OPPO has traditionally been known for its camera-centric smartphones. While most of its smartphones are centered on all-round capabilities, it is the company’s F-series that has consistently been developed around camera-centric innovations above anything else. Fresh in the series is the OPPO F19 Pro Plus, a midrange smartphone loaded with OPPO’s exclusive camera features for distinct imaging experience. Powered by MediaTek Dimensity 800U system-on-chip, the smartphone boasts a thin-and-lightweight design, punch-hole AMOLED screen, in-display fingerprint sensor, quad-camera array on the rear, and fast-charge support.

Priced at Rs 25,990, the OPPO F19 Pro Plus seems to have a balanced specifications-price ratio. But is it as good as it seems on paper? Let’s find out:

Design

OPPO continues to add finesse to its minimal design language by improving ergonomics. Though the OPPO F19 Pro Plus carries over the plastic construction of the previous iteration, the upgrades here are mostly around the form factor and build quality. The OPPO F19 Pro Plus is compact, sturdy and has a lightweight design that makes it easy to hold and operate. For novelty, it boasts a frosted glass with matte texture on the back cover.

Though it is not the only smartphone to experiment with a frosted glass theme, the minimal design and neat rear profile make it look different, in a good way, from other smartphones. The matte texture protects the phone from fingerprint smudges and adds some level of protection from scratches too. The phone’s rear-camera module protrudes, but not so much as to bring a distraction to the rear profile. Thankfully, the phone comes with a silicone cover that reduces the camera bulge when applied on the phone. Besides, it also protects the back cover from scratches. On the downside, the cover adds some weight and size to this otherwise thin-and-lightweight smartphone.

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TISSNET result 2021: Tata Institute of Social Science will declare TISSNET (National Eligibility Test) 2021 result today on its official website tiss.edu. The entrance exam to MA course was earlier held on February 20.

TISSNET 2021 result: Steps to check result

Step 1: Visit the official website, admissions.tiss.edu

Step 2: On the homepage, click on ‘result link’ in latest announcements

Step 3: You will be redirected to a new page

Step 4: Log-in using credentials

Step 5: Result will be available. Download and take a print out for further reference.

The selection process consists of passing the TISS national entrance test (TISS-NET) exam followed by the programme aptitude test (TISS-PAT) along with online personal interview (OPI).

About TISSNET

The entrance exam is being conducted for admission in MA, MSc, MHA and MPH courses.

TISS campuses

The qualified candidates will be eligible for admission to TISS campuses including Tuljapur (Maharashtra), Guwahati (Assam), Hyderabad (Telangana), and centre in Chennai (Tamil Nadu).

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Facebook has announced new measures to prevent its interest-based forums called Groups from spreading harmful content, like hate speech and misinformation.

The measures come after the social networking platform faced criticism for its groups being linked to protests that led up to the Capitol riot in the US earlier this year.

“We know we have a greater responsibility when we are amplifying or recommending content,” Tom Alison, Vice President of Engineering at Facebook, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

These new changes will roll out globally over the coming months, Facebook said.

The social networking giant said that when a group starts to violate its rules, it will now start showing them lower in recommendations, which means it is less likely that people will discover them.

This is similar to its approach in News Feed, where the platform shows lower quality posts further down, so fewer people see them.

“We believe that groups and members that violate our rules should have reduced privileges and reach, with restrictions getting more severe as they accrue more violations, until we remove them completely,” Alison said.

“And when necessary in cases of severe harm, we will outright remove groups and people without these steps in between.”

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Pixxel, India’s first private earth imaging company, said it has closed its $7.3 million seed round with new capital from Omnivore and Techstars joining alongside previous investors Lightspeed Ventures, Blume Ventures, growX and Ryan Johnson, ex-President at Planet Labs.

Also, for the first time on Thursday, Pixxel lifted the veil of secrecy and publicly discussed its mission to build the world’s highest resolution hyperspectral satellite constellation. The company’s first hyperspectral satellite will launch within the next few months.

“We are very excited to finally speak about what we are building at Pixxel. Our new funding enables us to build a health monitor for the planet through the world’s most advanced hyperspectral small-satellites. This enables us to capture some of the richest imagery that’s ever been beamed down to earth,” said Awais Ahmed, CEO, Pixxel. “Our hyperspectral satellites will allow society to tackle many of humanity’s most pressing issues and we believe they will become the holy grail of remote sensing – providing the best combination of spatial, temporal and spectral resolutions to date and empowering humans to see the earth like never before,” he said.

