More than a year after announcing plans to buy Fitbit for $2.1 billion, Google has announced that the deal has closed. The announcement may be a little premature, but Google says that despite the company’s reputation for shutting down the companies it acquires and for monetizing everything with ads, there are no plans to sell customer data for advertising purposes and users will be able to continue using Fibit hardware with third-party services.

In other news, there’s a major update to Wine, the open source Windows compatibility layer that makes it possible to run some Windows apps and games on non-Windows operating systems, the developers of the Panfrost open source graphics driver for ARM GPUs is making progress, and Samsung wants a piece of the Bluetooth tracker space currently dominated by Tile.

Samsung Galaxy SmartTag

Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.

  • Google completes Fitbit acquisition [Google]
    Google has completed its acquisition of Fitbit, promises that Fitbit users will still be able to pair their devices with third-party services and that Fitbit user data will not be used for advertising purposes.
  • Wine 6.0 released [WineHQ]
    Wine 6.0 is now available, bringing improvements to the software that lets you run some Windows apps on Linux or Mac, Among other things, the new release should bring better graphics, text rendering, audio and video, and support for copy protected apps.
  • Desktop OpenGL 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost [Collabora]
    The open source Panfrost graphics driver for ARM’s Bifrost and Midgard graphics now supports desktop OpenGL 3.1 support. Basically this means you can expect better graphics when running Linux on devices with recent ARM Mali GPUs.
  • Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag is a $29.99 Tile competitor [The Verge]
    Samsung introduces Galaxy SmartTags which work like Tile Trackers, using Bluetooth Low Energy to help you locate missing keys, wallets, phones, pets, etc. A $30 tag is coming Jan 29, and a $40 Tag+ with Ultra Wideband (UWB) is coming later this year.

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You can also find the latest news about open source phones by following our sister site Linux Smartphones on Facebook and Twitter.

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