OnePlus is now ready to lift up all the suspense and launch the much anticipated OnePlus 5T. The company has already sent out media invites for the upcoming launch event which will be held in Brooklyn, New York. The company is all geared up to unveil the smartphone globally on November 16 at 11 AM ET (9:30 PM IST). the event is not only restricted to media as fans can also join the event by paying a sum of $40 as an entry fee which will be later donated to charity.
However, OnePlus fans in India can also watch the event at select PVR theatres across Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune. The fans can buy the ticket for just Rs. 99 via Bookmyshow, starting today and the event will be held on November 16 at 9:30 PM IST. Interestingly, all the fans will be able to experience the all-new OnePlus 5T at the venue, right after the launch with free snacks and a surprise gift. The company will also be live-streaming the event so that anyone can watch the event around the globe.
OnePlus also announced that the OnePlus 5T will go on an Early Access sale on November 21 at 4:30 PM IST on Amazon.in and the company's own website, oneplusstore.in. The smartphone will be available through all sales channels in the country soon after.
As far as the specifications are concerned, the OnePlus 5T is expected to sport a 6-inch display with a resolution of 1080x2160 pixels and an 18:9 aspect ration. The smartphone is rumoured to come with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset. It is being said that the upcoming smartphone will have a better camera and a better display when compared to the OnePlus 5.
Twitter, the popular social networking service, has finally increased its character limit. The website earlier had a limit of 140 characters and it has now been doubled up to 280 characters. However, users tweeting in certain languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean will be restricted to the same old 140 characters limit as those languages use fewer characters.
The website made a tweet stating, "We're expanding the character limit! We want it to be easier and faster for everyone to express themselves."
The social networking site claims that 9 percent of the tweets made in English hit the 140 character limit. Twitter believes that increasing the character limit will be helpful in getting more people to tweet and will ultimately help it to increase its user base. Twitter has also stopped counting polls, photos, videos and other things toward the limit in order to fit in more characters into that single tweet.
Aliza Rosen, Product Manager said in a blog post that the test showed most people still used 140 characters or fewer, suggesting the fast-moving nature of Twitter will not change.
"Our goal was to make this possible while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter," Rosen said. "We're excited to share we’ve achieved this goal and are rolling the change out to all languages where cramming was an issue," he further added.
Originally Twitter started the character limit so that the tweets can easily fit into a text message. People earlier used text messages to receive tweets and 140 characters were easy to send in one go. The company finally decided to increase the limit as now most people use the mobile app instead of the old-fashioned text messages.
Lenovo owned Motorola recently unveiled the mid-range Moto X4 during IFA in Berlin. The company is now gearing up to launch the smartphone in India on November 13. Motorola confirmed this by sending out the media invites for an event which will be held in New Delhi. The company also made a tweet via its official Twitter handle regarding the launch date and availability of the device. Motorola claims that the upcoming Moto X4 will be exclusive to the e-commerce website Flipkart.
Flipkart being the exclusive to sell the Moto X4 has already set up a page on its website for the Moto X4 launch. The page mentions 4 E's to promote the smartphone which includes extraordinary, exceptional, excellent and exquisite. The media invites sent out by Motorola states "Experience 'perfection' crafted into a smartphone as Motorola brings to you the new Moto X4."
As far as the specifications are concerned, the Moto X4 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 SoC coupled with Adreno 508 GPU. The smartphone features a 5.2-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels. The phone packs in 3GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage which is further expandable up to 256GB using a microSD card. Under the hood, there is a 3,000mAh battery powering up the device. The Moto X4 runs on Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box and will be soon updated to Android 8.0 Oreo.
As for the optics, the Moto X4 comes with a dual-camera setup at the back consisting of a 12-megapixel sensor coupled with an 8-megapixel sensor. The rear cameras come with a dual-tone LED flash for better low light images. Up front, there is a 16-megapixel sensor with f/2.0 aperture and a selfie flash.
The Moto X4 was initially launched in Super Black and Sterling Blue colour variants and Motorola is expected to launch both the colours in India as well.
