Category: Editorials

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OnePlus Nightscape vs. Gcam Night Sight: Which one is better?

Back in March this year, Huawei shook the tech world with its then-flagship smartphone, the Huawei P20 Pro. Most notably was its camera capabilities especially in challengingly low light conditions. Indeed, Huawei was ahead of the curve in night photography, where the phone would tap into the dedicated NPU to take stellar hand-held low shutter speed photos no matter how shaky your hands are. Certainly, this left a lot of users in awe. But we all knew it was a matter of time before other manufacturers catch up with the trend.

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Pixel 2 XL long-term review: Still the best… aside from its QC issues

Google’s second-generation line of Pixel phones have been out for about nine months now, and the Pixel 2 XL has been my daily driver now ever since. In nine months, the phone has certainly grown on me, and I can confidently say that it’s still the best, but that’s not without the fair share of issues I’ve had with it.

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Should you be worried about sharing your data with Google?

Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit the news, a lot of people have been deleting their Facebook or at least making an effort to use it less. But for a lot of people, this has been a complete awakening to the whole internet privacy controversy and consequently, there’s been a growing trend to boycott all internet services known to be collecting user data. The one other company talked about most in this regard is Google. There have been complete guides going around the internet on how to stop using Google services completely and instead use alternatives for each of its services. That means no Google search, no Google Maps, Photos, Drive, or YouTube, and there are people actually trying this. Believe it or not, there have actually been people attempting to replace their YouTube usage with Dailymotion! As a Google-centric news blog, we are obligated to address this madness. Continue reading “Should you be worried about sharing your data with Google?”

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[Update: Family plans] What’s really going on with the new YouTube Music, and how will it affect existing users?

Update 5/18: Article has been updated to reflect the recent response from YouTube regarding current family plan members.

Today, Google announced new YouTube subscription services—YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium—and a brand new YouTube Music app. There’s been a slew of confusion and frustration over this move, namely because both are different in their own ways but also because of the lack of clear communication from Google over the upcoming changes. In this post, we’re going to attempt to clear up some of that confusion by explaining what exactly is changing and what will happen for users of YouTube Red and Google Play Music.

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Pixel 2, iPhone X, and OLED woes

Everyone is raving about the Google Pixel 2 XL’s screen burn-in issues. People who have never even touched a Pixel smartphone, much less owned one, have been obnoxiously quick to hop on a bandwagon riot against the second-generation Mountain View device. Some of the most ardent haters are, as you may expect, Apple groupies. But is this new evidence that Google phones suck?

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In-Depth: How Google talks to you and what WaveNet is all about

When a computer talks back to you, it almost seems magical. However, there is a lot of research that goes behind converting text-based answers to speech ones. Initially, during the early days, lots of audio based outputs were recorded by natural human voices. However, with a large number of words present in the human language, it is largely clear that we need to teach the computer how to speak properly.

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In-Depth: Why phone manufacturers continue to eliminate the headphone jack despite all the backlash

Ever since the iPhone 7, there has been an addition to the list of things smartphones can usually endorse as features – the inclusion of a headphone jack. Not that Apple was the first to exclude what for years has been considered a mandatory part of any personal computing device from their smartphone. But because it’s Apple and the iPhone is the most popular phone in the world. So it sets the standard.

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In-Depth: Understanding the Cortex A53 on Mobile SoCs

To start off, ARM Holdings is a chip design company, which is owned by Soft Bank Ltd. ARM stands for Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Computer) Machine. RISC is something that people in Computer Science domain should definitely be aware of, but for the uninitiated, RISC is a microprocessor that is designed to perform a smaller number of types of computer instructions so that it can operate at a higher speed. Its speed is measured in MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). Today, we take a look at the Cortex A53.

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