Online smartphone shipments in India grows 65% YoY in Q2 2018, Xiaomi leads with 54% share: Canalys

The online smartphone market in India is expected to surpass 15 million units in Q3 2018 with a growth of more than 25% year-on-year and expected to account a record 38% of the total smartphone market. In Q2 2018, online channels including Flipkart, Amazon, PayTm Mall, mi.com, OnePlus.com grabbed 35% share, growing 65% year-on-year. Shipments sold directly via vendors and websites accounted for 9% of all online shipments, while retailers such as Flipkart, Amazon, etc. took the remaining 91%. While almost all vendors in India have some sort of online presence, Xiaomi led the market by a mile, grabbing a commendable 54%, followed by Samsung with 13% and Huawei was third with 7%. Thanks to the festive season, Flipkart and Amazon are expected to stimulate demand with aggressive offers during their festival sale. This adding to the launch of sub-brands targeted squarely at the online consumers. The Xiaomi's Pocophone and OPPO's Realme are expected to boost shipments in Q3 and Q4, 2018. As of Q2 2018, 62% of smartphones were shipped to distributors in India and eventually resold to lower-tier channel partners and retailers. Asus who was earlier a 100% distributor led company until Q1 2018, revamped its go-to-market and moved to 100% online-only ...

Sony Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact Android 9.0 (Pie) update starts rolling out

Sony Mobile officially confirmed the list of its smartphones that will get Android 9.0 (Pie) update back in August. It said that its Premium-range models will get the upgrade from November, now the company has started rolling out the Pie update for its Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact smartphones earlier than expected date. Android Pie update comes with lots of new features and improvements including navigation gestures, Adaptive Battery that uses machine learning to prioritize system resources for the apps, App Actions, and more. The update comes with new camera app, however it doesn't include portrait selfie mode. The OTA update is 1.05GB in size and has version number 52.0.A.3.27. It also includes the latest October Android security patches. Xperia XZ2 Premium, Xperia XZ1 and XZ should get the update soon. The company already said that its XA2 series will get the update in early 2019. Source

Facebook Groups gets custom chat rooms with up to 250 members

Facebook might just combine Groups and Messenger as the company will gradually roll out the ability for members of Facebook Groups to launch group chats about specific sub-topics where up to 250 members can join. Group members can also start an audio or video calls with up to 50 members. Chat for Groups could make Facebook’s discussion forums bring more real-time engagement in strengthening the loyalty. Facebook, instead, of notifying you of every message in every thread, you’ll first get a Facebook Groups notification inviting you to each new group chat you have to voluntarily join to receive further notifications. In case you miss the initial alert, you can go to the new Chat tab on Facebook Groups to browse the active threads or launch a new one. You can also turn off notifications about message reactions and Messenger games or opt to only be notified if you’re mentioned in the thread. With Groups Chats, Facebook expects users could “plan events, arrange in-person meetings, or have deeper discussions.” Source

Apple iOS 12 is on 53% of devices from last four years

After being in beta for a while, Apple rolled out the iOS 12 updates to every compatible phone on September 17th.  The iOS 12 update is now present on 53% of active devices introduced in the last four years, according to Apple states page on the App Store.  iOS installation rates are being broken down in a new way. The 53% statistic applies only to devices released in the last four years. While it is at 50% on the whole. Of all the device released in the last four years, 40% are running on iOS 11 and 7% are running an earlier version of iOS. Among all devices, 39% continue to run iOS 11 while 11% use an earlier version of the operating system. Apple's data is in line with iOS 12 adoption rates as monitored by analytics site Mixpanel which suggested around 46% of devices were running iOS 12. The iOS 12 adoption has outpaced iOS 11 adoption rates at the same time last year. In early October of 2017, iOS 11 was only installed on approximately 38.5% of devices and by the early November 2017, the iOS 11 adoption rate hit 50%, according to Apple's official numbers. iOS 12 adoption rates are in ...

Facebook rolls out 3D Photos in News Feed and VR

Facebook announces the roll out of 3D photos which is a new way to share memories and moments in both the News Feed and VR.  You can scroll, pan and tilt to see the photo in realistic 3D and you can also view 3D photos in VR using the Oculus Browser on Oculus Go or Firefox on Oculus Rift. Facebook says that the 3D Photos use the depth maps that are stored with “Portrait” photos taken on iPhone 7+, 8+, X or XS. You’ll get the best results if your main subject is three or four feet away, and to really make it pop, try to capture scenes with multiple layers of depth, including something in the foreground and something in the background. https://ift.tt/2ISH2aD Facebook says for better results, try to avoid transparent objects like clear plastic or glass, as they aren’t always accurately captured by depth sensors. The ability to create and share 3D photos is already available and will be available to everyone in the coming weeks. Source

