Peter's Interest

After introducing its new range of 4K TVs at CES, earlier this year, Samsung has finally brought some models to India including its curved 4K TV. Samsung likes to call these TVs SUHD TVs with the S prefix symbolizing superior picture clarity, wider colour gamut and improved brightness as the company has used its Nano Crystal technology. Samsung claims the TVs offer elevated brightness up to 2.5 times brighter than conventional TVs, and twice the colour adjustment points for accurate colour reproduction. These are also the first Tizen OS-powered Samsung TVs. We've been using the 55-inch variant of Samsung's JS9000 SUHD range to try to find out if it's the best 4K TV available at this time...  Build & design Samsung JS9000 sports a sleek metal frame with slim, narrow bezels surrounding the panel. It's got a brushed silver finish. The back, meanwhile, has a wrap-around metallic plate with a shirring pattern (raised vertical lines) that looks exquisite even th...

Apple Inc will launch the next generation of its Apple TV set-top box in September, with a new remote and support for Siri voice control, online publisher BuzzFeed has reported.  The new Apple TV will have a slimmer chassis, a "drastically improved" remote with touch-pad input, increased on-board storage and an operating system that will support Siri, BuzzFeed said, citing sources familiar with the matter.  The device will be launched with its own App Store and a software development kit for app developers, the website said.  Apple did not immediately respond to phone calls seeking comment.  The Apple TV has not been refreshed since 2013.  The iPhone maker was expected to unveil a new version in June at its annual Word Wide Developers Conference, but it launched the Apple Music streaming service.

That's the amount Microsoft wrote off on Nokia's phone unit, which it bought a little over a year ago for what it said was $9.5 billion. Considering that the deal included $1.5 billion in cash, the write-off means Microsoft now values a business that once controlled 41% of the global handset market at just a small fraction of the purchase price.  Thanks in large part to the huge accounting charge, Microsoft reported its largest quarterly loss ever last week ($3.2 billion). It was only the third loss in its history as a public company.  "If you were talking about any other industry, this would be considered a catastrophe that's the equivalent to a natural disaster," said Horace Dediu, who spent eight years at Nokia during its heyday and is now at the San Francisco research firm Clayton Christensen Institute, which studies disruptive technologies.  This being the technology business, Microsoft's still relatively new chief executive, Satya Nadella, gets credit f...

The plane piece was found on Wednesday washed up on Reunion located in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar. Plane debris washed up on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean is almost certainly part of a Boeing 777, a Malaysian official and aviation experts said, potentially the biggest breakthrough in the search for missing Flight MH370. Malaysian investigators are expected in Reunion on Friday and the object, identified by aviation experts as part of a wing, would then be sent to a French military laboratory near Toulouse for checks, French police sources said. National carrier Malaysia Airlines was operating a Boeing 777 when the ill-fated flight disappeared in March last year en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, creating one of the most baffling mysteries in aviation history. It was carrying 239 passengers and crew. The plane piece was found on Wednesday washed up on Reunion, a volcanic island of 850,000 people that is a full part of France, located in the Ind...

CLEVELAND (AP) — Brandon Moss was sorry to see close friend David Murphy traded earlier this week by the Indians. Now he's gone, too. Moss was dealt Thursday to the St. Louis Cardinals, who were in the market for an outfielder after seven-time All-Star Matt Holliday re-injured his right quadriceps on Wednesday. In exchange for Moss, who was in his first season with the Indians, the Indians received minor league pitcher Rob Kaminsky, a first-round pick in 2013. The Cardinals lead the NL Central by 4 1/2 games over Pittsburgh. However, St. Louis is in an offensive funk and hasn't scored a run in 22 consecutive innings after being blanked 1-0 on Wednesday by the Cincinnati Reds. And Holliday is out again with the same injury that sidelined him for 31 games earlier this season. The Cardinals will hope to get some pop from Moss, who signed a one-year, $6.5 million contract as a free agent with Cleveland during the offseason. While he did produce — 15 h...

Google Translate is a pretty useful app when you're on the road. The tech giant has been working to help travellers explore the world without the barriers of language, and its latest update does just that. Google has added 20 new languages to its instant visual translation feature, the company  announced  on its blog. This means that in addition to the seven languages – English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish – that were made available in the last update, you can now use the app to translate signs between English and Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. You will have to download a language pack for each. The app also now extends the visual translation feature, called Word Lens, to Hindi and Thai. Currently, you can only visually translate signs one-way, from English to Hindi or Thai. For the oth...

