Apple releases iOS 9.2.1 public beta

Right on the heels of yesterday’s launch of the iOS 9.2.1 developer beta, Apple has released iOS 9.2.1 to those registered in its public beta testing program.

If you’re already a registered member of the public beta program, or if you’d like to join, just venture over to Apple’s beta website to get going.

To get started with the public beta on your iPhone or iPad, simply log in to the beta program website, and enroll your device. Once enrolled, updates will be conducted in typical OTA style.

Yesterday’s developer-centric release was pushed out with no change log, which isn’t at all out of the ordinary for Apple to do with its minor release versions. There are likely only bug fixes to report in the incremental update.

Google to make driverless cars an Alphabet company in 2016: Report

Google plans to make its self-driving cars unit, which will offer rides for hire, a stand-alone business under its parent company Alphabet Inc next year, Bloomberg reported. The service could be launched in San Francisco and Austin, Texas locations, where it has tested the cars extensively, Bloomberg said, citing a person briefed on the company’s strategy.

The fleets could be deployed first in confined areas like college campuses, military bases or corporate office parks, Bloomberg reported. Alphabet declined to comment.

The company reorganized itself in August to separate the core web advertising business from newer ventures like driverless cars.

Under the new structure, search, advertising, maps, YouTube and Android are part of the Google unit. Alphabet’s businesses include connected home products maker Nest, venture capital arm Google Ventures, and Google X, the secretive research arm which houses the self-driving car unit.

Alphabet’s pet project of driverless cars started in 2009 and it along with other automakers have said the technology to build self-driving cars should be ready by 2020.

The company said in July it was testing a fleet of 23 specially equipped Lexus prototypes, which had logged more than 1 million test miles.

In June, the company began testing tiny, bubble-shaped self-driving prototype vehicles of its own design on public roads around Mountain View. The company has also started testing self-driving prototypes in Austin.

Google’s move to put the self-driving cars up for hire will put it in direct competition with ride hailing services such as Uber and Lyft.

Uber also currently uses Google Maps to help users hail a cab as well as chalk out routes. But, Uber awarded TomTom a contract in November to provide digital maps and traffic data for the software used by its drivers.

Google-owned online mapping company Waze in July launched a carpooling pilot programme called RideWith in Israel where commuters pay fellow drivers a small fee for a ride.

Android N name might be decided via an online poll, says CEO Sundar Pichai

He runs global internet giant, but the question that stumped Sundar Pichai on his first India visit as Google CEO was whether the popular mobile operating system Android can be named after an Indian dessert!

A smiling Pichai replied he will ask his mother for suggestions and Google can even go for an online poll to decide the name. He was interacting with students at the prestigious Shri Ram College of Commerce on the second day of his India visit.

Some of the suggestions that came at the event itself included ‘peda’, ‘neyyappam’ and ‘nankhatai’. Previous versions of Android OS have been named after sweets like Donut, Eclair, Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, Kitkat and Lollipop. The latest version is called Android Marshmallow and is being rolled out across mobile devices.

Asked why Google did not have any Indian dessert as Android version name, Pichai said, “When I meet my Mom, I will ask for suggestions” and added that Google could conduct an online poll to decide the name for Android N. He also revealed that he didn’t like sweets as a child and mixed sambar with payasam, so that the payasam wouldn’t taste sweet.

The one-hour session was similar to the Townhall of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who conducted a session at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in October. Zuckerberg was also stumped when an audience member asked when would Facebook would stop the unwanted invites for Candy Crush mobile game.

Pichai’s session at Shriram College of Commerce was moderated by cricket commentator, Harsha Bhogle, who called the India-born executive the ‘Rahul Dravid of the tech industry’. Pichai suggested students to do their own thing in life. He said while India has a culture of valuing education, the system here should encourage creativity and make sure it doesn’t penalise the person for being different.

When asked how much he had scored in his class 12 exams, Pichai quipped: “Not enough to get into Shri Ram College of Commerce."

Inshorts app included in Google’s ’50 best apps of India’ list

Inshorts, which curates news items of the day and crunches them into 60 words, has been included by Google in its list of 50 Best Apps of India. The other popular apps in the list include Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, Skype, TrueCaller, Zomato, and Gaana to name a few.

