COVID-19: Airtel extends prepaid pack validity till April 17, gives Rs. 10 talk time to 80 million users

The whole world is fighting the coronavirus pandemic and the outbreak has impacted many. As many places in the world are under lockdown, many companies are introducing special measures to help people. Recently, Reliance Jio announced free 10 Mbps Jio Fiber connection in feasible areas, double data on Jio Fiber, several apps are offering paid subscriptions for free and more. On similar lines, Airtel has now announced special measures to assist low-income group customers impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. Over 80 million prepaid Airtel users will get validity extension till April 17th, 2020 and even if their plan is exhausted, they will still continue to receive incoming calls without interruption. Apart from this, these users will get Rs. 10 talk time and Airtel says that these special measures will help migrant workers and daily wage earners who may have been impacted by the outbreak of coronavirus. The company says that this benefit will be available to over 80 million users in the next 48 hours. Furthermore, Bharti Enterprises and its companies Bharti Airtel, Bharti Infratel and others are contributing a sum of over Rs 100 crore for India’s fight against COVID-19. Commenting on this, Shashwat Sharma, Chief Marketing Officer, Bharti Airtel said: In this difficult ...

Video conferencing apps witness increased demand due to coronavirus lock down globally

The whole world is fighting the coronavirus pandemic and the outbreak has impacted many. As many places in the world are under lockdown, people are working from home and resorting to apps and tools to stay in touch with colleagues, attend virtual meetings, and more. While video conferencing apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, etc are already popular among users, the impact of coronavirus has witnessed a surge in downloads of these apps and the report indicates a record growth in demand. According to the report, business apps crossed 62 million downloads during March 14-21 across Google Play Store and App Store and is 45% up from the week before March 14th. Furthermore, apps like Zoom Cloud Meetings witness a surge in downloads in the UK, US, and Europe and during the week of March 15-21 in the US, it was downloaded 14 times more than the weekly average during Q4 2019, 22 times more in France, 20 times more in the UK, 17 times more in Germany, 27 times more in Spain and 55 times more in Italy. Similarly, Microsoft Teams during the week of March 15-21 saw a surge in downloads at 13x in the UK, 11x in ...

Telegram v6.0.1 update brings Chat folders, channel stats, Archives and more

Telegram has released a new update to its chat app across all its supported platforms, bringing new features like chat folders with desktop sync, swipe to archive, new animated emoji and more. This update brings the app version up to v6.0.1. [gallery link="file" columns="2" size="large" ids="308769,308770"] The biggest feature in this update is the ability to organise your chats into folders. With more people using instant messaging apps, it can get quite cluttered in the chat list screen. To help with this, Telegram has introduced Folders that will automatically show in the interface if the chat list gets long enough. Users can also manually create folders by going to Settings→ Folders→add custom folders. Recommended preset folders will be present if Telegram decides to show Folders in the UI automatically. Each of the folders can have as many pinned chats as needed too and Telegram will sync your folders with the desktop app. Telegram always had the option to Archive chats, similar to the feature present in WhatsApp. They have finally added the shortcut option to swipe left of a chat to archive it quickly. Archived chats will stay hidden until a notification pops up from it. A pretty cool feature in this update is the ...

HONOR Play 9A with 6.3-inch 20:9 display, dual rear cameras, 5000mAh battery announced

At an event today, HUAWEI's HONOR brand along with the HONOR 30S and the Kirin 820 5G SoC also announced a budget smartphone - HONOR Play 9A, the successor of last year's HONOR Play 8A. The HONOR Play 9A flaunts a 6.3-inch HD+ display with a 20:9 aspect ratio and 1600 x 720 pixels. It is powered by the Octa-Core MediaTek Helio P35 SoC paired with 4GB RAM plus up to 128GB of internal storage. The storage can be expanded up to 512GB through microSD. The rear design is a step up from the HONOR Play 8A and this time the camera module has seen a refresh too. It also now sports a physical fingerprint scanner to the back which was lacking on the HONOR Play 8A. Coming to the optics, the Play 8A sports dual rear cameras which is a combination of 13MP f/1.8 (primary) + 2MP f/2.4 (depth sensor) and the front-facing camera is an f/2.0 8MP shooter. It runs on Android 10 on top of Magic UI 3.0.1 but does not ship with Google Mobile Services (GMS). Lastly, it packs a 5000mAh battery with support for 10W charging through a micro USB port. Honor Play 9A specifications 6.3-inch (1600 × ...

