Gadgets
Best Smart Home and IoT Devices to Wishlist This Diwali
If you’re looking to buy new smart home kit for your connected home, the Amazon Great Indian Festival 2021 Sale has a number of options available across product categories and brands, including robot vacuum cleaners, handheld vacuum cleaners, smart bulbs, smart speakers, and more. Here are our top picks in the smart living and smart home segments.
360 S7 Robot Vacuum-Mop
Although not very well known in India, the 360 S7 is surprisingly one of the best robot vacuum cleaners you can buy right now. The cleaning robot offers effective vacuuming, acceptable mopping, decent battery life, and a very good app experience with lots of controls and features. The device uses laser navigation, which is accurate and allows the device to move quickly and efficiently.
Buy 360 S7 Robot Vacuum-Mop
Dyson Omni-glide Vacuum Cleaner
Among the newest products in Dyson’s range, the Omni-glide is priced at Rs. 34,900 and has a unique omni-directional roller head which makes floor cleaning a lot easier. Although expensive and with average battery life, this compact and easy-to-use Dyson is a very useful gadget for home cleaning.
Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen)
Amazon’s most impressive smart speaker and display yet, the Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen) has a unique motion-enabled screen that follows your gaze. This device combines a capable 10.1-inch screen, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video integration, the ability to give visual cues for all smart functionality, and the full suite of Alexa capabilities. Although sound quality doesn’t quite match up to the price, this is a modern smart home device with considerable capabilities.
Buy Amazon Echo Show 10
Mi Smart Bulb
Among the best smart bulbs you can buy right now, the Mi LED Wi-Fi Smart Bulb is impressive for a number of reasons, including 16 million colour support, voice controls with Alexa and Google Assistant, and a rated life of 11 years. This affordable smart bulb works with the Mi Home app and is a great way to get started with making your appliances and home fittings ‘smart’.
Apple AirTag
If you have a habit of misplacing small personal items such as your keys or wallet, the Apple AirTag is a smart way to keep track of where you left things. Devices can be tracked on a map, and you can also specifically locate items within a short range by making the AirTag chime or using your iOS device to directionally locate it with the Find My app. The device has a battery that is replaceable and rated to run for up to a year.
Buy Apple AirTag
Gadgets
Microsoft Partners With Inworld to Bring AI Game Development Tools to Xbox
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
Gadgets
BSNL Offers Free 4G SIM Upgrade: Here’s How to Get It
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Gadgets
Realme GT 5 Pro Teased to Feature 3,000 Nits Display; More Details Revealed
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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