Compared to the common multispectral satellites prevalent today, Pixxel’s hyperspectral earth-imaging satellites will beam down 50x more information by capturing light reflected from the earth in far more detail and in much narrower bands than just red, green and blue. This allows Pixxel to capture exact chemical signatures and offer much more accurate solutions to seemingly unsolvable issues in agriculture, energy and environment conservation. Once deployed, Pixxel’s constellation will provide 24-hour global coverage in higher quality resolution and lower cost than any existing satellite competitors.

The additional funding will be utilised to boost Pixxel’s efforts in making the agricultural industry more efficient in the country and worldwide. The satellite imagery with agricultural datasets can help in improving the existing crop and water management analytics as well as identifying a spectrum of issues that crop up during the growing season. The funding will also enable Pixxel to continue to rapidly scale its operations to meet the growing demand for high-quality remote sensing data through hyperspectral imaging.

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India has become the top country in the world in the use of mobile applications and the government is encouraging and promoting Indian innovators to create apps, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad informed the Rajya Sabha on Thursday.

Replying to supplementaries during the Question Hour, he said the Digital India programme coupled with encouragement being given by the government to promote Indian innovators to create apps has of late become a big movement.

“You will be happy to know that India has become the top country in the use of mobile applications. But we have to expand further and I’m quite sure in the coming years, Indian mobile app platforms on hosting of mobile apps will surely give a tough competition to the international platforms,” he said.

The minister said that the government has started allowing Mobile Seva App Store to also host apps free of cost.

“In our mobile government app, all have come on board and its total download is 8.65 crore. Therefore, it is an improvement in the right direction.

“We are encouraging Make in India apps for Indians. We started a very good Atmanirbhar Bharat mobile app innovation challenge in which 6,940 app developers came and we selected 25 in nine categories and also rewarded them,” he said.

Replying to a question on whether the government is developing its own app hosting platform, Prasad said there is already a mobile sewa app and there are state government messaging centres and a lot of dedicated messages were sent during the COVID-19 period.

“But we want more innovations to come from outside the government. And that’s what our whole policies are about,” he said.

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US-based action camera manufacturer GoPro on Wednesday launched a new mobile app named “Quik” that will replace the GoPro app in App Store and Google Play Store.

The app lets users import photos and videos from any phone or camera, including GoPros and DSLRs. It features a suite of editing tools to edit photos and videos by users.

“Quik makes it simple and fun to finally make sense of the vast number of photos and videos we all have on our phones,” Nicholas Woodman, Founder and CEO, GoPro, said in a statement.

“You don’t even have to open the Quik app to organize your images, simply share your favorite shots directly to Quik from your camera roll, text threads or wherever your best shots may be. We named it Quik because that’s what it is!” Woodman added.

Through the app, users can back up photos and videos on cloud at its original quality.

Users can also create impressive music-synced videos by simply selecting the photos and videos they want to include along with a song from the included library or your own.

Quik is free to download and use on a trial basis.

Users can unlock the app’s full capabilities by subscribing for just Rs 499/year or Rs 99/month. This will include unlimited cloud backup of your imported photos and videos at their original quality when the backup feature is released later this year.

For GoPro camera users, Quik features all of the capabilities of the previous GoPro app, plus so much more.

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Chinese Venture Capital firm Shunwei Capital has exited Bombinate Technologies, the parent company of Koo, after existing investors and a clutch of prominent individuals bought out its minority stake, the company said on Wednesday.

Prominent Indians including Former Indian Cricketer Javagal Srinath, BookMyShow Founder Ashish Hemrajani, Udaan Co-Founder Sujeet Kumar, Flipkart Chief Executive Officer Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Zerodha Founder Nikhil Kamath participated in the round to buy out shares of Shunwei Capital.

Shunwei Capital had held a little over 9 per cent in Bombinate Technologies.

“Existing investors along with a bunch of individuals have bought out Shunwei Capital’s minority stake in Bombinate Technologies, the parent company of Vokal and Koo,” the statement said but did not divulge financial details of the transaction.

Commenting on the development, Javagal Srinath, former Indian cricketer and fast bowler described Koo as “one of India’s most talked-about social media platforms”.

“I am very happy to be backing Koo…The fact that they are building a platform to bring the voices of Indian language audiences onto the internet is commendable and as an Indian, I extend my support to them wholeheartedly,” Srinath said.

Koo had seen a massive surge in user base as Union ministers and government departments endorsed the homegrown microblogging platform amid a spat with Twitter, earlier this year.

Aprameya Radhakrishna, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Koo said, “As earlier stated, we had been in discussion with Shunwei Capital to enable a smooth exit after it invested in our company 2.5 years ago while we were raising funds for Vokal and have now fully exited the parent company Bombinate Technologies.”

