K320t smartphone comes with rear dual cameras and a 3000mAh battery. Chinese tech company Lenovo enters the new age screen resolution of 18:9 full wide-screen with their K- Series line up — the Lenovo K320t. The company made their official announcement on 2nd January, 2018 and will go on sale on 4th January in China and will be priced at Yuan - (approx Rs 9,990).
The Lenovo K320t comes with a 5.7-inch IPS LCD HD display with an aspect ratio of 18:9 and has screen to body ratio of 73.5 per cent. The phone is powered by a 1.3GHz quad core Spreadtrum processor and comes in two variants — 16GB storage with 2GB of RAM and 32GB storage with 3GB of RAM and supports micro-SD card up to 128GB. The Lenovo K320t smartphone has a decent 3000mAh battery and ships with Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box. The K320t supports dual-SIM 4G and is equipped with 8MP + 2MP dual rear cameras with f/2.0 and f /2.2 aperture respectively and has a front facing 8MP selfie camera with f/2.2 aperture. These dual cameras are capable of recording videos at 1080p@30fps and features face detection, geo-tagging, and auto-focus. The fingerprint sensor is featured on the rear panel. The K320t weighs around 153.8g and measures 155.2 x 73.5 x 8.5mm. This phone is also equipped with 3.5mm audio jack, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, FM Radio and microUSB 2.0 The smartphone is expected to be a mid-range phablet from Sony and might be launched at MWC 2018 in Barcelona. Rumours of Sony Xperia XA2 Ultra are already doing rounds and now a new report suggests that the phone will have a dual camera setup on the front. The smartphone is expected to be a mid-range phablet from Sony and might be launched at MWC 2018 in Barcelona. The handset is the successor to the Xperia XA1 Ultra.
The leaked images suggest that the placement of the rear camera is going to be different than what we have seen in the previous handsets and the fingerprint sensor might be placed on the back panel. The phone is expected to come with Snapdragon 630 chipset clocked at the speed of 2.2GHz. It might have an Adreno 508GPU that is seen in most of the mid-range phones. It is believed that the company might drop the stereo speakers. The smartphone might feature a 6-inch display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080pixels and 16:9 aspect ratio. Buddybuild was founded in 2015 by former Amazon employees Dennis Pilarinos and Christopher Stott. Apple has acquired Canadian start-up buddybuild, a mobile iteration platform focused on building integration and debugging tools for iOS developers, for an undisclosed sum.
"We're excited to share that the buddybuild team has joined the Xcode engineering group at Apple to build amazing developer tools for the entire iOS community," buddybuild said in a statement on Wednesday The company said that it would stay in Vancouver -- a hotbed of developer and engineering talent. "The buddybuild service will remain available to existing customers to build, test and ship iOS apps to testers through buddybuild.com," it added. The startup is no longer accepting new customers. "Existing 'Free Starter' plans and Android app development will be discontinued on March 1, 2018," the company said. According to TechCrunch, buddybuild would be rolled into Xcode, Apple's suite of development tools for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS. Apple still generates significant revenue from apps. "Of the $17 billion generated in Q3 from apps globally (excluding China), Apple accounted for around $11 billion of it, according to App Annie," the report added. Buddybuild was founded in 2015 by former Amazon employees Dennis Pilarinos and Christopher Stott. In 2014, Apple acquired TestFlight which began to require users to employ Xcode to utilise the service. There were also reports earlier this week of Apple looking to acquire Netflix instead of launching a video subscription product in 2018 to counter Netflix. In fact, Apple has been on an expansion spree. In December, it acquired music recognition app Shazam for $400 million. Prior to that in November, acquired Vrvana, a startup from Montreal, Canada , which makes Totem headset, for around $30 million. Prior to that, it also acquired InVisage Technologies in November as part of its strategy to work on smaller but powerful computing devices. InVisage develops solutions to improve imaging capabilities on space-constrained devices, like smartphones. Anant Maheshwari said he is proud to play a role in the transformation of India's core pillars of education, health care, agriculture and governance. Various technologies at Microsoft that began transforming the lives of individuals and communities in India last year will gain further momentum in 2018, the company's President Anant Maheshwari said on Tuesday.
