IntellectBeat

LG at the ongoing MWC 2016 trade show launched its G5 flagship, which was a major shakeup in the world of flagship smartphones, as form and function take centre stage while specifications are heavily downplayed. We got to spend some time with the LG G5 at MWC, and you can check out our initial impressions in the video. The LG G5 has already wowed critics and users alike with its innovative removable battery and modular design, which expand the phone's functionality. These modules or add-ons are called the LG Friends, meant to signify the companion devices that can be attached to the G5. LG Cam Plus is a camera module that adds physical buttons for camera operations along with expanding the total battery capacity to 4000mAh. The Hi-Fi Plus module, co-developed by Bang & Olufsen, is a portable Hi-Fi DAC which can be used as a standalone portable DAC or with the G5 to enable 32-bit audio playback. As for the specifications, the LG G5 sports a 5.3-inch QHD d...

Xiaomi on Wednesday unveiled its latest flagship smartphone, the Mi 5, at an event in Beijing, China. The Chinese company also revealed the Mi 5 at MWC in Barcelona which marked Xiaomi's first official presence at the global event. The Xiaomi Mi 5 launch comes almost two years after the Mi 4, which was unveiled back in 2014, and the company claims was one of the best sellers so far with sales figures close to 4 million. Considering that a lot rides on the success of the new flagship Mi 5 smartphone, the company has packed some impressive specifications under the hood as well as added some aesthetic improvements. Here are the top five features in Xiaomi's new flagship smartphone. 3D Ceramic body Xiaomi at the launch of the Mi 5 stressed that the company was looking to experiment with a new build for the new handset and that was when 3D ceramic material for the rear came up. Hugo Barra, Vice President of International for Xiaomi, at the Barcelona bri...

Xiaomi on Wednesday unveiled its latest flagship smartphone, the Mi 5, at an event in Beijing, China. The Chinese company also revealed the Mi 5 at MWC in Barcelona which marked Xiaomi's first official presence at the global event. The Xiaomi Mi 5 launch comes almost two years after the Mi 4, which was unveiled back in 2014, and the company claims was one of the best sellers so far with sales figures close to 4 million. Considering that a lot rides on the success of the new flagship Mi 5 smartphone, the company has packed some impressive specifications under the hood as well as added some aesthetic improvements. Here are the top five features in Xiaomi's new flagship smartphone. 3D Ceramic body Xiaomi at the launch of the Mi 5 stressed that the company was looking to experiment with a new build for the new handset and that was when 3D ceramic material for the rear came up. Hugo Barra, Vice President of International for Xiaomi, at the Barcelona bri...

At the MWC 2016, Xiaomi took wraps off its anticipated flagship smartphone - the Mi 5 - that comes powered with many a firsts for the China-based manufacturer. The 5.15-inch Android Marshmallow phone has at its core the newest Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset that is touted to make the phone 'insanely fast'. With its top-of-the-line variant featuring 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage, the Mi 5 features a 16 megapixel rear camera coupled with a 4 megapixel front camera. As Hugo Barra reveals, it took Xiaomi about 2 years to design the Mi 5 that comes with a 3D ceramic body that feels like marble. The phone, available in Black, White, and Gold colour choices, is expected to soon make its India debut. Here's the Mi 4 successor in photos.

After a string of leaks, rumours and teasers, Xiaomi has finally unveiled its new flagship smartphone- the Mi 5 - at the ongoing Mobile World Congress 2016, which is the company's first big release of the year 2016. The company has launched the Mi 5 in three variants. The Mi 5 (32 GB storage and 3 GB RAM) is priced at RMB 1999 (roughly translates to Rs 21,000), the Mi 5 64 GB variant is priced at RMB 2299 (approximately Rs 24,000) and the Mi 5 Pro (the top-of-the-line SKU with 128 GB storage and 4 GB RAM) carries a price tag of Rs 2699 (roughly translates to Rs 28,500). The phone is coming soon to India, said Xiaomi vice-president Hugo Barra at the launch event. Successor to the Mi 4, the design of the Xiaomi Mi 5 is inspired by the Mi Note. Featuring curved edges, the new Mi 5 sports a slim metal frame with a 3D ceramic body which is claimed to be durable, wear resistant, and feels like marble. As Barra explains, the 3D ceramic body is 75 per cent more expensive than 3D glass. ...

