Carriers often don’t do this sort of thing, but when they do it may be a big deal for you. Normally when you purchase a device through your carrier, you have the option of adding insurance to your device from day 1 up to 30 days in case you need some time to think about it. After that, you cannot enroll any longer and any damage repairs will need to be paid out of pocket.

AT&T is allowing customers a second chance to protect their smart devices with an open enrollment of smartphone insurance for those who wished they got it before they dropped their devices.

This open enrollment period started yesterday, March 1 and will last all the way until April 30. If you are on AT&T and haven’t already enrolled your device, AT&T offers three different ways to do that with plans from $7.99 for a single device to a multi-device plan for $29.99.

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Google is testing a new payment service totally separate from Android Pay. It will allow customers who have their hands full (the only example given is if you are shopping with small children) or customers who are just lazy, to pay in-store without taking out the phone and with minimal interaction.

Here’s how it works: your phone must have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled before using Hands Free and most of us already have those two things enabled. Bluetooth Low Energy in conjunction with location services provided by Wi-Fi prepares phones for payments by communicating with beacons installed at the registers.

The customer will simply tell the cashier that he or she is “paying with Google”, then the cashier verifies the image and initials with the customer and confirms the payment. A notification is then sent directly to your device, confirming the payment you just made.

The problem with these kinds of payment methods is they require even more hardware in order to accept these Hands Free payments and this is not idea in a world where NFC terminals payments are still limited as to where they can be used.

This pilot is currently only available in the South Bay Area of California for select locations of two merchants: McDonald’s and Papa John’s.

Still, it’s nice to see Google coming up with these new pilot programs, even though, Google has ventured its nose into places it shouldn’t have and ended up shutting down these unused services. But kudos to Google for actually taking the risks.

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