IntellectBeat

Google last month released the first Developer Preview of Android N for developers introducing a host of new features including multi-window support, notification enhancements, background optimisations, number-blocking, and other new features. The company on Wednesday released the second Developer Preview of Android N in the form of factory images for eligible devices, and, OTA updates for devices enrolled in the Android Beta Program. The latest Developer Preview brings new features including Launcher shortcuts, Emoji Unicode 9 support, and more. As before, the Android N Developer Preview will be available to eligible devices including the Nexus 6,Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, and Pixel C devices. Google has also added the General Mobile 4G Android One smartphone to receive the N Developer Preview 2. In a post, Dave Burke, VP of Engineering, revealed that the Nexus Player users will have to wait a bit to receive the latest Developer Preview 2 wh...

HTC has so far caused quite a lot of confusion regarding which model of its new flagship, the HTC 10, it intends to launch in India. The company on Thursday provided a statement that intended to clarify the issue, but did little to clear the muddy waters. "We are pleased to announce that global flagship HTC 10 is coming soon to India. Stay tuned for the announcement and the availability date," Faisal Siddiqui, President HTC South Asia. We asked the company what this meant precisely, would the Snapdragon 820 variant of the smartphone launch in India? The company refused to elaborate however, so for now, your guess is as good as ours, and we can all be glad the confusion will be cleared "soon" alongside the smartphone's launch.  To recall, in its launch statement on Tuesday, the company had said it would bring launch the Snapdragon 820-based HTC 10 in some markets, and the Snapdragon 652-based HTC 10 Lifestyle in others. The HTC 10 Lifestyle with Snapdra...

Aiming to create a space for itself in the budget smartphone market, LG on Thursday introduced two new Android smartphones under the K series - the K7 and the K10, the company's first 'Made in India' phones. Both the mid-range phones appear to be promising, but do they have in them to compete against the competitors' offerings in the same price segment? We have played with both the phones, but here we will talk about how the Rs 9,500 LG K7 phone fared during the review period and where it stands in the already heated budget smartphone market. One of the most impressive features of the K7 is its premium finish. The device comes with a slightly curved display thanks to LG's 2.5D Arc Glass on top. And the rounded edges and LG’s pebble design make it an extremely eye-pleasing smartphone. The K7 comes houses all the buttons at the back, and therefore, with no button at the sides, the company has managed to give the phone a slim profile. The K7 feels comfortable to ho...

An anonymous developer who goes by the name of LibreVR has managed to develop a compatibility layer that allows you to play Oculus VR games - Lucky's Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck only for now - on the HTC Vive virtual reality headset. Called Revive, it patches over your existing game files to make it work with OpenVR. "It works by reimplementing [sic] functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls," the developer said on the software's GitHub page. "Unfortunately Oculus has implemented a Code Signing check on the Runtime DLLs, therefore the Revive DLLs cannot be used unless the application is patched." The instructions are fairly straightforward to work with, and you shouldn't have a lot of trouble trying it if you want. But this is still an unofficial and unapproved method, considering Oculus' love for a closed system. Where on one hand the Oculus Store doesn't even recognise the HTC Vive when connected, SteamVR is happy...

LG has introduced its new budget smartphones under the K series - K7 and K10 - in India. The new 4G-enabled phones, which were first unveiled to the world in January at CES 2016, have been introduced in India for under Rs 15,000. The LG K7 is priced at Rs 9,500, while the K10 carries a price tag of Rs 13,500. Talking about the specs, the LG K7 features a 5.0-inch FWVGA (854x480) In-cell Touch display, 1.3GHz quad-core processor, 5 megapixel front and rear cameras, 8GB ROM, 1 GB RAM, and a 2,125mAh battery. The LG K10, on the other hand, comes with a 5.3-inch HD (1280x720) In-cell Touch display, Snapdragon 410 quad-core processor paired with 2 GB of RAM, 13 megapixel rear camera, 5 megapixel front camera, 16 GB of internal storage and a 2,300mAh battery. Both the phones run Android 5.1 Lollipop and include a microSD card slot for additional storage. Both devices are equipped with Flash for Selfie on the front and have "design cues borrowed from nature", which give them a...

A team led by an Indian-origin professor at Columbia University has created a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras. "Cameras today capture the world from essentially a single point in space. While the camera industry has made remarkable progress in shrinking the camera to a tiny device with ever increasing imaging quality, we are exploring a radically different approach to imaging," said Shree K Nayar, computer science professor at Columbia University. "We believe there are numerous applications for cameras that are large in format but very thin and highly flexible," added Nayar who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, in 1984. Nayar's team designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. This optical adaptation enables the device to produce high quality images over a wide ...

