Google I/O 2020 cancelled due to coronavirus concerns

Google has cancelled its I/O developers' conference for this year that was supposed to take place at Mountain View, California from May 12th to 14th due to coronavirus concerns. The company said that "it's sad that we won't be able to gather as a developer community but your health and safety is our priority." The company said that it is exploring new ways to connect and support the global developer community and will offer more details on google.com/io. We are exploring new ways to connect and support our global developer community. Stay tuned. More info soon → https://t.co/mSTQKlTa90 (2/2) — Google Developers (@googledevs) March 3, 2020 Also, guests who registered for the event will automatically enter the drawing for I/O 2021 tickets next year. Google has also announced that it will give $1 million to local small businesses and schools for STEM research and coronavirus protection. This is not the first global event that has been cancelled this year. MWC 2020 Barcelona, Facebook's F8 developer's conference, Game Developers Conference were some of the events that have been cancelled. Even though the event has been cancelled, it will likely have online streaming explaining the new features that will be introduced in Android 11 along with the ...

WhatsApp Dark mode finally available for all Android and iOS users

WhatsApp for Android got dark mode feature in beta back in January, and it has been in the works for iOS for more than a year. Now WhatsApp has announced the roll out of dark mode for all the Android and iOS users. This lets users choose from light or dark theme. The dark theme is more like dark gray unlike pure black available in some apps. Chats appear with dark background, and your messages are shown in green bubbles. WhatsApp said that when designing dark mode it spent time researching and experimenting with a focus on two particular areas: Readability: When choosing colors, we wanted to minimize eye fatigue and use colors that are closer to the system defaults on iPhone and Android respectively. Information Hierarchy: We wanted to help users easily focus their attention on each screen. We did this by using color and other design elements to make sure the most important information stands out. Users on Android 10 and iOS 13 can use dark mode by enabling it in system settings. Users on Android 9 and below can go into WhatsApp Settings > Chats > Theme > select ‘Dark’. The WhatsApp for iOS v2.20.303 update also brings new ...

Realme 6 series and Redmi Note 9 series India launch events cancelled due to coronavirus concerns, will have online launch

Last week realme announced an event in India to launch the realme 6 and realme 6 Pro smartphone on March 5th. Today the company has decided to cancel the event due to coronavirus concerns in the country. The company will still offer live stream of the event, in which the CEO Madhav Seth will give live speech at the Indira Gandhi Stadium in New Delhi. In light of current reports of #coronavirus impact & related advisory by health officials to maintain social distance as a precautionary measure, I'm calling off our biggest event. Will still give live speech in stadium with you watching #realme6series event online. #HealthFirst — Madhav 5G (@MadhavSheth1) March 3, 2020 The company sold launch event tickets at Rs. 599 starting from February 28th and said that it will include goodies worth Rs. 2500 and complimentary snacks, in addition to entry for the event. realme CEO said that it will offer full refund for the tickets and will also offer a free realme Band for those who bought the tickets. Providing full refund of ticket value. I know how excited you were for #realme6series launch, so as a special gesture will be giving a #realmeBand to every single person who booked a ticket. Details ...

Black Shark 3 Pro 5G gaming phone with 7.1-inch Quad HD+ AMOLED 90Hz display, Snapdragon 865, 12GB RAM and Black Shark 3 announced

Black Shark just announced the Black Shark 3 and Black Shark 3 Pro smartphones in China, as it had promised. The Black Shark 3 features a 6.67-inch FHD+ display and the Pro version has a 7.1-inch Quad HD+ screen. Both these have 90Hz refresh rate and world's highest touch sampling rate of 270Hz, and the company says that single-finger touch response delay is as low as 24ms, multi-finger touch response delay is as low as 28ms. These have screen pressure sensitivity 3.0, and the number of pressure-sensitive sensors increased to 4, and the pressure-sensitive area increased by 48%. These have MEMC intelligence Motion compensation technology as well. The phone is powered by Snapdragon 865 with up to 12GB LPDDR5 RAM and features "Sandwich" liquid cooling system, double-sided liquid-cooling covers key heat sources. Heat dissipation area is increased by 100% and the heat dissipation capacity is increased by 50% compared to the previous generation, says the company. It has Black Shark GameEngine and SolarCore intelligent game acceleration engine so that the games load faster, complex scenes run more smoothly with minimal power consumption for the best gaming experience. It has a new symmetrical design and the company says it is extremely comfortable to ...

HMD Global schedules an event on March 19 in London, Nokia 8.3, Nokia 5.3 and more expected

HMD Global has scheduled an event on March 19th in London to introduce new smartphones. There is a new separate event since there is no MWC this year. Last year at the MWC the company announced Nokia 9 PureView, Nokia 4.2, Nokia 3.2, Nokia 210 feature phone and Nokia 1 Plus Android Go Edition phone. At the London event later this month the company is expected to introduce Nokia 8.3 5G phone. Thie could be the phone that was teased back in December with ZEISS optics that will also offer 4K UHD ultra-wide video support, side-mounted fingerprint scanner and triple rear camera setup. Alongside, the company is also expected to introduce Nokia 1.3 and Nokia C2 budget phones, Nokia 5.3 and few feature phones such as Nokia 400 4G and see the revival of Nokia 5310 XpressMusic with large stereo speakers. There are also reports of 007 kevlar cases for Nokia 7.2 and 6.2 being introduced. We should know more details about the phones in the coming weeks. Source

