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The Hunt Here’s the thing: My four-year-old HP laptop has been rotten to its core and other than raw performance, there’s nothing it can offer me. It still works, performs exceptionally well thanks to the i7 processor+8GB RAM but the battery lasts only thirty minutes and it heats like a burning oven. So a couple of months ago, when I was looking for a new portable workstation, I knew iPads were out of the frame due to their limitations and costs, and budget Windows laptops were just not tolerable....

The Cool Changer S1 sports a metal unibody design with a 7.5mm thin profile. The flagship smartphone comes with a 5.5-inch Full HD (1920 x1080) IPS LCD display flanked by a microphone grille and three capacitive buttons. Powering the Cool Changer S1 is the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 quad-core processor that is also found inside the LeEco Le Pro3. Besides, the Cool Changer S1 comes with either 64 or 128GB internal storage options, which are apparently based on UFS 2....

Big News this! The much awaited CyanogenMod 7.0 for android phones has been released and is available for download as well. CyanogenMod 7.0 (popularly known as CM7) is based on the 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) release of Android and includes support for several phone models and some tablets too! There are more than 30 devices which are currently supported including tablets like Barnes & Noble’s Nook color and ViewSonic G tablet. Other phones supported include Commtiva Z71, Geeksphone One, Geeksphone Zero, HTC Ace, HTC Aria, HTC Desire (CDMA, GSM), HTC Dream, HTC Evo 4G, HTC Evo Shift 4G, HTC Glacier, HTC Hero (CDMA, GSM), HTC Incredible, HTC Legend, HTC Magic, HTC Slide, HTC Tattoo, HTC Thunderbolt, HTC Vision, HTC Wildfire, Motorola Droid, Nexus One, Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy S and ZTE Blade....

That’s not the sort of response you expect from someone who calls you up when you are ill. But then you do not expect managing directors of the Indian branch of one of the world’s largest companies to check on your health either. Or recommend a dollop of bloodthirsty crime fiction instead of medicine (yes that’s what was meant by “a good murder” – homicide of a fictional sort rather than a real one)....

There are lots of reasons fabricated to undermine the electric car, but most of them are completely false. First of all, electric cars are just like normal petroleum based cars when it comes to prices: there are those exceeding $100,000 and those that cost $5,000. To address the other issue about electric cars, that they are complicated and need continuous maintenance, that is not true. Just think of a normal car, with its motor, gearbox and the other parts it consists of, there are thousands of moving parts, many of them moving parts that break down fairly easily....

1. Google Drive Google Drive comes straight out of the biggest search-engine giant, Google. Compared to Dropbox, it is justly new in the cloud storage service game. However, over the years, with consistent updates and the addition of new features, it did manage to garner over a billion users till 2018. The service relies on a Google account, so if you have one, you can get started pretty much right away....

Facebook has partnered with media publishers across the Asian region. In India it has tied up with AajTak, Hindustan Times, India today, The Indian Express and The Quint. Instant Articles is aimed at allowing publishers to introduce intuitive features like zooming and panning high res pictures by tilting the phone, interactive maps, audio captions and an ability to highlight and comment at individual lines of the article. The news will be pushed on your timeline and Facebook claims that the reading experience will be up to ten times faster than a run of the mill mobile browser....

So you can imagine our surprise when we clapped eyes for the first time on the Qiku Q Terra. No, we will not call it a small phone, for it isn’t one. But it definitely does not look like a phone with a 6.0-inch display either. For at 157.6 mm in length, it is a tad shorter than the 158.2 mm iPhone 6s Plus and significantly shorter than the 159....

Apple iPhone X – the ‘tenth’ anniversary phone from Apple, which introduced a new design after a long time is going on sale during the Big Billion Days. It comes with an A11 Bionic Chip, dual rear cameras, and FaceID for authentication, which is also its USP. The phone will be available starting September 30 for a very attractive price of Rs 44,999 with discounts on credit and debit cards....

