In order to further diversify its audio products portfolio in the country, Sony on Monday launched its MHC-V50D one-box portable audio system in India at Rs. 33,990. Some of the highlight features on the new audio system include built-in party lights, support for karaoke mode, and motion control support. The new audio system will be made available in all Sony Center and major electronic stores across India from Thursday, July 13.
In terms of connectivity options, Sony MHC-V50D comes with a built in DVD/CD player, USB port, audio input, an HDMI output, and a built-in FM radio tuner. The audio system supports guitar input and users can plug in their guitar to get the output through the system. It comes with a Karaoke mode that might be preferred by users who like to sing songs their own way.
Notably, the Sony MHC-V50D also supports Bluetooth connectivity and users can therefore connect the system to their smartphones and play music from any streaming app. If you are wondering what we meant when we mentioned motion control support earlier, the audio system detects smartphone's movement to change tracks or volume with gestures.
As we said earlier, the new Sony audio system comes with built-in party lights. "Lights are directed through a lens to spread a wide light pattern. One can control the lights on the system, and watch them sync to the beat of the music for a club-style dance floor at home," the company said in its release.
Lastly, the Sony MHC-V50D comes with an LED touch panel that makes it easier to control music playback and "space illuminating lights beams multi-coloured light from the ceiling to the floor in time with the beat." Just like some of the earlier speakers from the company, Sony's new audio system can be connected with other one-box systems from the company to amplify the sound and create a party chain effect.
At the start of 2017, HMD Global entered the the smartphone market. The company first launched the Nokia 6 smartphone, and later the Nokia 3, Nokia 5, and the Nokia 3310 (2017), bringing the once-loved Nokia brand back in the game. In India, Nokia launched the Nokia 3, Nokia 5, and Nokia 6 in June, but only the Nokia 3 is currently available in the market. In a statement, HMD Global has detailed its performance in India, and has confirmed that the Nokia 5 and Nokia 6 will not be available to buy until mid-August.
In a statement to NokiaPowerUser, HMD Global says that the company is very humbled by the Indian market’s response to the Nokia 3, and that it will bring the Nokia 5 and Nokia 6 into the market by mid-August. “We are humbled by the response to Nokia 3. Currently, we are ramping up our production for Nokia 3 on priority to meet the existing consumer demand. In the coming week, we will start production of Nokia 6 and Nokia 5 to get them ready for sales start by mid-August,” the company said in a statement.
HMD Global confirmed the same information to Gadgets 360, adding that it has tentative plans to start sales around August 15, Independence Day.
This means that the Nokia 5 and Nokia 6 won’t arrive until August. The pre-bookings for the Nokia 5began last week, and is expected to be an offline exclusive smartphone. Even though the pre-bookings have begun, HMD Global didn’t give any clarity on the availability of the smartphone back then, but now this statement makes it clear that it won’t be available before mid-August.
The Nokia 6, on the other hand will be an Amazon exclusive smartphone, and registrations for the smartphone will begin on Friday, July 14. However, availability of the Nokia 6 will also be in mid-August only. Only the Nokia 3 is available offline and online in India for now with a price tag of Rs. 9,499. The Nokia 5, on the other hand, is priced at Rs. 12,899, while the Nokia 6 is priced at Rs. 14,999 in the country.
Xiaomi has sent out invites for a launch event in New Delhi that's scheduled to take place on July 18. The event will likely see the launch of the Mi Max 2 in India, the latest member of Xiaomi's popular phablet series, which was unveiled in China in May going by the company's tagline of "big is back". The Mi Max 2 highlights a massive screen and battery and has been priced in China starting at CNY 1,699 (roughly Rs. 16,100).
The Mi Max 2 follows a similar design language compared to the Mi Max with a metal unibody casing with a fingerprint sensor on the back. It also keeps the same screen size at 6.44-inch with a full-HD (1080x1920 pixels) display. But the Mi Max 2 goes bigger on the inside with a 5300mAh battery.
Apart from the larger display and battery, the Mi Max 2 is powered by an octa-core Snapdragon 625 SoC clocked at 2GHz coupled with 4GB of RAM. In China, the handset has been launched in two storage variants of 64GB and 128GB, with the latter being priced at CNY 1,999 (roughly Rs. 18,900). It's still not known whether both the variants will make it to the Indian market.