The Google apps list is a ready reckoner listing the best apps and games (both free and paid format) that were featured this year on Play Store, thus enabling the audiences to see how their favorite apps and games have fared throughout the year.

“The inclusion of Inshorts in Google’s list of top 50 apps for 2015 validates our brand promise of keeping our users informed by the means of simple, precise and short form content which could be consumed in less than 15 seconds. In 2016, our focus would be upon serving relevant content to relevant users, ” said  Azhar Iqubal – CEO and Co-Founder, Inshorts.

The company was founded in 2013 by three IITians – – Azhar Iqubal, Anunay Arunav and Deepit Purkayastha. The application can be downloaded on Android/iOS.

Inshorts has grown from less than 100,000 downloads at the beginning of the year to more than three million downloads by December 2015, the company said. The app serves more than half a billion page views everyday and 80 per cent of its users as of today come fromNew Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, Chandigarh and Jaipur.

The app has recently launched a Hindi interface to make inroads in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and based on its success, plans a foray in Marathi, Kannada and Tamil by mid 2016. With these initiatives, Inshorts aims to increase its reach by an additional 5 million users by April 2016.

Inshorts is currently working on building India’s first intuitive content recommendation engine and is testing its efficiency with the help of its community of beta users called ‘Insiders’ which has more than 20,000 users.

With the content recommendation engine, the app aims to identify its users based on their content consumption habits and serve them more alternative content in the genres of their interest. The company is also in the process of partnering with popular alternative content publishers and helping them to increase the reach of their content through the Inshorts platform.

Sketchy rumor claims Apple’s been secretly working on its own GPU for years

Apple is making its GPU to cut the cord from Imagination Technologies and has been secretly developing its own GPU in-house for a few years now. That’s what a sketchy rumor published Thursday by Fudzilla contends, citing sources in the graphics industry.

An in-house-designed GPU would let Apple reduce the cost of its own mobile chipsets further. More importantly, such a move would help it advance the iPhone and iPad’s graphics capabilities beyond what Imagination’s designs (that Apple licenses) permit.

For end users, this should result in an even smoother iOS and flashier graphics in games (the overhyped term “console-quality” comes to mind) with more realistic special effects.

A risky endeavor

“Rome hasn’t been built in a day and it sure takes at least a few years to create a fully functional mobile GPU,“ reads the report. “This is why Apple has been working under extreme secrecy for a few years,” according to Fudzilla’s source in the graphics industry.

Apple A8X floorplan courtesy of chipworks (blue rectangles are GPUs).

Indeed, developing a mobile GPU is an incredibly challenging endeavor.

Take, for instance, Samsung which has been developing a mobile GPU of its own for more than half of a decade and yet has nothing to show for it. In fact, the South Korean firm has yet to ship its own custom CPU cores, which should debut along with its new Exynos 8890 chipset in 2016.

With that in mind, an Apple-developed GPU might take years to ship. The report also states that Apple is not working on a LTE/4G modem chip for the iPhone 7, as previously suspected. “It has already given the work to Intel for the future iPhone,” writes Fudzilla.

Apple and Imagination Technologies

Apple’s been designing iOS device chipsets in-house for years now. It originally licensed GPU cores from Imagination, a fabless UK-semiconductor maker in which Apple has invested, and CPU cores from ARM, another UK-based fabless outlet.

Apple’s engineers tweaked those designs to its needs and applied various optimization and power-saving techniques. But starting with the A7 chip in 2013, Apple stopped licensing ARM designs and started developing its own fully customized CPU cores.

The GPU cores in A-series chipsets, however, continue to be licensed Imagination designs. The iPad Pro’s A9X chipset, for instances, packs in Imagination’s six-core PowerVR Series 7XT GT7600 GPU.

Tile-based rendering vs. shaders

The biggest problem in using Imagination’s GPUs is their reliance on tile-based rendering, a technique that results in fast graphics but with limited special effects.

It’s a reasonably efficient way of painting pixels on the screen, but it requires plenty of dedicated bandwidth. GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, on the other hand, feature so-called shaders that create ambiance with materials and surfaces that mimic reality.

