Sony has announced that its gaming subscription service ‘PlayStation Plus’ users will get a new lineup of free games next month.

“PlayStation Plus starts 2021 with a bang. PlayStation Plus members will receive two PS4 titles – action-adventure Shadow of the Tomb Raider and action RPG GreedFall on January 5,” the company said in a statement.

On the same day, PlayStation 5 owners with a PlayStation Plus membership can play a terrifying apex predator in the open-world RPG Maneater.

Maneater is an open-world RPG where players take control of a shark, which PlayStation Plus refers to as a SkaRkPG.

The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on May 22, 2020, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 in November 2020, and will be released for the Nintendo Switch in the first half of 2021.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Eidos-Montreal and published by Square Enix. It continues the narrative from the 2015 game Rise of the Tomb Raider.

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The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) is set to launch Amazonia-1, the first satellite to have been developed completely in Brazil by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the Latin American nation’s apex space research body.

Emirates SkyCargo, the freight division of Emirates airline, has executed a cargo charter to transport Amazonia-1 from Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil to Chennai. This is the first time that Emirates SkyCargo has transported a space satellite from South America.

The earth Observation has been designed, assembled and tested in Brazil and took eight years to be developed. Once launched into space, it will help monitor the ecosystem of the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest tropical rainforest. The satellite is due to be sent to space in February 2021 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the East coast of India.

The Amazonia series satellites are composed of two independent modules: a Service Module, which is the Multi-Mission Platform (MMP), and a Payload Module, which houses image cameras and equipment for recording and transmitting image data.

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I thought it would not be easy to like any other smart television after my experience with Sony’s flagship A8H OLED TV (review). Now it seems I might have been wrong. Xiaomi’s debutant 55-inch QLED TV is quite a competent smart television. Though not as technology-rich as Sony’s OLED, it delivers a comprehensive experience that few premium smart TVs can match. Important to note that the Xiaomi Mi QLED TV 4K is priced at Rs 54,999 which makes it an entry-level smart TV in the QLED segment. The Mi QLED TV 4K does carry an accessible price tag, but make no mistake: It barely cuts corners on any major features, technology or otherwise.

Starting with the design, the Mi QLED TV 4K boasts a metallic frame with a 55-inch screen covering almost the entire front. The edge-to-edge stretched screen leaves negligible borders and the otherwise prominent bottom bezel is also reasonably thin. The TV’s metallic frame has a glossy finish with diamond-cut edges for a smooth profile, and laser cut engraving on the right side accentuates the premium stance of the television.

Design details aside, the Mi QLED TV 4K’s strength lies in its 55-inch QLED screen of 4K UHD resolution. From HDR to HDR10+, Dolby Vision and HLG – the screen supports a wide range of available high dynamic range (HDR) formats. Moreover, there is a dedicated chip for motion smoothing and reducing motion blurs. In terms of performance, the screen is bright and vivid. It handles UHD content well and manages to upscale 1080p to 4K without losing much detail. The screen’s contrast is good, if not exceptional due to the absence of a controlled backlight system. It adjusts and improves contrast for deeper blacks and brighter whites based on on-screen content requirements. On a side note, there is an auto-dimming feature which reduces the back light intensity based on the ambient environment. However, it affects the screen legibility sometimes, especially when the screen’s backlight is reduced, as the entire frame becomes dim-lit, affecting the whites and blacks equally.

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Although 2020 hit Bollywood real hard, millennials were not short of entertainment, thanks to the vibrant OTT scene. From Paatal Lok on Amazon Prime Video to Season 2 of Criminal Justice, which released a week ago, viewers had enough choices to spoil themselves.

Yet, if you need encouragement to move through the pandemic with a few more months of working from home, here are five Indian web series to binge-watch in 2021:

1. The Family Man: Season 2

After the success of season 1 in 2019, creators Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K. will most probably be back with season 2 of the action-thriller on Amazon Prime Video in 2021. Starring Manoj Bajpayee and Priyamani, it’s a story of a middle-class man secretly working as an intelligence officer in a fictitious branch of the National Investigation Agency.

2. Nail Polish

Directed by Bugs Bhargava Krishna, Nail Polish is a new Hindi courtroom-drama series to be aired on Zee5, starring Arjun Rampal, Anand Tiwary, and Manav Kaul in prominent roles. The series will be released on January 1, 2021. The makers have released the teaser, which seems to have created a good buzz around the show.

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Infrastructure company Larsen & Toubro (L&T) on Thursday said its construction arm has received orders in the overseas and domestic market.

The company did not provide the value of the contracts, but said the orders fall under the ‘significant’ category, which ranges between Rs 1,000 crore and Rs 2,500 crore, according to the classification of contracts.

“The construction arm of L&T has secured orders from prestigious clients for two of its businesses,” L&T said in a regulatory filing.

L&T said its power transmission and distribution business has won two transmission line packages in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. These lines are expected to strengthen the grid in the Eastern Region of Saudi Arabia and facilitate power evacuation.