The Mi Max 2 runs on MIUI 8 based on Android Nougat and features a 12-megapixel rear camera with PDAF support and dual-LED flash that the company says is identical to the Mi 6. It also houses a 5-megapixel front-facing camera similar to its predecessor. Xiaomi says that the 5300mAh battery can last up to two days and also comes with Quick Charge 3.0 that powers up the battery up to 68 percent in just one hour.
We'll know the exact India price and availability details of the Mi Max 2 once it is launched on July 18. To recall, the Mi Max was launched in India last year starting at Rs. 14,999 for the 3GB RAM/ 32GB variant and Rs. 19,999 for the 4GB RAM/ 128GB model.
Over the last decade, the rise of smartphones and tablets has fundamentally transformed the semiconductor business. As the market has matured, however, an increasingly large number of companies have struggled to remain profitable. Firms like Samsung and Apple earn the vast majority of the profits on smartphone sales. A handful of SoC providers dominate the component business, with Qualcomm at the relative top of the market and companies like Rockchip, Allwinner, and Mediatek holding large swathes of the budget and midrange segments.
The above means less profit for other firms. If Computex was any indication, these companies are looking towards emerging markets in self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, next-generation connectivity solutions, artificial intelligence, and a range of other topics.
“We are going from hype phase to more a reality phase with real products. You can see them, you can feel them,” Hugo Swart, head of Qualcomm’s consumer electronics and IoT businesses,told Reuters. “I see last year was a year of a lot of promises and this year is a material realization.”
ExtremeTech spoke to Anshel Sag, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, who talked about how the focus and nature of the Computex trade show is changing. “Computex was always more of a traditionally PC hardware for both consumers and business show. Now it’s turned into more of a high-end PC hardware show with IoT to boot,” Sag said. “Many of the Taiwanese vendors want to get involved in IoT and that’s why you’re seeing so much support for them from the chip vendors.” Chip vendors, in this case, refers to companies like ARM, Intel, MediaTek, Qualcomm, and other SoC designers.
Nvidia’s Drive PX2 platform.
These reports jive with what we’ve seen from companies like AMD, Nvidia, Tesla,Uber, and Waymo over the past few years. After largely sitting out the AI market, AMD is positioning its upcoming Vega products forAI and HPC workloads, Nvidia is making a huge push intoself-driving vehicles, Tesla already has itsAutopilotfeature on the market, and Alphabet’s Waymo project could team up withHondato bring self-driving cars out by 2020. We tend to think about the markets for these products as being strictly tied to the sale of just one vehicle, but the number of discrete components that go into creating one self-driving car is enormous.
According to Sag, devices likesmart toastersand fridges draw a fair amount of derision, but they aren’t where most companies are actually focusing their R&D efforts. At the same time, however, nobody really knows what killer capabilities, analytics, or technologies will be the first to drive mass consumer adoption and support. Wearables, to date, have only had a modest impact. But that could change as technology, battery life, and software all improve. Nobody wants to be caught napping when and if that happens, so we’re seeing a lot of mud get flung at the wall in the name of finding out what might stick.
Apple’s autonomous car project has morphed yet again. This time, it’s being described as a massive exercise in artificial intelligence that concentrates on self-driving. It appears Apple may be leaving the hardware part — the steel, glass, and rubber car — to others.
The latest information comes from a reliable source, Apple CEO Tim Cook, in a video interview withBloomberg TV. Cook called it “the mother of all AI projects … probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.”
Apple is still in the game
Apple’s interest in self-driving has been evident since 2014 when it launched Project Titan (internal code name) and hired 1,000-plus engineers to work on autonomous-driving technology, andpossibly the vehicle, too. Apple apparently planned to farm out the manufacturing work to an existing automaker. Creating a factory from scratch takes time, and often build quality in a new factory takes time to improve.
A trip to Europe to talk to BMW and Daimler (Mercedes-Benz) was said to be fruitless. But some accounts, there were concerns over data protection and security of the software. There were also reports egos played a part, and none of the three alpha dogs — Apple, BMW, Daimler — wanted to be the underling in the relationship.
In the Bloomberg interview, Cook was asked about Apple’s plan to manufacture a car in collaboration or to sell the software to automakers, like Apple CarPlay, only orders of magnitude more complex. Cook said, “We’ll see where it takes us. We’re not really saying from a product point of view what we will do.”