Micromax is shifting to a new gear as the competition intensifies in the smartphone market. The company has redone its clenched fist logo as part of a refreshed Micromax 3.0 strategy. The company that redefined the budget smartphone market in India also announced a string of new products  including 14 phones , 3 TVs and 3 tablets. The major launch at the event was Micromax's new flagship phones - the Canvas 6 and the Canvas 6 Pro. Both the phones are priced the same at Rs 13,999 and will be up for pre-order Wednesday on micromaxinfo.com Both the phones have similar 5.5-inch FHD display. The Canvas 6 Pro has a 2 GHz octacore processor while the Canvas 6 comes with a 1.3 GHz processor. The 6 Pro has 4 GB RAM, while the 6 comes with 3 GB. Both phones have 13 megapixel rear cameras, but the front camera in the Canvas 6 is 8 megapixel compared to 5 megapixel in the Canvas 6 Pro. The Canvas 6 is the first Micromax phone to sport a fingerprint sensor. The 6 Pro doesn't have any...

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

HTC unveiled its latest flagship smartphone - the HTC 10 - that comes with an improved camera and battery. The HTC 10 tries to strike a balance between image resolution and individual pixel size with its 12 megapixel rear camera, which is the same as the latest iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfie camera — to 5 megapixels, matching the rival devices. It also joins its rivals in letting the screen serve as a front-facing flash. The HTC 10 phone is expected to be available in late April. The phone comes with 3 GB RAM, 32 GB internal storage, and a 3000mAh battery that is claimed to last up to two days. The company has not announced the pricing. Here's the HTC 10 in photos:

HTC has unveiled its latest flagship phone, the HTC 10 with a number of improvements and fixing past errors. HTC's flagship phones have drawn good reviews in the past, but it's had trouble translating those into sales. HTC doesn't currently rank as one of the top five phone manufacturers worldwide and in recent months, it has branched out to fitness and virtual-reality devices. But it isn't giving up on phones. The company didn't immediately announce pricing for the phone. Here are 10 highlights of the new HTC 10: 1.  HTC is promising a better camera in the HTC 10. Tt has brought down the megapixel count from 20 to 12 but with larger individual pixels (1.55µm). 2.  The front camera also gets a slight boost to 5 megapixels. 3.  The HTC 10 also joins its rivals in letting the screen serve as a front-facing flash. 4.  HTC says its new flagship is the first phone with dual optical image stabilisation (OIS) in both the rear and the front cameras. 5. ...

The new Facebook Surround 360 camera can capture footage via 17 cameras and then pull all of the images together via a web-based application. The idea behind the system, which is huge and features a mix of cameras including a fish-eye lenses is to create perfectly spherical films tailored to each eye that can be rendered in 4K and 8K and of course viewed in Virtual Reality. The array of cameras unveiled at the company's developer conference on Tuesday is designed to serve as a reference design. The plans needed to construct an array at home will be open source and the software application capable of taking all of the information from each of the lenses and pulling it all together will be equally free to use.

After Microsoft unveiled new Windows 10 emojis last week, Emojipedia has reported that Microsoft has made available six new ninja cat emojis, exclusive to Windows 10 users. According to Emojipedia, those with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update can find the six new ninja cats by combining the existing cat emoji with other emojis, with the website listing further instructions on the combinations to use for each of the six ninja cats. With the right combination users will reveal ninja cat, ninja cat flying, ninja cat at a computer, ninja cat riding a T-Rex, ninja cat drinking coffee, and ninja cat in space. Ninja cat was first discovered a year ago and has proved to be a popular emoji among Windows users. Not only has he been turned into a meme by fans, but Microsoft have also built on this popularity, hiding ninja cat in event invites, and even handing out out stickers promoting ninja cat.

Renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking entered the universe of Chinese social media with a big bang on Tuesday, with his first post to the country's Twitter-like Weibo service garnering him more than a million followers the same day. In less than five hours Hawking flew past Apple chief Tim Cook, who has around 820,000 fans after a nearly a year online. "In my physical travels, I have only been able to touch the surface of your fascinating history and culture," the Cambridge scientist said in his initial post, writing in both English and Chinese so as to avoid any information loss in translation. "But now I can communicate with you through social media -– and I hope to tell you more about my life and work through this page and also to learn from you in reply," he added. He also explained that he first visited China in 1985, traversing the country by train, and had last been in the capital in 2006 for a physics conference. China holds scientific and intellec...

Billionaire Russian investor Yuri Milner and British cosmologist Stephen Hawking on Tuesday announced an ambitious new space initiative for a mission to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth. Milner and Hawking are spearheading the "Breakthrough Starshot" team of scientists working on the bold research program to create a fleet of super-compact, ultra-light space vehicles or "nanocraft." The goal is to send the light-propelled mini space vehicles -- each no bigger than a cell phone -- to Alpha Centauri, which is 4.37 light years away, or 25 trillion miles, from Earth. They estimate it could take about 20 years to reach the star system from the time of the launch -- rather than the 30,000 years it would take with today's fastest spacecraft. "Space travel as we know it is slow. How do we go faster and how do we go further? How do we make this great leap?" Milner, who is planning to initially commit $100 million to the project, told a pres...