Sony only recently launched the Sony Xperia 5 phone, but now it’s back with another numbered handset, the Sony Xperia 8.
This latest entry in the ever-more-confusingly numbered range has a 6.0-inch Full HD+ LCD screen with a 21:9 aspect ratio, a mid-range Snapdragon 630 chipset, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a microSD card slot.
There’s also a dual-lens rear camera, with 12MP f/1.8 and 8MP f/2.4 snappers, while around the front is an 8MP f/2.0 selfie camera. Other specs include a 2,760mAh battery, water resistance (a feature which the Sony Xperia 10 notably lacks), and Android 9 Pie.
A small upgrade
The Sony Xperia 8 looks slightly dated design-wise, with a large bezel above the screen, although it does at least have a metal frame and a glass back.
Overall, on paper it sounds like a minor upgrade of the Xperia 10 (though not necessarily of the Sony Xperia 10 Plus, which has a larger screen and a slightly better chipset).
It’s set to go on sale in Japan at the end of October for a price of JPY 54,000, which converts to roughly $505 / £410 / AU$750, although there’s no news on the handset launching outside Japan – if that changes we’ll let you know.
Ring’s smart doorbells and security cameras are designed to ward off intruders and allow you to talk to whoever is stood on your doorstep – and thanks to a deal over at Amazon, they’re around 20% cheaper than usual.
Let’s start with the Ring Video Doorbell 2. This nifty doorbell camera lets you monitor your home in live HD video, with two-way talk allowing you to converse with visitors to your home using your mobile device.
Motion-activated alerts means that you’ll be notified any time a visitor triggers the doorbell’s built-in motion sensors, while Alexa-compatibility allows you to hook it up to your Echo Show or Echo Spot smart speaker to see the view from your door with a simple voice command.
It’s currently reduced by £40, bringing the price down from £179 to £139 – which at face value seems like a good deal, but is nowhere near the lowest price we’ve seen for this device.
In October last year, we saw the price drop down to £95.20 – so it may be worth hanging on a few weeks to see if Amazon can match this price over Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
(Image credit: Ring)
The Ring Door View Cam deal however, is the lowest price we’ve seen, also dropping from £179 to £139. This is the best Ring device for renters, as it works with your door’s existing peephole – no need to drill any holds and threaten your security deposit.
Lastly, we have the Ring Video Doorbell Pro, which comes with customizable motion detection, and connects to your existing doorbell wiring, so you don’t have to change the batteries.
This model has been reduced from £229 to £179, which is a saving of 22%. Again, this isn’t the lowest price we’ve seen; in November last year, it dropped all the way down to £139.
Therefore, we’d recommend waiting until Black Friday in case Amazon drops the price any further – but, if you want to get your hands on any of these deals regardless, you can check them out below.
Today’s best Ring doorbell deals
Ring Video Doorbell 2 £179 £139 at Amazon This pre-Black Friday deal sees £40 knocked off the price of the Ring Video Doorbell View. Bear in mind that we’ve seen the price drop far lower in the past, so we’d recommend waiting until Black Friday and Cyber Monday in case we see that fantastic deal again.View Deal
Ring Video Doorbell Pro £229 £179 at Amazon Once again, this isn’t the lowest price we’ve seen and we would recommend hanging on until Black Friday – however, if you’re in a hurry, a £50 discount is nothing to be sniffed at. This kit comes with a chime and transformer, and connects directly to your existing doorbell wiring.View Deal
Xiaomi’s popular Redmi Note 7 Pro has received a permanent price cut in India, is now down to Rs 11,999.
The Redmi Note series has been one of the best budget smartphones in India, with the company having sold millions of units since its launch in February. The Redmi Note 7 Pro was discounted to Rs 11,999 (4GB + 64GB variant) from Rs 15,999 during last week’s Flipkart Big Billion Day, but it seems like the price drop is here to stay. All the colour options are currently in stock viz. Space Black, Nebula Blue and Neptune Red.
Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro specifications
The Redmi Note 7 Pro was one of the best budget devices when it came out, bringing an octa-core Snapdragon 675 chipset and up to 6GB of RAM to this price segment.
It has a 6.3-inch LCD with an FHD+ resolution on the front with a dot notch on the top for the front camera.
Speaking of cameras, the Note 7 Pro has a dual-camera setup on the back, consisting of a 48MP primary camera and a 5MP depth sensor. The front camera is a 12MP shooter. Powering everything, we get a 4,000 mAh battery with support for fast charging over USB Type-C. The 3.5mm headphone jack is still around.
The device runs on Android 9 Pie with MiUI 10 on top, and should soon be updated to the next version.
Redmi Note 8 Pro
(Image credit: Xiaomi)
This could also be in preparation for the Redmi Note 8 series, which is expected to come to India towards the end of October and will succeed the Note 7 Pro and will be priced around the Rs 15,000 mark.
Interestingly, even the base variant of the Redmi K20 seems to retain its discounted price of Rs 19,999 for the 6GB + 64GB variant, but the other variants are back to their original pricing. This could be a temporary drop, so act fast if you plan on getting one.
NAD’s $2,750 M10 media streamer is an integrated amplifier and media consolidator of wide scope and ability that produces pristine sound. It’s also easy to set up and use (mostly), and will look great nestled amid your other equipment or on its own.