Wrapping it up

We know Apple hired graphics experts from both AMD and Nvidia and common sense tells us these experts probably are not wasting their time and expertise optimizing AMD and Nvidia GPUs for use in the Mac, as some suggested.

And if talk of a fifth-generation Apple TV with a “dramatically improved” graphics and “new hardware functions” has any merit to it, Apple could be looking to boost its graphics prowess to take on dedicated gaming consoles whilst tackling the technological challenges of outfitting future iPhones and iPads with 4K screens.

Apple launches Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader for iPad and iPhone

In addition to the long list of Apple updates including the all-new Apple Smart Battery Case was the launch of a small yet useful Apple accessory called the Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader. The accessory is priced at $29.99 (approximately Rs 2000) at the online Apple Store and will also work on your iPhone.

Indeed the sole purpose of the adapter is to get photos and videos from your camera on to your iPhone or iPad. Aimed at professionals as well, the key feature here is transfer speeds. The SD Card Camera Reader supports the fast USB 3.0 transfer speeds (up to 640 MBps) on the new iPad Pro, which is a first, as every other Apple accessory in the past was limited to USB 2.0 speeds.

According to Apple, the Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader supports standard photo formats, including JPEG and RAW, along with SD and HD video formats, including H.264 and MPEG-4.

But the boost with speeds is only available with the iPad Pro, since its special lightning port shows pins on both sides indicating that it can do more. For the rest of the lightning devices including the same will be limited to a mere 60 MBps (USB 2.0). Apple just recently updated its iPhone with iOS 9.2 that also enabled support for the SD Card Reader and the older USB Camera Adapter for iPhones something that was never supported in the past even though the accessory was widely available.

Apple iPad Pro coming to India next week; here’s all you need to know

Apple is all set to launch its new iPad Pro in India, which is likely to hit store shelves next week.

The exact availability and pricing hasn’t been revealed yet. However, citing sources at Apple,TheQuint has revealed that the 32GB iPad Pro Wi-Fi will be priced at Rs 67900, 128GB iPad Pro Wi-Fi at Rs 79,900 and 128GB iPad Pro Wi-Fi Cell at Rs 91,900. The report also adds the availability of the device from the second week of December.

The iPad Pro  with 12.9-inch 2732 x 2048 pixel Retina Display is just 6.9mm thick and weighs 713 grams. On the inside, the iPad Pro sports the Apple A9X chipset which Phil Schiller had said offers better performance than 80 percent of portable laptops out there. According to Apple, the A9X offers desktop-grade CPU and console-grade GPU. It promises a 10-hour battery life as well.

To complement the iPad Pro, Apple has finally made a stylus called the Apple Pencil. This white coloured pressure sensitive stylus that it launched at $99 and is aimed more at the creative professionals who want to get precise and accurate output for their ideas. There is no word on the Apple Pencil pricing in India.

The other additional accessory is the Smart Keyboard which can fold up to become the iPad Pro cover. You can orient the keyboard to be used for typing, for watching content on the display and covering the iPad Pro. This is also sold separately.

The recent iFixit teardown leaves the Pad Pro with a poor score of 3/10. iFixit gave it a repairability score of 3 out of 10 and pointed out that the Smart Connector port is virtually impossible to replace and also, that the fused front panel increases the cost of screen repair along with the risk of damaging the LCD when opening.

Steam Machine: Valve has placed big bets on Linux, for gaming!

As the owner of the Valve the company behind Steam — the most popular online store for digital games — Gabe Newell saw Windows 8 as a threat to the freedom of the Windows software market. The idea of Windows being locked to installing software from a Microsoft-controlled store isn’t a pleasant one if your core business is to run a software store.

Valve decided to bet on Linux, and they bet big. Over the past three years, Valve has not only brought Steam and all its own games to Linux, but they have also created their own Linux-based OS called Steam OS. The number of games available natively for Linux has expanded from a few dozen to over 1500 as of this writing.

Their latest effort, a Linux / Steam OS-based device called the Steam Machine has just come to fruition along with their own keyboard-and-mouse compatible Steam Controller.  They also created the Steam Link, a tiny device that allows you to stream games from a gaming PC to your TV. With these three devices they aim to expand PC gaming to the living room.

