Google Pay roll out begins today, replaces Android Pay

Last month Google announced that it is merging Android Pay and Google Wallet into a single brand – Google Pay, making it an unified payment solution. Today the company has renamed the Android Pay app to Google Pay. The company said that it is currently working on bringing Google Pay to all Google products so that user will have a consistent checkout experience using the cards saved to their Google Account. As announced earlier, Google is also working with partners online and in stores, so Google Pay will replace Android Pay on sites, in apps, and other places around the world. It still has all the existing features such as bank's perks and protections. Google also said that it has an extra layer of security, since Google Pay doesn’t share your actual card number when you pay in stores. It will get more features soon, and in the next few months, U.S. and UK users will be able to use Google Pay to send and request money. Google Wallet app is now called Google Pay Send, and has been redesigned to match the new Google Pay brand. This will likely be a temporary name until it merges it into the core Google Pay app. Google already said ...

Flipkart Billion Capture+ Battery Life Test – #OneChargeRating

Flipkart launched its mid-range  Billion Capture+ smartphone as a part of its Billion brand recently. We already brought you the review of the phone, here we have the battery life test results of the phone. It packs a 3,500mAh built-in battery, has a 5.5-inch 1080p display, is powered by Octa-Core Snapdragon 625, has up to 4GB of RAM and runs on Android 7.1.2 (Nougat). Check out the test results below. Talk Time It lasted for 33 hours and 34 minutes in our talk time test. 3G Browsing It lasted for 7 hours and 49 minutes in our 3G browsing test. WiFi Browsing It lasted 10 hours and 6 minutes in our WiFi Browsing test. Video Playback It lasted for 14 hours and 16 minutes in our video playback test. Charging Time It took 1 hour 48 minutes for charging it from 0 to 100% since it has support for fast charging, and it took about 39 minutes to charge it from 0 to 50%. Standby Time It lasted for 53 days in our standby test. In achieved a One Charge Rating of 16 hours and 45 minutes, which is good for a phone with a 3,500mAh battery. Check out our battery life test procedure, to know more about our tests in detail.

Qualcomm raises its bid to acquire NXP

Qualcomm today announced that it has reached an agreement with NXP Semiconductors NV to raise its bid to $127.50 per share from $110 and has lowered minimum tender threshold to 70% of outstanding shares instead of the 80% it required under the earlier terms. Qualcomm said that it has reached a binding agreement with nine NXP Stockholders who currently collectively own more than 28% of outstanding shares which excludes additional economic interests through derivatives. The latest offer values NXP at $44 billion. The revised price reflects NXP’s recent performance which includes the 2017 results which exceeded Qualcomm’s transaction model on revenue, gross margin and EBIT and GAAP operating income also increased 20% from calendar 2016 to 2017. The NXP auto business has increased revenues by 11% YoY on the other hand,  Qualcomm has also significantly improved its own capabilities in key industry segments such as Auto, IoT, and Networking. NXP’s shares were up 6.5% at $126.15 in premarket trading. The acquisition will help Qualcomm in the fast-growing auto-mobiles chipset market. NXP has time till March 5th, 2018 and Qualcomm intend to fund the additional consideration with cash on hand and new debt. Qualcomm’s acquisition of NXP has received antitrust clearance from eight of the nine required government regulatory bodies around the world ...

Black Shark with Snapdragon 845, 8GB RAM surfaces in benchmarks, could be Xiaomi’s first gaming phone

A new smartphone codenamed Blackshark has surfaced on AnTuTu, revealing that it is a top-end smartphone. This hints that it could be Black shark technology incorporated, in which Xiaomi has invested. The company's website shows that it has been established  in August 2017 and its weibo account reveals that it is a mobile phone maker. The teaser on its website shows some kind of a gaming device. The AnTuTu listing reveals that the phone will be powered by Snapdragon 845 with Adreno 630 GPU and 8GB of RAM. It also reveals 32GB of storage, Android 8.0 (Oreo) and 2160 x 1080 FHD+ 18:9 display. The phone has scored 270680 points in AnTuTu, which is on-par with the upcoming Nubia NX606J that share similar specifications, but it has 6GB of RAM instead of 8GB of RAM. Xiaomi has not confirmed if they are working on a gaming phone under a sub brand. It might come with a 120 Hz display to compete with the Razer Phone. We will have to wait to find out more details about the mysterious smartphone. Source 1, 2

Google’s new AI algorithm can predict heart disease through retina scan

Google has announced its new AI algorithm that can detect heart diseases by retina scanning. Scientists from Google and its subsidiary health tech Verily claim that by deep scanning of a patient’s eye, the newly developed AI software is capable of accurately detecting data including age, blood pressure, and whether or not they smoke and more.  Furthermore, this can also detect the risk of a person suffering a major cardiac event with roughly more or less the same accuracy as current leading methods. the algorithm is said to make it simple for doctors to analyze a patient’s cardiovascular risk since it doesn't require a blood test. However, even before this software is implemented, it needs to be tested for accuracy and perfected. Google says that using the deep learning algorithms trained on data from over 284,335 patients, it was able to predict CV risk factors from retinal images which also included eye scans as well as general medical data.The company claims that the algorithm was able to distinguish the retinal images of a smoker from that of a non-smoker 71% of the time. Neural networks were used to mine this information for patterns, learning to associate telltale signs in the eye scans with the metrics ...

Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Review

Xiaomi launched the Redmi Note 5 smartphone in India last week. As expected, it is the same Redmi 5 Plus that was introduced  in China back in December last year, which is not a huge upgrade except for the full-screen display, camera and the selfie flash. It is definitely worth the price, but should you get it? Let us jump into the review to find out. Unboxing We recently unboxed the smartphone, check out the video below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUSzcpRBt_U Box contents Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 in Black color 2-pin charger (5V-2A) Micro USB cable SIM ejector tool Clear protective case User guide Display, Hardware and Design The main change in the Redmi Note 5 compared to the Note 4 is its 18:9 2.5D curved glass screen with gentle rounded corners. It has a large 5.99-inch Full HD+ display with a pixel resolution of 2160 × 1080 pixels and a pixel density of about 403 PPI. The display is bright, thanks to 450 nits brightness and has 1000:1 contrast ratio. Sunlight legibility is good, since it has a Sunlight display that uses hardware-level technology to adjust the contrast of each pixel in real time, so images are less affected by glare. It has 84% of NTSC color gamut, compared to 72% in the predecessor. It also has Corning Gorilla Glass 3 ...

Vodafone trials world’s first 4G IoT drone tracking and safety technology

Vodafone today announced the commencement of trials of the world’s first air traffic control drone tracking and safety technology. It uses the 4G IoT technology to protect aircraft from any unexpected accidents as well as prevent any unintentional or criminal drone incursions at sensitive locations such as airports, prisons, and hospitals. The company says that the regular drones are too small to be tracked by conventional radar and also present a serious risk to pilots worldwide, particularly in the immediate vicinity of airfields and airports. Since the usage of drone in criminal activities is a possibility, additional security and intelligence services are increasingly concerned about the wrong usage of them. With this thought in mind, Vodafone has developed the world’s first Radio Positioning System (RPS) for drones. It combined with Artificial Intelligence algorithms which are also developed by Vodafone enables very large numbers of drones to be tracked and controlled remotely. The company claims that it has kept the RPS research and associated intellectual property in the public domain with no licensing fees for re-use in order to accelerate the pace of drone safety and geolocation innovation worldwide. The Vodafone IoT drone tracking and safety technology trials support the objectives of the European Aviation ...

Chrome 64 for Android automatically cleans messy URLs when you share them

Chrome 64 for Android was rolled out last month with features like the white navigation bar, blocks auto redirect pop-ups and more and an ad blocker. Today the company is adding one more new feature that automatically shortens URLs and converts them and removes the unnecessary strings at the end of URLs. This feature was first spotted by Android Police cleans up long or messy URLs when shared through the browser’s built-in Share functionality in the overflow menu. You can also quickly copy the URL to the clipboard or share directly to another app with additional setup required. This feature is related to the "canonical page" URLs that Google started supporting some time ago. We've seen similar features in AMP pages where sharing the content would share a usable URL. It isn't functional in V63 and is only available in Chrome V64. Chrome's URL trimming will remove anchor tags that load a page to a specific location. This feature also works on links from Amazon, Google AMP, and also works with the “Copy to clipboard” option and any other third-party app. You can download the Chrome 64 directly from Play Store. Via

Swype Keyboard for Android discontinued

Nuance Communications, the makers of Swype Keyboard today announced that they are discontinuing the Keyboard for Android and iOS. According to a Reddit user who reached out to Nuance with a crashing issue has received a reply saying that they are ending the development. The Swype Keyboard app is one of the most used applications and in fact, it came pre-installed on Huawei and other phones. The company in their response email clearly clarified that the company will no longer be updating the Swype+Dragon keyboard for Android. It also mentioned that it is ending direct-to-consumer keyboard business to focus more on the AI solutions for sale directly to businesses. Furthermore, Nuance Mobility earlier this month announced the end of support to its iOS app and it will no longer be offering the Swype keyboard on the iOS app store. The company has also recently started working on getting its dictation software in vehicles. This is seriously sad news for those Swype users, and with that being discontinued, Gboard and SwiftKey keyboards are better alternatives. The company is a statement said:  Nuance will no longer be updating the Swype+Dragon keyboard for Android. We’re sorry to leave the direct-to-consumer keyboard business, but this change is necessary to allow us to concentrate on developing ...

Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact prototype surfaces – rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and no 3.5mm audio jack

Sony is expected to introduce the Xperia XZ2 Compact at the MWC 2018, but before the official launch, the device now surfaces in a new prototype image. The Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact next to a Xperia Z5 Compact shows a brief design and an idea of what to expect. A reader of Xperia Blog has left a comment on a post with an alleged photo of the Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact and also clarified that since it is a prototype image, it may not represent the final version. Furthermore, there is also no 3.5mm audio jack and a rear-facing fingerprint sensor much like the Xperia XA2. It has a slightly curved bottom design which completely contrasts from Sony’s usual blocky slab design. The final version of the Xperia XZ2 Compact will have a slightly smaller bezel on the top of the screen, and the design might reflect the plate + human design concept that was leaked back in 2015. With MWC 2018 event kickstarting in a few days, we are expecting the phone to make its appearance which might have a slightly modern look. Source