Techno Bhogi

If you haven’t already heard, OnePlus is taking the Indian smartphone market by storm. OnePlus has now  pushed past both Samsung, as well as Apple, to take the top spot in the premium segment of India, according to Counterpoint Research. OnePlus, which entered India merely 3 years ago to take on the flagships with its budget flagship killer, has managed to capture a 40% share in the premium segment. It’s closely followed by Samsung, with a 34% market share, while Apple has fallen down to 14% (its lowest market share to date) in Q2 2018. To acknowledge its success in the country, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau has published an  official statement saying that they’re just getting started. He then goes on to reminisce about the company’s memorable experiences, such as 2 lakh sign-ups to buy the OnePlus 2, which was quite overwhelming for them at the time. He further added, As humans, we are quick to judge, but you cannot do that with a country like India. India is today a community that is o

Flipkart and Amazon are both at the top of the online e-commerce service market in India, with both brands offering great discounts and fast deliveries across the country. However, thanks to its Prime membership, Amazon has managed to serve to a larger audience, promising free deliveries and early access to sales. Now, it seems like Flipkart is all set to follow in the same footsteps, bringing forth changes of its own. Flipkart has announced that it will launch the “Flipkart Plus” service this Independence Day, that is, on August 15. Flipkart Plus is a benefits program intended to reach customers from all over the country with its inclusive aspects such as no-fee membership and a wide range of choices on rewards . The program promises a superior experience for customers across all touch points, with key highlights being free & fast delivery, early access to major sale events such as big festive season sales, and an enhanced customer support experience. In addition, all Flipkart

The race to become the first-ever trillion-dollar company just intensified as Apple today posted its best-ever revenue in Q3 2018. The Cupertino giant has posted strong earning numbers and again managed to beat market estimates. Apple has reported a revenue of $53.3 billion in the third quarter , which is a 17% growth year-on-year and $1 billion over analyst predictions. The earnings per share (EPS) stood at $2.34, significantly higher than the market estimate of $2.18 earnings per share. iPhones Selling Like Hotcakes The third quarter is usually expected to be the weakest for Apple, as we witness a slow down in the sales due to the expected launch of new iPhones and other hardware products launching in the next couple of months. Users become wary of picking up a current-gen iPhone when an upgrade is right around the corner but this was not the case this time around. The average selling price of an iPhone stood at $724, which is also better than the $693 analyst estimates. Wh

Xiaomi backed Huami recently launched the Amazfit Bip ( Rs. 5,499 ) and the Amazfit Stratos ( Rs. 15,999 ) in India, and I’ve been using the Amazfit Stratos for the last week, wearing it 24×7, and I’ve come to notice a whole bunch of stuff about the watch. So, if you’re wondering whether the Amazfit Stratos is worth its Rs. 15,999 price tag, here’s my review of the ‘affordable’ smartwatch. Amazfit Stratos Specs Before we jump into the review, lets get the specs out of the way. Here’s what the Amazfit Stratos packs inside its carbon-fiber patterned plastic shell. Processor 1.2GHz Dual Core Processor Storage 4 GB RAM 512 MB Display 1.34-inch 320x300 pixels Water Resistance 5 ATM Sensors air pressure, geomagnetic, ambient light, gyroscope, PPG heart rate sensor, triaxis accelerometer Connectivity Bluetooth 4.0 BLE, WiFi 802.11 b/g Battery 290 mAh Price Rs. 15,999 Design and Build Pre-launch, while I was busy ogling at pictures of the smartwatch,

The upgraded version of National Payments Corporation of India’s real-time payment system, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), will debut in August. Sources familiar with the knowledge of the new developments have revealed that the next version of UPI, dubbed UPI 2.0 , will be up and ready by mid-August and will come with multiple new features. With UPI transactions growing by over 1,000% on a YoY basis, banking institutions have been eagerly anticipating the arrival of UPI’s upgraded version to give another major push to digital payments in the country, and as per the new reports, their wait will finally come to an end two weeks from now. Before we look at the new features in UPI 2.0, let’s talk about a key element that will be absent from the upgraded version of the payments system i.e. recurring or standing payments. UPI 1.0 allowed users to provide an Electronic Clearing Service (ECS) mandate to banks in order to make recurring payments to merchants, however, that facility wi

