Tech – The Arabian Stories News

Apple’s iPhone 15 series goes on sale today, long queues outside store in Mumbai

Tahera Rangwala — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 04:47:12 +0000

MUMBAI : Apple’s much-anticipated iPhone 15 series went on sale in India on Friday (September 22).

Apple’s much-anticipated iPhone 15 series (iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max) as well as the Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 were announced on Tuesday (September 12) at their “Wonderlust” event.

Long queues of people were seen outside the Apple store at Mumbai’s BKC – India’s first Apple store. People were also seen standing outside the Apple Store at Delhi’s Select Citywalk Mall in Saket.

Rahul, the first customer today at the Apple Store at Select Citywalk Mall in Saket, said, “It was a great experience. I was in the queue since 4 am and then purchased the phone. I have always had top phones with me. I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max and an iPhone 14 Pro Max. After the 15 series was announced, I wanted to get the iPhone 15 Pro Max – that too before everyone else.”

A customer outside the Apple store at Mumbai’s BKC shared, “I have been here since 3 p.m. yesterday. I waited in the queue for 17 hours to get the first iPhone at India’s first Apple store. I have come from Ahmedabad…”

Another customer, Vivek from Bengaluru added, “I am happy I am getting my new iPhone 15 Pro. I am very excited…” Aan from Ahmedabad says, “I flew in yesterday. I was here at the store at 5-6 o’clock. I was at the store opening a few months ago where I was fortunate enough to meet Tim Cook for the second time.”

iPhone 15 and the iPhone 15 Plus, both versions come up with the dynamic island feature that first debuted on the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max and the USB-C type charging.

As per The Verge, an American technology-based website, the iPhone 15 also has an OLED Super Retina display, which supports Dolby Vision content with 1,600 nits of brightness. The peak brightness of this display is 2,000 nits in sunlight, double that of the iPhone 14.

Apart from this, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus also has an improved camera system.

The main camera sensor is moving to a 48-megapixel one, up from the 12-megapixel one found on the previous iPhone 14. There’s also a 12-megapixel telephoto and improvements to the portrait mode mean you won’t have to manually switch to portrait mode anymore, reported The Verge.

The iPhone 15 has a 6.1-inch screen while iPhone 15 Plus comes with a 6.7-inch screen.

Both versions will be available in pink, yellow, green, blue, and black colours.

The iPhone 15 is priced starting at USD 799 for a 128GB model and the iPhone 15 Plus starts at USD 899 for a 128GB version.

iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max

The 15 Pro starts at USD 999 with 128GB of storage, and the Pro Max at USD 1,199 with 256GB of storage.

Both will be available for preorder this Friday and on sale September 22, as per The Verge.

Both are powered by the A17 Pro chip, which Apple says has the fastest performance in any smartphone and can even challenge some high-end PCs. Along with a redesigned GPU, Apple seems to think these devices could be poised to level up the kinds of games you can play on your phone. Also, both phones have a USB-C port on the bottom rather than the old Lightning port, reported The Verge.

Interestingly, the ring/silent switch is gone, replaced with an “Action Button”. With the new, button that you can customize to run shortcuts, bring up accessibility features, open the camera, turn on the flashlight, and more.

The Pros both have Super Retina XDR displays with ProMotion and support both the always-on display and the new StandBy mode in iOS 17.

Camera functions have been improved. On the iPhone 15 Pro Max (but not the regular iPhone 15 Pro), there’s a new telephoto camera, with a new tetra-prism design, increasing the zoom up to 5x (the iPhone 15 Pro maxes out at 3x).

But the main, wide camera, as well as the ultrawide camera (which are the same on both the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max) have received significant improvements as well. (ANI)

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Elon Musk’s Neuralink gains approval for human brain implant trial

Meenu Prasad — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 07:38:12 +0000

California : Billionaire Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink, announced on Tuesday that it has received approval from an independent review board to start recruiting human participants in a brain implant trial aimed at helping individuals grappling with paralysis. The development comes after the company’s previous announcement in May, wherein it announced its acquisition of the FDA to begin human testing.

According to a blog post from the California-based neurotechnology company, the main purpose of these human trials is to test whether its brain-computer interface (BCI) — called “the Link” — is safe and functional. “The aim of Neuralink’s BCI and the company as a whole is to create implantable devices that’ll let users control things with their brains. And while it sounds super sci-fi, Neuralink is far from the only company developing brain interface devices,” as per the Mashable website.

“The initial goal of our BCI is to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone,” the company said in its announcement.

