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Following the launch of its  high-end X470 platform controller  earlier this year,  AMD  has just released a mid-range counterpart, the B450. This chipset will support a wide range of AMD processors, including the current and previous-generation  Ryzen 7 , Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 models,  Ryzen APUs , and also legacy Athlon and legacy A-series CPUs designed for Socket AM4. AMD is touting the longevity of its  Socket AM4 interface , and says that it provides a long-term upgrade path for buyers. The company has previously  committed to support Socket AM4 till 2020 . The B450 will supplant last year's B350 for mid-range PCs. It does not introduce any dramatic new features, but an AMD spokesperson mentioned optimisations based on "lessons learnt over the past year". The B450 platform supports PCIe Gen 3.0 and USB 3.1 Gen 2, and thanks to AMD's architecture, total platform connectivity depends on which CPU is used. Motherboard manufactur...

Following the launch of its  high-end X470 platform controller  earlier this year,  AMD  has just released a mid-range counterpart, the B450. This chipset will support a wide range of AMD processors, including the current and previous-generation  Ryzen 7 , Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 models,  Ryzen APUs , and also legacy Athlon and legacy A-series CPUs designed for Socket AM4. AMD is touting the longevity of its  Socket AM4 interface , and says that it provides a long-term upgrade path for buyers. The company has previously  committed to support Socket AM4 till 2020 . The B450 will supplant last year's B350 for mid-range PCs. It does not introduce any dramatic new features, but an AMD spokesperson mentioned optimisations based on "lessons learnt over the past year". The B450 platform supports PCIe Gen 3.0 and USB 3.1 Gen 2, and thanks to AMD's architecture, total platform connectivity depends on which CPU is used. Motherboard manufactur...

YouTube  has added a dynamic video player to its desktop version. With the latest development, YouTube on desktops has started supporting square and vertical videos. The new player also dynamically supports videos with an aspect ratio other than the traditional 16:9 ratio.  YouTube for iOS  received an update in December last year  with a dynamic player  to start adapting horizontal and square-shaped videos. In March, the Google-owned company  expanded its offering to Android  as well and started providing an all-new video streaming experience to a large number of mobile phone users. While the new change brings the same experience that has existed on  Android  and  iOS  for the last some months, some desktop users are apparently not convinced. The addition of the dynamic player to the desktop version of YouTube lets you watch vertical videos without any black bars covering the left and right sides. The player adapts to the size ...

Huawei  is now gearing up to launch its new phones in the Mate series, presumably sometime in October, and leaks in June  suggested large displays . Now, more information on specs and an image of the  Huawei Mate 20 Pro has leaked online. The Huawei Mate 20 and Huawei Mate 20 Pro are tipped to sport 6.1-inch and 6.9-inch displays respectively, according to a previous report. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro is now rumoured to sport a notch-less and bezel-less display, a triple camera setup at the back, and an in-display fingerprint scanner. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro leaked image and specs are  courtesy  C Technology on Weibo, and the tipster suggests that the device will be powered by the Kirin 980 SoC. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro will also sport a triple camera setup like the  P20 Pro , but it will come with a 42-megapixel sensor, and not a 40-megapixel one that was seen on the P20 Pro. The tipster claims that the Huawei Mate 20 Pro supports 40W fast charging, and an in...

PS4 -exclusive  Gran Turismo Sport's latest update adds micro-transactions to the game. Right now you can purchase cars for cash. The only restriction is that they should cost less that 2,000,000 in Gran Turismo Sport's in-game currency. At the moment this change is live in the US and Asia, while the rest of the world, India included as it falls under Europe for Sony, won't see the new option until August 2. The move could not come at less opportune time. Developers have been shirking away from micro-transactions, going as far as removing them from their games, most prominently, Warner Bros-owned Monolith that removed micro-transactions from Shadow of War and Dice removing them from Star Wars Battlefront 2. What's more is that this move from Sony comes after series producer Kazunori Yamauchi stated that the simulation racer would not get micro-transactions. When asked if the game would feature micro-transactions like past Gran Turismo games, Yamauchi responded throu...

