Qualcomm’s chips bring 4G connectivity to dumb phones

In an effort to differentiate its processor lineups (and annoy tech publications), Qualcomm recently renamed its chips as “Mobile Platforms” instead of “processors.” We can now see why: It just unveiled the 205 processor, er, Mobile Platform, its first low-end 200-series chips with LTE and no Snapdragon branding. The idea is to bring services like banking, Voice over LTE (VoLTE), and music or video streaming to feature phone users in Latin America, India and other regions just getting high-speed data services.

The chips have lowly specs with dual 1.1GHz CPUs, Adreno GPUs, 480p maximum display support and 3-megapixel front and rear cameras. However, they pack Category 4 LTE modems that allow for 150/50 Mbps download/upload speeds, along with Voice over LTE and Voice over WiFi support. Devices like flip-phones using the chip will also get 45 days of standby time, 20 hours of talk time and 86 hours of music playback — unheard of numbers for smartphones.

The Qualcomm 205 Mobile Platform allows us to bring 4G connectivity and services to the masses with devices at price points never seen before.

All told, that could be a big help to consumers and micro-enterprises in developing nations. Users can more easily process financials transactions, for instance — a big help in countries like India that are trying to eliminate cash. At the same time, devices can go days without charging, a boon in places where power is unreliable. “The Qualcomm 205 Mobile Platform allows us to bring 4G connectivity and services to the masses with devices at price points never seen before,” says Qualcomm VP Kedar Kondap.

The chips are now being produced, and devices using them should start arriving in the next quarter. If Nokia’s successful 3310 reincarnation is any example (that phone doesn’t support LTE, by the way), the chips look like a savvy bet by Qualcomm.

Source: Qualcomm

TSMC Won’t Make Official Decision About Building U.S. Plant Until 2018

Apple supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company won’t make a decision about moving some of its chip manufacturing into the United States until sometime in 2018, according to company spokesperson Michael Kramer (via Reuters).

Although recent reports have focused on Foxconn’s potential move stateside for Apple-specific iPhone manufacturing, TSMC chairman Morris Chang in January mentioned that the supplier was not ruling out the U.S. as a location for one of its foundries.

Now TSMC is putting off an official decision until next year, with Kramer stating that the company would lose a lot of its “flexibility” if it moved production into the United States. Sources in Taiwan point towards a decision coming specifically in the “first half of 2018,” with upwards of $16 billion potentially being invested in getting the American plant up and running.

“We won’t make a decision until next year,” TSMC spokesperson Michael Kramer said. The company currently gets about 65 percent of its total revenue from the United States.

“We would sacrifice some benefits if we move to the States. But we have flexibility in Taiwan. If an earthquake happened for instance (in Taiwan), we could send thousands of people here as support, whereas it’s harder in the States,” he told Reuters.

No Apple supplier has made an official decision about building a plant in the U.S as of yet. Last year, Foxconn looked to be in the preliminary stages of building an assembly plant in the U.S., but this month chairman Terry Gou raised uncertainties about such plans. Both TSMC and Foxconn have teamed up to bid on Toshiba’s memory chip unit, although the latter company has reportedly lost ground in the bidding due to the Japanese government’s fear of Foxconn’s ties to China.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

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Luxury Swiss watch brand Gc enters Android Wear 2.0 market with Gc Connect

With the watch trade show Baselworld taking place in Switzerland this week, we fully expect many luxury timepiece brands to announce new smart devices; some for the first time.

Swiss luxury watch manufacturer Gc is among those, with an announcement that it will be offering Android Wear 2.0 smartwatches this year.

Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 processing platform, the Gc Connect watches will be available in models for men and women. They have round displays and each are based on the company’s Gc Structura analogue watch designs.

The watches have a 318L stainless steel case with brushed and polished steel and rose gold or bronze. The men’s watch design also has a black ceramic top ring around the circular display.

• Best upcoming smartwatches: Future wristwear to look forward to in 2017
• Tech meets fashion: 6 of the most stylish smartwatches

There will be five different styles for men, with rose gold, polished steel, black silicone strap, crocodile leather patterned strap and bronze case, or a steel version with a grey embossed silicone strap.

