Tech Nuggets with the Technology

Sunday, December 15, 2019

No more mobile pujas & cricket: Data price pinches poor as much as onions

With Airtel, Vodafone and Jio increasing tariffs for prepaid plans, the urban poor, who get their fix of what digital anthropologist Payal Kapoor calls ABCD: Astrology, Bollywood, Cricket and Devotion, from their smartphones, are feeling the pinch https://ift.tt/2Pp5LrO https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Xiaomi Mi 10 confirmed to be launched in early 2020: Report

Xiaomi, it appears, is gearing up for an explosive start to the new year. According to a recent report by Chinese media outlet IT House on one of Sina Corp's websites, the launch of the Xiaomi Mi 10 smartphone has been confirmed to take place in the first quarter of 2020. The news reportedly comes from the Public Relations Manager of Redmi TV, a user who is identified on leaked screenshots online as ‘Panda’. With any luck, the new smartphone should sport the recently announced Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset.

Though we don't have an exact date for the launch of the new Xiaomi Mi 10, we know that it will happen in the first quarter of 2020. Apart from this, we know very little about the Xiaomi Mi 10. Lin Bin, the Founder and President of Xiaomi Corporation, announced at Qualcomm's annual Tech Summit event in Hawaii that the Xiaomi Mi 10 would be one of the first smartphones to be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 chipset is a successor to the Snapdragon 855 chipset that's currently seen doing duty on flagship-grade smartphones such as the OnePlus 7/7 Pro, Redmi K20 Pro, and Samsung Galaxy S10 series. Qualcomm claims the new Snapdragon 865 delivers a 25-per cent boost in performance and power efficiency even though it employs the same subsystem architecture as its predecessor with very little change to the cores' clock speeds. You can read more about it here.

Xiaomi launched the Mi 9 smartphone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset in several markets earlier this year but did not bring it to India. It features a 6.39-inch Super AMOLED display with Full HD+ resolution. It comes with up to 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage space. It has a triple camera setup on its back panel, including a 48MP primary sensor with f/1.8 aperture. The selfie camera is a single 20MP sensor with f/2.0 aperture. The Xiaomi Mi 9 is powered by a 3300mAh battery that supports 27W fast charging and 20W wireless charging. The handset runs MIUI 10 based on Android 9 Pie.

Cover image represents Xiaomi Mi 9, sourced from Xiaomi website

https://ift.tt/2LXdJ9x

Saturday, December 14, 2019

'We trusted you': WeWork's chair on Adam Neumann and the future

The SoftBank bailout has given WeWork some breathing room, but there are big problems to fix. The company has been opening so many locations that it is spending far more money than it is bringing in. https://ift.tt/2sxINWv https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

ByteDance unit establishes venture with Chinese state media firm

Bytedance has formed a series of partnerships with state media organisations in order to feed its leading news aggregator platform, Jinri Toutiao. https://ift.tt/35yerCd https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Google wants US Federal Reserve to follow India's UPI example

According to Google, UPI was thoughtfully planned and critical aspects of its design led to its success. https://ift.tt/38P3kXw https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Next-gen Google Assistant now available in Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, Singapore

Google demonstrated the power of its next-gen Assistant in a video earlier this year during Google I/O 2019. It showed that the popular virtual assistant could recognise voice commands much faster and work offline. This drastically improved Google Assistant was introduced in the Google Pixel 4/4 XL a couple of months ago but was restricted to the US market. Now, however, Google is rolling it out to the Pixel 4/4 XL other markets such as Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and Singapore.

The news of Google's new rollout comes in the form of a short and sweet text update on the Community section of the Google Assistant Help website. Available since December 12, 2019, the new Google Assistant currently works only in English. Support for other languages and locales are expected to be added soon, though we have no definite timeline. Google hasn't mentioned when or if the next-gen Assistant will be made available on non-Pixel devices.

According to Google, the next-gen Assistant is up to ten times faster in terms of voice response speed. The California-based company has apparently worked out a way to reduce the size of its speech recognition models from 100GB on the cloud to 500MB on the device, thus making it available for offline use as well. The next-gen Assistant also comes with Continued Conversation, a feature that lets the user ask follow-up questions to Assistant's responses. For example, a user can ask, “When was he born?” right after Google Assistant's response to, “Who is the artist of this song?”

The next-gen Google Assistant also incorporates a faster way to disable alarms and timers. For example, a user can say “Stop” when an alarm begins to ring to dismiss it. They needn't begin such commands with “OK Google”. In addition, saying, “Hey Google, let's drive” will bring up the new driving mode that replaces Android Auto. There, the user will find a long feed of information in sections such as ‘Just for you’, ‘Recent places’, ‘Communication’, and ‘Media’. In certain connected cars, they will even be able to modify the car's temperature remotely using Google Assistant.

https://ift.tt/34pB0r4

Distracted Boyfriend, Blinking White Guy, Pepe the Frog, and more: a rundown of 100 influential memes from the 2010s (BuzzFeed News)

BuzzFeed News:
Distracted Boyfriend, Blinking White Guy, Pepe the Frog, and more: a rundown of 100 influential memes from the 2010s — 100. Yodeling Walmart Kid — 99. Moth Memes 98. VSCO Girls — Every generation has its subcultures, and in 2019, Gen Z's was undoubtedly VSCO girls.

Airbnb rival WhyHotel, which operates temporary hotels out of unrented luxury apartment buildings, raises $20M Series B, bringing total raised to $35M (Paul Sawers/VentureBeat)

Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Airbnb rival WhyHotel, which operates temporary hotels out of unrented luxury apartment buildings, raises $20M Series B, bringing total raised to $35M — Airbnb has emerged as the single greatest disruptor of the $500 billion hotel industry over the past decade.

Xiaomi working on smart display to take on Amazon Echo Show, Google Nest Hub: Report

The modern smart display market in India was created practically in a year's time. It started with the launch of the Amazon Echo Show earlier this year, followed by a smaller and more affordable Amazon Echo Show 5. Shortly after that, Google brought in the Nest Hub and, more recently, Lenovo introduced its smart display portfolio. Now though, it appears these models may soon be joined by a smart display from Xiaomi. It's called XiaoAI Touchscreen Speaker Pro 8 and it costs CNY 599 (Rs 6,100 approx).

On Chinese electronics portal ITHome, we see leaked images of a boxed Xiaomi XiaoAI Touchscreen Speaker Pro 8. It looks like a product that's ready to be shipped. If these images are anything to go by, then we can tell the new Xiaomi smart display looks quite a bit like the Google Nest Hub. Distinguishing it from the Nest Hub is the fairly tall speaker bar below the rectangular screen with rounded corners. The entire device is painted completely white with no coloured accents on the front side.

According to the text on the device's box, the Xiaomi XiaoAI Touchscreen Speaker Pro 8 features three inbuilt passive diaphragms, which should boost its low-frequency performance. The Hi-Fi level audio processing chip and the high-performance amplifier made by Texas Instruments should provide high efficiency and low distortion. It also employs an advanced multi-band dynamic response control algorithm along with professional tuning from DTS.

The leaked information does not suggest when the Xiaomi smart display will be made available in the Chinese market but we expect it to go on sale sometime in the first quarter of 2020. It could even make its way to India a few months later. The price of the XiaoAI Touchscreen Speaker Pro 8 is listed on the website as CNY 599, which translates to about Rs 6,100. You may not be able to get your hands on the XiaoAI Touchscreen Speaker Pro 8 this year but you can always read our review of the Amazon Echo Show 5 here in case you're in the mood for gifting.

Cover image courtesy: Xiaomi Today.it

https://ift.tt/36A7DUt