Xiaomi  has reportedly been  working on the Pocophone F1, rumoured to be its next handset powered by  Snapdragon 845  processor. New details on the specifications of the upcoming smartphone have emerged online, thanks to a Bluetooth certification. The Chinese manufacturer already has four handsets -  Mi 8 ,  Mi 8 Explorer Edition ,  Mi Mix 2S , and  Black Shark  - in the market, but now a new handset under the Pocophone brand appears set to be launched. The latest information affirms that the Pocophone F1 will feature a liquid cooling system that will pair well with the latest Qualcomm SoC. The  Bluetooth SIG Certification  of the Xiaomi Pocophone F1 confirms the existence of the smartphone, but the company may always cancel its launch like it did with the  Mi Max 3 Pro . However, the Bluetooth certification reveals a bit more information, than just the name of the handset. The listing confirms that the Pocophone F1 is powe...

Priyanka Chopra has been picked as the female lead for the film adaptation of comic book Cowboy Ninja Viking, according to a new report. The film stars Chris Pratt ( Guardians of the Galaxy ) and will be directed by Michelle MacLaren (Breaking Bad). According to  The Hollywood Reporter , Chopra will play the "love interest" of Pratt's character Duncan, but there are no specifics. It's likely that she'll play Sara Nix, assistant to Dr. Ghislain – the creator of the story's Triplets Program – and Chris Pratt's love interest at the start of the comic, but it's also possible Priyanka Chopra's been tapped to portray Grear Fulkirk, Duncan's ex-wife and a rival to Nix. Chris Pratt has been attached to the film since November 2014, while MacLaren was hired as director in January this year. It'll be Priyanka Chopra's second feature-length venture for 2019, after the upcoming adaptation of Kristin Hannah's novel The Nightingale. Her TV cr...

PS4  sales have totalled 82.2 million,  Sony  announced during its quarterly earnings report. This puts Sony's current console ahead of the PS3 which ended up with around 80 million sold in its lifetime. In April 2018 Sony announced that the PS4 had sold 79 million which means it sold 3.2 million PS4 consoles in the last quarter. Also, Sony stated that it has 33.9 million PlayStation Plus (PS Plus) subscribers, which is a slight dip compared to the 34.2 million subscribers it had as of March 31, 2018. As for games, 40.6 million games have shipped during in the April to June quarter with digital downloads consisting of 43 percent of sales. Games makes up the majority of Sony's PlayStation division revenue followed by hardware and services like PS Plus. "Sales are expected to be significantly higher than the April forecast primarily due to higher-than-expected PlayStation 4 ("PS4") software sales including sales through the network, the impact of foreign exchan...

Alphabet's  YouTube  is creating scripted series and other original programming for international markets including France, Germany, Japan, Mexico and India to try to draw new customers to its paid subscription service, a senior executive said on Friday. The programming will come in the form of multiple genres such as music documentaries, reality series, talk shows and scripted series, Susanne Daniels, YouTube's global head of original programming, said in an interview. It will be produced in local languages and subtitled or dubbed for other markets. Some of the programming will appear on  YouTube Premium , the monthly subscription service formerly called  YouTube Red . Other content will be available on YouTube's free service with advertising. We are targeting markets where we believe we have a tremendous upside in potential subscribers," Daniels said. YouTube already has released a handful of original shows in South Korea and one in India, a talk show in ...

Web browser developer Opera's shares rose as much as 30 percent in their US market debut on Friday, giving the Norway-based company a market value of about $1.72 billion (roughly Rs. 11,803 crores). The company's shares opened at $14.34 (roughly Rs. 984), about 20 percent above its initial public offering price of $12.00 (roughly Rs. 823) per American depositary share. Opera , founded in 1995, was originally owned by Norwegian software firm Otello Corp ASA before  being bought by a consortium of Chinese investors  in 2016. The company has pioneered several innovations that later became common in major browsers such as  tabbed browsing  and  pop-up blocking , which helped users control an earlier generation of in-your-face ads and malware disguised as advertising. Opera competes with companies such as  Alphabet ,  Apple  and  Microsoft . Opera, which has about 322 million monthly active users, said its mobile browsers are mostly us...