The women’s model also comes with rose gold, steel and white silicone strap or rose gold and a polished bracelet.

They all have “mineral glass” and are, naturally, touchscreen.

There will be custom Gc watch faces and complications, with the possibility to mix and match design and app data. And as they are Android Wear 2.0 enabled, the Gc Connect line will work with Android and iOS smartphones.

Price and release date are yet to be revealed.

The Morning After: Monday, March 20th 2017

Hey, good morning!

Is there such a thing as a good Monday morning? Hopefully, you’ve managed to calibrate to the clock changes last week, as we kick of this one with the weekend’s highlight. After all that bad Uber news, its president has quit, while Tesla is killing its (slightly more) affordable 60kWh Model S. Our weekly After Math breaks down all the numbers from the last seven days too — no calculators required.

Say bye-bye to the Model S 60 and 60D… again.
Tesla kills its relatively affordable 60kWh Model S options

After April 16th, people will no longer be able to buy the most affordable Tesla cars available today. The automaker has decided to stop offering the Model S 60 and 60D options to “simplify the ordering process,” according to a newsletter it sent to subscribers. They’re merely software-locked to 60kWh, and customers can pay an additional fee to unlock the remaining 15kWh. Tesla says most people ended up paying for the software unlock, so it sees no reason to continue selling the 60kWh versions of the vehicle.

The browser now supports WebGL 2.0’s advanced visuals.
Chrome quietly received a big 3D graphics boost

Notice a boost to 3D web graphics while using Chrome? It’s not just you. Google says that Chrome version 56 and later releases support the WebGL 2.0 standard. You should see faster performance, new texture types and visual effects (such as volume-based effects and tone mapping). And importantly, it’s now on par with the same OpenGL ES 3 spec you see in newer mobile games

This wasn’t the company he thought he joined.
Uber president quits following a rough few months

Uber might be on the hunt for a second-in-command to keep its behavior in line, but that isn’t stopping one key executive from heading out the door. Company president Jeff Jones is leaving after having been on the job for less than a year. Reportedly, the string of controversies in recent weeks were simply too much. In a statement, he said that his values and leadership style are “inconsistent with what [he] saw and experienced at Uber,” and that he “can no longer continue” at the company.

FB’s Building 8 works on everything from augmented reality to brain scans.Facebook may show off new hardware very soon

When Facebook launched its hardware-focused Building 8, it raised all kinds of questions: just what was it making in there, and when would you see the first fruits of its labor? You might not have to wait long to get the details. Sources speaking to Business Insider claim to have a broad overview of not only what Building 8 is creating, but when you might get to see it. The team is reportedly working on four advanced technology projects, and is poised to play a key role in Facebook’s F8 conference in April. At least it won’t be another effort to ape Snapchat. Unless it’s specs?

But wait, there’s more…

• After Math: Potpurri
• Amazon will judge your daily outfit choices
• Watch your weather forecast in virtual reality

Watch this pilot at the controls as he lands a passenger jet in extremely windy conditions

Why it matters to you

It may look a bit scary, but it’s extremely rare for commercial jets to get into serious difficulties while landing in such conditions.

It’s a video that’ll be enough to persuade nervous fliers to cancel their next flight and take the car instead.

Posted to Facebook last week, the 50-second sequence purports to show commercial airline pilot Artur Kielak at the controls of a Boeing 737 as he brings it in to land.

But, as the video reveals, this is clearly no ordinary landing. Indicated by the plane’s rather wildly active control wheel, the 737 is tackling extremely windy conditions — possibly as ferocious as those of the passengers sweating it out in the cabin.

Kielak looks reassuringly calm during the rough descent, though his broad grin when the plane finally touches the tarmac suggests the experience was a little unusual. Indeed, he confirms as much in a note attached to his video

“I’m always saying that [the] airline pilot gets [all] his salary for one landing per month…this is the day I earned mine,” Kielak wrote.

