Opera Mini is a popular browser on mobile platforms for its data saving functionality and customisations. Opera has rolled out a new update for Opera Mini for Android that brings a few new features.
The update extends the browser's compression technology allowing users to now save pages for offline use, compressing the page to as little as 10 percent of its original size. The compression works so that the essential content is saved minus the "unwanted frills", as the update describes it.
A notable new feature, available you are in the Extreme data savings mode, automatically scans social media, MP3, and movie download sites for direct download links. The downloadable content will show up in a drop-down menu right at the top of your screen, making it easy for you to find you were looking for. The auto scan feature includes sites like Facebook, Pagalworld, Tubidy, DJPunjab and more. Opera says the list will continue to grow in the coming days.
A Facebook notification bar can now be added to the app drawer once you've logged into Facebook using the updated Opera Mini for Android. The notification bar will keep you updated on any new friend requests, direct messages, mentions among other things.
The new Opera Mini update also gets a built-in artificial intelligence-powered newsfeed feature which learns the user's reading habits to suggest more relevant news. This feature, however, is currently under testing in select countries including India.
Apart from the ones already mentioned, the new update brings improvements to the download manager UI and several other bug fixes to make it smooth. Android uses can download the updated Opera Mini for Android app from the Play Store.
Lenovo's Moto M was launched in China in November and was brought to the Indian market a month later. The mid-range smartphone boasts of a premium design language, which seems to have worked in the company's favour. A new report cites the company as claiming that more than 3 million Moto M units have been sold since its launch across all markets where the phone has been available.
According to a report, Lenovo announced this milestone at the Moto M's launch in Indonesia. The company says the smartphone has been especially popular in countries like China and India thanks to its affordable pricing and impressive specs. The Moto M was launched in India in two variants - the 32GB + 3GB model priced at Rs. 15,999, and the 64GB + 4GB version that costs Rs. 17,999.
The report further states that Moto M sales accounted for 20 percent of Lenovo's quarter revenue in Q4 2016. The smartphone is also due to launch in countries like Pakistan, Poland, Malaysia, Thailand, among others. As of now we do not have the exact figures of how many Moto M devices have been sold in India alone.
To recall, the Dual-SIM (Nano-SIM) Moto M is the first Motorola smartphone with an all-metal body. The smartphone sports a 5.5-inch IPS display with 2.5D curved glass and full-HD (1080x1920 pixels) resolution. The handset is powered by a 2.2GHz quad-core MediaTek Helio P15 processor coupled with 3GB or 4GB of RAM. For storage expansion, Moto M users can slip microSD cards of up to 128GB capacity in the secondary SIM card slot.
Optics for the Moto M include a 16-megapixel rear camera with Phase-Detection Autofocus (PDAF), and an 8-megapixel front camera for selfies. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth v4.1, GPS/ A-GPS, 4G VoLTE (with support for Indian LTE bands), USB Type-C (USB 3.1), and a 3.5mm audio jack.
The Moto M is fitted with a 3050mAh batter with support for fast-charging. The smartphone measures 151.35x75.35x7.85mm and weighs 163 grams.
WhatsApp has tried to curb the outrage over the removal of the text status feature by quickly bringing it back. The Facebook-owned company brought back the feature earlier this week for Android and soon after rolled it back for iPhone users as well.
The latest WhatsApp for iPhone update will get you your old text status back. All you need to do is head on over to the App Store and download the latest version of WhatsApp (v2.17.10). As the update description reads, the new text status feature is now called About. The update also brings a few other features including playing videos without downloading completely, a new moon icon for capturing better photos and videos better under low-light conditions and 3D Touch support for directly cropping an image.
After updating WhatsApp for iPhone, you'll find the new About section by tapping on Settings in WhatsApp and tapping once agin on your profile name on top. You'll find About at the bottom of the screen, most likely showing your last updated status before it was removed. You can now edit your status the way you want and be certain that it won't disappear with 24 hours. Your contact list will be able to view your status message by opening your contact, starting a new chat thread or viewing your info in a group.
Of course, the new Snapchat-like disappearing photos and videos feature is still very much present and WhatsApp has no plans to remove it any time soon. Interestingly, WhatsApp's parent company Facebook also rolled out a similar feature earlier this month for its Messenger app, called Messenger Day while Facebook-owned Instagram also got this feature last year.