Apple just recently refreshed its MacBook Pro lineup with upgraded internals and a better keyboard, but the MacBook Air has been largely ignored for years. However, the new buzz is about the launch of a new MacBook Air lineup in the coming months and a fresh report from Economic Daily News (loosely translated from Taiwanese) suggests that it will be powered by Intel’s eighth-generation Kaby Lake-R processor family . These are the same processors that Apple had used in its MacBook Pro variants, with the touch bar from earlier last year. The newly upgraded MacBook Pro’s, however, now come packed with the latest Intel Coffee Lake processors. Apple could not have used the same processors in its lower-end MacBook Air, as it would need a lot more room to cool, and there are some heat issues in the higher-end chipsets. The Cupertino giant is also known to have shown interest in the use of Cannon Lake chips in the upcoming MacBook Air refresh, but the delays are yet again the reason for

Logitech has agreed to acquired audio equipment maker, Blue Microphones, for a sum of $117 million in cash. The acquisition of Blue Microphones means that the Snowball and Yeti line of microphones will now be Logitech property, which means professionals ranging from musicians to podcasters who need high fidelity audio recording will now be headed to Logitech stores. Logitech announced the acquisition via an official blog post, however, it is not known whether Blue Microphones will continue to operate as a separate brand, just like other intellectual properties of Logitech such as Ultimate Ears, Astro Gaming and Jaybird. “Logitech’s acquisition of Blue Microphones will accelerate our entry into a growing market, and offers another way for us to help bring people’s passions (from music to blogging) to life. Joining with Blue is an adjacent opportunity for us – a new way to grow – with additional synergies related to our existing gaming, PC webcam and audio categories.  It’s exciting!”

Though Nvidia’s 10xx-series graphics cards are still selling like hotcakes, they made their way to the market over a couple years ago. The anticipation for a new series of graphics cards has recently been quite high and Nvidia has now added fuel to the rumors with the announcement of its ‘GeForce Gaming Celebration’ at Gamescom 2018 on August 20 in Germany. In its official blog post , the tech giant states that its event isn’t only going to “be loaded with new, exclusive, hands-on demos of the hottest upcoming games, stage presentations from the world’s biggest game developers, and some spectacular surprises. “ Nvidia is being sneaky but it certainly hints at the arrival of new graphics cards, which has been long due. The company has decided to organize its public event a day ahead of the Gamescom 2018 expo , which is further indication of the fact that it can unveil next-gen GeForce graphics cards in August. We are also hopeful of the launch of 11xx-series graphics cards from Nvi

With Reliance Industries’ stock price hitting an all-time high of Rs. 1,179 on BSE earlier today, the conglomerate has gone past Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to become the most valuable company in India. The Mukesh Ambani-led company is now said to be worth Rs. 7.41 lakh crore as opposed to TCS’ market-cap of Rs. 7.39 lakh crore. The company’s stock has gained around 28 percent this year on the back of strong growth in the petrochemical, retail and telecom sectors. Reliance’s stock started its current upsurge after the company, aided by higher oil prices and rapidly multiplying Jio subscribers , posted its highest-ever quarterly net profit of Rs. 9,459 crore for the April-June period. The profits are significantly higher than the Rs. 8,021 crore (Rs 13.5 per share) that the company earned during the same period last year. The company’s consolidated revenue stood at Rs. 141,699 crore, up 9.7 per cent sequentially and 56.5 per cent from the same quarter last fiscal. According to

We may have left the wizarding world (of the books) behind many years ago, but Harry Potter and his first Quidditch match is still as fresh in our mind as dew on grass on a chilly morning. It was yet another day at the Hogwarts school but if you, a muggle, wants to glide on the Nimbus 2000 broom and relive that gripping moment for yourself then it’s now possible. Snapchat has decide to celebrate the birthday of the wizarding world’s boy wonder, Harry Potter, in the best way possible. With the latest update, Snapchat has added new 3D Harry Potter Bitmoji Lens to let you become a part of any of the four Hogwarts houses and play the most-popular sport – Quidditch – in augmented reality. As you can see above, it is really simple to fly around on a magical broom and catch the golden snitch for muggles. You only need to open Snapchat, point the camera to where you want to fly, and long press the screen to activate the Harry Potter world lens . Once you follow through with these steps, y

