HTC One M9 just a minor upgrade over One M8 : Report
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HTC One M9 just a minor upgrade over One
M8 : Report
Days ahead of HTC's big reveal, the company's upcoming flagship
phone One M9 has already made an appearance online courtesy of @Upleaks, a Twitter user
infamous for sharing details of unreleased devices.
@Upleaks posted three videos featuring the upcoming smartphone
expected to be released on the sidelines of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The videos,
which showcased the One (M9)'s design, software and camera features have now been
removed from YouTube but not before a number of online publications captured screen
grabs.
The videos suggest that One M9 features the same design as its
predecessors except that the display panel has thinner bezels and the metal body is now two-
tone with the edges featuring a different colour tone. The Sense 7 UI skin is not very
different from its current avatar but now offers the ability to customize the UI theme with a
source image and has a location-aware menu that changes app shortcuts depending on the
user's location. It also lets users select theme packs for app icons and the BlinkFeed home
screen also offers meal time suggestions. There's also a new photo editor.
The front camera is now based on UltraPixel technology for low-light
selfies while the rear camera has been upgraded to a 20MP sensor. HTC's BoomSound audio
will be powered by Dolby Audio Surround. HTC One M9 is said to be powered by an eight-
core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor.
Other rumoured specifications of the phone include 3GB DDR4 RAM,
32GB storage, support for VoLTE and LTE Category 6 networks, a 20.7MP+2.1MP rear
camera and a 4MP or 13MP front camera, BoomSound front speakers, Bluetooth 4.1 and a
2840mAh battery.
While it's difficult to verify the authenticity of the videos, it would be
disappointing to see the new One M9 sporting the same, stale design and getting just an
incremental update.Videocon Mobile to soon roll out 4G enabled
handsets
Videocon Mobile Phones, the handset brand of the $4 billion Videocon
Group, is mulling a rollout of its fourth generation (4G)-enabled mobile phones in the next
couple of months, a top official said.“We are working on 4G enabled handsets and it will be
out in the next two months,” Videocon Mobile Phones chief executive officer Jarold Pereira
told IANS.
However, Pereira could not quote a price for the 4G device. He said the
company will manufacture 4G handsets going by the requirement.“There are other operators
who are planning to launch 4G services soon. We do not want to miss out on the opportunity.
If we roll out our own handset during that time, we can go for bundled offers,” Nikhil Garg,
sales head (North), Videocon Mobile Phones, told IANS.
Videocon Telecom said Feb 19 it is all set to invest over Rs.1,200 crore
($193 million) in the next three years for 4G rollout in 29 cities. The service will be rolled
out in three circles in UP East, UP West and Bihar, the company had said earlier.“We can
also go for bundled offers with our own services,” Garg said, adding: “The company has set
a sales target of six million handsets per month by 2016.”
Saying that the company‟s mobile phone business is still at a nascent
stage, he added: “It is five-year-old. We started manufacturing mobile phones from our two
factories at Aurangabad and Kashipur (Uttaranchal) a year back. Around 100,000 units are
manufactured every month in both feature and smartphone category ranging between Rs.800-
900 and Rs.5,000.”Pereira added that the company is also planning to start a mobile
manufacturing unit in South India in one of its existing units within a couple of months but
declined to disclose the location. “We are planning another mobile manufacturing line in the
south. Hopefully it will be operational within two months.”
Garg rued that the ecosystem in India is still not there for end-to-end
manufacturing of mobile phones. It is more of assembling and some bit of
manufacturing.“But we will be focussing more on manufacturing now as making it here is
set to become more economical than importing from China,” he added.
The mobile handset industry is expecting that the government will
increase the customs duty on imported handsets from the current seven percent to double
digits. That will also help the government to promote its Make in India programmeTrack your friends with new Microsoft app
soon
Good news for Windows phone users. Microsoft is working on a new
app that will give a user real-time updates as to where their friends happen to be.
Called “People Sense”, the app will help you pull up directions to a
friend‟s whereabouts and message or call them to let them know that you are on the way, PC
Magazine reported.
This is how it works. Start off with a map that shows you where all of
your friends are around a given location. When you go to look up a specific contact, you get
to know where your friend is, when he or she was last seen and what his or her status
currently is.
You can call or message your friend via little icons at the app‟s bottom.
The app is like Apple‟s “Find My Friends” that displays friends as roving markers inching
through the streets.
No launch date has been set for “People Sense” yet but a video review
of the app, provided by Microsoft Place, shows an already robust set of features at work.Bacterium jumps host with a single
mutation
With just a single mutation, a disease-causing bacterium was able to
switch hosts. But it was a human pathogen that made the leap and gained the ability to infect
animals, not the other way round.The ST121 strain of Staphylococcus aureus is not one to be
trifled with, capable of producing life-threatening disease in people. After a highly virulent
ST121 strain spread through commercial rabbit farms in developed countries, a group of
European researchers decided to investigate how such a strain had emerged.
Bacteria are notorious for their ability to exchange bits of their DNA,
even across species. Such „mobile genetic elements‟ can give microbes the ability to thrive in
new hosts, make them resistant to antibiotics and be able to secrete potent toxins.Indeed,
transfer of mobile genetic elements was implicated in previous jumps of S. aureus strains
from humans to livestock. But that was not the case with the ST121 strain in rabbits, say José
R Penadés of the University of Glasgow in the U.K. and his colleagues in a paper published
online by Nature Genetics last week.
They analysed the full genome sequences of 23 different ST121 strains
from humans and rabbits obtained from eight countries in three continents covering a period
of 50 years. The most likely explanation for the emergence of the ST121 strain associated
with epidemics at rabbit farms was “a single human-to-rabbit host jump that occurred more
than 38 years ago,” their paper noted.
The scientists then looked for mutations that all the rabbit ST121 strains
shared but which the human strains lacked. A dozen genes in the rabbit strains had been
affected by such mutations.In order to identify which mutations allowed a human ST121 to
infect rabbits, they reversed those mutations in two representative rabbit strains and checked
whether the resulting bacteria could still produce skin sores in the animals. They also
introduced the mutations into a human ST121 strain and tested that bacterium too in a similar
fashion.
Mutations in 10 genes had no effect on bacterial infectivity or the
severity of infection in rabbits.However, with one particular mutation in the dltB gene, a
human ST121 strain became capable of infecting rabbits, giving rise to sores similar to those
produced by a rabbit strain. Two more mutations in the same gene increased the bacterium‟s
infectivity.It was “amazing” and “completely unexpected” that a single mutation could make
a human S. aureus strain capable of infecting rabbits, remarked Prof. Penadés in an email.Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet design, features
leaked
While it is widely known that Samsung and HTC will unveil their
flagship smartphones of the year at the Mobile World Congress next week courtesy a number
of leaks, Sony's plans remain murky.
However, it now seems that Sony is going to give its Xperia Tablet Z
series a refresh on March 3, going by a leak from the Xperia Lounge application.
According to the leak, the upcoming Xperia Z4 Tablet will come with a
2K screen, up from the Full HD panel of its predecessor Xperia Tablet Z3. It will also feature
"the latest ultra fast processor" and have "industry leading battery performance."You can also read