Notably, Facebook has been working on a number of new features for its site and Messenger app to make it more fun and conversational. The social media giant on Friday introduced two new features for Messenger, called Message Reactions and Mentions. Facebook is also reportedly testing the ability to add GIFs to comments from services like Giphy and Tenor.
HMD Global announced its first Nokia-branded phones with the Nokia 150 and Nokia 150 Dual SIM feature phones back in December last year. The company had mentioned then that the phones will go on sale in the first quarter of 2017, and now the Nokia 150 Dual SIM has been spotted online on Amazon India and Flipkart priced at Rs. 2,059.
The Nokia 150 Dual SIM features a polycarbonate shell which is offered in a choice of Black or White on Flipkart and only Black on Amazon India. The feature phone sports a 2.4-inch QVGA (240x320 pixels) display and runs on Nokia Series 30+ operating system. The phone offers an expandable storage via microSD card (up to 32GB).
The Nokia 150 Dual SIM houses a 1020mAh battery which claims to offer up to 22 hours of battery life with a standby time of up to 25 days. The phone measures 117x50x13mm and weighs around 82 grams. Additional features include an MP3 player, FM radio, Bluetooth v3.0 with SLAM, and a VGA camera with an LED flash.
The Nokia 150 Dual SIM feature phone is expected to come with pre-loaded with Snake Xenzia, and the try-and-buy version of Nitro Racing by Gameloft2, based on what HMD Global had said at the time of announcement.
HMD Global recently unveiled a slew of Nokia-branded devices at MWC 2017 including the first set of Android-powered Nokia smartphones with Nokia 3, Nokia 5 and Nokia 6. The company also added a dash of nostalgia by announcing a redesigned Nokia 3310, which is expected to launch ahead of the Android phones.
The company also confirmed on Friday that the Nokia 3, Nokia 5 and Nokia 6 smartphones will launch in the second quarter (April - June) in 120 markets including India at the same time at "affordable prices".
Last year, Apple launched the iPhone SE. It’s the company’s last remaining 4-inch device, and it uses the same chassis as the iPhone 5s, but packs iPhone 6s hardware into the form factor. The diminutive smartphone was reviewed extremely well, but for one aspect of its design: Its low-end model was limited to 16GB.
Now, Apple has removed that restriction and bumped the basic storage to 32GB, while keeping the same $399 price tag. In doing so, it’s transformed the iPhone SE into the best iPhone on the market, in my personal opinion, even if the guts of the chip are now 18 months old. Here’s why:
First, the iPhone SE is still the easiest iPhone to grip and use with one hand. The iPhone 6, 6s, and 7 may only technically be slightly larger, but that small difference is increased when you add a protective case. It may not be a huge difference (in fact, it can’t be when you consider we’re talking about millimeters) but every millimeter counts. I am aware, of course, that there are plenty of people who love giant phablet phones, and some won’t be happy until the skit below becomes reality:
Nonetheless, as a person who likes the ability to answer a call, type a text, or flip through menus while securely gripping my phone, the original iPhone 5’s chassis is superior to anything Apple has built since.
Second, there’s battery life. Despite being built on older technology, the iPhone SE’s battery life beats the iPhone 7, as shown in the chart below, from Ars Technica’s review of Apple’s latest hardware.
The only Apple device that manages to beat the iPhone SE is the iPhone 7 Plus, which wins by a whopping 3 percent. In gaming tests, the iPhone SE is tied with the 7 Plus and 6 Plus as the longest-lasting smartphone, at ~374 – 377 minutes.
Third, there’s price. True, the iPhone SE isn’t as fast as either the iPhone 7 or 7 Plus, but it’s also a heck of a lot cheaper — and you may never notice the processor difference since it’s pushing fewer pixels than the two larger phones. A 32GB iPhone SE is $399, an iPhone 7 starts at $649, and the 7 Plus is $769. That’s the base price for 32GB of storage for all three phones. You may not be getting quite as much overall performance, but even the iPhone 7 is 1.62x more expensive than the SE.
Fourth, you get to keep your headphone jack. I won’t belabor this point; you either care about having a headphone jack or you don’t.