In a mission statement, Maheshwari said he is proud to play a role in the transformation of India's core pillars of education, health care, agriculture and governance, among others. Today, about 25 per cent students drop out from grade 10 to grade 11. "We have partnered with Andhra Pradesh government to see how machine learning can help educators foresee signs of a student being on the risk of dropping out and take preventive action. In 2017, the government expanded the rollout of the programme to all 13 districts in the state," Maheshwari said. Microsoft has also initiated "Project Sangam" that aims to upskill the workforce to prepare it for jobs that exist now and in the future. "The learning modules are hosted on the Cloud and are coupled with the power of LinkedIn to enable candidates to find jobs," he said. Along with the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Microsoft is using machine learning and historic weather data to predict the best time for sowing seeds and other stages of the farming process and pass on that information to farmers via SMS. "In 2017, we not only increased the pilot to more farmers across additional states like Telangana, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, but also expanded the crops for which we can provide predictive information and saw increase in crop yields ranging from 10 per cent to 30 per cent," Maheshwari informed. Researchers at Microsoft India are also working on a project which uses low-cost ground-based sensors and aerial photography, along with data analysis systems that can provide even better predictive analysis for individual fields. When it comes to health care, Telangana government is using Microsoft's Cloud-based advanced analytics solution to screen children from birth to 18 years of age for major conditions affecting the health of children in the state. "One of the insights from the screenings indicated that visual impairment was among the most prevalent health issues among children. This led Telangana government to adopt Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE), which was developed in partnership with LV Prasad Eye Institute," Maheshwari said. MINE uses machine learning and advanced analytics to predict regression rates for eye operations, enabling doctors to pinpoint the procedures needed to prevent and treat visual impairments. While the rest of the world might be talking about self-driving cars, researchers at Microsoft India have devised ways on how low-cost tech can make drivers drive better. "Project 'HAMS' uses a smartphone as an intelligent edge device that can track multiple events such as driver distraction, fatigue and gaze tracking, as well as vehicle ranging, which determines whether a safe separation distance is being maintained with the vehicles in front," he added. Researchers are now looking at Bollywood movie scripts to figure out how bots of the future will be able to understand how humans mix languages in a conversation. "We are also breaking language barriers by adding more Indian languages in Microsoft Translator," Maheshwari said. YouTube has withdrawn its app from Amazon’s smart platform following Google’s fight with Amazon. In the world of consumer technology, apps play an important role and decide the rise or demise of a particular platform. Google’s YouTube is currently the biggest source of video content on the web and every platform provides an app to access it — except for Amazon, whose Fire TV stick and Echo Show tablets are currently witnessing the withdrawal of the app.
The removal of the app is Google’s way of retaliating to Amazon’s refusal of selling Google’s products and services on their e-commerce platform. Google had been in talks with Amazon for reaching an agreement on selling their products on their marketplace while Google would make available Amazon’s content on their devices such as Chromecast and others. Google had also been looking forward to providing their apps on Amazon’s Fire TV platform. However, neither party could reach a conclusion, leading to the Search giant pulling off the support for YouTube from Amazon’s latest range of Echo smart devices. In an interview to The Verge, YouTube said, “We’ve been trying to reach an agreement with Amazon to give consumers access to each other’s products and services. But Amazon doesn’t carry Google products like Chromecast, and Google Home doesn’t make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of Nest’s latest products. Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and FireTV. We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon.” Currently, Fire TV owners can access the website version of YouTube from browsers such as Firefox and Silk. Another way to keep using YouTube is to prevent updating the firmware so as to keep the app working. Leaks reveal that the 4G-enabled 3310 could be running Android-based YunOS operating system. HMD Global brought back the world’s favourite mobile phone brand back to prominence in 2017 by marking a solid re-entry with Android-powered Nokia smartphones and a reincarnated version of the ‘brick phone’ — the 3310. However, the 3310 never really caught up with the crowd due to its lack of support for modern ‘must-have’ features such as faster Internet connections, support for popular apps and a basic OS. However, it seems that the 3310 could be undergoing a complete ‘soul overhaul’ with the 4G version of the 3310.
If we are to hope for TENAA’s listings to become true anytime soon, then the 4G 3310 could be running on YunOS. YunOS was developed by Alibaba group for trying their hands designing a mobile phone operating system. What’s unique about YunOS is that unlike Amazon’s Firefox OS, it can run Android apps as it is based on Google’s Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The OS is actively used in China, where Alibaba claims that around 157 million devices are utilising the platform. If the 3310 comes up with YunOS, then there might be a possibility of the phone becoming a massive hit amongst the ‘budget-smartphone-seeking’ crowd. Android app support will allow for popular messaging platform WhatsApp to be ported to the feature phone, which is very important these days in a smartphone-oriented country like India. However, we also expect Nokia to put in beefier specifications inside that cutesy body to provide a seamless user experience. Users blasted the review section over the inclusion of the infamous Coinhive in-browser miner’s JavaScript code in the extension. Google has taken down an extension of its Chrome browser which was reportedly to be secretly mining cryptocurrency using the CPU power of the users.
Archive Poster, a widely used extension which allowed Tumblr users to "reblog, queue, draft, and like posts right from another blog's archive" was said to be hijacking the CPUs of over 1,05,000 users to secretly mine Monero cryptocurrency. Users took it to the review section of the extension to express the disappointment. Users blasted the review section over the inclusion of the infamous Coinhive in-browser miner’s JavaScript code in the extension. Coinhive is the same miner which was used by the torrent website The Pirate Bay to mine cryptocurrency using user’s CPUs. The extension kept mining the cryptocurrency until the browser was open and did not prompt any permission from the users. The process is popularly known as cryptojacking. Besides, there is no option for the user to shut the process but to uninstall the extension or close the website executing the process. After the extension was taken down, another extension ‘[SAFE] Archive Poster’ has emerged. Offered by ‘Archive Poster’, the extension does not provide any screenshot of how it works, which raises serious concerns about the reliability of the extension. iTunes has been a huge hit for Apple, but viewers have migrated increasingly to services like Netflix or Amazon to watch their favourite shows. Contrary to the reports of Apple launching a video subscription product in 2018 to counter Netflix, analysts from Citi have said that the iPhone maker could possibly buy the entertainment company by taking advantage of US President Donald Trump's corporate tax cut.