While this may be an exciting development for some, Neuralink’s “first-in-human clinical trials” may represent a substantial risk to its patients, according to the Mashable website.

Musk and his company have already faced massive criticism for the trial of “brain chips” on lab animals. In February 2022, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine submitted a complaint alleging that Neuralink did “invasive and deadly brain experiments.”

By December of that year, the company was being investigated by federal authorities for potential violations of animal welfare standards, with documents indicating that the company had murdered around 1,500 animals, including rats, monkeys, pigs, and mice, since 2018.

Neuralink fought back against these very serious allegations claiming that the rhesus macaque monkeys under its care were “respected and honored” by the team, the Mashable website reported.
Musk even took to X (formerly known as Twitter) this past week to say that “no monkey has died as a result of a Neuralink implant”.

The announcement left it unclear when these trials would begin, but did state that those who have “quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)” may qualify for the trial, according to the Mashable website.

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X to roll out audio, video calls feature, announces Elon Musk

Gayathri Das — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 08:47:43 +0000

Los Angeles: After his takeover of Twitter and renaming the social media micro-blogging site as X Elon Musk, on Thursday, announced that X would sonn see fatures like audio and video calls integrated in the platform.

The feature will be compatible with Android, iOS, PC, and Mac. Interestingly, the calls can be made without any phone number, as Musk stated.

“Video & audio calls coming to X: – Works on iOS, Android, Mac & PC – No phone number needed
– X is the effective global address book …That set of factors is unique,” he wrote on X.
Musk has however not given any date for the launch of the features.

In July, the company’s designer Andrew Conway hinted at the feature. Conway shared screenshots of the feature in action a month ago, as per Mashable.

In the screenshot, the audio and video call options are added in the top left of the DM screen.
The audio and video calls are, however, another step towards Musk’s vision of X becoming the “everything app”. Musk has often seen himself as a challenger to Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and has a vision to make X bigger.

In a post on X earlier this month Musk said “The sad truth is that there are no great “social networks” right now. We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one.
On August 25 X posted about the Audio and Video improvements on the platform which included allowing premium subscribers to post Long videos of upto 2 hours, improved live broadcasting quality from mobile, immersive video player in Android and iOS and speak in & co-host a Space on web – support for millions of participants on Spaces.

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Meta introduces AI system that can translate 100 different languages

Gayathri Das — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 07:47:20 +0000

Los Angeles: Meta has developed an AI model called SeamlessM4T that can translate and transcribe almost 100 languages in both text and speech as part of its effort to create AI that can comprehend a variety of dialects, TechCrunch reported.

A new translation dataset called SeamlessAlign is also available in open source. According to Meta, SeamlessM4T is a significant breakthrough in the field of AI-powered speech-to-speech and speech-to-text.

According to Meta in a blog post shared with TechCrunch, “Our single model offers on-demand translations that help people who speak different languages to communicate more effectively.” The source languages are implicitly recognised by SeamlessM4T without the requirement for a separate language identification mechanism.

In some ways, SeamlessM4T is the spiritual heir to Universal Speech Translator, one of the only direct speech-to-speech translation systems that support Hokkien, and Meta’s No Language Left Behind, a text-to-text machine translation paradigm.

Additionally, it expanded on Meta’s architecture for massively multilingual speech, which offers technology for speech synthesis, language identification, and recognition across more than 1,100 languages.

Not just Meta is devoting efforts to the creation of cutting-edge AI transcription and translation systems.
As part of Google’s larger effort to develop a model that can comprehend the 1,000 most widely spoken languages in the world, the tech giant is developing what it calls the Universal Speech Model, which goes beyond the wealth of commercial services and open-source models already offered by Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, and a number of startups.

In the meantime, Mozilla led the development of Common Voice, one of the most comprehensive collections of voices in multiple languages for teaching automatic speech recognition systems.
However, SeamlessM4T is one of the more daring attempts to date to integrate translation and transcription abilities into a single model.

According to Meta, SeamlessM4T outperformed the most recent state-of-the-art speech transcription model in voice-to-text tasks on an internal benchmark for background noise and “speaker variations” in speech-to-text tasks.

This is attributed to the training dataset’s rich blend of speech and text data, which according to Meta provides SeamlessM4T an advantage over speech-only and text-only models.

“With state-of-the-art results, we believe SeamlessM4T is an important breakthrough in the AI community’s quest towards creating universal multitask systems,” stated Meta in the blog post.

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Upcoming Free-to-Play games that have everyone hyped!