InFocus, the US-based smartphone manufacturer on Tuesday announced that they will be slashing the price of the InFocus Snap 4 smartphone in India for a limited time period. The device will be available on Amazon India for Rs. 9,999 with a discount of Rs. 2,000. The smartphone will be available online with the special discount from November 1 to November 17. The InFocus Snap 4 was initially launched in India at Rs. 11,999 back in September. The USP of the InFocus Snap 4 is its quad camera setup: two at the rear, and two up front.
As for the specifications, the InFocus Snap 4 sports a 5.2-inch HD display with a resolution of 720x1280 pixels. It is powered by the MediaTek MT6750N processor coupled with the Mali-T860 GPU. It comes with 4GB of RAM along with 64GB of internal storage expandable via microSD card. It is backed by a 3,000mAh non-removable battery, and this smartphone runs on Google's Android 7.0 Nougat operating system.
As for the camera, the InFocus Snap 4 comes with a dual camera setup on the rear: 13-megapixel + 8-megapixel, both the cameras work in tandem to produce good bokeh effect images. On the front, the smartphone features a dual camera setup: 8-megapixel + 8 megapixel. Additionally, the front camera also comes with a live beautification feature.
The company launched the InFocus Snap 4 in India along with the InFocus Turbo 5 Plus back in September, both the devices are camera-centric. We think that the company is asking a bit more for the devices, and there are much cheaper options from competitors currently available in the market.
Bharti Airtel, one of the leading telecommunications services provider in India, introduced 'Data Rollover' facility for its home broadband customers. Using this new facility, customers will be able to carry forward their unused monthly data to the next month. This facility is introduced for the first time in India under the fixed home broadband segment.
George Mathen, CEO – Homes, Bharti Airtel, said, “At Airtel, our constant endeavour is to deliver best in class service experience and great value to our customers. With this innovation, our home broadband users no longer have to worry about their unused data, which will always be available to them. Home broadband continues to drive the massive growth of in-home consumption of online content and the combination of Airtel V-Fiber and ‘data rollover’ will enable a truly world-class experience for today’s digital homes.”
The 'Data Rollover' facility will make sure that no user's monthly data is wasted and customers can enjoy more data on the next billing cycle. The company claims that customers can accumulate up to 1000 GB data and easily track their usage and balance data available on MyAirtel App. However, existing customers can check the data rollover eligibility on their MyAirtel App, while the New customers can log on to Airtel's website to opt for a plan with data roll over.
Airtel's recently launched 'V-Fiber' is now available in 87 cities across India. The V-Fiber is a combination of Fiber and Vectorization technology that delivers up to 100mbps of speed. The company offers a huge range of home broadband plans with large dollops of high-speed data and unlimited free calls to any number in India.
Airtel Home Broadband now has over 2.1 million customers and is the second largest home broadband provider in the country.
iVoomi, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer, recently stepped into the Indian market with a portfolio of budget-oriented smartphones. The company has blissfully announced that they have reached the 1,50,000 mark in selling smartphones in India during its festive season. The massive figure is a collation of its sales across various platforms like Flipkart and Amazon.
Commenting on the announcement, Mr. Ashwin Bhandari, iVOOMi India Said, “It is an achievement for iVOOMi India, and we are extremely thankful to our iVOOMi family for their support in achieving this milestone. This is just the beginning. We will continue to provide world-class technology and advanced features as a value proposition. Strategic planning and close control over our supply chain for our highest selling smartphones – Me3 & Me3S throughout the festive season have also helped in increased sales.”
As iVoomi had a lot of discounts for its customers during the festive season, it also saw a massive growth in sales. The company offered huge discounts on it flagship products Me3 and Me3S alongside other products which include Me1, Me4 and the Me5. During the season, the company also offered a Cash Back through Mobikwik on the purchase of an iVoomi smartphone. Apart from the discounts, the company also provided its customers with Free Screen replacement offer on Me3 & Me3s for up to 180 days. In particular, iVoom Mi Me3 and Me3S were the highest sold models of smartphones offered by the brand during the festive season sale.