Its water and effluent treatment business has secured an EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) order in Gujarat to execute a package in the SAUNI Yojna Link 3.

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Samsung is reportedly planning to launch three foldable smartphones in the market next year, including Galaxy Z Fold 3, Galaxy Z Flip 3, and an affordable model which could be named Galaxy Z Flip Lite.

To keep the phone’s price low, the company has decided to make this affordable mode an LTE-only smartphone, which means it won’t have support for the latest 5G communication technology, reports news portal Gizbot.

A new Samsung foldable smartphone with the model number SM-F720F was spotted and is expected to draw power from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset, which is the currently available 4G chipset.

Apart from this, there’s not much information about the rumoured Samsung Galaxy Z Flip Lite.

Earlier, the company filed a patent for three foldable smartphone designs with cutouts for inner cameras.

The patent includes three different designs — two with an outward folding screen like the Huawei Mate Xs and one with an inward folding screen like the Galaxy Z Fold 2. All three of them have a cutout on the front display so that the cameras present inside can be used even when the phone is closed.

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Xiaomi has launched as many as eight phones in the Redmi 9 series in India and now, the company has launched an affordable Redmi 9 Power device with a massive 6000mAh battery.

The Redmi 9 Power is priced starting at Rs 10,999 for the base variant with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage and Rs 11,999 for the 128GB storage option.

The phone is offered in four colours — mighty black, blazing blue, fiery red and electric green.

We used the 128GB variant in blazing blue colour option for around a week and here is what we think about the new budget device.

At the base, it features a Type-C port at the base with a mic on the right side and a single grille speaker on the other side.

At the top, it has IR Blaster along with a 3.5mm audio jack.

The volume rocker is on the right, with the fingerprint sensor which also doubles up as a power and display button just below it. There’s a USB Type C port on the base.

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Russian luxury goods brand Caviar, known for making luxury variants of popular gadgets, has unveiled custom-made, over-ear headphones AirPods Max plated with “pure gold” for the high price of $108,000, which roughly translate to nearly Rs 80 lakh.

Caviar said that the luxury headphones will be “released in a single piece worldwide,” indicating that supplies will be limited.

The earcups of the headphones are made from pure gold, replacing the current aluminium that Apple makes the earcups out of.

Caviar is also replacing the mesh headband with “rare crocodile leather”.

The Caviar AirPods Max headphones will come in white or black headband but the earcups will remain in gold for both versions.

AirPods Max was launched earlier this month with high-fidelity sound, Adaptive EQ, Active Noise Cancellation and spatial audio for Rs 59,900.

AirPods Max uses Adaptive EQ to adjust the sound to the fit and seal of the ear cushions by measuring the sound signal delivered to a user and adjusting the low and mid-frequencies in real-time – bringing rich audio that captures every detail.

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A federal judge in Florida on Tuesday dismissed Apple Inc’s copyright infringement claims against a Florida startup whose software helps security researchers find vulnerabilities in Apple products including the iPhone.

U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith ruled in favor of Corellium LLC, saying its software emulating the iOS operating system that runs on the iPhone and iPad amounted to “fair use” because it was “transformative” and helped developers find security flaws.

Apple accused Corellium of essentially replicating iOS to create “virtual” iOS-operated devices, whose “sole function” was to run unauthorized copies of the system on non-Apple hardware.

But the Fort Lauderdale-based judge said Corellium “adds something new to iOS” by letting users see and halt running processes, take live snapshots, and conduct other operations.

“Corellium’s profit motivation does not undermine its fair use defense, particularly considering the public benefit of the product,” Smith wrote.

The judge also rejected Apple’s argument that the Delray Beach startup acted in bad faith by selling its product indiscriminately, including potentially to hackers, and by not requiring users to report bugs to Apple.

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From interest rates to fashion, pandemics in the past — like the Black Death in the 14th century — have left deep imprints on economic life. This time may be no different. In the aftermath of the coronavirus, governments can reimagine capitalism by giving all of us a stake in the most valuable byproduct of our day-to-day living: data. But make no mistake. It will still be a Faustian bargain.

A global data profit will be a very different GDP from gross domestic product. The case for technology companies to share it with we, the people who supply them the bits and bytes, is compelling. In fact, it could even emerge as a better universal basic income — another revolutionary concept whose time may have come — for the post-Covid world.

A state-provided allowance can improve citizens’ well-being, a widely studied Finnish experiment has shown. Yet only a small group of developed countries would even have a chance of sustaining a meaningful subsidy, provided taxpayers agree. Most developing nations would balk at the expense. Inequality between the global North and South would worsen.

This is where a share of global data profit for the 63 per cent of the world population that’s already online could prove helpful. The FANG quartet — Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Netflix Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. — garners $140 billion in combined operating earnings. China’s BAT trinity of Baidu Inc., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. hauls in another $50 billion. Throw in device makers like Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and Xiaomi Corp., payment processors like Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., and Paypal Holdings Inc., and the available profit pie of our data overlords is at least $350 billion. Their combined revenue is in excess of $1.3 trillion.

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