Flying for European low-cost airline Ryanair, the Polish pilot added, “The maximum crosswind limit steady, gust plus steady and gust in one…FULL FORCE column deflections was required…I LOVE Boeing 737 for it’s [sic] stability in severe conditions.” And, it’s fair to say, so do the passengers.

More: “Can anyone fly a plane?” Hobbyist pilot shows how you can land a jet in an emergency

YouTube has numerous videos showing aircraft coming in to land in windy conditions, but Kielak’s is different in that it shows the pilot close-up, at the controls, in the final stages before the plane’s wheels touch down.

It’s extremely rare for a plane to get into serious difficulties in such a situation, as strict rules are in place to determine if the conditions are too severe to attempt a landing, in which case the plane could be diverted to another airport. Factors that determine whether the plane can land include the aircraft type, the strength and direction of the wind, the runway setup, and the policy of the airline.

‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ performance guide

Getting the best performance you can out of a PC game — even a brand-new one like Mass Effect: Andromeda is easy. Just turn all the graphic and video settings down to the bare minimum, run that cutting-edge game in 800×600, and even the lowest-end PC can hit upwards of 100 frames per second.

Unfortunately, that means your game is going to look like a hot mess, all jagged edges and blurry textures. Finding a balance between performance and aesthetics is always tricky, especially with demanding games like Mass Effect: Andromeda.

So, we’ve gone ahead and tested each individual setting in Mass Effect, to determine which ones have the biggest impact on your performance, and on how your game looks overall. Whether you’re a seasoned PC gamer looking to get the most out of an old PC, or a newcomer looking to decipher all those settings in the graphics menu, we’ve got you covered.

Testing conditions

To test Mass Effect: Andromeda we used a PC with a mix of high-end and mid-range components. To make sure that our internal components weren’t going to drag performance down, we used an Intel Core i7-6950X CPU, clocked at 3.0GHz, 16GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 with 6GB of RAM.

More: Wonky facial animations in ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ might not be fixed

That’s a pretty powerful machine, so it should be able to get the most out of Mass Effect: Andromeda with all the settings maxed out. For most of our tests, we’ll be running the game in 1440p. Our benchmarks were straightforward. We ran, jumped, and shot our way through a varied outdoor environment, gleefully frolicked in an extraterrestrial pond, and ran a circuit inside a space ship.

It’s important to point out that we’re not testing this PC’s hardware, we’re testing how the game performs with different settings. Your numbers are going to vary based on the strength of your hardware, but they should be proportional — for instance, turning down your resolution or lighting settings won’t yield the exact same frame rates we experienced, but the relative amount they change should be about the same.

Brace yourselves

Now, you may have heard this already, but Mass Effect: Andromeda isn’t without its faults. Chief among them, unfortunately, is that it just doesn’t run very well. On our testing rig, with all the settings maxed out, running in 1440p, we were barely able to manage a consistent framerate between 30 and 40 FPS. That’s not bad, but it’s kind of the bare minimum serious PC gamers expect, and this test rig isn’t exactly underpowered.

Additionally, Andromeda just doesn’t look great. That’s not the most precise criticism, but even with all the settings pushed all the way up, this game looks only slightly better than Mass Effect 3 — which came out about five years ago. Most of the new detail is in the quality of distant scenery and textures, both of which are greatly improved. The earlier Mass Effect games always worked within tight constraints. Even outdoor areas were just small arenas. Here, levels are closer in scale to Dragon Age: Inquisition, though so far they do seem a bit smaller (that could also be due to the Nomad which, being a tank, gets around quickly).

On the other hand, character details seem to have hardly advanced. Facial detail and animations haven’t come all that far from Mass Effect 3, and thus often look weird and lifeless. Everyone has a wax-statue-come-to-life vibe, and none of the character models are particularly lifelike. Hair is a big issue, as most hairdos look embarrassingly bad in any shade brighter than auburn. Many world details, like buildings, also have a flat appearance. Bioware could’ve done more with lighting effects to create atmosphere, especially in outdoor areas, where objects often suffer drab colors and a lack of texture depth.

