IntellectBeat

Only yesterday, we informed you about Ringing Bells' upcoming Freedom 251 smartphone, which will be available in the country starting tomorrow. Priced at Rs 251, it will be the cheapest smartphone ever launched in the country, which for us is equivalent to nano of the smartphone market. We are dumbfounded by the fact that a company is selling a smartphone at a price which is less than what a good screen-guard costs, and that too without cutting down on the specs. Here is everything we know about the device. (Images: www.freedom251 .com ) Inside Freedom 251 It will come equipped with 4-inch display, a 1.3GHz quad-core processor, 1GB RAM, 8GB internal storage, which is expandable by up to 32GB. Powering it would be a 1450mAh battery, which should easily last a day. This device will come running on Android Lolipop 5.1 straight out-of-the-box. Freedom 251 will have a 3.2MP rear camera and 0.3MP selfie snapper. The imaging capabilities sure are a bit disappointing, but then what more ...

The Rs 251 mobile phone Freedom 251 is a bad advertisement for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitious "Make in India" programme. The 'Make in India' is a very high profile initiative which wants to make India a World Class manufacturing hub of everything – starting from mobile phones to aircraft. The "Make in India" website says "The Make in India program was launched by Prime Minister Modi in September 2014 as part of a wider set of nation-building initiatives. Devised to transform India into a global design and manufacturing hub, Make in India was a timely response to a critical situation: by 2013, the much-hyped emerging markets bubble had burst, and India’s growth rate had fallen to its lowest level in a decade. The promise of the BRICS nations had faded, and India was tagged as one of the so-called ‘Fragile Five’. Global investors debated whether the world’s largest democracy was a risk or an opportunity. India’s 1.2 billion citizens questio...

Indonesia said on Thursday it will block access to microblogging platform Tumblr over pornographic content, the media reported on Thursday. "After an exhaustive study, the ministry has decided to ban Tumblr since it contains many videos and pornographic images," said the communication ministry's e-business director, Azhar Hasyim. The ministry has also decided to ban 477 other online sites for the same reason. According to Azhar, blocking access to these sites will take two to three days. Tumblr, which has about 280 million blogs, was set up in 2007 by David Karp and acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 for $1.1 billion. The ban was announced a week after the Indonesian government demanded the removal of emoticons representing homosexuality in messaging apps, following an internet campaign against Line, another popular messaging application, for the same reason.

An X Prize unveiled on Wednesday promised millions of dollars to a team that could best show that artificial intelligence is humanity's friend, not its enemy. X Prize founder Peter Diamandis and the newly-appointed head of Watson at US technology veteran IBM David Kenny challenged software savants to demonstrate "how humans can collaborate with powerful cognitive and AI technologies capable of solving some of the world's grand challenges." Diamandis and Kenny announced a $5 million X Prize on the stage of a prestigious annual TED Conference here, telling the audience it would be here that the ultimate winner would be picked by the audience in the year 2020. "Personally, I am sick and tired of the dystopian conversation around artificial intelligence," Diamandis said, referring to high-profile public debate whether self-aware and smart machines would annihilate humanity or help it thrive. Diamandis weighed in on the side of AI being vital to surmounting h...

With rumors of a new high-end smartphone and a two-in-one tablet PC aimed at business users, Chinese manufacturer Huawei is hoping to make its mark on the 2016 Mobile World Congress, which runs February 22-25 in Barcelona, Spain. Data from Gartner now puts Huawei as the world's third largest smartphone seller, behind Samsung and Apple. The firm is expected to unveil the Huawei P9 -- set to replace the P8 launched in spring 2015 -- as a new flagship handset for 2016. A power-packed smartphone Leaks and rumors on various tech websites suggest that the firm's new smartphone could have a slightly curved 5.2-inch screen (1080p). The smartphone will no doubt run Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), and reportedly uses a latest-generation 2.3GHz Kirin processor and 4GB of RAM. Like the rumored Samsung Galaxy S7 and LG G5 smartphones, the Huawei P9 could also come with dual rear cameras. Although it's expected to debut at the Barcelona event, the Huawei P9 may not launch in Europe or the...

Video streaming delays generate as much stress as watching a horror film, the Swedish telecom company Ericsson said Wednesday. Ericsson, which sells equipment to mobile telephone companies to accelerate download speeds and prevent delays or buffering, said its study measured the heart rate, brain activity and eye movements of people watching videos on a mobile phone. People were asked to perform tasks on deadline, during the study, which required them to watch a badly buffered video download. Subjects experienced an average heart rate jump of 38 per cent, according to Ericsson. If this buffering delay lasted six seconds, "the stress response to delays was similar to that of watching a horror movie or solving a mathematical problem and greater than waiting in a check-out line at the grocery store," Ericsson said in its quarterly report on trends in the mobile internet. The test was conducted in Denmark, a country which boasts some of the world's fastest mobile internet...

