated for Office 2016. A lack of Office apps or plug-ins is one thing, but you still can’t see what others have said about the apps in question. There’s also a big “Trust It” button that basically serves as a warning to download plugins at your own risk. No wonder the Apps for Office store basically failed.
MARK HACHM
Storing documents in the cloud seems like a terrific idea, until stuff like this happens. Time to do some rewriting. (And no, this was the only app open.)
Note that all these additional insights, however, can seriously cramp anything but a widescreen monitor. You could potentially have a document recovery pane, revision pane, Insights pane, and Wikipedia pane all bracketing your main document. On a standard 1080p monitor, however, it looked just fine.
PowerPoint shows collaboration’s pain points
PowerPoint—the tool of most modern presentations—is an appropriate place to talk about what Microsoft is trying to accomplish with collaboration, and where it struggles.
In the upper right corner of most of the Office 2016 apps you’ll see a new “Share” button, which is where collaboration takes place. For now, however, the sharing experience differs sharply between apps like PowerPoint and Word.
MARK HACHM
This is how real-time collaboration is supposed to work: colleagues edit your documents on the fly, with small flags to show who’s doing what.
Here’s how real-time collaboration works within Word: to share a document, you first save it to the cloud. Then you invite one or a series of people to edit it, using the Share button, which opens up an in-app message box. You can also eliminate all that and simply send a link. (Permissions are built in, so you can send one link to view, and another to edit.) I found using a link was better for casual editing, as the recipient can simply open the document as a “guest” in Word Online, rather than needing to type in his or her Microsoft password. (Otherwise, you’ll need a Microsoft account to authenticate yourself.)
As long as all parties have Office 2010 or later versions, real-time editing can take place: Invited guests can add, edit, or delete content in a sort of collaborative free-for-all. That can be managed, however, by some relatively fine-grained editing restrictions, such as locking format changes, restricting a user to making only tracked changes, or by blocking him or her entirely (while letting other users make free, unrestricted edits). You can attach a comment to the document itself, or to a specific location in the text (which then shows up as an icon). You can also manually save whenever you’d like to create a version history that helps organize the document further. Even if you’re offline, you can still monitor progress using Track Changes.