Console or PC?
The comparison to consoles like PlayStation 4 and XBox One are obvious, but the Steam Machine is different enough to that a simple checkbox-comparison table  doesn’t cover it.  Part of the trouble with understanding what Steam Machines are is the false dichotomy between PCs and consoles. The distinction between those two devices is mostly artificial.

Current generation consoles such as the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One are both essentially made from PC hardware. Both those devices feature AMD x86-64 processors, and graphics card not very different from the kind you’d find on a standard desktop.

The real difference between a desktop PC and a console then is that consoles provide a stable and fixed hardware and software platform for the lifetime of the device. This stability ensures that which allows developers to target and optimise to a standard platform.

It is this stability that is entirely lacking for Steam Machines. Valve while being behind Steam, Steam OS and Steam Machines, doesn’t make them themselves. They only provide Steam OS to preinstall on these devices and hope that developers will target it. The actual machines are made by third parties like Alienware and Syber.

Unlike the highly locked console devices where end-consumers cannot upgrade hardware, change OS, or write their own software, a Steam Machine is just a PC that comes with SteamOS preinstalled, includes a Steam controller, and looks like something designed for the living room rather than a desk.

You can change the OS, and in most cases upgrade most of the hardware components like RAM and disk drives. SteamOS itself includes a full desktop experience that allows you to install traditional desktop software on your machine, and even games from other stores than Steam.

Also unlike traditional consoles, Steam Machines come in all kinds of configurations, from a cheap machine that can play most games at 720p quality to machines capable of possibly running even upcoming games  in full 1080.

Those looking to be generous with the Steam Machine can compare it to a new console launch. New consoles do not launch with over a thousand games already available, and do not generally give you access to games you already own on PC.

However it’s also important to look a few years down the line. In five years, a PS4 or XBox One will still play the latest games, but will the Steam Machine?  Valve may have something up its sleeve when it comes to this or game makers might themselves ensure compatibility with popular configurations. However unlike consoles, the Steam Machine offers no guarantee that any PC games released during the lifetime of the device will play on it.

Linux on a Console!
It is natural to worry about the choice of OS as well. With a rather small user base, Linux isn’t exactly a the most lucrative platform for selling games. However the choice of OS is a distraction; it’s simply not important. The PlayStation 4 for instance runs a Unix-based OS but that doesn’t excite any concerns. Game developers don’t avoid the PS4 because Unix games don’t sell. The PS4 sells, PS4 games sell, hence they will target whatever software platform the PS4 provides.

Likewise the availability of games on the Steam Machine has nothing to do with the popularity of Linux, but on the popularity of Steam Machines. A comparison with Android can be made, which despite being Linux-based is still widely supported. Unlike Android though, “Steam OS games” can still run on Linux and vice versa.

This makes Steam Machines a rather safe bet if you find the hardware satisfactory. As a Linux-user it pains the author to consider this, but even if Steam OS doesn’t work out and developers stop targeting Linux, it is always possible to install Windows on the device and keep playing games.

With the Steam Machine in the worst case you are getting yourself a neat little computer that can connect to your TV and plays games, which isn’t a bad bet if you’re a PC gamer looking to take your gaming to a larger screen.

Reliance’s Jio Chat now available in nine countries

Jio Chat, the instant messaging app from Jio is now available across nine countries, including India. Customers in Canada, USA, UK, UAE, South Africa, Singapore, Australia and China can now download Jio Chat and chat with friends and family across these countries. It is available for Android and iOS devices. This app competes with popular apps such as WhatsApp, Line, WeChat and Hike in India.

In terms of features, the app supports messaging, voice calling, video chat, conferencing and audio notes. It also adds in doodles, stickers and emoticons. The app will also have location sharing along with status sharing features. The app will work over mobile data as well as Wi-Fi networks.

Contacts will be synced upon downloading the app and free SMS invites can be sent to all. Jio Chat also offers chat channels which allows users to stay updated about their favorite celebrities, brands or even news as well. Users will also find special promotions in this section. The app will also offer an offline chat option, which can be used to store typed messages after which they can be sent once the user comes online.

Sharing more details, a spokesperson of Jio Chat said, “We are excited to launch our services in eight new countries as it will help in boosting our international presence and will also let our customers based in India connect seamlessly with their loved ones abroad.”