Archives January 2023

Battery life on a smartphone depends upon several factors such as the number of background apps running, usages pattern and more. Despite that, running out of power at an important situation can be a real inconvenience and there’s a possibility, that the charging point isn’t always available.
But, there are several ways using which you can extend your smartphone’s battery life and ensure that it says powered up throughout the day. Here are 9 tips that can help you improve your Android smartphone’s battery life.
Reduce Screen Brightness
Displays usually consumes the most power and it can be one of the biggest reasons behind faster battery drain. Lowering the screen brightness can significantly reduce power consumption and extend the battery life of your Android device.
Reduce screen turn-off time
Android smartphones allow users to set the time interval after which the screen turns off automatically. Reducing it will increase the battery life as it will turn of the display when the phone is not in use faster to save battery life.
Set brightness level to automatic
Most modern smartphone comes with an Ambient light sensor that’s responsible for automatically adjusting the brightness of the screen based on the surrounding. It can help improve the battery life as it automatically lowers the screen brightness in dark areas.
Turn off Vibrations
Vibrations use more power than ringtones, so turning off vibrations can help conserve battery life.
Restrict apps with high battery use
Background apps consume lots of system resources which eventually results in more battery consumption. Turning off background services, especially the ones that are consuming more power can help improve battery life.
Use Power Saving mode
Android smartphones come with power-saving modes. That can extend battery life by turning off background services, reducing screen brightness and in some cases reducing the CPU performance.
Close unused apps
Running multiple apps at once can drain your battery quickly. Close apps you’re not using to conserve power.
Adjust sync settings
Syncing data such as email and social media updates can use a lot of power. Adjust your sync settings to sync less frequently or only when connected to Wi-Fi.
Use a Black or Dark theme
Dark mode or black theme can save battery life on OLED screens by turning off pixels that would otherwise be displaying black.

Google recently announced that it will be cutting 12,000 jobs and if the reports are to be believed, the company is probably seeing the most dramatic layoffs one may have heard off. The company has sacked employees working for as long as 20 years and earlier this week, reports claimed that 27 message therapists were among those who were told to go. In the latest development, two former employees have shared how their firing was a shocker to them.
Employee fired after coming back from leave
In a post on LinkedIn, Tommy York, former employee at Google, stated that his layoff felt like “a slap in the face, like being hit when you’re down.” He said that he was laid off from Google last week – four days after he returned from “bereavement leave for my Mom, who died from cancer in December.”
“I’m tired and disappointed,” York wrote. He also noted that there will be more opportunities to work at exciting companies, and he was grateful that he spent time with his Mom, “and not overworking for a company who might decide on one cold Friday morning that my badge doesn’t work anymore.”
‘Call got disconnected suddenly..’
Another employee revealed how he was fired abruptly when he could not access his account anymore. A similar thing happened with a Google recruiter, who was in the middle of a call with a potential candidate when the call was disconnected all of a sudden. Google has been so discreet about its layoffs that even the people in the recruiting department had no about the company’s shocking move.
Dan Lanigan-Ryan worked as a recruiter at Google and said his call was disconnected while he was in the middle of a chat with a potential candidate. As per Business Insider, he said that he tried to log in during the call Friday but couldn’t do so. Soon after they were informed via email that they are among the 12,000 people to be fired from the company.
“I was blocked out of everything. And then I saw on the news about 15, 20 minutes later that Google was announcing 12,000 layoffs,” he was quoted as saying.

We’ve already seen several price leaks for the Samsung Galaxy S23, but they’re not stopping ahead of the expected launch of the phones on February 1. We now have information on pricing in Turkey, Germany and India.

Even if you don’t live in those countries, these are important markers of how the handsets are going to be priced globally. In Turkey for example (from Roland Quandt (opens in new tab) via Notebookcheck (opens in new tab)), the Galaxy S23 phones are set to cost substantially more than their Galaxy S22 predecessors.

