Here are All the Xiaomi Phones that will Get Android Q

If there is one thing I don’t love about the state of Android devices, it’s the simple fact that Android updates across OEMs are a mess and unless you’re using a Pixel, you can barely be sure about when you might actually receive a new version of Android on your phone, or even if you ever will. Well, Xiaomi is answering both of those concerns.

In a post on the official MIUI forums, the Chinese giant has announced the list of phones that will be getting the Android Q update along with the expected time-frame for the same.

List of Xiaomi Phones Getting Android Q

• Xiaomi Mi 9
• Xiaomi Mi 9 SE
• Xiaomi Mi 8
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Explorer Edition
• Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S
• Xiaomi Mi MIX 3
• Xiaomi Mi MIX 3 5G
• Xiaomi Redmi K20 Pro
• Xiaomi Redmi K20
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro

The company also announced when each of these phones will get the update. According to Xiaomi’s post, the Mi 9, Mi 9 SE, Mi 8, Mi 8 Pro, Mi 8 Explorer Edition, Mi MIX 2S, Mi MIX 3, Mi MIX 3 5G, Redmi K20, and Redmi K20 Pro will receive the update in Q4 2019, while the Redmi Note 7 and Note 7 Pro will get updated to Android Q in Q1 2020.

What’s really surprising here is that the list doesn’t mention the Poco F1, but Poco team leader Alvin Tse took to Twitter to announce that the Poco F1 will, indeed, get updated to Android Q.

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Nubia Red Magic 3 Gaming Phone with Built-in Cooling Fan Launched in India

The mobile gaming industry has hugely transformed over the past year or so with a vast number of phone makers looking to tap into this niche. Chinese smartphone giant Nubia launched the third iteration of its gaming smartphone, the Nubia Red Magic 3 in China a couple of months ago and well, it has now brought the same to India.

Yeah, the Nubia Red Magic 3 has today launched in India with flagship Snapdragon 855 chipset,

Nubia Red Magic 3: Price and Availability

The base variant of the Nubia Red Magic, with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage, has been priced at Rs 35,999. It will be available in red and black color variants. The 12GB and 256GB variant will only be available in a Camo color variant and has been priced at Rs 46,999. It will go on sale starting from 27th June on Flipkart.

Nubia Red Magic 3: Specs and Features

Nubia Red Magic lineup has maintained that gaming phone aesthetic, with an aluminum build and RGB light strip from the start. Well, the same has been carried ahead with the Nubia Red Magic 3, which features an almost similar design, only with the addition of a new light-up Red Magic logo at the bottom of the rear panel.

On the front, Nubia Red Magic 3 features a huge 6.5-inch Full-HD+ AMOLED display, with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio, HDR support, and 90Hz refresh rate. The higher refresh rate should make this a capable gaming smartphone, giving it an edge over Black Shark 2 in India.

Talking of the internals, well, Nubia Red Magic 3 is a flagship smartphone. It’s powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset, couple with up to 12GB of RAM and 256Gb of internal storage. It runs an almost stock-ish Android build, which is pretty decent.

The biggest addition to Nubia Red Magic 3 comes in the form of an in-built cooling fan. Oh yeah, Nubia Red Magic 3 has baked a tiny fan on the inside to complement the liquid cooling tech already present on the device. This internal turbo fan, the company claims increases heat transfer by up to 500%, thus, offering an enhanced gaming experience to users. There’s also a gaming port onboard and you can connect an accessory, which will enable you to connect a LAN port, charger, and more.

In the camera department, Nubia Red Magic 3 features a single 48MP (f/1.7) Sony IMX586 sensor on the rear and a 16MP (f/2.0) selfie camera. Well, the 48MP camera is not really a huge deal since every other smartphone launching nowadays comes with this very sensor. Instead, the crazy part is that Nubia Red Magic 3 is the world’s first phone to be capable of shooting 8K video. The feature is currently in beta but yes, it works.

There’s still an odd-looking fingerprint sensor present on the rear, along with dual front-firing speakers on the front, trigger buttons on the side, and a new 4D vibration feature that’s been added to elevate the gaming experience. It has a massive 5,000mAh battery packed in the smartphone as well, which is great for all PUBG Mobile fanatics, isn’t it? It supports up to 27W

So, if you’re looking to buy a gaming smartphone, which one will your pick – Nubia Red Magic 3 or Black Shark 2? Let us know in the comments below.

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Google Accused of Unlawfully Copying Song Lyrics

Genius Media, a US-based digital media company that specialises in song lyrics, has accused Google of copying their work to display in its Search results for years without permission and has asked the search-engine giant to address the situation.

According to Genius Media, the lyrics that Google displays alongside any usual information about a particular song on Search are picked up from the company’s work.

“The company has shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius in their Lyrics OneBox. This is a serious issue and Google needs to address it,” The Verge reported Ben Gross, Chief Strategy Officer at Genius Media as saying on Sunday.

Launched in 2009, Genius Media describes itself as a “platform for annotating clever rap lyrics” and has since expanded into other types of music as well.

As part of its investigation, the site used a series of alternating straight and curved apostrophes in its lyrics to form a type of watermark and as per their plan, converting the patterns into Morse code revealed the words “Red Handed”.

However, in defence, the search-engine giant confirmed that any information displayed in its search results are licensed from various sources.

“The company is investigating this issue with our data partners and if we find that partners are not upholding good practices we will end our agreements,” the report quoted a Google spokesperson as saying.

According to other media reports, Google has claimed that the lyrics its Search displays alongside any song being searched is sourced from a third-party called LyricFind Inc.

The company LyricFind also denied that it borrowed song lyrics from Genius Media, the report said.