It would be easy to blame on the engine, after all big-budget RPGs often use heavily customized engines which can degrade performance and graphical quality. But there’s a problem — Andromeda is running on EA’s Frostbite engine, the same one that powers Battlefield 1, a game which has been roundly praised for its lavish visuals and impressive performance. Neither of which are in evidence in Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Presenting the presets

Let’s dig into some examples, shall we? One of the first things you’ll want to do when you fire up a new PC game is open the settings menu, and navigate to the graphical settings. Here, you’ll find the usual array of preset quality settings — low, medium, high, and ultra.

There’s one big difference though, and you might not notice it if you’re unfamiliar with digging under the hood and tweaking your graphical settings. Switching from the Ultra preset, to the High preset, there’s a setting that changes, right there in plain view: resolution scaling.

Thumb on the scale

If you’re unfamiliar, resolution scaling is a helpful way to improve your game’s settings by scaling down the resolution at which the game’s engine renders. It means the game engine renders at a lower resolution, while elements that are outside the 3D engine – the interface, primarily – continue to display at native resolution. That keeps them readable and properly sized.

Since Andromeda uses resolution scaling as part of its graphical presets, we ran tests at each quality setting (low, medium, high, ultra) with the resolution scaling intact, and a set of tests without it.

The results are stark. Using the built-in quality presets, our game looked good on ultra and high settings, but once you take a step into the medium preset — with your resolution scaled down to 900p — things take a turn.

Similarly, taking one more step into the abyss, to low settings, Andromeda scales your resolution down to 720p. The world seems to lose all life, detail, and aesthetic appeal. Objects look blurry, textures have no depth, and reflections seem straight out of an Atari game. At least the downgrades net a big performance boost.

We averaged 34 FPS on the Ultra preset, 66 FPS on the High preset, and on the Medium preset we saw 91 FPS. What about Low? Well, on Low we were hitting around 149 FPS. All of these numbers are from an outdoor section of Eos, the first “full” planet the player travels to.

The Low preset is certainly effective at boosting framerate, but we’re willing to bet most gamers won’t want to play a game that looks that bad. Even the original Mass Effect looks better.

De-scaling

So how does the game look and perform without resolution scaling? Much better, and much worse, respectively. To get a better idea of how well the game runs at different quality settings, we went through and ran the same tests on the same preset quality settings but disabled resolution scaling.

The results speak for themselves. Just look at those textures! They’re so much happier now that the game isn’t crushing the life out of them.

But with big graphical gains, come big performance hits, and overall we saw FPS drop by at least 30 percent across the board — sometimes a bit more.

Our test rig managed to average 42 FPS on High, 63 FPS on Medium, and 76 FPS on Low. Ultra remained the same, because resolution scaling is off by default on that preset quality level.

Remember, our rig is quite powerful. The GTX 1060 meets the recommend specifications, and is about as quick as a GTX 970, the most common video card according to Steam’s hardware survey. Yet even so, the game only averaged above 60 FPS on medium detail at 1440p resolution.

We’d be okay with that if the game looked outstanding. We’ve tested some trying, but also extremely attractive, games as of late – like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Forza Horizon 3. The problem is that as mentioned, Mass Effect: Andromeda just doesn’t look that great. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t push the limits, and we think it’s arguable that much older games like The Witcher 3 and Grand Theft Auto V boast superior overall presentation.

The takeaway

So, resolution scaling is bad for visuals, great for performance, and kind of sneaky to include as part of the default quality presets. If you’re having trouble running Andromeda or if you’re worried that your rig won’t be up to the task, just take another look at the screenshots for the low quality preset without resolution scaling.

It doesn’t look that bad compared to the medium and high quality settings. It’s playable, and keep in mind the game automatically upscales your textures during conversations and cutscenes, so if you’re just in it for the story, you can absolutely get by running the game on low — just make sure you disable scaling, the performance gains just aren’t worth the cost.