Fifth, while mobile benchmarks are great for showing big numbers on devices, they aren’t so great at actually capturing the experience of using the device. My personal phone today is the iPhone 5c (16GB). It’s built on iPhone 5 hardware, which means I’m “rocking” a smartphone effectively built in 2012. I’m not going to tell you that I don’t notice the speed difference between an iPhone 7 and my poor 5c. Of course I do. It’d be stupid to claim otherwise. But the relative experience of using the 5c has degraded much more slowly than the discount iPhone 3G I bought in 2009 and was painfully waiting on by 2011. My 5c is effectively a year older than my 3G was when I replaced it, but it’s far more useful to me at this point in its life cycle than the 3G was. Smartphones, like PCs, don’t age as quickly as they used to. (I might love the SE, but I also find the video below to be hilarious).
If you love huge screens and cutting-edge tech, this opinion piece won’t change your mind. If you’re an Android user, well, I don’t expect us to see eye-to-eye, either. But one of the reasons I’ve stuck with Apple is because it continues to make a small phone that suits my preferences at a time when most of the Android market has been chasing larger devices. The only reason I didn’t upgrade to an SE already is because the 16GB capacity stuck in my craw, and bumping up to 32GB removes that problem. If the screen size doesn’t trip you up, it’s arguably the best iPhone you can buy today.
It’s only been a few short years since the first 4K panels hit store shelves, and now we’ve got an 8K display you can purchase as well. This is a stunning panel for people who do a particular kind of work in photo or video editing. It boasts full coverage of the SRGB, Adobe RGB, and Rec. 709 gamuts, and 98% of the DCI-P3 professional gamut. 8K support is only driven via 2x DisplayPort 1.4 ports (making this explicitly an MST product) and its maximum brightness of 400 nits is fairly standard for the industry as well. But it’s not necessarily the kind of panel you should spring for just yet, for reasons we’ll discuss.
In many ways, the new UP3218K reminds us of the UP2414Q we reviewed nearly three years ago. The color reproduction and general feature set of that display wowed us, even back then, but the 24-inch screen was simply too small for realistic 4K use. The 31.5-inch Dell UP3218K might seem slightly more roomy. But remember — stepping from 4K to 8K quadruples pixel counts, it doesn’t double them. Icons and images designed for a 32-inch 1080p display will be 1/16th original size on an 8K panel. Even Microsoft’s font scaling options baked into Windows 10 won’t keep up with that issue.
The other downside is that displays this early in the production run often have issues that prevent them from functioning properly. For example, we still have that Dell UP2414Q, and to this day, it cannot switch from multi-stream transport mode to single-stream transport mode without rebooting the entire system. Simply turning this display off and on (or unplugging it and replugging it) doesn’t work.
Despite the impressiveness of the figure, we’re nowhere near 8K panels in widespread use, for a few simple reasons. One, we’ve just about gotten to the point where a single GPU can drive 4K, which only has 8 megapixels worth of image. Quadruple that again, to 32MP, and you’re not going to be pushing that image with any set of modern GPUs. Two, the power consumption, reliability, and price will all need to be improved to build a viable consumer product. Three, there’s no near-term rush to 8K because, again, 4K streaming and video content are only barely coming online in 2017. We’re years away from 8K content being widespread, regardless of what the videophiles would like to see.
Still, Dell does deserve credit for getting to this point in the first place. If you’re one of the handful of people that can actually use a display with this much resolution, you should be happy with the end result.
Another installment in giving you what we have on the LG G6 as soon as we have it series is here, and it's a hot topic - battery life.
The LG G6 is powered by a 3,300mAh battery - a significant upgrade over last year's G5 and its 2,800mAh. The G6 has a larger display, you'll counter, but the the battery capacity has been upped by 18% while screen area is just 8% more now. In fact, the G6 packs more juice than the V20 (3,000mAh), which has a larger display to light up - 5.7" in 16:9 is more area than 5.7" in 18:9, plus the V20 has that secondary screen on top. The G6's battery, however, is sealed in, unlike both the G5 and the V20.
Anyway, all this is to preface that we expected better battery life from the G6 than what we got out of the G5 and V20, neither of which were particularly impressive. As it turned out, we had predicted correctly.
