Call of Duty Mobile Battle Royale Mode: Better than PUBG Mobile? Call of Duty Mobile arrived in closed beta to India earlier last week, looking to emulate the mind-boggling success ofPUBG Mobile. Though the beta commenced solely with the multi-player mode enabled, giving users a chance to relive the nostalgia of the Modern Warfare days, the battle royale mode became available a couple of days ago. I had been having the time of my life, playing back-to-back Team Deathmatch games on the Killhouse map, since there was no word on when the Battle Royale mode will go live....

China Could Hurt Apple Profits by 29% If It Fires Back on the Huawei Ban: Goldman Sachs As the US imposed trade restrictions on Huawei slowly take their toll on the world’s second largest smartphone company, Goldman Sachs analysts have now said that China could hurt Apple’s profits by as much as 29% if the country decides to retaliate on the ban. In a note to investors, Goldman Sachs analysts mentioned that Apple could lose as much as 29% of its profits if China banned the sale of iPhones in the country as retaliation for the ban on Huawei in the US....

Huawei Ban: Everything That’s Happened So Far A lot has happened with Huawei over the course of the last week. The company saw itself being put on the Entity List by the US Commerce Department — a list of companies that aren’t allowed to buy technology from US based companies without government approval — approval that the US government wouldn’t give to Huawei anyway. In the immediate aftermath of being placed on the list, US companies started cutting off Huawei from access to their technologies, starting off with Google....

IGTV Gets Support for Landscape Videos In yet another attempt to keep its long-video supporting IGTV feature afloat, Facebook-owned photo-messaging app Instagram has added support for videos shot in landscape mode. “We’ve heard from creators who want to upload landscape videos for IGTV. Similarly, we’ve heard from viewers who come across landscape videos in IGTV but want to watch them in a more natural way. That’s why we’re announcing support for landscape videos in addition to vertical,” the company wrote in a blog-post on Thursday....

India has the Second Highest Number of Government Requests for Facebook User Data The Indian government requested Facebook to provide data for 20,805 users (including 861 emergency requests) in the July-December 2018 period — second only to the US government — and the social networking giant provided some data in 53 per cent of the cases. During the second half of 2018, the volume of content restrictions based on local law increased globally by 135 per cent, from 15,337 to 35,972....

Sony SRS-XB12 Bluetooth Speaker Review: Loud Sound in a Tiny Package I have used a lot of Bluetooth speakers, and for the most part, I have found that larger, usually more expensive ones offer better sound. However, they do compromise considerably on portability — that’s one of the reasons you might see me carrying around a JBL Go instead of my relatively bigger (but better sounding) Sony Bluetooth speaker. However, when Sony sent over the SRS-XB12 over to us for a review, I was immediately drawn towards it — it’s small, not as much as the JBL Go, but still relatively tiny, and my experience with Sony’s Bluetooth speakers suggested that it would have better sound quality than my usual JBL go-to; and so, in the last 10 days, I’ve had the XB12 dangling off of my bag, and I’ve used it for everything from listening to music at work and home, while watching movies, and everything in between....

Twitter Records Around 400 Million Tweets for #LokSabhaElections2019 Twitter India on Thursday said conversations around the 2019 Lok Sabha elections grew 300 per cent from 2014 to reach 396 million tweets between January 1 and May 23. During the course of the six weeks of the election from April 11 till May 19, national security emerged as the most talked about election-related topic on Twitter, followed by religion, jobs and employment, agriculture, and finally demonetisation....