The market is a little down The global smartphone market registered a small dip in Q3 2019 as compared to the same quarter last year – a decrease of 0.4 percent. Global smartphone sales were down from 389.04 million units in Q3 2018 to 387.48 million in Q3 2019. Gartner attributes this to consumers being more concerned about getting value for money. The report also hints that with 5G on the horizon, consumers are holding off purchases until 2020....

Well, something similar has happened in the case of the Gionee A1. The phone was launched with a focus (pun intended) on its 16.0-megapixel selfie camera, backed with a high-profile Selfiestan ad campaign featuring Bollywood star Alia Bhatt. But after a few weeks of using it, we really think that there is more to Gionee’s flagship other than a high megapixel front-facing camera. Selfiestan? Yeah, but “normal”istan is good too!...

Apart from letting you browse your phone’s files, “Files Go” comes with a slew of tools for freeing up the storage. One of such is that the app recommends uninstalling other applications which you haven’t used in awhile. Similarly, it sends out alerts when the storage is almost full and suggests activities like deleting app cache, clearing hefty media files, and more. In addition to that, the app can recognize and remove spam and duplicate images too....

Google’s Inbox is now available to everyone and you can get it on iOS, Android or in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox desktop browsers, as well. One of its most important features is the ability to snooze messages. Furthermore, the app can automatically bundle emails together in groups and it’s also connected to a Google Now-style card system so that you can search for important information, such as your flight time....

The best part of Motion Stills is that the entire process is offline and would not require connectivity until and unless you want to share the resulting GIF’s. Google achieved this by creating GIF animations from photo bursts along with an Algorithm that made it look as though one has shot the video using video stabilisation gear. The low size of the files seems to be a direct consequence of real time GPU rendering, which means that some of the textures would be run by the GPU every time the file is played....

What GPU Turbo basically does is increase the efficiency of graphics processing during gameplay by 60% while reducing the power consumption by 30%. Neat, right? And for the icing on the cake, Huawei also promised to roll out an update to most of its existing devices which would enable GPU Turbo on them, hence indicating that the feature is entirely software based and has nothing to do with tweaking of the GPU itself....

The setup itself is largely straightforward and doesn’t require more than a few minutes. To get started, make sure you are on the latest WhatsApp beta version. In order to sign up for the beta channel, head over to this link and hit the “Become a Tester” button. The feature is still rolling out as a server-side update, therefore there’s a chance it might take a while to reach your region....

The Control Centre, accessible anywhere on the device with a swipe up from the bottom of the screen, provides easy access to some of the basic functionalities which would otherwise require going into Settings every time. Though Apple says having Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on all the time does not affect the battery life, it’s hard to believe so. Plus, people don’t like walking around with their Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned ON all the time on their devices and be vulnerable to possible attacks....

What is a Gaming Console Controller? Gaming Controller is a gadget we use on different devices for gaming. Generally, all gaming controllers come with joysticks through which we can provide various input in different types of games. Many people prefer controllers over keyboards or touch screens because of their ergonomic design. Furthermore, physical buttons offer a better experience when compared to playing games using touch. A gaming controller can be easily held with two hands and offer huge flexibility....

Over the past year or so, security researchers have found out that a lot of users (using personal assistants in-and-out) have their personal information on stake. For instance, when a user uses an assistant to perform certain actions using commands, their audio (along with a transcript) is sent across to the company’s servers to offer an apt result. Ideally, this information must be deleted soon after the action is carried out and the result has been provided....

Founded in 2004, Flickr has gone through a few ownership changes. In the year 2005, Yahoo acquired Ludicorp and Flickr, which led to tonnes of data migrated from servers back in Canada to servers in the United States. Following this acquisition, a lot of changes were made to the platform, like design changes, an increase in storage capacity, and the inclusion of some nifty features. Among these changes, the one that caught a lot of eyeballs was the addition of 1 terabyte of free storage for all Flickr users....