Keying on artificial intelligence
“We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” Cook said. “Clearly one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars. There are others. We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. … It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on.”
Analysts suggest Cook’s careful phrasing means Apple’s AI work might have applicability in other industries beyond cars. Cook noted, “We’re not really saying from a product point of view what we will do, but we are being straightforward that it’s a core technology that we view as very important.”
Does this mean Apple won’t build a car?
Apple’s focus on the software aspect suggests it’s out of the car-building business, and instead would license its technologies to other automakers. But is it really? It’s true that building a car involves orders of magnitude more parts than screwing together a PC. But assuming Apple isn’t building a plant from scratch — Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory is actually an old GM/Toyota facility — Apple doesn’t have to cut deals with name automakers.
Apple could turn to Magna Steyr in Austria, which has decades of experience building cars for others and in some cases handling pre-production engineering. Some reports say the big engineering team included a dozen engineers on loan from Magna Steyr.
Steyr currently produces the Mercedes-Benz G-Class (for decades) and the BMW 5 Series (starting in 2017). In 2018 it will build the Jaguar Land-Rover i-Pace, an EV. In the past, it has built Minis, Aston Martins, Jeeps, and Volkswagens. For those who believe Apple could build its own car via a contract manufacturer, it’s seen as no different from Hon Hai (Foxconn) building Apple’s iPhones.
If Apple is to build a car, it would have to chose gas or electric. Here’s one hint: Cook said he admires what Tesla has accomplished. “It’s a marvelous experience not to stop at the filling station or the gas station,” Cook said.
Apple investors would have to be patient if Apple builds cars. It took Tesla a decade to become a roaring success and four more years to pass Ford and GM in market value. It is now the fourth most valuable automaker (by market cap), behind only Toyota, Daimler, and VW, and just ahead of BMW.
Chinese smartphone startup OnePlus has made its name over the last few years by offering high-end specs for a much lower price than more established smartphone makers. It’d developed something of a cult following, too. The run-up to the OnePlus 5 announcement was filled with rumors and leaks, and now we have all the details. OnePlus has announced the OnePlus 5 with an aluminum chassis, Snapdragon 835, up to 8GB of RAM, and a dual camera array. Pricing starts at $479 and pre-orders are live today.
The Snapdragon 835 is the same chip that powers the vastly more expensive Galaxy S8, and you can’t even get a version of that phone with 8GB of RAM. For people who care about specs, OnePlus has certainly come through. However, there are two versions of the OnePlus 5. The $479 device only has 6GB of RAM with 64GB of storage. The $539 phone comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. You have to choose carefully, because there’s no microSD card slot for expandable storage. For all its focus on big specs, OnePlus is sticking with a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED on this year’s phone. That’s an advantage when it comes to battery life, though.
The number of phones with dual cameras has exploded in the last year, and now OnePlus is giving it a shot. Some dual camera phones use them for image sharpening, and others are offering wide-angle secondary sensors. Then, there are some like the OnePlus 5 that use the secondary camera as a sort of digital zoom. The built-in telephoto lens offers 2x magnification and 20MP resolution. The main camera is only 16MP, but it has a wider aperture to let in more light. The comparatively narrow aperture on the telephoto lens means that some “zoom” images taken in low light are actually done with the main camera and digital zoom. Also, the positioning makes the OP5 look rather like an iPhone 7 Plus.
The OnePlus runs Android 7.1 Nougat, and it’s almost bone stock. OnePlus makes a ROM called OxygenOS for its devices, which doesn’t make nearly as many changes to Android as Samsung’s TouchWiz or LG’s UI. It’s a very fast phone because of the light touch software. OnePlus has even gotten better about updating its phones, and was one of the fastest to get Nougat on the OnePlus 3 last year.
The OnePlus 5 is a GSM/LTE unlocked phone with support for dual SIM cards. It’s only available direct from OnePlus, but you canpre-order one todaywith the “clearer photos” code. Yes, really. The phone will be available for immediate ordering on June 27th.
One of the major features Intel has claimed with for its new X-Series of CPUs (both the Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X) is that they’re all unlocked, with higher TDP ratings and a top-end platform to pair with the chips, dubbed X299. However, according to overclocker der8auer, there’s a serious set of problems with every X299 board he’s tested to date.