Jio has posted a net profit of Rs. 612 crores for the first quarter just a day after arch rival Airtel reported  a drop in net income . The  Jio  quarterly revenue stood at Rs. 8,109 crores as for June 30, 2018, with an ARPU (average revenue per user) of Rs. 134.5. This is the second consecutive dip in ARPU for the company, which earned Rs. 154 per customer in the Dec 2017 quarter and Rs. 137.1 crores in the January-March period. The Jio user base stands at 215.3 million at the end of June quarter, a figure RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani had  announced  at the company’s AGM earlier this month. According to RIL data, Jio added 28.7 million new subscribers in Q1 2019 compared to 26.5 million in the preceding three months. The company says this is the highest user growth it has experienced since it started commercial operations in April 2017. The churn rate (percentage of people leaving Jio against those joining the network) was 0.30 percent, which the operator cla...

All critical personal data on people in India should be processed within the country, a government panel said on Friday. The recommendation comes at a time when data breaches are becoming common globally and there is heightened scrutiny by governments on how companies handle user data. The panel, headed by former Supreme Court judge B.N. Srikrishna, also presented a draft bill -  Draft of Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 - that will go before parliament designed to enhance data protection. The legislation could affect how global companies store data in India. The panel said "personal data determined to be critical" will be subject to the requirement of being processed "only in India", according to its 213-page report released on Friday. "The central government should determine categories of sensitive personal data which are critical to the nation," the panel said, adding that there will be a prohibition against cross-border transfer of such da...

Aiming to expand its presence in the US,  HMD Global  - the Finnish company which sells the  Nokia  brand of phones - is hiring a team, the media reported. According to a  few job listings on LinkedIn , HMD Global is looking to hire an e-commerce lead to deal with its online distribution partners like Amazon and Best Buy. It needs a technical account manager to handle customer requirements, PhoneArena reported late on Thursday. This is actually an interesting move considering the fact that Xiaomi hasn't yet entered the US market. Most of HMD's Nokia smartphones available in the US belong to the mid-tier range, which would've made Xiaomi a fierce competitor," the report added. According to the job postings, the company also needs a product lead, to talk to carriers and decide on a roadmap, anticipating trends in the market. Without the help of the carriers, it will be hard for the Nokia smartphones to compete with the likes of  Samsung ,  LG...

Samsung  launched the new Gear IconX 2018 in India on Thursday. The  Gear IconX  is a lightweight and truly wireless earbuds. Samsung says that the device has been customers "who are always in action." The Gear IconX comes with standalone music playback and 4GB of inbuilt storage. The company is touting the presence of several new and upgraded features that come with the Gear IconX. Notably, the Gear IconX is available in India starting today (July 26). It comes in a Black colour model and has been priced at Rs. 13,990. It is available in available via both online and offline channels. The new Gear IconX, Samsung says, provides an upgraded music experience. Music on the earbuds can be loaded either wirelessly or from a smartphone or PC using a USB cable. Once done, touch-based gestures will allow you to play, pause, skip as well as provide you with the option to browse entire playlists. There is an equaliser feature that allows users to adjust the audio frequency to o...

Ten more satellites for Iridium Communications have been successfully launched into orbit. A  SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket  lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, at 4:39am Wednesday and released the satellites about an hour later. It was the seventh launch in Iridium's $3 billion (roughly Rs. 20,600 crores) campaign to replace its entire fleet of globe-circling satellites and brought the number in orbit to 65. One more launch will increase the number to 75, including 66 operational satellites and nine spares. SpaceX  says that despite challenging weather and sea conditions, the Falcon's first stage successfully returned to Earth and landed on a "droneship" stationed in the Pacific Ocean south of Vandenberg.