Shortly before  the Mi 5 launch event kicks off in Barcelona , Xiaomi has announced the Mi 4S smartphone at an event in Beijing. The Xiaomi Mi 4S is a new version of the Mi 4 which was launched in India early last year, and should not be mistaken as the successor to the Mi 4. The Xiaomi Mi 5, which actually will be a follow up to the Mi 4, will be unveiled in a couple of hours from now. Priced at 1699 Yuan (roughly Rs 18,000), the phone is encased in a metal frame with a glass panel at the back. Unlike the Mi 4, the new Mi 4S sports a fingerprint sensor. Other specifications of the new 4G-enables Mi 4S include a 5-inch full HD display, 2.5GHz Snapdragon 808 processor, 3GB of RAM, 3260 mAh, and a 13 megapixel rear camera. The phone will be available in only 64GB storage variant. The company is expected to announce the same device at the Mi 5 launch event in Barcelona as well. You can watch the livestream of the Mi 5 event  here . Source: ibnlive

Chinese phone maker Oppo has announced world's fastest charging technology that can charge your smartphone from zero to 100 per cent in flat 15 minutes. Unveiling the technology at Mobile World Congress here on Tuesday, Oppo said that its its new "SuperVOOC" quick-charging technology will charge a dead 2,500mAh battery to 100 per cent and the technology will work over traditional micro-USB and USB Type-C cables, Endgadget reported. The technology uses a low-voltage algorithm to keep the charge at low temperatures. According to the company, only five minutes' charging time will give up to 10 hours of talk time. This makes it the fastest charging device after Qualcomm's "Quick Charge 3.0" technology which claims to charge smartphones from zero power to 80 per cent in nearly 35 minutes. But the chargers are compatible only with smartphones that have Qualcomm Snapdragon processors. “SuperVOOC” charger will also not be compatible with non-Oppo smartph...

Business magnet Bill Gates is supportive of investigators' efforts to force Apple to help them crack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, saying a balance needs to be struck between government access and the need to preserve data security. While clarifying he doesn't support untrammeled government access to personal data, the Microsoft co-founder's position runs contrary to those of many tech executives who have backed Apple Inc. The heads of Facebook, Twitter and Google have all sided with Apple on the grounds that complying with the government's request would ultimately undermine data privacy. Gates stated in a handful of interviews that it's not uncommon for phone companies and banks to hand over customer information to investigators. He questioned why tech companies should be treated differently. In particular, he took issue with Apple CEO Tim Cook's argument that helping crack the shooter's iPhone would set a broader precedent...

Adding to its plethora of multiple-range sound systems, portable digital innovative solutions provider Portronics on Tuesday announced the launch of the Thunder Bluetooth Soundbar which provides more vibrant, full-range sound. Portronics said in a release here that Thunder is the perfect upgrade to the default speakers in a TV which will add superior sound output to the set. Thunder, it said, is absolutely compact and majorly improves dialogue clarity while providing more vibrant, full-range sound. What more, it takes up minimal space and is designed to flow with modern décor. Thunder is an active soundbar with an all-in-one setup and houses six powerful 10W speakers in one sleek bar giving a super powerful output of 60W from a single sound system and at the same time lends it a more streamlined and compact look. Setting up Thunder is also a cinch as it allows you a super simple plug-and-play connectivity. Thunder -- available at a special launch price of Rs 7,999 -- fits the...

In hills where Zulu royalty once hunted wildlife, South African conservationists now scan live video from a thermal-imaging camera attached to a drone, looking for heat signatures of poachers stalking through the bush to kill rhinos. The unarmed drone, which resembles a model airplane, flies several miles (kilometers) from a van where an operator toggles a customized video-gaming control, zooming and swiveling the craft's camera. The nocturnal surveillance in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Game Reserve comes amid international discussion about whether technology, particularly drones, will make a real difference in anti-poaching efforts that often rely on the "boots on the ground" of rangers on patrol. Several years ago, drones were touted by some as a silver bullet for conservation, but some experiments have foundered. Even so, drone technology is developing quickly and the aircraft have been used around the world, including: — In Belize, where the Wildlife Conservation Society he...