British Gas owner Centrica wants 6,000 jobs to go, mainly in the UK, while Shell is to cut 6,500 staff and contractors worldwide More than 12,000 jobs are being axed by two of Britain’s leading energy companies on the back of lower oil prices and major internal restructuring. Shell is to cut 6,500 staff and contractors worldwide while Centrica, the owner of British Gas, wants 6,000 jobs to go, mainly in the UK. The cutbacks at Centrica – one of the big six domestic gas and electricity suppliers – is likely to cause a political storm as the British Gas arm doubled its profits to £528m. The price of oil has halved over the last 12 months has forced oil and gas companies onto the defensive and spending to be slashed. But Centrica has come under a new management which promised radical change. Shell saw its second quarter profits slump by 35% to £3.36bn while Centrica’s first half adjusted operating profits profits were down by only 3% to £1bn. Centrica, under its new bos...

Windows 10 comes with new features that make it an attractive upgrade. Whether you're looking to try the new Start experience or if you just want to talk to your new assistant, Cortana, there are a few things you should do before you upgrade. To ensure that your system can handle Windows 10, you should check the Windows 10 Upgrade Advisor. When you get a notification in your taskbar to reserve your free copy of Windows 10, you can click the hamburger menu on the top left, navigate to Check Your PC and run the Advisor to ensure that your hardware and software will work with the latest version of Windows. Microsoft will run a check, and you'll get feedback on whether your installed software or hardware is compatible with Windows 10. Once you know how upgrade-ready your system is, here are a few things to do before you actually take the Windows 10 plunge: Create a recovery disk or drive with your current OS You have a full month to test drive Windows 10, and if you don...

Finland's Nokia, once the world's largest phone maker, has unveiled a spherical camera designed for making 3D movies and games that can be watched and played with virtual reality headsets.  The device, showcased at an event in Los Angeles, takes video and audio in 360 degrees with eight sensors and microphones, and is the first from Nokia's digital media solutions business -- one of its new focuses for future growth.  Nokia is going through restructuring after selling its mobile phone business to Microsoft last year and following that up with a proposed 15.6 billion euro ($17.2 billion) acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, which is set to boost its main network equipment business.  "We expect that virtual reality experiences will soon radically enhance the way people communicate and connect to stories, entertainment, world events and each other," Nokia executive Ramzi Haidamus said in a statement.  In May, GoPro introduced a similar system using 16 cameras and Google...

 Motorola is looking to start mobile phone manufacturing in India and may tap the company's Chennai factory, which has been lying unused since 2013. If the plan goes through, this will be the third manufacturing location for the company outside China and Brazil, a top company official said.  Motorola, part of Chinese electronics major Lenovo which bought the company from Google, sells phones in India only through Flipkart. The company is looking at a larger play through its 'E', 'G' and 'X' range of devices, while also eyeing orders for 4G phones from Mukesh Ambani's 4G venture, Reliance Jio Infocomm.  "India is one of the biggest markets for Motorola globally, and also among the fastest-growing. We have started evaluating on whether it makes sense to make in India," Marcus Frost, senior marketing director for Motorola Mobility's Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) as well as Asia-Pacific (APAC) regions, told TOI here.  Frost said ...

Motorola has unveiled the latest update to its popular Moto G smartphone, offering the usual combination of low price and premium specs, but with added water-resistance and the ability to customise the device using Motorola's Moto Maker service. When Google first launched the Moto G in November 2013, it was widely praised for its low price, quad-core processor and HD screen, offering a wallet-friendly alternative to some of the premium devices on the market at the time, like Apple's iPhone 5c. Less than a year later, Motorola updated the device with a bigger screen, better cameras and microSD storage expansion, and raised the price from £135 to £145. Now the company has unveiled the third-generation Moto G – the first to be launched since Lenovo bought Motorola from Google for $2.9bn (£1.8bn) in 2014. The new Moto G runs Android Lollipop and has a 5-inch HD display, all-day battery life and built-in SD card support. It ...

Hours after its  India unit unveiled  the third-generation Moto G smartphone, Motorola announced two new smartphones of its Moto X range in the US.  While the new Moto X Style is priced at $399 (unlocked), its smaller sibling Moto X Play costs $299 off-contract. The former will hit the market in September, and the latter in August.  Notably, Moto X Style will be in direct competition with  the new OnePlus 2 smartphone , which costs $389 ( Rs 24,999 in India ). However, there is no word when the company will bring Moto X Style to the Indian market.  Moto X Style sports a 5.7-inch QHD (1440x2560p) resolution and runs on the 1.8GHz hexa-core 64-bit Snapdragon 808 chipset with 3GB RAM. It will come with 64GB of internal storage, with microSD card support up to 128GB. The smartphone has a 5MP front camera, 3,000mAh battery, and universal 4G support, and the "world's fastest turbo charging technology." Moto X Play, on the other hand, has a 5.5-inch Ful...