HONOR 30S with 6.5-inch FHD+ display, Kirin 820 5G, 64MP quad rear cameras announced

HUAWEI's HONOR brand just announced the HONOR 30S, the company's latest mid-range smartphone and the first smartphone to be powered by its Kirin 820 5G SoC in China, as it had promised. It packs a 6.5-inch FHD+ screen with 90.3% screen-to-body ratio with a punch-hole that houses a 16-megapixel camera, comes with a 64-megapixel main camera, 8-megapixel telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom, 8-megapixel 120° ultra-wide-angle lens and a 2-megapixel macro lens. It runs Android 10 with Magic UI 3.1.1, but has HUAWEI Mobile Services instead of Google Play Services, has a 2.4mm ultra-narrow side-mounted fingerprint scanner, gradient glass back and packs a 4000mAh large battery with 40W super fast charging that can charge up to 70% in 30 minutes. HONOR 30S specifications 6.5-inch (2400 × 1080 pixels) Full HD+ LCD 2.5D curved glass display with 96% NTSC color gamut HUAWEI Kirin 820 5G (1 x Cortex-A76 Based 2.36GHz + 3 x Cortex-A76 Based 2.22GHz + 4 x Cortex-A55 1.84 GHz) processor with ARM Mali-G57MP6 GPU, 1 x NPU (Neural-network Processing Unit) 8GB LPDDR4x RAM with 128GB / 256GB storage Android 10 with Magic UI 3.1.1 Dual SIM 64MP camera with f/1.8 aperture, 8MP 120° ultra-wide camera with f/2.4 aperture, 8MP telephoto ...

Kirin 820 5G 7nm Octa-Core SoC with Mali-G57 GPU, 73% improved NPU AI performance announced

HUAWEI's HONOR brand at the HONOR 30S launch event introduced Kirin 820 SoC, successor of last year’s Kirin 810. It uses 7nm processor technology, similar to the predecessor. This has one ARM Cortex-A76 prime core clocked at 2.36GHz, three ARM Cortex-A76 larger core clocked at 2.22GHz and the other four smaller ARM Cortex-A55 cores are clocked at 1.84GHz, which promises 27% CPU performance improvement compared to the predecessor and the new ARM Mali-G57 MP6 GPU, which has a 38% gaming performance improvement over the previous generation and supports Kirin Gaming+ 2.0 technology. It also has upgraded NPU with 1.33 TFLOPS computing power offering 73% improvements compared to the predecessor, and uses the same Kirin ISP 5.0 as the Kirin 990, and supports BM3D SLR image noise reduction and video dual-domain noise reduction. The Kirin 820 5G SoC supports 5G dual-mode, five frequencies, multi-dimensional search, such as network search, uplink / down link speed, and dual SIM experience. The company did not compare the Kirin 820 with any other processor, but the recent AnTuTu benchmark leak revealed advantages in terms of CPU / GPU performance compared to Kirin 810 and Snapdragon 765G, and almost the same in terms of CPU performance as the Kirin 980. The ...

Redmi K30 Pro will not be rebranded as POCO F2, POCO TWS earbuds coming soon: POCO GM

A couple of days back, XDA findings revealed that Redmi K30 Pro might launch under POCO branding in India and everyone assumed it to be long-awaited POCO F2. In an interaction with POCO Fans over a Zoom meeting today, POCO GM, C Manmohan has revealed that POCO F2 is a different smartphone from Redmi K30 Pro. POCO GM also revealed that POCO F2 is still in works and it will definitely not be priced around INR 20,000. To recall, POCO F1 took the entire industry by storm when it launched back in 2018 and offered insane value for money performance as it packed flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 with Liquid Cooling for just INR 20,999. Last week, Manmohan conducted a poll on Twitter asking fans about interesting gadgets that they want to see under POCO's portfolio, Hey guys, the home quarantine situation has offered me the luxury to sit back and think. For one - do you guys think POCO should launch other cool tech products apart from smartphones? If so, what do you guys suggest? Vote below! — C Manmohan (@cmanmohan) March 26, 2020 In today's Zoom video chat session, Manmohan also revealed that the company is working on TWS earbuds. Xiaomi has quite a ...

