Telegram Update Boosts Size of Supergroups to 5,000 Members

Telegram last month hit 100 million monthly active users and alongside announced a bunch of updates for the app as well. The instant messaging service has now announced another update, focusing on the Supergroups feature.

As a part of Telegram v3.7 on Android and iOS, the company has now increased the number of people who can join a Supergroup from 1,000 to 5,000. The admins of the group can now also let other members know some important news or any other information by pinning it at the top. In addition, all the members in the Supergroup will receive a notification for the pinned message, even if they have muted ordinary messages from the group.

The app update also brings the ability to make a Supergroup 'Public' and share them via a short link with others. This will let the link recipient read the entire chat history and also join to be able to post messages. Since, this would lead to an increase in spammers in Supergroups, Telegram has also introduced some 'powerful moderation tools' for admins. "From now on, they can quickly delete all messages from a specific member, block and report them," says the company blog post.

Further, an admin of any group can now convert the group into a Supergroup. Group admins are shown in group members list after the app update. The company has added that the public groups feature will be rolling out gradually. It is for now available in the US and Europe, and will soon reach several countries in Asia as well. The updated app is available to download from Google Play and App Store.

Last month Telegram gave users the ability to edit their messages after it has been posted. The post however, can be edited a short while after they have been posted. A single tap on Android and double tap on iOS would let them edit the sent messages.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

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...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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