A few days after he revealed his Aadhaar number on Twitter in a misguided attempt to show the safety and efficacy of the controversial ID system, TRAI Chairman RS Sharma took to the micro-blogging platform to complain about trolls who are apparently using his number to generate an insane amount of (failed) Aadhaar Authentication OTP requests that are fast draining his phone battery. Friends. Let's reconvene tomorrow. Small request, the failed Aadhaar Authentication requests (OTP's) are really draining my battery. I'm always ready for constructive discussions. If you have any suggestions please share. — RS Sharma (@rssharma3) July 30, 2018 This is the latest twist in a long series of developments over the past few days after Sharma recently revealed his 12-digit Aadhaar number on Twitter and dared hackers to ‘do any harm’ to him based on that info. As it turned out, not only his phone number, but his address, bank accounts, PAN card, telecom operator, phone model,

AMD has bounced back in tremendous fashion in the hardware business, reporting a huge 53% rise in its revenue . The major credit for this goes to their Ryzen series of CPUs and APUs, along with the heavyweight Threadripper processors. While the company already has a total of 3 model motherboards to its name, namely the A320, B350, and the X370, the company has now launched the all-new B450 motherboards. The new AMD B450 chipset will support almost the entire range of AMD’s processors, including the Athlon Processor, the 7th-gen AMD A-Series APU, and both the 1st-gen and 2nd-gen AMD CPUs and APUs. As for the features, the new B450 chipset will support 24 PCIe Gen 3 Lanes along with full DRAM OC. Also, since all the Ryzen processors are unlocked out-of-the-box, the B450 will also feature Unlocked CPU Overclocking. What’s more is that the new chipset will come with support for the AMD StoreMI Technology as well, promising SSD-equivalent speeds from the SATA HDDs. The best part about

Huawei may have already impressed us with the P20 Pro , however, the Chinese giant is now gearing up to launch its Mate flagship series to surprise us even further. The rumor mill has been chatting up the device on the Internet and we have now got a first look at Huawei Mate 20 Pro via a leaked live image. Thanks to a Chinese tipster over on Weibo, you can scroll down a little to check out the purported live image of the high-end variant of the Mate 20 series  – Huawei Mate 20 Pro. You can see in the image attached below that the device is expected to feature a dual edge curved screen, similar to the recent Galaxy S series phones. In addition to the live image, the Chinese tipster has also shared with us some key specs for this device. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro, as you can see, sports a huge screen but almost negligible bezel on all sides. This will give the device an impressive screen-to-body ratio, something most buyers would be in favor of. The device is expected to be powered by t

After bezel-less design, the divisive notch, pop-up cameras and under display sensors, it seems that foldable smartphones are going to be the new industry trend. According to a new report, Chinese companies are in talks with component suppliers to develop foldable smartphones, and the latest names to join the race are Xiaomi and Oppo. Huawei is ahead in the race among the big Chinese names in the foldable smartphone game, and is looking to beat Samsung to the punch . Samsung has been working on a folding smartphone for years, and will likely release it next year , but China’s Xiaomi and Oppo are trying their hardest to take home the title of launching the world’s first foldable smartphone. Recently, a patent application filed by Xiaomi revealed that the company is working on flexible displays and foldable smartphones, which adds more credibility to the new report. But Xiaomi is reportedly taking a different approach when it comes to designing a foldable smartphone. While Samsung’s

Amazon may be the preeminent online retailer of anything and everything under the sun today, but the company started off with books, and it is one category that continues to remain close to heart of the company’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos . While the retailer sells a variety of books in the US, the choice, especially in the textbook department, has always been somewhat limited in India. Now, however, that’s all set to change, with the retailer focusing on offering a larger portfolio of textbooks and reference books for schools, colleges and universities in the country. With a view towards doing just that, the US retail giant is now offering a separate section for ‘Engineering Textbooks’ that apparently has a selection of almost 100,000 books spanning various streams, subjects and universities. As can be seen in the above screenshot of the landing page for Amazon’s engineering textbook section, users will be able to choose books on Aeronautical Engineering, Electrical, Mechanica

Audio-video sharing platform Snapchat has struck deals with the National Football League (NFL) and NBC Sports Group to offer more sports programming to its users. In its deal with NBC, the company would team up on “Premier League: Extra Time”, which is a weekly show that recaps UK’s top-tier soccer or football matches. “Each Monday throughout the Premier League season, the show will bring snapchatters in the US a recap of the weekend’s top action and standout storylines, while also spotlighting the super fans that make the league one of the most popular in the world,” NBC Group wrote in a blog post late on Monday. “A preview of the show will air on Snapchat on Thursday, August 9, with the first episode airing on Monday, August 13, and continuing each Monday throughout the season,” the company added. The Snap-owned company has also extended its NFL partnership to include a “best of Sunday Story” in the “Discover” section that summarizes American football news and highlights of the