Getting granular

If you’re comfortable ditching the presets and digging into the individual graphics settings, you’re in luck, Andromeda has a few settings which can seriously spike your performance if they’re turned up too high. To find those settings, we went through and tested each individual graphics option, ran a few simple benchmarks, and compared side-by-side screenshots.

Like many PC games, most of the individual graphical settings in Andromeda have a negligible effect on performance and overall quality. It’s when they’re turned up or down together that you can start to see cumulative effects on your performance and graphical fidelity — with two notable exceptions.

Go ahead and guess, we’ll wait. Nope, not texture quality. Not model quality either. The two settings that have the biggest impact on your performance are ambient occlusion and lighting quality.

Both of those settings affect the way the game world looks, but let’s start with the weird one: Ambient Occlusion. Also called AO, ambient occlusion refers to the quality and number of shadows that objects and people cast on themselves.

See here, our Sara Ryder’s face is notably different at each level of ambient occlusion. With it turned off entirely, her face loses almost all definition — she loses the shadows in her eye sockets, on her eyes, and even in her nose. Step it up just a bit, and she regains some definition.

Andromeda features four levels of quality for ambient occlusion: off, SSAO, HBAO, and HBAO Full. SSAO stands for screen-space ambient occlusion, and HBAO stands for horizon-based ambient occlusion.

There are a host of differences between the two different methods of providing ambient occlusion, but the one that really matters for our purposes is performance impact. SSAO gives you a basic approximation of ambient occlusion — it puts those shadows back in Sara’s face, but they’re not as rich and detailed as they are under HBAO or HBAO Full. It’s easier on your system, and doesn’t hit your FPS quite as hard as full-on HBAO does.

Looking at the numbers, we managed 42 FPS with AO off, versus 34 FPS with it on (that’s with everything else at the Ultra preset). That’s a sizable difference, and it doesn’t hurt your overall quality very much — Sara’s nostrils look a bit weird, but it’s not too bad. With SSAO we managed about 37 FPS, so you still take a hit if you want to put those shadows back, but you do get a solid performance boost just by stepping down from HBAO to SSAO.

Turn down the lights

The second most effective way to boost your FPS without killing your graphical quality is another light-and-shadow based setting: lighting quality.

Mass Effect games are notorious for their over-use of lens flares and bright, shiny, sci-fi lights, and Andromeda is no exception. Turning down the quality of those lights can net you a small but consistent boost to your overall FPS. First though, let’s look at what you’re sacrificing for those gains

Not much, right? Stepping your lighting down to low or medium, you still have accurate shadows and the environment still looks good. There’s a barely noticeable change to the quality of the lighting, mostly that light sources are a bit harsher and less natural. But let’s be honest, the lighting in Mass Effect: Andromeda isn’t exactly superb to begin with, so toning it down for an eight percent boost to FPS is worthwhile.

With lighting set on low, we managed 37 FPS on average, compared to 34 FPS on the default Ultra preset. It’s not a big gain, but it’s among the biggest boosts you can get from any single graphical setting in Mass Effect: Andromeda.

An underwhelming performer

As always, your mileage will vary. According to our tests, Andromeda isn’t the most efficient performer to begin with, so you might have some trouble running it at the quality settings you’re used to running most games on, just get in there in tinker.

Don’t be afraid of digging into your graphical settings and doing your own experiments, there’s nothing in there you can’t fix by just clicking over to one of the existing presets. And make sure you turn off resolution scaling unless you’re hard up for a performance boost.

Neato’s vacuum cleaners can now be controlled with Google Assistant

Why it matters to you

Google Assistant integration means vacuuming around the house can be controlled without even lifting a finger.

With the growing trend of smart appliances, the utopian future people dream of is getting closer. Devices like Google Home and Google Assistant have allowed these devices to connect to one another, making them appear more autonomous than ever. For anyone who owns one of Neato Robotics’ Botvac Connected series vacuum cleaners, the company has announced integration with Google Assistant. Now users will be able to control their robot vacuum with their voice.