The company also feels proud for achieving a milestone of establishing more than 1,000 service centres across India, fulfilling their promise to provide unmatched after-sales services.
OnePlus has been giving a lot of hints on its upcoming smartphone, the successor to the OnePlus 5. There have also been a lot of leaks and rumours regarding the upcoming OnePlus 5T. Now that the rumours are coming to an end and OnePlus is all geared up to kick off the suspense and reveal the smartphone to the world, the launch date has been put forward by the company. The company gave a hint before that the smartphone will be launching in New York, and now the company says the event will be held on November 16.
Interestingly, this time the launch event is not only restricted to the media as OnePlus fans can also join in by paying a decent amount of $40 ticket. OnePlus claims that the money given by fas as entry fees will be given away to charity. However, as usual, the launch event will also be live-streamed so people can watch the event from anywhere around the globe.
OnePlus has also revealed the availability of the new smartphone. The OnePlus 5T will go on sale in North America and Europe starting November 21. The device will also go on sale in India on the same date, Nov 21, but as a flash sale. However, the official sales in India will start from November 28. Surprisingly, the company's home country China, will not be receiving the device anytime before December 1.
Apart from the launch and availability details, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau also revealed the estimated price of the upcoming smartphone. The pricing details were revealed by Lau in a Chiese micro-blogging website, Weibo. Though the exact prices were not revealed, Lau says that the pricing would be slightly higher than that of the OnePlus 5. He claims that the OnePlus 5T will cost under CNY 4,000 (roughly Rs. 39,000) for the 6GB RAM variant.
Gionee the Chinese smartphone manufacturer will be launching eight new smartphones with bezel-less displays on November 26. The company is expected to do so in its home country in Shenzhen, China. This can be assumed seeing the invite that the company shared on Weibo, the Chinese social networking website. In the invite eight smartphone displays can be seen with an aspect ratio of 18:9.
A report from Android Headlines has claimed, that Gionee will be launching the - M6, M2018, S11, S11 Plus, and the M7 Plus on November 26. Out of all these, the M6 and the M2018 will be the company's flagship devices. Additionally, the M7 Plus will be a premium looking device with a leather back, 6GB of RAM along with 64GB of internal storage. In another report, it is said that the M7 Plus will sport a 6.43-inch display with an aspect ratio of 18:9.
The M2018 will be succeeding the M2017 lunched previously this year in China. It was priced at CNY 6,999 (Approximately Rs. 68,000). The Gionee S11 will sport a 6-inch full HD+ display with an aspect ratio of 18:9, it will be powered by a MediaTek MT6763 processor, 16-megapixel primary camera along with a 5-megapixel selfie camera.
All of these smartphones which will be launched on November 26 will come running on Google's Android Nougat operating system with Gionee's own AmigoOS skin on top. Currently, we don't know how much will the devices be priced at or how much will they cost, however, we will keep you updated whenever we get the news.
In early August we wrote about how Apple was teasing AR support for its new iPhone. And as it turned out, it was more than a tease! In the process of unveiling not one but two new iPhone editions (the iPhone 8/8-plus, and the iPhone X), Apple also introduced iOS 11, which comes with support for ARKit. For those who aren’t familiar just yet, ARKit is a design program that enables developers to create beautiful and convincing augmented reality experiences that need only a mobile device to work. While Apple’s interest in AR had been rumoured and written about for some time, the sudden rollout of such a fully developed platform caught a lot of users by surprise.
By now we’ve had a little bit of time to dive into iOS 11 and try out many of the first apps to be released for augmented reality. For the most part, these apps speak for themselves in terms of what kinds of experiences they offer. But here we’re going to look a little bit deeper, to see what we can learn from these early apps.