OnePlus 8 Series online launch event set for April 14

After rumors OnePlus just confirmed the OnePlus 8 global online launch event on April 14th. "At the launch event, a newly engineered display with an incredible 120 Hz refresh rate will be introduced, poised to deliver an even more fluid and immersive viewing experience. Coupled with it are a handful of other new and exciting technologies that will elevate the OnePlus flagship experience to a new level," said the company in the official release. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zozIECZKwF8 Back in January OnePlus confirmed that its next flagship will feature Quad HD+ OLED ‘Fluid Display’ with a refresh rate of 120Hz, 240Hz touch sampling rate, 10-bit HDR and a built-in MEMC motion compensation chip. The company recently confirmed 5G support for all the OnePlus 8 series phones, so we already know that these will be powered by Snapdragon 865 along with X55 5G Modem. OnePlus 8 rumored specifications 6.55-inch Full HD+ Fluid AMOLED display with 90Hz refresh rate, 3D Corning Gorilla Glass protection 2.84GHz Octa-Core Snapdragon 865 7nm Mobile Platform with Adreno 650 GPU 8GB LPDDR4X RAM with 256GB (UFS 3.0) storage / 12GB LPDDR4X RAM with 256GB (UFS 3.0) storage Android 10 with OxygenOS 10.0 Dual SIM (nano + nano) 48MP rear camera with LED Flash, 0.8μm ...

POCO X2 gets Android 10 based Paranoid Android Alpha build

POCO made a comeback in the Indian market as an independent brand and launched the POCO X2 (codename ‘pheonixin’), its first mid-range smartphone in the new X series in India earlier this month. POCO F1, the very first device from the brand had great development support and as a result, we have tons of custom ROMs and mods available for the device. Carrying forward the legacy of POCO F1, the company released kernel sources for the POCO X2 on the launch day itself on the promise and also sent out a few units to third-party custom ROM developers but the development could not be started due to the bootloader unlocking issue. The issue was resolved at the beginning of the month and as a result, we now have the first Custom ROM for POCO X2. Arter97 dropped the first Alpha build of Android 10 based Paranoid. [gallery columns="2" size="large" ids="308661,308660"] Paranoid Android is a custom ROM aiming to extend the system, working on enhancing the already existing beauty of Android and following the same design philosophies that were set forward by Google for Android Open Source Project. [gallery columns="2" size="large" ids="308662,308663"] We tried flashing it on our unit, and we were successful in doing so without any ...

ICICI launches WhatsApp Banking services

Due to the nationwide lockdown imposed to halt the spread of the Coronovirus outbreak, most banks are also closed, leading to many difficulties related to banking. To solve this, ICICI has launched a new service where users can use WhatsApp to access their account information and other services. Using the service, ICICI account holders can securely check their savings account balance, last three transactions, credit card limit, get details of pre-approved instant loan offers and block/unblock credit & debit card. Additionally, they can also get details of the nearest three ICICI Bank ATMs and branches in their vicinity. To use the service with your registered mobile number, Save the banks verified profile number - 9324953001 Simply message "Hi" The Bank will respond with a list of services available. The available banking services are: Check account balance: Type any keyword like "balance", "bal" or "ac bal" View last three transactions: Type "transaction", "stmt" or "history" Get outstanding balance and view available credit limit of credit card: Type "limit", "cc limit" or "cc balance" Block/Unblock credit and debit card instantly: Type "block", "lost my card" or "unblock" View details of available pre-approved instant loans: Type "loan", "home loan", "personal loan" or  "instant loans" View nearest ...