A new mobile handset has been announced by the studio behind a suite of Android optimization apps and will go on sale in Europe this April for €199 (~$219). Announced at the 2016 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and bearing the name of its studio, Cheetah Mobile, the CheetahPhone is being manufactured in partnership with another Chinese firm, Cubot. Initial color options for the 149 x 74.9 x 7.95mm phone are gold, rose gold, and space grey, while on the inside a 1.5GHz 64-bit octa-core CPU and 3GB of RAM powers the device's full HD screen. Samsung is supplying the 13MP rear camera, and a secondary 8MP lens is on the CheetahPhone's front; Cubot provides a launcher as well as its gallery and image transfer app. Ten gigabytes of free cloud storage, the Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system, and a rear panel fingerprint sensor are also named as features by the Kingsoft subsidiary, with Cheetah Mobile installing its own selection of 50 wallpapers and themes. Cheetah Mobil...

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is all set to unveil the new flagship smartphone - the Mi 5 - at MWC 2016 in Barcelona. If speculations are to be believed, the company will also announce the launch of the Mi 5 Plus alongside the Mi 5. While the event is yet to begin, an online retailer has already revealed the images, specifications and prices of both the phones. If we go by the latest leaked details, the Mi 5 will come with a Snapdragon 820 quad-core CPU with 4GB of RAM, 16 megapixel rear camera and a 5.2 inch Quad HD screen (with 2560x1440 pixels) high resolution. Also, it is claimed that the phone will come in two storage options - 16 GB and 64 GB - with no option to expand the memory. The Mi 5 Plus, on the other hand, is said to come with a 6-inch QHD (2560×1440 pixels) IPS display, Qulacomm Snapdragon 810 chipset and a battery capacity bigger than the one in Mi 5. Also, unlike the Mi 5, it will come in only one storage variant i.e, 64 GB. The phones, reportedly, will be ...

LG may have re-earned a name for itself in the smartphone market courtesy the Nexus 4, 5 and 5X phones over the last couple of years, but the company’s bottom line is still not the best of shape. At a time when its core brand didn’t attract too many eyeballs in the market it successfully sold Google-branded Nexus phones in the same market. But overall its efforts to lure consumers towards its phones don’t appear to be paying off. If you differ, ask yourself that how many people have you seen carrying LG phones in the recent past? In an uncertain market, it is normal to witness the rise and fall of companies. For instance, the once-popular Nokia (now part of Microsoft) and BlackBerry are now have beens. On the other hand, the erstwhile average performer - Samsung - has been widening its market space and sticking to the no.1 position for quite some time now. By and large, many would equate the performance of a company to the products on its carousel and the prices they...

Chinese manufacturer ZTE is at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to present its latest range of devices, including one curiosity -- the Spro Plus -- a hybrid gadget that's a portable projector and a touchscreen tablet all rolled into one. As a successor to the Spro 2 -- ZTE's Android pico projector with built-in touch screen -- the ZTE Spro Plus has the form factor and power of an Android tablet. Presented at the Barcelona trade fair and due to go on sale by summer 2016, the device has an 8.4-inch screen (2560x1440 pixels), 3GB of RAM, 32 to 128GB of memory (depending on the version) and a microSD card slot. The Spro Plus has a built-in laser projector with brightness up to 500 lumens, which can project an 80-inch image from a distance of 2.4 meters. The projector will be available in WiFi and 4G/WiFi models but there's no word yet on how much this two-in-one might cost. Note that ZTE counts over 500,000 unit sales of its Spro 1 and 2 projectors. Alongside the Spro Pl...

Chinese smartphone maker LeEco has announced the sale of its first smartphone powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset -- Le Max Pro, a month after the device was first unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show ( CES ) 2016 in Las Vegas. The company made the announcement on Monday at the ongoing Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016 in Barcelona, the capital city of the autonomous community of Catalonia in Spain. The new generation mobile phone is priced at approximately Rs 21,000 and runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow system topped with LeEco's eUI. "As the new generation of LeEco's superphone, it sets three worldwide industry benchmarks - the first Android smartphone with Snapdragon 820 chipset, ultrasonic Sense ID fingerprint scanner, and 802.11ad connectivity," a company statement said. Qualcomm released its Snapdragon 820 chipset last year. Le Max Pro shares many similarities with its predecessor, Le Max, which was launched in India early this year and started th...