Tahera Rangwala — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 06:05:08 +0000

XDefiant

From the house of Ubisoft, this FPS multiplayer brings together multiple Ubisoft franchises, as players pick a character and customize their loadout and participate in Arena-style PVP battles.

Wayfinder

An ambitious Action RPG, Wayfinder will feature multiple playable characters, and players can swap between them as they please. The gaming community expects Wayfinder to standout among the others in the gameplay aspect.

Disney Speedstorm

This one is basically Disney’s version of Mario Kart, as various Disney characters across franchises compete one another in a Kart race. For all its flaws, it seems the concept of the game will make it a major success.

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Elon Musk introduces Live video feature for X

Gayathri Das — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 12:07:31 +0000

San Francisco: After introducing a feature to hide the Blue tick, X CEO Elon Musk has come up with a Live video feature.

Taking to Twitter, Musk updated fans with the new option and tweeted, “Live video now works reasonably well. Just tap the button that looks like a camera when you post.”

He also tested a live option and shared a hilarious video featuring himself and his teammates.

He also flaunted his dumbbell and weight-lifting skills.

On Thursday, X CEO introduced a new feature to hide the Blue tick.

According to the Help page of the micro-blogging site, one of the features reads, “Hide your checkmark: As a subscriber, you can choose to hide your checkmark on your account. The check mark will be hidden on your profile and posts. The checkmark may still appear in some places and some features could still reveal you have an active subscription. Some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden. We will continue to evolve this feature to make it better for you.”

As per the Mashable website report, for subscribers to Twitter Blue, the “Hide your blue checkmark” option is visible in the “Profile Customization” page in your Account Settings.
Twitter first introduced the blue check mark system in 2009 to help users identify celebrities, politicians, companies, brands, news organizations and other accounts “of public interest” as genuine and not impostors or parody accounts. The company didn’t previously charge for verification.

Musk launched Twitter Blue with the check-mark badge as one of the premium perks within two weeks of the company’s takeover last year.

On April 1, Twitter removed blue ticks from verified accounts, following the implementation of paid subscription service which charges USD 8 for a blue verification badge on the microblogging site.

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Twitter allows users to hide Blue tick

Gayathri Das — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 07:57:53 +0000

San Francisco: After the implementation of paid subscription service which charges USD 8 for a blue verification badge on the microblogging site, X CEO Elon Musk has introduced a new feature to hide the Blue tick.

According to the Help page of the micro blogging site, one of the features reads, “Hide your checkmark: As a subscriber, you can choose to hide your checkmark on your account. The checkmark will be hidden on your profile and posts. The checkmark may still appear in some places and some features could still reveal you have an active subscription. Some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden. We will continue to evolve this feature to make it better for you.” https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue

As per the Mashable website report, for subscribers to Twitter Blue, the “Hide your blue checkmark” option is visible in the “Profile customization” page in your Account Settings.

Twitter first introduced the blue check mark system in 2009 to help users identify celebrities, politicians, companies, brands, news organizations and other accounts “of public interest” as genuine and not impostors or parody accounts. The company didn’t previously charge for verification.

Musk launched Twitter Blue with the check-mark badge as one of the premium perks within two weeks of the company’s takeover last year.

On April 1, Twitter removed blue ticks from verified accounts, following the implementation of paid subscription service which charges USD 8 for a blue verification badge on the microblogging site.
B-town celebrities including Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Alia Bhatt, politicians CM Yogi Adityanath, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi and cricketers Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma are among those who lost their verified blue ticks from their Twitter accounts. But, others got the badge back after a few days.

Notably, on July 24, Twitter replaced its recognisable bird logo with the letter “X” as its new official mark.
Earlier, Musk, also the CEO of Tesla, said after certain organisational changes, the number of monthly users of social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, had hit a “new high.”

He posted a graph of user statistics that indicated the most recent count to be above 540 million.
In the post, Musk also referred to this design as an “interim” one, suggesting that there may be other logo changes in the future.

According to a report by US-based tech portal TechCrunch, it’s possible that the social network won’t stop changing the logo. According to Musk, the business would eventually “bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”

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WhatsApp now allows users to record, share video messages

Tahera Rangwala — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 11:55:32 +0000

NEW DELHI : Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced a new feature on WhatsApp, which allows users to send short video messages.

Zuckerberg took to his official Facebook handle and shared a demonstration video along with a caption, “New for WhatsApp — we’re adding the ability to instantly record and share a video message in your WhatsApp chats. It’s as easy as sending a quick voice message.” As per a statement shared by the WhatsApp team, voice messages on WhatsApp changed the way people communicate by providing a quick and secure way to share your voice. Now one can record and share short personal videos directly in the chat.