Twitter brings uniformity to emoji character count

Twitter has announced moving forward it will count all emojis equally including those with gender and skin tone modifiers. This update marks significant progress for our service, and everyone can now benefit from the additional room to express themselves with more character. It is also in support of recent updates to Unicode. The company is making this change to eliminate the differences in the way written text and emojis are encoded, many emojis have counted as more characters than other emojis. There was also a difference in character counts amongst emojis. Additionally, the company is also releasing an update to its Open- Source library - 'twitter-text 155' - to account for these changes. This handles the way the internal services and client applications parse Tweets. This has consistently been a very popular library, and many users still rely on it directly. Twitter is also releasing a supporting library for the Javascript implementation - twemoji-parser 55 - that enables identifying emoji entities within a string. Source

Google Assistant to get Screen call to handle spam calls; Duplex to roll out from November

Google earlier this week has introduced new hardware, and along with it, the company has introduced new Assistant features that will be coming over the next few weeks. The Google Assistant can now also control many popular media and entertainment devices, and the biggest among them is the ability to detect spam calls and let Assistant do the job for you.  When you get an incoming call from an unknown caller, just tap “Screen call” to let the Google Assistant help out. You'll see a transcript of the caller's responses in real-time. This feature is coming to Pixel 3 this month and to Pixel 1 and 2 in November. This uses the same AI technology as Google Duplex. The company back in May at the I/O 2018 introduced the Duplex technology which on behalf of the user takes the appointment requests and more. At the Pixel event, Google announced that this feature would live in November. All three generations of Pixels will be getting Duplex booking capabilities, but only in New York, Atlanta, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area to begin with. Every smartphone comes with a lockscreen, and this acts as a security layer but also makes the Assistant useless which could be ...

Apple Music partners with Genius for lyrics; Genius adds embedded Apple Music player

'Genius' as we know is the world’s biggest encyclopedia of music, built by artists, scholars, and super-fans working together. The company has announced that it is making Apple Music its default music player and subscribers who visit Genius will be able to play any song in full right from the song page. Genius will provide lyrics to thousands of hit songs on the service thus bringing world-class accuracy and timeliness that is backed by Genius’s global community of artists and fans. The Apple Music player is currently available on Genius.com and in iOS app. Ben Gross, Genius’s Chief Strategy Officer said: Being able to read lyrics and annotations on Genius while you listen along on Apple Music is a dream Genius experience. We’re proud to make Apple Music our official music player, and we’re doubly excited to bring Genius lyrics to their amazing platform. Source

Apple iPhone patent hints at automatic detection of nuisance callers using spoofed phone numbers

Apple seems to be working on a new technology that could detect nuisance callers using spoofed phone numbers as the company filed for patents named "Detection of spoofed call information." This system could let iPhones perform checks on a call to ascertain if it is genuine, if not warn the user of the nuisance callers or prevent it from disturbing the phone user at all.  There are cases where a call is made, a session initiation protocol (SIP) invite is sent along between phone networks to the user's device. The SIP invite can contain a number of elements, with headers providing data meant to establish the call, such as speech codec information, network equipment identifiers, 3GPP VoLTE protocol information, server identifiers, and other elements. While the spoofing caller can fill in some SIP invite fields, some are populated or overwritten by network servers as it travels. This automatically added or altered information constitutes a signature for that network, which could be used to compare with other existing call signatures to determine if the call itself is legitimate. The new Apple's system could also be used to determine if the spoofer is passing the call through a forwarding device, which is connected to a legitimate network ...

OPPO introduces Hyper Boost Smartphone Acceleration Technology

OPPO Mobile has introduced OPPO Hyper Boost, its full-scenario, system-level performance boost engine at an event in Shanghai, China yesterday. Developed extensively over the year, this promises improvements to smartphone's power consumption and performance by optimizing system-level resource allocation, says that company. Hyper Boost works by enabling real-time "two-way dialogs" between applications and system resources. After having recognized the various scenarios and user behaviors from different applications and game programs, Hyper Boost comprehensively optimizes the allocation of resources across the system to specific needs. This helps ensure better utilization of hardware resources, faster response speed of applications and game programs, and smoother operation of the overall system. Consisting of three parts, Hyper Boost offers comprehensive acceleration for smartphones at three levels: system, game, and application. System engine: Hyper Boost delivers system-level optimization across the Qualcomm and MediaTek platforms. The system engine provides over 50 solutions for optimizing the utilization of the underlying hardware resources against 20-plus software scenarios and 20-plus software behaviors, ensuring that users have a smooth and stable experience in almost every common scenario. This optimization helps general applications achieve up to 31.91% shorter loading time. Game engine: One of the smartphone manufacturers to first work with Tencent, Netease and ...