The G6 is good for 22 and a half hours of voice calls on a single charge in our testing environment - 5 more than the G5, and 3 more than the V20. In both comparisons the endurance is actually better on the G6 than the proportional increase in capacity - so great, then.
MWC 2017 is gone and everyone is looking forward to the next big event in the mobile technology - the Galaxy S8 announcement on March 29. It's just that at the rate these leaks are coming in there will be hardly anything left to announce when the time comes.
The long-awaited Samsung flagship may be the biggest talking point right now but there were some announcements that embellished the news feed in the past week. BlackBerry Aurora was unveiled in Malaysia and Xiaomi revealed smart shoes powered by Intel.
India will host its own MWC in September, though it's unlikely to be as exciting as the one in Barcelona. Still, this is the first congress aimed directly to South East Asian markets so manufacturers like Xiaomi, Meizu and Oppo might bring their A-game.
A few months after we welcomed the Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017), here comes the Galaxy A7 (2017). It arrives two months after the official launch, but hey, it is the biggest and heaviest in the current A-series family - we guess it needed extra time to get itself to the office. Jokes aside, the Galaxy A7 (2017) was initially released on a limited set of markets in Eastern Asia.
Samsung Galaxy A7 (2017) is the third and final (for now) member of the new Samsung A-list. The other two - Galaxy A3 (2017) and Galaxy A5 (2017) already passed our review tests with flying colors. Now it’s time for the biggest of them all, but before that, here are our initial impressions.
The first and most important distinction of Galaxy A7 (2017) from the other A-series smartphones from 2017 is that it won’t be available everywhere. For example, it will not appear in Europe.
Samsung is one of the few companies that keep making pink smartphones that are actually pink. Some might argue the actual color is coral, peach blossom or salmon and the Galaxy A7 (2017) is, in fact, all of these, depending on the light. The color's official name is “Peach Cloud” and it does look special.
The 5.7” screen of Galaxy A7 (2017) has Samsung’s in-house Super AMOLED display with FullHD resolution. Inside the device ticks the same octa-core Exynos 7880 chipset that was used in the Galaxy A5 (2017). The memory and storage also match the smaller sibling - 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. There is a separate slot for microSD that does not compromise the Dual SIM slot - you can have both SIM cards and plenty of storage.
The battery is 3,600 mAh and thanks to the 14nm power-efficient SoC, it should last you for quite a while between two charges.
Sadly, phone ships with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. On top of it is Samsung's latest launcher - GraceUX, as it's called. You probably remember the interface from the Galaxy Note7, a brilliant phone with unusually short life.
A new feature in Galaxy A7 (2017) that Samsung implemented in this year’s A-series is the IP68 certification. I accidentally spilled some coffee over the speaker and then washed it away effortlessly. [Editor's Note: Please tell me you didn't!]
Another similarity to the lower A3 and A5 models is the speaker placement. It is unusually placed on the right-hand side of the device above the power key.
Everyone in the office is wondering will the Galaxy A7 (2017) somehow outperform the A5 (2017) despite having the same hardware. It is time to take the device to the labs and roll up our sleeves. Stay tuned!
Motorola used its event at Mobile World Congress last month to officially unveil the G5 and G5 Plus, the latest smartphones in its line of affordable devices with decent specs. We've since seen them going up for pre-order in Germany, and getting a launch in India on March 15. The duo will arrive in Russia next month, but in the meantime the G5 has actually become available in one European country.
We're talking about the Netherlands, where no less than three retailers already have the Moto G5 in stock and ready to be shipped to eager customers. The price for a SIM-free and unlocked handset is €199, the same we've seen for the pre-orders in Germany. So we assume this is the official recommended retail price for the Eurozone. That means that you should expect the Moto G5 Plus to cost €289 when it reaches the Netherlands or any other countries that have the Euro as their currency.
Mobiel.nl, GSMwijzer.nl, and Belsimpel.nl all also give you the option to purchase the Moto G5 with a carrier contract, in which case you'll obviously have to pay a lot less for the device upfront.
The Moto G5 comes with a 5-inch 1080p touchscreen, a 13 MP main camera, a 5 MP selfie snapper, the Snapdragon 430 chipset, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of expandable storage, and a 2,800 mAh battery. It runs Android 7.0 Nougat.