The accusation on Google comes shortly after reports surfaced that the US Department of Justice is preparing to open a case against the tech giant for potential anti-trust violations, thus, putting scrutiny on the tech giant amid a growing chorus of criticism about the power of Big Tech

Earlier in March, European Union’s (EU) anti-trust regulators on Wednesday fined Google 1.49 billion euros ($1.7 billion) for abusing its dominance in the online search market by blocking rivals.

Later in May, India joined EU when its antitrust watchdog Competition Commission of India (CCI) ordered an investigation into Google’s aggressive push to Android that seems like a block-technique against its rivals.

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Xiaomi Supplier Opens 1st Manufacturing Plant in India

Xiaomi supplier Holitech Technology on Saturday said it has inaugurated its first component manufacturing plant in Greater Noida and will invest nearly $200 million over three years in the country.

Holitech Technology would be manufacturing compact camera modules (CCM), capacitive touch screen module (CTP), thin film transistor (TFT), flexible printed circuits (FPC) and fingerprint module locally.

The local manufacturing plant is ready and will be in production within the third quarter of this year and aims to generate 6,000 jobs in three years, Xiaomi said.

Spread across four factories and spanning over 25,000 square metres, the component manufacturing plant will start mass production with a production capacity of over 300 million components per year.

“Xiaomi has witnessed significant growth in the country and we are positive that Holitech’s plans for India will herald a new stage of evolution for the electronics manufacturing industry in India,” Muralikrishnan B, Chief Operating Officer, Xiaomi India, said in a statement.

The plant also boasts of class 1000 and class 100 clean room. A clean room is a contained space where provisions are made to reduce particulate contamination and control other environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity and pressure.

“The phenomenal growth of Xiaomi along with their initiatives to promote local manufacturing has encouraged us to explore component manufacturing for Xiaomi in India,” said Chenguisheng, CEO, Holitech Technology.

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New Li-ion Battery Tech Can Charge for 300kms in 10 Minutes

Chinese researchers have developed a high-energy Lithium-ion Battery (LIB) technology, which could enable a running distance of 300 km per 10 minutes of charging.

The debut of a passenger car loaded with the 50-kWh battery pack was held in Hangzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported.

“The key to this fast-charging technology is the R&D of fast lithium-ion conducting materials,” said Zhou Xiaoping, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Hunan University and Chief Scientist at Zhejiang Folta Technology Co. Ltd.

The materials mainly consist of low-impedance ionic compounds that could not only raise power cell efficiency but bring down safety risks caused by lithium precipitation during charging and discharging, Zhou added.

A third-party evaluation report issued by the independent testing company TUV SUD showed that the life cycle of the power cells using the new technology has hit 5,000 times in a 150-ampere charge-discharge performance test and is expected to exceed 6,000 times since the cycle testing continues.

Folta has also finished joint tests on the new LIB products with a Chinese automobile manufacturer and is ready for industrial production, the company said.

Industry insiders believe that the breakthrough in fast charging technology will help popularize pure electric vehicles by providing a shorter charging time, a smaller battery load in limited spaces and more safety.

“Folta has made further improvements and innovations on the existing technology,” said Xu Dingming, Deputy Chief of The Expert Consultation Committee of China’s National Energy Commission. “Industrial production is the next step, which will give China’s New Energy Vehicles (NEV) and energy storage industry a hopeful nudge forward.”

Xu noted that more tests still need to be done before this new technology could bring about a ‘fast-charging revolution’ for the industry and thus speed up industrial transformation for green development.

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Adobe Trains AI to Detect Photoshopped Images

Adobe, along with researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have trained Artificial Intelligence (AI) to detect facial manipulation in images edited using the Photoshop software.

At a time when deepfake visual content is getting commoner and more deceptive, the decision is also intended to make image forensics understandable for everyone.

“This new research is part of a broader effort across Adobe to better detect image, video, audio and document manipulations,” the company wrote in a blog-post on Friday.

As part of the programme, the team trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to spot changes in images made with Photoshop’s “Face Away Liquify” feature, which was intentionally designed to change facial features like eyes and mouth.

On testing, it was found that while human eyes were able to judge the altered face 53 per cent of the time, the the trained neural network tool achieved results as high as 99 per cent.

The tool also identified specific areas and methods of facial warping.

Adobe’s execution in detecting facial manipulation came just days after doctored videos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and US Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the rounds on social media as well as news channels.

“This is an important step in being able to detect certain types of image editing, and the undo capability works surprisingly well. Beyond technologies like this, the best defence will be a sophisticated public who know that content can be manipulated, often to delight them, but sometimes to mislead them as well,” said Gavin Miller, Head of Research, Adobe.

Adobe’s Photoshop software was originally released in 1990.

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China Behind DDoS Attack on Telegram: Founder

Private instant messaging and voice over IP service Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov has tweeted China was behind the cyber attack on the platform after as many as 200 million users were hit worldwide.

Telegram was struck by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in light of the ongoing protests in Hong Kong over an extradition legislation that will allow people to be extradited to Mainland China for trials.

According to Durov, founder of the encrypted messaging platform, a distributed denial of service attack, which overloaded the firm’s servers with “garbage requests”, was tracked to “IP addresses coming mostly from China” and significantly slowed messaging on the app.

“IP addresses coming mostly from China. Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong (coordinated on @telegram). This case was not an exception,” Durov tweeted on Thursday morning.

Citizens in Hong Kong have taken to the streets to protest plans made by Beijing to roll out a legislation that would allow extraditions to mainland China for the first time.

They are using Telegram to disseminate plans and coordinate the distribution of supplies like masks, head gear, and water. Hong Kong police has arrested one of the Telegram groups’ administrators, according to MIT Technology Review. The protests gave way to violence that injured at least 72 people, said reports.

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