Samsung India has opened its largest premium experience store in North India in the heart of the national capital. The all-new experience store is located in Connaught Place, New. Delhi. The Samsung experience store showcases the company’s complete product ecosystem through different zones such as Connected Living, smartphones, audio, gaming, lifestyle screens and wearables, among others, including multi-device connectivity with SmartThings.
Special discounts, offers and prizes for customers till February 15
As a part of the new store inauguration, the company is offering five lucky consumers among the first 500 buyers a chance to win a Galaxy Z Fold4 or a Galaxy Z Flip4. While the first 200 buyers spending above Rs 10,000 will get assured gifts on every purchase.
Apart from that, consumers coming into the store on the first two days (January 28-29) can avail an additional cashback of up to 10% on Galaxy smartphones, tablets, wearables, laptops, TVs and digital appliances and 2X loyalty points on the entire Samsung product portfolio from January 30 to February 4. They can get Galaxy Buds2 at Rs 2,999 when buying select Galaxy devices between February 9 and February 15.
Samsung experience store: Connected Living, Gaming Arena and more
The new Samsung store is spread over two floors, across 3,500 sq ft of space. The store will host a variety of engaging events for consumers such as Galaxy workshops, live commerce activities and cultural performances. The store also offers a fully functional customer service center.
Samsung recently also revamped the iconic Samsung Opera House in the heart of Bengaluru by bringing in exciting new technology experiences. Consumers visiting Samsung Opera House can now enjoy Samsung’s complete product ecosystem and new zones such as Connected Living, Gaming Arena, Audio, Home Theatre and Lifestyle TVs.
“We are excited to open a new Samsung experience store at Connaught Place in Delhi, an iconic location teeming with energy, diverse culture and rich heritage. This is the largest Samsung experience store in North India offering the widest portfolio of Samsung devices. With this new store, our goal is to provide every consumer, especially Gen Z and millennials, the best of Samsung products and experiences such as Connected Living, Gaming and Lifestyle Screens,” said Sumit Walia, senior director, Samsung India.
“This new store will also offer a one of its kind phygital experience through Store+, further enhancing the shopping experience and choices for our young consumers,” he added.

Wordle is a web-based puzzle game owned by The New York Times. It was created in 2021 by Josh Wardle and featured a daily puzzle where users have six attempts to guess the “word of the day.” The colour of the tiles changes to help users figure out the correct word, with grey indicating the letter is not part of the word, yellow indicating the letter is part of the word but in the wrong location, and green showing the letter is in the correct location and part of the “Word of the day.” Wordle 589 is the puzzle for January 29; this article provides hints, clues, and answers to the puzzle.
Wordle is an online puzzle game popular among people who want to use their time productively. If you are having trouble with the Wordle 589 puzzle for January 29, 2023, the following hints and clues may help you solve it:
Wordle hints and clues for today, January 29, 2023, are stated here for our readers:

Wordle 589 hints and clues, January 29, 2023, are:

Still, stuck? If you could not find the answers, fret not, we have got it all figured out for you:
FISHY is the solution to Wordle 589 for January 29, 2023.
If you keep winning for two or more days, you will be awarded a winning streak. This will continue till the time you fail to guess the correct word. If you lose, the streak will be broken.

They are by far the world’s most popular headphones and are used by millions across the world. Out of these millions, there are many who end up losing or misplacing their AirPods. Apple has a feature that can help them find missing AirPods. However, despite the feature being there, you will also have to rely on lady luck. And if you have luck on your side — or even if you don’t — you must follow all these steps in our detailed guide to locate your missing AirPods:
Things to keep in mind
Apple has a Find My app, which can be used to find missing devices. Find My is the only way that you can track or locate a lost or missing device. There is no other Apple service that can find, track, or otherwise flag your device for you.
Also, to find your AirPods, you need to set up Find My with your iPhone or iPad. Updating your device to the latest OS version is also advised.
How to turn on the Find My feature
If you turn on the Find My feature, you might be able to see the location of your AirPods. Do keep in mind that Find My works with AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods Pro and AirPods Pro (2nd generation), and. AirPods Max. It also works even if your iPhone, or iPad, isn’t connected to a Wi-Fi or cellular network. Here are the steps to follow:

You can play a sound on your AirPods
There’s another way to find AirPods if they are in your close vicinity and you can’t find the,. If your AirPods are near any of your Apple devices and connected to Bluetooth, you can play a sound to help you find them. With AirPods Pro (2nd generation), you can also play a sound to help find your charging case. Here are the steps to follow:

Recieve an alert if you leave your AirPods behind
If you have iPhone 12 or later, you can set up separation alerts so that you don’t leave your AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods Pro and AirPods Pro (2nd generation), or AirPods Max at an unknown location. Follow these steps:

You can also turn on Lost Mode for your AirPods

Apple also has a Lost Mode in case you lose your AirPods. When you turn on Lost Mode for your AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods Pro and AirPods Pro (2nd generation), or AirPods Max, you can share a message with your phone number or email address. If someone finds your AirPods, the message appears on their iPhone. Here are the steps to turn on Lost Mode:

The government has established three Grievance Appellate Committees based on the recently amended Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021) to look into users’ complaints against internet intermediaries. The need for such Committees reportedly arose due to large numbers of grievances being left unaddressed or unsatisfactorily addressed by internet intermediaries.
The notification to this effect has been published. As per the notification, three Grievance Appellate Committees (GACs) have been constituted with three members each. The IT rules 2021 provide for creating avenues for grievance redressal apart from courts and ensure that the constitutional rights of Indian citizens are not contravened by any Big Tech platform by ensuring new accountability standards for SSMIs.
What and why of GAC
The Grievance Appellate Committee is an important piece of overall policy and legal framework to ensure that the internet in India is open, safe and trusted and accountable. The need for GAC was created due to large numbers of grievances being left unaddressed or unsatisfactorily addressed by internet intermediaries. GAC is expected to create a culture of responsiveness amongst all internet platforms and intermediaries towards their consumers. The GAC will be a virtual digital platform that will operate only online and digitally — wherein the entire appeal process, from the filing of appeal to the decision thereof, shall be conducted digitally.
The appeals can be made on https://www.gac.gov.in
Users will have the option to appeal against the decision of the grievance officer of the social media intermediaries and other online intermediaries before this new appellate body. The committee will endeavour to address users’ appeals within a period of 30 days.
Timeline and names
The government had earlier interacted with major social media intermediaries. Keeping in view of the transition period required for the intermediaries as per their requests and technical requirement, the online platform will be operational within one month of this notification of the Grievance Appellate Committee, i.e., from March 1, 2023. Periodic reviews of GACs and reporting and disclosures of GAC orders will also be part of the process.
Rajesh Kumar, CEO of Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), Ministry of Home Affairs; Vikram Sahay, Joint Secretary in charge of Policy and Administration Division in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting; and Kavita Bhatia, Scientist G, and Joint Secretary rank officer in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology are respective Chairperson ex officio of the three committees.

Google researchers have created an AI that can generate musical pieces from text inputs – similar to how ChatGPT can turn a text command into a story and DALL-E generates images from written prompts. The AI program can turn text input into seconds, and even minutes-long music, as well as turn, hummed melodies into other instruments.
As per research published on Github, the AI model is called MusicLM, and the company has uploaded a string of samples that it produced using the model. The samples are called MusicCaps and are basically a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, with rich text descriptions provided by human experts.
“We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as ‘a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff’. MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes,” the company said in the research published.
Google’s AI creates 5-minute melodies
The examples include 30-second clips as well as long-form music of 5 minutes that sound like actual songs. They have been created by paragraph-long descriptions, and the more clear the instructions are, the better the music is. Furthermore, the examples also include genre, vibe, and even specific instruments.
“The audio is generated by providing a sequence of text prompts. These influence how the model continues the semantic tokens derived from the previous caption,” the researchers said.
Story Mode
There is also a “story mode” demo where the model is basically given multiple text inputs with time duration for each type of music that needs to be created.
Take this prompt, for example:
time to meditate (0:00-0:15)
time to wake up (0:15-0:30)
time to run (0:30-0:45)
time to give 100% (0:45-0:60)
“Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption,” the researchers noted.