More: Neato’s new vacuum bots cut old prices but keep their sweet features

“The explosion of artificial intelligence has enabled more sophisticated voice control and we are happy to bring this revolutionary technology to customers,” said Neat Robotics CEO Giacomo Marini. “At the heart of Neato’s brand is — and always has been — technology leadership through innovation — the Google Assistant integration further cements our commitment to innovation in the smart home.”

Setting up voice commands on Google Home is simple. Afterward, simply state, “OK Google, tell Neato robot to start cleaning,” to get things started. However, users can do more than just start the vacuum. They can also check the battery level, locate the Botvac with the FindMe function, and set up a cleaning schedule. Additionally, users can control their robot with the Neato App, Amazon Alexa, and Neato Chatbot for Facebook.

Every Neato robot uses the firm’s patented Neato LaserSmart technology. This combines laser scanning, room mapping, and object detection to create the most efficient course for cleaning the home. Essentially, the Botvac will alter its navigation in response to new obstacles. Whether it is light or dark, this robot can navigate from room to room and return to its base to recharge. With a full battery, the Botvac will resume right where it left off.

Integration with Google Assistant is now live with all Neato connected robot vacuums. This includes the Botvac D3 Connected, Botvac D5 Connected, and Botvac Connected.

The BarkBath gets your dog clean without making a mess

Why it matters to you

If cleaning your dog in the bath always descends into utter chaos, the BarkBath may be the machine of your dreams.

It’s a brave owner who tries to clean their dog in the bathtub. The mightier the mutt, the greater the struggle, the bigger the mess. It’s time consuming, too, and uses a ton of water from start to finish.

So check out the BarkBath, a new piece of kit that hopes to transform this tiresome chore into something quick and easy for both you and your four-legged family member.

Dubbed “the next generation of dog bathing,” the BarkBath is the creation of Michigan-based floor-care specialist Bissell. Considering its line of work, it’s little surprise that the BarkBath resembles a canister-type vacuum cleaner, with a main base, flexible hose, and cleaning head.

The BarkBath requires just a small amount of water and shampoo to clean your canine from head to tail, with the dirty waste collected in a separate tank for simple, speedy disposal.

You begin the process by simply moving the cleaning head gently over your dog’s coat. As you do this, the head sprays warm water and a no-rinse shampoo onto the animal’s fur. The nozzle gets beneath the hair, right down to the skin, to allow a deep clean that removes both dirt and odor, while a soft suction mechanism pulls the grime and water away, depositing it in the tank.

The fact that the system creates little to no mess means you can use the BarkBath anywhere in the home, with a full clean likely to take around 20 minutes.

More: Here’s what happens when a dog shoots a wedding video

“We’re actually changing the way that you wash the animal,” Chuck Martin, Bissell’s general manager of innovation, says in a video (above) promoting the BarkBath. “Normally you would wash from the fur down, and what we’re doing is cleaning from the skin up.”

Martin explains that “in a traditional bathtub method of washing a dog, you’d use about 19 gallons of water to wash an 80-pound dog. We use less than 48 ounces of water because we’re much more efficient at the process.” He adds, “Our shampoo is really unique because it doesn’t have a lot of the harsh chemicals that other shampoos might have, and it’s really safe and effective on the animal.”

One note of caution — Bissell points out that the machine makes a sound similar to that of a vacuum cleaner, which most people know can scare the bejeezus out of some dogs. “For best results, your dog should not be afraid of the sound of a vacuum,” the company helpfully explains.

The BarkBath is currently an Indiegogo project with a month left to go. It’s already more than doubled its $50,000 funding target thanks to pledges from more than 1,000 backers.

At the time of writing, some early-bird deals for the machine remain, allowing U.S.-based dog owners to make a saving of up to 27 percent on the expected retail price of $150. Shipping is scheduled for June, 2017.

Qualcomm’s 205 Mobile Platform brings 4G connectivity to feature phones

Qualcomm will roll out sub-$50 feature phones with Category 4 LTE.

Qualcomm announced last week that it would move away from the Snapdragon branding for its lower-end platforms, and we’re now getting a first look at what that entails.