Faced with a federal judge's order to help investigators break into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters, Apple may well argue that the request places an unreasonable burden on the company. In fact, experts say that complying with the government's request wouldn't be particularly challenging for Apple. But doing so might set a dangerous precedent that could threaten the data security of the millions of iPhone users around the world. The phone in question was used by Syed Farook, who along with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people in a December attack. Investigators don't know if the phone contains important evidence about the attack or the couple's communications — and because its contents are encrypted, they won't unless they can get the passcode to unlock it. The phone was issued by Farook's employer, the county of San Bernardino. Investigators can't just try random passcodes until they hit on the right one, either...

When machines at a nuclear plant in Iran suddenly began spinning out of control six years ago, suspicion quickly fell on the United States and Israel, especially after a sophisticated virus was found that appeared to have been tailored to sabotage a key process in the enrichment of weapons-grade uranium. Computer security experts dubbed the virus Stuxnet, describing it as the most powerful cyberweapon the world had yet seen. While the attack on the Natanz plant appeared to have met its immediate objective — to disrupt Iran's nuclear weapons program — the emergence of Stuxnet was soon compared to the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 for its ability to change the course of warfare. A broad public debate about the use of cyberweapons has yet to happen, however, although every modern society is vulnerable to attacks on its critical infrastructure, says Alex Gibney, an Academy Award-winning documentary maker who spent years investigating the Stuxnet case f...

Apple Inc launched its mobile payment system in China on Thursday in a bid to convince the hundreds of millions of users of the country's entrenched, dominant services to switch. "We think China could be our largest Apple Pay market," Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay, told Reuters in an interview in Beijing. In an early boost, China's biggest lender, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd (ICBC), was among the banks that said earlier this week that customers would be able to use Apple Pay from Thursday. However, Apple Pay has not had an easy ride so far in China, the fifth country to get the service. Even in its US home market, Apple has faced sceptical retailers in its effort to develop a new revenue stream. China is not likely to prove any easier to crack. "People switch applications for significantly better experiences, it (Apple) has to deliver not just a little bit more secure, or a little bit easier to use," said Mark Natkin, foun...

Performance of mobile operators deteriorated in terms of call drops during July-September 2015 with Aircel having a drop rate of as high as 18 per cent in North East and Orissa for 3G services, TRAI has found. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has shared the performance data for July-September quarter of 2015 and compared it with preceding quarter of April-June. As per the data, for 2G services, the call drop rate of Aircel was up to 17 per cent in North East while that of state-run BSNL was up to 9.57 per cent in West Bengal. In terms of worst-affected cells having more than 3 per cent call drop rate for 2G services, Aircel's performance was lagging in 17 circles, state-run BSNL did not meet the benchmark in five circles, Tata GSM and CDMA in 15 circles while Vodafone in two circles. For 3G services, Aircel was not meeting the 3 per cent drop rate in 10 circles, BSNL in three circles, Tata in five circles and Vodafone in two circles. All other operators, though,...

On Wednesday, Indian Telecom company Ringing Bells launched its new smartphone - Freedom 251 - which is touted as the world's cheapest phone with a price of just Rs 251. Other than its iPhone-like similarities nothing seems to be well with the ridiculously inexpensive smartphone. The phone can be booked online through a dedicated website freedom251.com by Ringing Bells between 6 am and 8 pm from February 18 to February 21. Upon clicking the 'Buy Now' option on the homepage, the site asks users to fill in the quantity and give out the shipping address and other related details. The company is charging Rs 40 per unit for shipping the device taking the total cost to Rs 291. However, once the user fills in the details and hits 'Pay Now', the site redirects the user to the same buy now page with blank columns for shipping address or a completely blank page. Although the company says that the phone's delivery will be completed four months later - by June 30, 2016 ...

Apple Inc is resisting a federal court order that it help the US government break into the iPhone 5c of Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people in a December shooting in San Bernardino, California, which the government has described as a terror attack. The following is an explanation of the technology and data privacy issues at issue. Q. Why does the US government need Apple's help? A. The government wants Apple to provide technical assistance to help it break into Farook's phone. Apple's mobile operating system encrypts virtually all of its data so that forensics experts cannot access email, text messages, photos or other information unless they enter a password. The phone requires two digital "keys" to unscramble the data: a passcode entered by the user when they want to use the device and a unique 256-bit AES key that is coded into the hardware during manufacture. The hardware key cannot be removed from the device, which prevents hackers f...

Amazon.com Inc is quietly inviting drivers for its new "on-demand" delivery service to handle its standard packages, as the online retailer known for low prices and razor-thin profit margins looks to speed up delivery times and tamp down its growing multi-billion dollar logistics bill. The move, which has not been announced publicly, is the latest sign that the world's biggest e-commerce company wants to control more of its own deliveries. Media reports have said the company plans to lease its own fleet of jets, and CEO Jeff Bezos eventually wants to use drones to get packages to customers. Amazon outlined details of its latest plan over the last few weeks in an email to contract drivers who deliver parcels for Amazon Flex, a program launched last year to handle speedy deliveries of common household goods to customers using Prime Now, a mobile app that comes with Amazon's popular $99-a-year Prime membership. They are not Amazon employees. If the gambit works, indu...