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Expanding its successful Galaxy A series, Samsung on Wednesday unveiled Galaxy A52, A52 5G and A72, saying that the devices will enable people to experience awesome technology at a price that suits their needs.

The new Galaxy A Series with Super AMOLED display will be available in Awesome Violet, Awesome Blue, Awesome Black, and Awesome White colours globally, and Galaxy A52 and A72 will arrive in India soon.

“Samsung strives to give consumers what they want and need most. That’s why we set out with a vision for the Galaxy A series to democratize Galaxy innovations for everyone,” said Dr TM Roh, President and Head of Mobile Communications Business, Samsung Electronics.

“The Galaxy A52, A52 5G and A72 encapsulate the Galaxy brand philosophy with cutting-edge innovations, services and features at an accessible price,” he added.

The devices have a versatile quad camera with 64MP high-resolution. The users can turn their favorite moments from 4K videos into 8MP high-resolution images with 4K Video Snap tool.

While A52 has 4,500mAh battery, A72 sports 5,000mAh battery with long-lasting capacity.

The Galaxy A52 and A72 are equipped with the Galaxy essentials including stereo speakers and external memory up to 1TB.

“Also, the redesigned One UI 314 helps enable more intuitive experiences and consistent interactions by increasing speed, reducing distractions and highlighting important information,” the company said.

The Galaxy A52, A52 5G, and A72 will support software upgrades for three generations, and regular security updates for a minimum of four years.

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Redmi India, a sub-brand of Mi India, on Wednesday announced the brand’s foray into the Smart TV category with the launch of Redmi Smart TV X series.

The smart TV series by Redmi includes the Redmi Smart TV X65, Smart TV X55 and Smart TV X50. All three smart televisions feature the same specifications but come in three different screen sizes.

The Redmi Smart TV X series starts at Rs 32,999 for the 50-inch variant, Rs 38,999 for the 55-inch option and Rs 57,999 for the 65-inch variant. The new Smart TV X series will go on sale on Amazon and Mi.com, Mi Home and Mi Studios from March 26 at 12 noon and it will also be made available in offline retail stores later on.

“India today has 170 million households with a television but less than 20million homes own Smart TVs. We launched our range of Mi TVs over three years ago and have been leading the Smart TV market since the past 10 consecutive quarters,” Raghu Reddy, Chief Business Officer, Mi India said in a statement.

The Redmi Smart TV X series comes with 4K HDR technology and Dolby Vision and also support HDR 10+.

The audio output is 30W with support for DTS Virtual: X, DTS-HD, Dolby Audio, Dolby Atmos Pass through via e-ARC. It runs the 64-bit quad-core A55 CPU coupled with Mali G52 MP2 and has 2GB RAM + 16GB Storage.

The TVs run on Android 10 out of the box and also come with Xiaomi’s PatchWall UI.

The Redmi TV comes with three HDMI 2.1 enabled ports all of which bring ALLM. One of the HDMI ports also supports eARC to connect Dolby Atmos soundbar or home theatre to the TV.

New TVs come with two USB ports, one optical port and a 3.5mm port. It also supports Bluetooth 5.0 and dual-band Wi-Fi.

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Google gets into sleep surveillance with new Nest Hub screen

Google’s next internet-connected home device will test whether consumers trust the company enough to let it snoop on their sleep.

New sleep-sensing technology will be a key feature on Google’s latest version of its Nest Hub, a 7-inch smart screen unveiled Tuesday.

But the latest Nest Hub can also perform a new trick. If you allow it, the device will also monitor your sleeping patterns from your bedside, negating the need to wear a fitness device or any other potentially bothersome gadget in bed.

The feature, which Google intends to offer for free through at least this year, relies on a new chip Google calls Soli, which uses radar to detect motion, including the depth of a person’s breathing.

The USD 100 Nest Hub can display pictures and video in addition to fielding questions and handling household task through Google’s voice-activated assistant. It doesn’t feature a camera.

The Nest Hub is supposed to generate weekly sleep reports with easy-to-understand breakdowns on the length and quality of sleep, how frequently the user gets up at night and snoring and coughing frequency, along with tips developed in consultation with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

Google says it honed the technology by studying 15,000 sleeping people over a combined 110,000 nights.

That kind of help may sound appealing to the millions of people who have trouble sleeping. But the feature may also raise privacy concerns especially given Google’s long history of online surveillance to collect personal details such as interests, habits and whereabouts to help sell the digital ads that generate most of its revenue.

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