Video messages are a real-time way to respond to chats with whatever you want to say and show in 60 seconds.

Sending a video message is as simple as sending a voice message. Just tap to switch to video mode, and hold to record the video. Users can also swipe up to lock and record the video hands-free. Videos will play automatically on mute when opened in a chat, and tapping on the video will start the sound. Video messages are protected with end-to-end encryption to keep your messages secure.

Video messages have begun rolling out and will be available to everyone in the coming weeks. (ANI)

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Tech-Ready: Top 3 tech trends to completely change the workplace paradigm

Gayathri Das — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 09:00:05 +0000

Muscat: From AI to advanced 3D printing, new and updated technological trends have been the talk of the town this year, with some burning brighter than others. Here’s a glance at 3 of the most popular tech trends showing huge possibilities for changing how we imagine our workplaces.

AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS)

It seems artificial intelligence is everywhere, from AI chatbots to complex image and art generation systems. While a section of the population who subscribe to a more Luddite point of view is scared that “AI will take their jobs”, another section is quite excited about the futuristic possibility of AI being integrated into the workspace, thus making work more efficient and easier for organic employees.

Although an emerging idea, from what the world has seen regarding the capability of AI as of now, its applications in the modern workspace can be in Chatbots, predictive analytics,

natural language processing, image recognition, and much more. Furthermore, it is a system that will be accessible to everyone through cloud computing, thus opening the possibilities of a more “global” office paradigm.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)

Having matured greatly over the past few years, VR and AR as technology will continue to advance, especially with the onset of what many are calling the “metaverse”. In fact, Microsoft and Nvidia are already developing metaverse platforms for collaborating on digital projects. And although, AR and VR technology have been associated mostly with gaming, entertainment, and so on, the metaverse is showing promising possibilities of making a complete overhaul of the workplace. Bernard Marr, of Forbes, says, “One area to watch is the work environment in the metaverse — in 2023, I predict that we’ll have more immersive meeting environments where we can talk, brainstorm, and co-create together.”

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software technology that makes it easy to build, deploy, and manage software robots that emulate human actions interacting with digital systems and software. Just like people, software robots can do things like understand what’s on a screen, complete the right keystrokes, navigate systems, identify and extract data, and perform a wide range of defined actions more swiftly and with more efficiency.

Since it enables the automation of repetitive and rule-based tasks, there is a strong chance that the RPA will soon become indispensable in the sectors of data entry, invoicing, HR onboarding, financial reporting, and so on. RPA is noninvasive and can be rapidly implemented to accelerate digital transformation, and furthermore, increases employee satisfaction, engagement, and productivity by removing mundane tasks from their workdays.

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Twitter changes its bird logo to ‘X’ officially

Gayathri Das — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 05:59:33 +0000

Los Angeles: Twitter has replaced its recognisable bird logo with the letter “X” as its new official mark marking the latest major shift since Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform.

This comes after Musk’s weekend announcement. The website has already displayed the change.

Notably, Musk noted that x.com now points to twitter.com as well. In the post, Musk also referred to this design as an “interim” one, suggesting that there may be other logo changes in the future.

According to a report by US-based tech portal TechCrunch, it’s possible that the social network won’t stop changing the logo. According to Musk, the business would eventually “bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”

Musk updated his profile picture to the new Twitter logo late on Sunday.

According to a tweet from the company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino, X will advance this transformation by focusing on features “centred in audio, video, messaging, payment/banking” and creating a “global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”

https://twitter.com/lindayacc/status/1683213895463215104
It’s commonly known that Musk has a fascination with the letter “X.” In 1997, he started X.com, which later changed its name to PayPal. The logo for his space company SpaceX is a ‘X’.

And most recently, he established X.ai, an AI business. The social network owned by Elon Musk changed its formal name from Twtter Inc. to X Corp. in April, TechCrunch reported.

Following the great Boston Celtics basketball star Larry Bird, the company acquired the iconic ‘Larry the Bird’ logo in 2010.

Elon Musk on Sunday revealed his plan to change the logo of Twitter. In a tweet, he mentioned that the little blue birdie is likely to be replaced by an “X”.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1682964919325724673
“And soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk tweeted.
“If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow,” he said in another tweet.

The bird was temporarily replaced in April by Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu dog, which ended up helping add as much as USD 4 billion to the meme coin’s market value.

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