According to Citi analysts, Jim Suva and Asiya Merchant, there is a 40 per cent likelihood that Apple will acquire Netflix. Under the new taxing rules, the tech giant will be able to repatriate about $220 billion in cash to the US. "The firm has too much cash -- nearly $250 billion -- growing at $50 billion a year. This is a good problem to have," Suva and Merchant were quoted as saying. "Historically, Apple has avoided repatriating cash to the US to avoid high taxation. As such, tax reform may allow Apple to put this cash to use. With over 90 per cent of its cash sitting overseas, a one-time 10 per cent repatriation tax would give Apple $220 billion for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) or buybacks," they added. A report in business insider said that iTunes has been a huge hit for the company, but viewers have migrated increasingly to services like Netflix, Amazon or Hulu to watch their favourite shows leaving Apple struggling to offer a compelling TV or movie offering. In September 2017, reports poured in that Apple might lease the Culver Studios in California as it plans to pour $1 billion into TV and movie productions. The battle for best movie scripts and television projects has intensified between tech giants in the Silicon Valley. Google-owned YouTube is already producing original television series and Amazon has won Oscars for "Manchester by the Sea" show. The iPhone maker has already hired top Hollywood talent, Sony duo Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg, to lead its Hollywood push and is reportedly developing a new TV show that will star Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. Google claimed that "Tacotron 2" can detect from context the difference between the noun "desert" and verb "desert" and alter its pronunciation accordingly. In a major step towards its "AI first" dream, Google has developed a text-to-speech artificial intelligence (AI) system that will confuse you with its human-like articulation.
The tech giant's text-to-speech system called "Tacotron 2" delivers an AI-generated computer speech that almost matches with the voice of humans, technology news website Inc.com reported. At Google I/O 2017 developers conference, company's Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the internet giant was shifting its focus from mobile-first to "AI first" and launched several products and features, including Google Lens, Smart Reply for Gmail and Google Assistant for iPhone. According to a paper published in arXiv.org, the system first creates a spectrogram of the text, a visual representation of how the speech should sound. That image is put through Google's existing WaveNet algorithm, which uses the image and brings AI closer than ever to indiscernibly mimicking human speech. The algorithm can easily learn different voices and even generates artificial breaths. "Our model achieves a mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.53 comparable to a MOS of 4.58 for professionally recorded speech," the researchers were quoted as saying. On the basis of its audio samples, Google claimed that "Tacotron 2" can detect from context the difference between the noun "desert" and the verb "desert," as well as the noun "present" and the verb "present," and alter its pronunciation accordingly. It can place emphasis on capitalised words and apply the proper inflection when asking a question rather than making a statement, the company said in the paper. Meanwhile, Google's engineers did not reveal much information but they left a big clue for developers to figure out how far they have come in developing this system. According to the report, each of the '.wav' file samples has a filename containing either the term "gen" or "gt." Based on the paper, it's highly probable that "gen" indicates speech generated by Tacotron 2 and "gt" is real human speech. ("GT" likely stands for "ground truth," a machine learning term that basically means "the real deal".) OnePlus 5T is likely to revive the sandstone material which was away for the past two smartphones. OnePlus might be bringing back the sandstone variant which it used for its OnePlus One and OnePlus 2. Company’s latest flagship — OnePlus 5T is likely to revive the sandstone material which was away for the past two smartphones. OnePlus has teased a new video that says “What’s in the Box?” on YouTube showing users holding a mystery box. While the video doesn’t reveal anything about the new variant, the people in the video mention words such as “stone,” “sand,” “grippy,” “smooth.” The video also teases “Unbox the mystery. January 2018.” OnePlus also recently launched the OnePlus 5T Star Wars Limited Edition priced at Rs 38,999. The company is also bundling the device with a special Star Wars themed cover. The new limited edition comes with a White finish, alongside the Star Wars logo and the OnePlus branding below the fingerprint sensor. The slider button now comes in Red colour, and we might see some pre-loaded Star Wars theme and ringtones on the device. To recall, the original OnePlus 5T sports a 6.01-inch full HD with 1080 x 1920 pixels resolution, protected by 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass. The OnePlus 5T is powered by an octa-core Snapdragon 835 processor clocked up to 2.45GHz. The smartphone runs on OxygenOS 4.7 based on Android 7.1.1 Nougat. The display also supports sRGB and DCI-P3 colour gamuts. The OnePlus 5T sports Face Unlock feature which the company claims that it is based on advanced facial recognition system and also feature a fingerprint scanner at the back panel. On the photography front, the OnePlus 5T sports a 16MP primary sensor with 1.12-micron pixels and a 20MP Sony IMX376K front shooter. The device is fuelled by 3300mAh non-removable battery. The smartphone will be available in a Midnight Black colour variant. |
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