I know it sounds crazy, but American multinational food, snack and beverage corporation PepsiCo is apparently working on its own smartphone. PepsiCo has confirmed to Reuters that it will indeed launch a line of Pepsi smartphones and accessories in China: Thus, this means that Pepsi isn’t actually looking to get into the cutthroat market of phone making, but it is instead looking to release a smartphone solely for branding purposes....

Sounds like a story we have all heard before, right? But the tech brand we are talking about here is not Apple and the two colleagues-cum-friends are not the two Steves, Jobs and Woz. This is actually a more recent, more modern day separation happening at one of the most popular brands in the market at the moment — OnePlus. The OnePlus phenomenon OnePlus was co-founded by Pete Lau and Carl Pei back in December 2013 and it wasn’t long before the brand became a very ‘unsettling’ competitor for the rest of the smartphone manufacturers in the game, living up to its “Never Settle” tagline....

OnePlus 7T Pro: Design and Display The OnePlus 7T Pro flaunts a 6.67-inch Fluid AMOLED display with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio, 3120×1440 pixels screen resolution, 516ppi pixel density, HDR10+, and Gorilla Glass 5. OnePlus calls it a Fluid AMOLED display, as it offers a 90Hz refresh rate, similar to the one found on OnePlus 7 Pro. The display extends all the way to the edges to give the phone a premium look and feel, and also offers an immersive experience while consuming content....

Looks like any other neckband Neckbands usually have little to no scope of creativity when it comes to design. The most brands can do to make their neckbands standout is to either go with an out of the ordinary color like Realme Buds Wireless 2 that are available in a striking yellow color, or have a hard plastic-like material around the middle like some of the early Samsung neckbands but none of these design elements really change the basic idea or structure of a neckband....

As already mentioned, OnePlus has always been at the edge to deliver some of the most stylish looking smartphones inspired by some of the best-looking racing cars. Following this trend, and taking a leap even further, it has not come up with its concept phone that takes design inspiration from McLaren’s 720S Spider sports car, which is popular for its retractable hardtop that features an electrochromic glass panel to quickly switch between tinted and transparent states....

OpenVid is completely free and unlike some of the other tools, it comes devoid of time limit or any other cap over the features. The caveat though means that one needs to refer to users to OpenVid in order to get unlimited features free. The new update has further bettered the offering by integrating front camera recordings in a Picture-in-Picture format. The entire desktop can be recorded and once done the videos will be uploaded....

Does the Poco X3 Pro belong here? That is an interesting question. Typically mid segment… Let us get some things clear: the Poco X3 Pro is a mid-segment phone in many regards. It has the sort of display (full HD+, 6.67-inch) that is a staple mid-segment, and even its 120 Hz refresh rate is no longer something you see only in premium segment devices. The 48-megapixel main rear camera and quad camera arrangement is something that we are seeing even in phones around Rs 12,000 – 108 MP seem to be the new IN thing in the Rs 15,000-20,000 range....

And the reason it works only on the iPhone 7 Plus is because it is the only iPhone with dual cameras. Portrait mode can be accessed among the normal shooting options from the default camera app, and well, the moment you enter it, you will notice that the camera uses the 2x optical zoom to get closer to the subject. You also get a message advising you to be within 2....

To enable that, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 comes with the Hexagon 685 DSP which can be found on the company’s flagship chipsets including the Snapdragon 845. Its always-on and always-sensing nature essentially allows phones to react quicker to machine learning queries. That also means phones with the Snapdragon 670 can have always-listening virtual assistant features too. Compared to the Snapdragon 660, Qualcomm says the addition of the Hexagon 685 has led to an uplift in AI performance of nearly 1....

All of which brighten up low light shots, which generally tend to be on the dull side in the color department. Terrific for the night, great for the day (especially Flamingo) And that’s very good. There’s just one problem – thanks to that categorization, most folks try those filters out only at night. Understandable. After all, they ARE called Special Night Filters, right? The problem is that a lot of daytime shots could benefit from the burst of color these filters provide....