Andrew Yang, a second-generation Chinese American running for the 2020 US presidential race as a Democrat, has announced that his campaign will accept cryptocurrency for donation. The campaign on Monday announced that it will accept Bitcoin, Ethereum, and anything on the ERC20 standard within a maximum of $2,500, reports Xinhua news agency. Venmo payments of up to $2,700 are also acceptable. HUGE news – my campaign can now accept Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies! https://t.co/GScyqfZXLY Let’s build the future together. @Steven_McKie @JulianSarokin @yidagao @AdamDraper @mashadrokova @albertwenger @novogratz @ericbahn @RamanFrey @richardtitus — Andrew Yang (@AndrewYangVFA) July 24, 2018 The campaign has also used other tech innovations including Twitch and Instagram TV to live broadcast campaign events. Donors will receive a form that will allow the campaign to verify their voter qualifications, after which it will send a cryptocurrency wallet address to allo

Alongside the Honor Note 10 , the Chinese giant has also unveiled two new variants of its MagicBook laptop at the launch event in Beijing. These new laptops are upgraded variants of Honor’s existing 14-inch MagicBook, which now come with a touch-screen in tow. Honor has made absolutely no changes to its laptop on the design front, but hands down a choice in the internals. You can pick between an AMD or Intel processor  depending on your workload and budget. Starting off with the AMD variant, the Honor MagicBook is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 2500U mobile processor paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD. There’s also the Radeon Vega 8 graphics on board to handle your graphics needs. The other variant is powered by an 8th-gen Intel Core i5-8250U processor . This is coupled with 8GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD PCIE and Nvidia GeForce MX150 for the graphics-intensive tasks. The key differentiator for the new MagicBook models is a 10-point touchscreen display, which boast of a 1920×1080 scre

Honor has confirmed that the Honor Play will be available on Amazon starting August 6 2018. The company also said it will begin rolling out the GPU Turbo update for the smartphone in the beginning of August. The launch date was first mentioned in a report last week , which also revealed the Amazon partnership. Honor says GPU Turbo is an acceleration technology that works with the the lower layer system for faster graphics processing and smoother gaming experience. “Honor Play has been devised with a key technological breakthrough with GPU Turbo, improving graphics processing efficiency by 60% and reducing SoC (System on Chip) energy consumption by 30%, setting new records in smartphone performance and energy consumption balance,” Honor said in a statement. Here are the key specs of the Honor Play smartphone: Display 6.3 inch, Full View FHD + (1080 x 2340 pixels) Memory 6 GB RAM Storage 128 GB ROM + MicroSD, up to 256 GB (uses SIM 2 slot) Processor Huawei Kirin 970,

When it comes to smartphones, running out of internal space is one of the most annoying problems which demands deletion of data, moving some of it to your cloud drive or another device and whatnot. In case you’ve been eyeing to purchase a high-capacity microSD card to solve the ‘insufficient storage’ problem once and for all, Amazon has an excellent deal for you on the  SanDisk 128GB Class 10 microSDXC memory card , which is now available at hefty 52% discount as part of a lightning deal. The 128 microSD card (SDSQUAR-128G-GN6MA), which carries a price tag of Rs. 5,650, can now be purchased for just Rs 2,699  for a limited time. The SanDisk microSD card, which also comes bundled with an adapter, is compatible with a wide range of Android smartphones and tablets, PCs and cameras, and is claimed to provide a data transfer speed of up to 100MB/s . The company claims that users can transfer around 1,200 photos in just one minute at that speed. The A1-rated card can also store Full HD

After testing multiple Quick Actions on its Android app notifications over the past few weeks, WhatsApp has finally started rolling out a new feature in the latest beta version of the software. First reported by WABetaInfo, the ‘Mark as Read’ feature is now live on version 2.18.232 of WhatsApp Beta. WhatsApp is rolling out the Mark as Read shortcut in WhatsApp beta for Android 2.18.232! https://t.co/GY8UWVPnst — WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) July 31, 2018 It is worth noting here that, evidence of the new Mark as Read button was spotted in the code of WhatsApp Beta v2.18.214 earlier this month, although, it is only now that it has gone live. As can be seen from the screenshot above, the new feature is already working for many users, including some in our office. It is also worth noting that Mark as Read is not the only Quick Action that WhatsApp has been testing in recent weeks. Alongside the Mark as Read  button, another new Quick Action being tested by the company is a ‘Mute’