Samsung invests $220 million in Vietnam to build R&D centre

Samsung Electronics has announced that it is building a $220 million dollar research and development centre in Vietnam aimed at enhancing the companies research capabilities. However, news has surfaced that Samsung had to cancel a ceremony related to the launch of the centre was cancelled, likely due to coronavirus outbreak. The new R&D centre is expected to finish constructions by the end of 2022 and will employ anywhere between 2200 and 3000 people. The main purpose of the plant would be to advance research in areas like artificial intelligence, internet of things, big data and 5G. Samsung is one of Vietnam's biggest single foreign investor, with a total of nearly $17 Billion invested. Smartphones and parts produced by Samsung contribute to Vietnam's exports that are worth about $51.38 billion. The coronavirus outbreak continue to affect the industry with many plants and industries struggling to ramp up its output. Samsung's Mobile device factory in Gumi, South Korea shutdown last weekend as a one of its workers tested positive with Coronavirus. Vietnam had also recently put up travel restrictions coronavirus-hit areas of South Korea, suspending their visa-free travel temporarily. Source

OnePlus Snowbot Battle will let anyone control 5G-powered Snowbots in global snowball fight

OnePlus today announced world’s first 5G-powered interactive snowball fight, which will take place starting 9th March 2020 for more than 70 consecutive hours in Finland. The experience will allow anyone from around the world to control the OnePlus Snowbots in a live snowball fight. OnePlus says that this will demonstrate the true 5G potential and how this can change the way people interact with smartphones, OnePlus developed custom-made snowball-firing robots: Snowbots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BlzzKny0TI The Snowbots will be operated through OnePlus devices with a 5G network, brought to the remote Lapland region by Finnish operator Elisa, allowing thousands of community members from across the globe to experience a seamless and lag-free offline-to-online gaming experience like never seen before. The OnePlus Snowbot Battle, hosted in Ruka-Kuusamo area, Lapland, Finland, will start on 9th March 2020 at 12:00pm GMT with a special Human vs. Robots event, that will see a selected number of people join in teams to play against the 5G-powered Snowbots operated by users from all across the world. From the evening 9 March to 12 March, the Snowbot Battle will run 24 hours a day, allowing everyone to join a team in the ultimate snowball fight. With the spirit of bringing its community together to experience ...

Apple to pay up $500 million to settle class action lawsuit for throttling older iPhones

Apple received a lot of backlash from the tech community and its users when they confirmed that they were throttling the performance of older iPhones with ageing batteries. Apple was since sued with a class-action lawsuit and has now finally decided to settle it, paying up to $500 million in fines. When initial reports of throttling surfaced broke out, Apple rejected any such claims. However as the number of throttling reports increased, Apple was forced to accept that they were throttling older iPhones, explaining that it was done in order to ensure system stability on the iPhones having older lithium-ion batteries. While settling the lawsuit, Apple still maintains that they did nothing wrong and it was not their intention to force Apple customers to upgrade to the newer devices. In their original statement back in December 2017, Apple did apologise for the miscommunication regarding the software throttling in their devices. They also said that in a future iOS updates, users can toggle this feature on/off and also have the ability to view detailed information of their batteries. The devices included in the class are former or current US owners of iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus and SE running iOS 10.2.1 or ...

Redmi 8 MIUI Software Update Tracker [Update: MIUI 11.0.7.0 Update with stability and bug fixes]

Xiaomi launched the Redmi 8 smartphone in India running MIUI 10.3 Global Stable on top of Android 9.0 (Pie). Xiaomi doesn’t follow any fixed update frequency for the MIUI Global Stable ROM but on average, the Global Stable ROM is updated once in a month. This post will help our readers in keeping track of MIUI updates for Redmi 8 (codename ‘olivein’), also check out our Redmi 8 content, Redmi 8 Unboxing and First Impressions Redmi 8 Review [gallery link="file" columns="2" size="large" ids="306463,306462"] MIUI Updates rolled out for the smartphone: [Mar 3, 2020]: Xiaomi has started rolling out MIUI 11.0.7.0.PCNINXM that brings bug fixes, however it still has January security patch. The update weighs 256MB in size. [Download Link] [Feb 17, 2020]: Xiaomi has started rolling out MIUI 11.0.6.0.PCNINXM with January security patch. The update weighs 633 MBs in size and adds a new Music Card to Vault and EU privacy adjustments. [Download Link] [Jan 18, 2020]: Xiaomi has started rolling out MIUI 11.0.5.0.PCNINXM update, the update weighs 208 MBs in size. [Download Link] [Jan 11, 2020]: Xiaomi has started rolling out MIUI 11.0.4.0.PCNINXM with December security patch. [Download Link] [Nov 22, 2019]: Xiaomi has started rolling out MIUI 11.0.2.0.PCNINXM with November security patch. The update weighs ...

Paytm gets brokerage licence to offer insurance products

Paytm today announced that it has received insurance brokerage license from IRDAI and will soon offer insurance across four categories including two-wheeler, four-wheeler, health, and life. The company added that Paytm Insurance Broking Private Limited (PIBPL), wholly-owned subsidiary One97 Communications Ltd (OCL), has already tied up with 20 of the leading insurance firms in India and will be integrating with 30 more companies over the next few weeks. Other than online initiatives, the company will be leveraging on its 16 million-strong merchant partner base to sell these insurance products across India. Building a large network of Point of Sales Persons (PoSP), it plans to increase the reach of insurance products to a large customer base. "This will also help us to empower millions of merchants with alternate income sources which they will earn through commissions on selling insurance products", said the company. Paytm has already started the process of shortlisting merchant partners who will be trained to become PoSPs and plan to rope in 2 lakh such PoSPs this year. Amit Nayyar, President of Paytm, said: Our entry into Insurance Broking is in line with our commitment to broaden our footprint into financial services and offering numerous and customized choices to millions of our ...