Encrypted messaging platform Telegram revealed that 100 million users are using its mobile app every month. Co-founder Pavel Durov confirmed the numbers during a keynote presentation at the 2016 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, having launched his instant messenger in 2013. The 100m number is up on a December 2014 disclosure that pegged Telegram at 50m active users, with TechCrunch comparing the tally to Facebook Messenger's 800m and the 1bn users of Facebook-owned WhatsApp. In-house figures were confirmed via Telegram's website, with 350,000 new users said to be signing up each day, and some 15 billion messages sent every 24 hours. Durov and elder brother Nikolai created VK, the Russian social network with upwards of 300m users, before leaving to start work on Telegram in 2013. It's one of a number of social applications that are built on secure messaging protocols. Telegram scored full marks on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's November 2015 Secure Messa...

US astronomers announced last month they may have found a ninth planet beyond Neptune, but conceded they had no idea where on an estimated 10,000-20,000-year orbit it might be. On Tuesday, a French science quartet said they have narrowed the search area. By studying data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn, the seventh planet from the Sun, they could exclude two zones, the team wrote in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Their work confirmed that a ninth planet might exist in the far reaches of our Solar System, co-author Jacques Laskar of the Paris Observatory told AFP, "but not just anywhere". Based on mathematical modelling, the French scientists calculated what influence a ninth planet -- travelling along the orbit postulated by the Americans -- would have on the movement of other planets as it passed nearby. They then looked at how the known planets actually behaved. The postulated planet is thought to circle the Sun in a lopsided, highly elong...

Connecting your smartphone to the web with just a lamp -- that is the promise of LiFi, featuring internet access 100 times faster than WiFi with revolutionary wireless technology. French start-up Oledcomm demonstrated the technology at the Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest mobile fair, in Barcelona. As soon as a smartphone was placed under an office lamp, it started playing a video. The big advantage of LiFi, short for "light fidelity", is its lightning speed. Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of over 200 Gbps -- fast enough to "download the equivalent of 23 DVDs in one second", the founder and head of Oledcomm, Suat Topsu, told AFP. "LiFi allows speeds that are 100 times faster than WiFi" which uses radio waves to transmit data, he added. The technology uses the frequencies generated by LED bulbs -- which flicker on and off imperceptibly thousands of times a second -- to beam information through the air, leading it to be du...

While tens of thousands flock to the Mobile World Congress to check out the latest smartphones, the show also offers glimpses of some of the coolest off-beat — and downright strange — innovations. Many of these newfangled prototypes found a niche at the trade show's special corner for start-ups, which gathered here to find business deals for their inventions. Here is a look at the quirkiest of the gadgets and apps on display this week in Barcelona. 1. Magic Drawings AP Photo/Manu Fernandez Remember pop-up books? Chromville takes the idea to another dimension with its augmented reality educational app. Here is how it works: Kids download and print pages with designs that they color in as they wish. Next, they hold a tablet over the page and, via the Chromville app, the drawing turns into a 3-D image they can interact with through the screen. The one on the solar system, for example, lets kids explore the planets, zoom in and out, and learn facts. Other modules teach...

Apple is battling the US government over unlocking devices in at least 10 cases in addition to its high-profile dispute involving the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino attackers, court documents show. The existence of other court fights supports Apple's argument that the legal case in California is about more than a single iPhone. Apple provided a list of cases where it is opposing the US Justice Department's requests in a February 17 letter to a federal judge in Brooklyn, where the company is challenging government efforts to access an iPhone in a drug trafficking case. The letter said the requests sought Apple's assistance under the All Writs Act, a 1789 law which allows the courts broad authority to help law enforcement. "Apple has not agreed to perform any services on the devices to which those requests are directed," Apple's lawyer Marc Zwillinger said in the letter. The letter said the cases were "similar in nature" but did not provide s...

Along with other Chinese phone makers such as Huawei and Xiaomi , Chinese brands have surpassed Samsung in China and are encroaching on Apple's turf. In the coming years, analysts forecast that these cheap Android phones with not-so-cheap features will likely attract more budget-conscious customers in Europe and even in Samsung's and Apple's home markets, South Korea and the United States. Chinese phone makers made their global ambitions known at this week's Mobile World Congress wireless show in Barcelona, Spain. Huawei and TCL vied to steal the spotlight from Samsung and LG, both of which announced new high-end phones at the show. Xiaomi, which typically launches phones in China, will preview the Mi 5 phone in Barcelona on Wednesday. "The Chinese smartphone vendors have a very unique feature — it is the price," said Shu On Kwok, editor of AndroidPIT, a website that tracks Android developments. "You get the same features as an LG or a Samsung smartph...