How do the Realme Buds 2 fair in that aspect? Let’s find out if it’s the best pair of earphones you can get for Rs. 599. Here is our Realme 2 Buds review. Design and Build As stated earlier, the Realme Buds 2 are build with solid materials and feel much more premium than the price tag might indicate. Right from the housing to the cables, the earphones feel robust....

The RealMe C1 has a 6.2-inch screen with a resolution of 720p and a notch at the top. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 450 octa-core chipset, 2GB RAM, 16GB of internal storage which can be expanded through a MicroSD card slot, and a large 4,230mAh battery. There are two cameras on the rear — a regular 13-megapixel lens and another 2-megapixel sensor for depth-sensing. On the front, you’ll find a 5-megapixel selfie camera as well....

The RealMe U1 comes with a 6.3-inch 1080p screen which has a tiny notch at the top and an aspect ratio of 19.5:9. Plus, there’s also a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 3. It runs on MediaTek’s latest MediaTek P70 octa-core chipset, up to 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of onboard storage which is expandable with a MicroSD card. In addition, the RealMe U1 features a large 3500mAh battery which is not compatible with quick charging....

In terms of design, both the 10,000mAh and 20,000mAh capacity power banks feature a polycarbonate body with a button at the bottom to view the remaining juice in the bank, which is highlighted using the LED indicators. Besides, the button can also be used to activate the low-power mode for charging low-power devices. To enable low-power mode, all that you need to do is double-press the button, and that’s it....

Dr. Philip Nitschke who calls himself as an activist for “voluntary euthanasia and rational suicide” has announced that he is close to finalizing a machine that will use Nitrogen gas to cause death. This device is aimed at offering an option to people who are suffering from illness, an option wherein they could die peacefully without any assistance. According to the Doctor, this way the patient will die peacefully with dignity....

Smartphones with curved displays are here. A day after LG confirmed that they are working on a curved OLED display for smartphones, Samsung has officially announced Galaxy Round which is available exclusively for SK Telecom in South Korea. Samsung Galaxy Round has a 5.7-inch Full HD screen, very similar to what we saw in Galaxy Note 3, but with a curved OLED display. The immediate upsides for having a curved display on a smartphone is not known, but Samsung is promising lots of software tweaks to make use of the non-flat back of Galaxy Round....

A recent teardown performed by Chipworks says that Samsung has actually used more of its own chips to power the new Galaxy S6 smartphone than it did with the Galaxy S5. Thus, U.S. chip supplier Qualcomm has apparently taken a bigger hit than it was initially thought, since Samsung is the incontestable leader of the Android market. Besides its own Exynos mobile processor, the South-Korean company is also resorting to its in-house semiconductor business for the modem and power management integrated circuit chips....

While the Snapdragon 660 was once regarded to be one of the most powerful mid-range chipsets and one had to spend Rs. 15-17k for a phone touting that chip, the ever-so-competitive Indian smartphone market made way for much more powerful Snapdragon 675 and Snapdragon 710 chips for that price, which offered staggering value for money. Now that premium mid-range chips were offered on affordable mid-range smartphones, chips like the Snapdragon 665, which undoubtedly offers immense power has moved its way down to the ultra-affordable segment and is undoubtedly a huge win for the end-user....

Connectify is a company I have been quiet familiar with thanks to their Hotspot app which would turn any laptop into a WiFi Hotspot, a novelty during the days where LAN cables still ruled the roost. Now the company seems to take a pledge in solving all your WiFi woes by intelligently switching between the available Wifi, Mobile and Bluetooth networks or even blending them to create the best possible experience....

Also, there are some SSD models which stand out from the rest, and just to get an idea, you should look at the best SSDs on the market, but you can also find budget models with more modest speeds, which are still blazing fast when compared to magnetic HDDs (an example here would be the Silicon Power Velox V20). But even the best SSDs out there need regular maintenance and tweaks, so they operate at peak performance throughout their lifetime, this is where SSD optimization comes into play....