At an event in New Delhi, Qualcomm has introduced its latest product, an entry-level SoC aimed at the feature phone segment in emerging markets. The Qualcomm 205 Mobile Platform is designed primarily to bring 4G connectivity to feature phones, with the SoC featuring the X5 Category 4 LTE modem with a download speed of 150Mbps.

The platform also supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, VoLTE and VoWIFI, 720p video streaming at 30fps, and an ISP that can handle a front VGA camera and a 3MP rear camera. The chipset offers a dual-core CPU clocked at 1.1GHz and an Adreno 304 GPU, and supports eMMC 4.5 flash storage and LPDDR2/LPDDR3 RAM.

There’s also dual-SIM connectivity, support for location services (GPS, GLONASS, and Beidou), and Qualcomm’s hardware-based SecureMSM security platform.

Although sub-$100 smartphones have been on the rise in markets like India, there is still a considerable demand for feature phones in the country. The rise of affordable 4G services with the launch of Jio — which offers 1GB a day of LTE data and free calls for just ₹303 ($4.60) a month — has catalysed the entire market, drastically lowering the barrier to entry for 4G.

Jio has been offering its services for absolutely free to its customers for the last seven months, amassing 100 million customers in the process. The “Jio effect,” as it’s called, has led to incumbents Airtel and Vodafone making their own 4G plans more affordable to stay competitive while improving their quality of service.

Feature phones still account for a majority of handset sales in India.

The proliferation of 4G has also resulted in an increase in sales of 4G-enabled devices, with 70% of devices sold in India in Q3 2016 offering LTE. We’ve seen phones that offer great value for money in recent months, including the likes of the Xiaomi Redmi 3S and Lenovo’s K6 Power. Although these phones cost under $150, their pricing puts them out of reach for millions of Indian customers, and that’s where the Qualcomm 205 Mobile Platform comes in.

With the entry-level chipset, Qualcomm is paving the way for sub-$50 feature phones that offer 4G connectivity. Feature phones account for 56% of the handset segment in India, and there’s continued demand for phones that offer dual-SIM connectivity and multi-day battery life. By throwing in a Category 4 LTE modem, Qualcomm is now making these devices make the switch from 2G to 4G. In addition to calls, feature phones will now be able to carry out “enhanced experiences” that include mobile payment solutions and access to music and video streaming apps.

Phones powered by the 205 platform will be available sometime next quarter, with Qualcomm partnering with the likes of Jio, Micromax, TCL, and others:

• Borqs
• CKT
• Flex
• FIH/Megafone
• HiPad
• Huiye
• LYF
• Micromax
• Reliance Jio
• TCL
• TSM
• Uniscope
• Viroyal/Feixun

Xiaomi Redmi 4A goes live in India with 720p display, Snapdragon 425 for just $90

The Redmi 4A shows that sub-$100 phones don’t have to be boring.

At a media event in New Delhi, Xiaomi rolled out the latest product in the Redmi series, the Redmi 4A. The phone will be sold exclusively on Amazon India for ₹5,999 ($90), making it the most affordable phone launched by the Chinese manufacturer in the country.

You get a lot for the asking price, including a 5-inch 720p display, Snapdragon 425 SoC with four 1.4GHz Cortex A53 cores and an Adreno 308 GPU, 2GB of RAM, 16GB storage (a variant with 32GB storage will also be sold), 13MP camera, 5MP front shooter, and a 3120mAh battery. On the software front, the Redmi 4A comes with the latest version of MIUI 8 (8.1.4.0) atop Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow along with the December security patch.

Like earlier Redmi devices, the Redmi 4A is manufactured in India, with Xiaomi stating that over 95% of its devices sold in the country are locally manufactured. The company is also rolling out a second manufacturing plant in India, increasing its production capacity to one phone per second.

As for the phone itself, the Redmi 4A will be going up for sale starting March 23 on Amazon India. The phone certainly has a lot to offer considering its price tag, and the blue color option (which I’m reviewing) in particular looks incredible. What are your thoughts on the device? Let us know in the comments below.

See at Amazon