Last year wasn’t the best for Microsoft’s gaming business. The company saw no major release for its gaming console Xbox. Besides Game Pass, almost everything from first-party studio games to hardware sales faced revenue drops. Suffice it to say 2022 was a forgettable year for Xbox overall. However, things may change this year, as promised by Xbox CEO Phil Spencer.
In an interview with IGN, Spencer noted that 2022 was a year “too light on games,” where the platform didn’t churn out enough first-party titles or exclusives. Our commitment to our fans is that we need to have a steady release of great games that people can play on our platform, and we didn’t do enough of that in 2022, there’s no doubt,” Spencer told the website.
At the same time, he assured that the projects in the Xbox’s current pipeline mean that 2023 “is going to be an exciting year.”
Spencer on what went wrong last year and his expectations for this year
While underlining the lack of major exclusive launches in 2022, Spencer said, “Our commitment to our fans is that we need to have a steady release of great games that people can play on our platform, and we didn’t do enough of that in 2022, there’s no doubt.” Taking ownership of this, he continued, “And fundamentally, that’s on me. I’m the head of the business.”
For the year ahead, the Xbox CEO shared that he felt the company had “momentum,” following its hit Hi-Fi Rush, which rolled out earlier this week during the Developer Direct showcase. He addressed Microsoft’s layoffs and restructuring that have also affected Xbox Studios, “Obviously, we’re going through some adjustments right now that are painful, but I think necessary, but it’s really to set us up and the teams for long-term success.”
Given that this year will mark the release of Xbox’s most anticipated exclusive in recent times, Starfield, Spencer revealed his excitement. He said, “I look at 2023, I love the games that we have coming out. Redfall and Starfield, as you commented, will be exciting, just given the timing with Bethesda now that they’re fully integrated into the organisation. When I think about the rest of the work that we’re doing this year, it’s going to be an exciting year.”

Samsung is set to hold its first major launch event of 2023 on February 1. At this event, the South Korea-based tech giant is expected to launch its next-gen flagship smartphone series — the Galaxy S23 lineup and several other products. The phones that will be launched under the upcoming lineup are likely to boot Android 13-based One UI 5.1 out-of-the-box. Key features that may come to the One UI 5.1 custom skin have been reportedly leaked just a few days before Samsung’s official announcement.
According to a report by WinFuture, One UI 5.1 is rumoured to add family-sharing albums in the Gallery app, easier access to the Expert RAW camera app, a new battery widget, advanced AR Emojis, and AR Zone and Samsung Notes collaboration, along with other improvements in stock apps, multi-device controls, and Samsung DeX. Here are all the new features that are rumoured to arrive with One U1 5.1.
Samsung One UI 5.1 for Galaxy S23 series: Expected features
Camera:
The upcoming custom Android skin is expected to add two handy features to its native camera app. Users will be able to change the hue for a selfie more easily with the Effects button that will be placed on the side of the display.
This update will also enable users to get quick access to Expert RAW images. The Expert RAW app helps users to capture high-quality images without any processing or compression. This tool can be ideal for users who want to edit their photos later. Users will also be able to access the Expert RAW easily through the Advanced menu.
Gallery:
The One UI 5.1 will include a Common family album feature that will help users to share photos with their family (up to 6 people) more easily. The Gallery app will also be able to remove shadows automatically, and reflections will also be able to create GIFs. The app is even expected to display convenient information like when and where the picture was taken and more.
Gallery search will also improve with One UI 5.1, and users will be able to save screenshots and screen recordings in a folder of their choice by setting it up in the advanced features.
AR features and Widgets:
Users will be able to access up to three Emojis in the AR Emoji Camera. The upcoming skin will also add layout and editing improvements in AR doodles. Apart from this, One UI 5.1 is also expected to add a new battery widget and an intuitive weather widget on the phones.
Customisation and connectivity:
With One UI 5.1, users will be able to choose different wallpapers according to their mood. This update has also added more conditions and actions for scenarios. For example, users will be able to open some apps using Script and will also be able to control Quick Share and touch sensitivity along with changing the ringtone and font style.
This update will allow multiple users to edit Samsung Notes and will even simplify the process to invite others to do the same. One U1 5.1 will also contain some multiple advanced controls between Galaxy Book and smartphone. The custom skin will make it easier for users to choose media output when connected to Wi-Fi speakers and will even allow real-time PC sync.
Samsung DeX will even offer improved multitasking while Samsung Internet will arrive with improved search. Several other minor changes and bug fixes will also be included in the upcoming update. Official details will be shared at the scheduled event.