Amazon ,  Apple ,  Google , and  Microsoft are all  working on artificial intelligence (AI)  to enhance their virtual assistants. But a new report shows that Google's  Assistant  has come first in an IQ test that saw it compete with Amazon's  Alexa , Apple's  Siri , and Microsoft's  Cortana . It appears that the recent developments by the search giant have improved the Assistant quite significantly and made it a strong contender against Siri, which has got the second position in the test. All four voice-based virtual assistants were asked 800 questions. Research-driven venture capital firm Loup Ventures on Thursday published the results of its annual digital assistant IQ test that made the Google Assistant a clear winner against Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Of the 800 questions that were asked to each digital assistant, Google Assistant was able to answer 86 percent of them correctly, while Siri answered 79 percent correctly, Alexa answ...

Facebook  has launched a new feature called "Watch Party" that allows members of the social network's groups to watch videos on Facebook together in real time, and comment. The launch of this feature on Wednesday  after about six months of testing  reveals Facebook's plans to go aggressive on the video streaming space that could help the social networking giant to compete against Google's  YouTube . "Once a Watch Party is started, participants can watch videos, live or recorded, and interact with one another around them in the same moment," Erin Connolly, Product Manager at Facebook, said in a  statement . To utilise this new feature, members of any Facebook group need to search a video on the platform and invite others to join them. A chat window then opens up for the members to have a discussion on the video as it plays. On the global launch of the feature, Facebook also added two new features that were not available at the test phase. It a...

You can now ask your  Amazon Echo speaker , " Alexa , what time does Rite Aid close?" and get hours for the pharmacy closest to your house. Amazon.com  is adding the hours, addresses and phone numbers of more than 1 million business locations to its Alexa digital-assistant platform so customers can access the information via voice command. The Yellow Pages-ish skill comes through a new partnership with Yext, which supplies business data used in Alphabet's  Google  search engine, Apple's  Siri digital assistant , and  Facebook's  social media platform. The pairing announced Wednesday pushes the world's biggest online retailer - already a starting point for more than half of all product searches - deeper into Google's turf of information searches. The effort emphasizes material based on the user's location after they enter an address in their Alexa app. No need to drop what you're doing and look up hours on your smartphone. Yext shares jumped 4...

Qualcomm  said Wednesday it was dropping its $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3 lakh crores) deal to buy Dutch chipmaker  NXP Semiconductors , a high-profile victim of the rising trade tensions between the US and China. Instead, the San Diego-based chipmaker said it will pay a $2 billion  (roughly Rs. 13,700 crores) breakup fee to NXP and spend up to $30 billion (roughly Rs. 2.06 lakh crores) buying back its own stock. Qualcomm had once hailed the NXP deal, first announced in 2016, as a way to break into markets for automobiles, security and network processing. But it said it would let the agreement expire at midnight Wednesday unless China granted last-minute approval. Continued uncertainty overhanging such a large acquisition introduces heightened risk," Qualcomm CEO Steven Mollenkopf said in a conference call with industry analysts. "We weighed that risk against the likelihood of a change in the current geopolitical environment, which we didn't believe was a high ...

Amazon.com  is expanding its presence in the emerging tech hub of Cape Town, upping the ante in its regional battle with cloud computing rival  Microsoft Corp . Amazon will be the sole tenant in a new, modern eight-story office building that's nearing completion in the South African city, multiple sources familiar with the project told Reuters. The company is advertising dozens of jobs in Cape Town, which played a key role in the early development of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-computing business. The adverts include one for a software development engineer that says Amazon is assembling a team for a "green-field project" dealing with machine learning, big data analysis and cloud computing, which are among the fastest-growing areas in the technology industry. The company's expansion shows how fierce competition in the cloud business and rising demand for computing power are driving activity even in relatively undeveloped corners of the technology univer...