Simplicity Will Be Valued In Gaming
One of the first games that came out in the iOS app store was actually an adaptation of a very simple (if somewhat addictive) game called Stack. Designed by Ketchapp, it involves nothing more than stacking squares on top of each other for as long as you can, though soothing visuals and sound effects make it an almost meditative game. In AR, the game doubles as a smooth adaptation and a nice show of what AR can do. The game itself is pretty much the same, except that you’re now stacking on top of a surface in the real world (or at least it looks that way). It’s almost oddly exciting to see how high you can build your tower, and the one-tap controls make it easy to play the game while you focus your phone so that it’s “looking” at the tower. On its own, Stack AR is a huge success – the best game of Stack you will ever play, as one review put it – but it’s also an indication that the simplest games may be the best in augmented reality.
AR Projects Systems As Well As Elements
That phrase may not make sense on its own, but unpacking it a bit it’s fairly clear. We think of AR as projecting elements of games and other activities, such as a character or, in the case of Stack AR, a set of shapes. But in the early going it’s become clear that AR can also project entire gaming systems, environments, or boards just as well. We’ve seen this through games like The Machines, which puts a whole game board smoothly on top of a real-world surface. This could hold a lot of implications for gaming moving forward. We’re very likely to see popular board games projected in a similar fashion. We’ve also already seen casino platforms launching virtual reality sections online, and they too could adapt to AR. Roulette wheels, gaming tables and the like would make for similarly easy simulations. Broadly speaking, just keep in mind that the surface or parameters of a given physical game are proving
just as easy to create as individual elements.
The most noticeable thing about the AR corner of the iOS app store right now is its heavy focus on home planning. There are apps meant to measure the dimensions of rooms through AR, and others that help people to plan furniture purchases. It’s likely that these are only the beginning of practical uses (rather than entertainment) that will come about via AR. It’s difficult to speculate right now on what some of those practical uses may be, but the home design apps we’re already seeing demonstrate that AR is not a “just-for-fun” development.
Creativity Will Be A Primary Focus
This is something that we probably could have predicted before AR came about, but it’s an idea that’s held up through the first wave of apps to reach Apple devices. But while we just noted that AR doesn’t exist just for fun, it’s also clear that people are going to get a lot of enjoyment out of all kinds of creative activities. Lightspace, a new app by Logical Animal, offers you the chance to use your phone as a paintbrush; numerous apps allow you to place gifs or images in physical space for photo opportunities. And we’re also already seeing early versions of games that involve the construction of environments and cities. It’s already become clear that AR has essentially become a new form of artistic expression that’s only going to grow from here.
Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, is gearing up to launch another mid-range smartphone in India, the Honor 7X. George Zhao, Honor's Global President announced that the company will be launching the Honor 7X in India in the month of December. He also stated that the upcoming smartphone will be an offline exclusive in India.
In an interview with IANS, Zhai boldly said, “We will launch Honor 7X in December at such a price that it will have no competitor in that segment,”
“We have the capability to out-compete other dominating players in the Indian smartphone market in terms of quality, but our marketing efforts need to improve,” he further added.
As for the specifications, the Honor 7X features a 5.9-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels and an aspect ratio of 18:9. The smartphone is powered by the company's own Kirin 659 processor coupled with Mali-T830 MP2 GPU. The device packs in 4GB of RAM with 32GB, 64GB or 128GB as storage options. The storage on the device is expandable up to 256GB using a microSD card. Under the hood, there is a 3,340mAh battery powering up the device. The Honor 7X runs on Android 7.0 Nougat with EMUI 5.1 skin layered on top of it out of the box.
On the optics front, the Honor 7X sports a dual camera setup at the back consisting of a 16-megapixel primary sensor and a 2-megapixel secondary sensor. Up front, there is an 8-megapixel selfie shooter.
As for the connectivity, the Honor 7X supports 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1 LTE, GPS and GLONASS.
The Honor 7X is currently available in China at a price of CNY 1,299(roughly Rs.13,000) for the 32GB variant.The 64GB variant retails for CNY 1,699 (roughly Rs. 16,800) while the 128GB variant goes for CNY 1,999 (roughly Rs. 19,800).