The first issue is that at least some X299 boards are only shipping with a single 8-pin power connector for the CPU. An overclocked Skylake-X pushing above 4.5GHz can pull more than 300W. According to his tests, the 8-pin cable temperature on his open testbed is hitting 65C in an air conditioned room.
That’s significant, because most people don’t run their PCs in open testbeds, may not have air conditioning, and may not have proper cooling at the bottom of the chassis (I confess, until this video, I’d never actually considered how hot an 8-pin power cable gets under load.) He suspects that in a closed-case configuration an overclocked Skylake-X with just one 8-pin cable could be hitting 90C-95C and recommends against any Skylake-X motherboard limited to just one 8-pin connector.
But the larger problem is the VRM design. Every motherboard der8auer tested — and he mentions three by name: the Gigabyte Aorus X299 Gaming 3 motherboard, the Asus Prime X299-A, and the MSI X299 Pro Gaming Carbon — were tested with the same CPU, a Skylake-X overclocked to 4.6GHz at 1.25v. According to der8auer, this chip is known to hit 5GHz and was chosen for these tests precisely because its behavior had been well-characterized. The cores were tested in the non-AVX version of Prime95 for 10 minutes and temperature readings were taken from the front and back of the motherboard.
Data by der8auer, graph by ExtremeTech. Click to enlarge.
Note that der8auer isn’t certain his temperature probe was in the proper spot on the back of the Asus motherboard, as the gap between front and back temperatures is usually larger than what he observed. But either way, these temperatures show extremely high VRM heatsink temps and it has a direct impact on the CPU’s ability to hold its overclock. As the VRM temps rise, the CPU starts underclocking to 1.2GHz. The MSI board’s better temperatures are apparently explained by more aggressive throttling when the CPU is under load.
In at least two cases, der8auer simply removed the VRM heatsinks altogether, aimed a 120mm fan at the motherboard, and cut the ambient VRM temperature by up to 40C. We’d expect passive heatsinks to be enhanced by adding an air cooler. But the performance of the passive VRM cooling clearly isn’t up to snuff if your goal is to overclock beyond stock speeds.
What manufacturers promise vs. what they deliver
There’s a nasty tangle of expectations and reality when it comes to high-end overclocking, motherboard performance, and what consumers expect. Der8auer puts the blame for this problem on Intel’s decision to pull its X299 launch in by several months, and thinks that boards with better cooling should be shipping soon. But at the same time, it’s not as if motherboards just added VRMs, or as if the X299 platform is the first Intel chipset to require good cooling to overclock well.
The bottom line is this: When enthusiasts invest in overclocking, they often want that investment to pay off with something like a guarantee of performance, stability, and longevity for the parts in question. People pay for larger power supplies, better cooling, and what they believe are higher-quality components out of a belief that said components are required for safe overclocking — and to be clear, sometimes they very much are.
The problem is, from the viewpoint of pretty much everyone, overclocking components voids your warranty. This holds true even if Gigabyte or Asus sells you an overclocked card themselves. If the box says the GPU will hold a 1.6GHz stock clock, they guarantee the chip at that frequency, even if they also advertise overclocking performance. Even the boutique OEM system builders only offer warranties on the overclocks they perform in-house.
The final problem is that it’s a lot less expensive to advertise high-end overclocking than it is to use the components that absolutely guarantee it. Motherboard companies are typically penny pinchers, and their high-end X299 boards aren’t going to move huge volumes compared to mainstream products. I’m not calling out any single company here (or justifying the practice), just pointing out that there’s a nasty collision between what users want, what companies are willing to support, and what their financial incentives are.
Ultimately, I agree with der8auer that this VRM situation is, at best, going to require some replacement of VRM coolers, better thermal paste, or an active fan to resolve. Customers who want to aggressively overclock should be aware of this as a potential issue. If you don’t plan to overclock, there may be no problem here — but if you do, be aware that better VRM cooling may be required.
Xiaomi has sent out invites for a launch event in New Delhi that's scheduled to take place on July 18. The event will likely see the launch of the Mi Max 2 in India, the latest member of Xiaomi's popular phablet series, which was unveiled in China in May going by the company's tagline of "big is back". The Mi Max 2 highlights a massive screen and battery and has been priced in China starting at CNY 1,699 (roughly Rs. 16,100).