It’s all goodness, except that for some reason, NAD didn’t leverage the unit’s large touch display for setup or selecting streaming sources. For that you need a computer or phone. It’s an odd omission in an otherwise comprehensive hi-ficomponent.
Design and features
The M10 is a squarish black box measuring 8.5 x 10.25 x about 4 inches (WxDxH) and weighing about five pounds. The front is devoted entirely to a 7-inch color LCD touch display that’s used for transport control, displaying album art and song information, choosing inputs, basic operations, and minor tweaks. On top is the NAD logo, which is backlit to double as a status indicator.
The back of the unit is home to two pairs of binding posts for speakers, two RCA analog input pairs, preamp and subwoofer outputs, coaxial and optical S/PDIF inputs, an HDMI ARC input, as well as an ethernet jack and USB Type-A port. There’s also a mini-USB port for servicing, a 12-volt trigger port, and an IR port. There’s three-prong AC connection, of course, as well as a service button to initiate firmware upgrades from USB media.
NAD
There are ports a’plenty on the back of the M10, though it doesn’t directly support surround sound.
The amp is rated for 100 watts continuous into an 8-ohm load with less than 0.1 percent distortion. An onboard DAC handles MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG, WMA-Lossless, ALAC, OPUS, MQA, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, up to 32-bit/192 kHz PCM, as well as converted DSD playback via the BluOS desktop app.
You might have noticed MQA on the list. Some TechHive editors like it, but I’m still not sure what is up with this codec, or delivery system, if you prefer. It supports high-definition audio, but beyond that, the website and docs that I’ve seen talk a lot without saying much. That’s not an uncommon occurrence in boutique audio mind you.
On the other hand, the M10 also accommodates Dirac Live, which is one of the reasons you might want to pay the premium price.
Dirac
Dirac is room and speaker acoustic analysis system that will optimize the EQ of your amp for its surroundings using what are known as impulse responses. These are created by emitting test tones (generally a frequency sweep) from your speakers, recording the reflections, and then mapping the time it took for them to reflect and/or which frequencies diminish or increase.
IDG
The included Dirac Live generates a filter that tunes the M10 for your room and speakers.
NAD provides a license for the required Dirac Live app, which is available for the Mac, PC, and Android/iOS devices. The Live version is limited to frequencies of 500Hz and below, but you can upgrade to the 20,000Hz version for $99 on Dirac’s website. If you buy the M10 to play with tune-to-the-room stuff, the upgrade might be worth it.
NAD includes the necessary microphone, and USB adapter which seemed to work just fine when plugged into the back of the M10. Once it’s connected, you run the Dirac app from whatever platform and follow the instructions. The process involves playing the aforementioned sweeping test tone and ends with the generated filter being uploaded to the M10.
Note that you’ll need to redo the process whenever you move your speakers or your primary listening spot, so to avoid repetition, decide on this stuff first. If you regularly dance about while listening, you might avoid the bother. You can read more about the Dirac process at NAD’s website.
Co-dependency
It’s one thing to leverage phone or PC connectivity to make a product easier and more convenient to use. In this case functioning as a remote control. It’s another thing to make the product dependent upon these devices for basic functionality. When you’re standing right next to a very expensive device with a large touchscreen, it’s just a tad annoying having to use your phone, tablet, or PC for basic setup and selection.
Where this offloading philosophy went from irritating to truly frustrating was when I brought the M10 home from the lab and hooked it up without connecting it to ethernet. Apparently the box didn’t like that the Wi-Fi network it had been previously connected to was missing, and dutifully commenced screen-blanking and rebooting every two minutes or so. If the device were capable of standing on its own two feet, I’m darn sure this programming mishap would not have happened.
IDG
I found it much easier to configure the M10 using the Web browser interface.
On the other hand, when ethernet is connected, the M10 is very easy to pair with the phone and BluOS app. As long as the phone and the box are on the same network, they should find each other. It’s auto-magical (with the aforementioned tunnel vision) on the box’s part.
App
The BluOS app (I used the Android version) is decent enough, though I think NAD and BluOS could come up with a more refined interface. It has the feel of being designed by engineers. I have a ton of music on a NAS box, and up to five NAS boxes in use on my local network at any given time. The phone app found only one, which sadly wasn’t the one with all the music. The web browser interface, run from my PC, found everything.
Note that the M10’s BluOS will only let you select the root folder of the network-shared folder, not subfolders, so organize things appropriately; i.e., put your music in the root of a shared folder named Music or some such. Generally that’s a good idea anyway when it comes to networks; some operating system lims the character count in file paths.
IDG
Part of the M10’s charm is that the BluOS supports a huge array of streaming services.
BluOS supports a veritable boatload of streaming services, as you can see below in the phone app. But it would be nice if you could select them from the touchscreen on the M10 itself.
The app won’t play music on your phone. I realize that the phone is simply acting as a remote, but it would be a nice touch as many users still keep their favorite tunes on their phones. To play them, you’ll need to connect to the M10 via Bluetooth.
Performance
Back to the good stuff. The M10 sounds very good; musical and distortion-free to my ears through all my tests on three different sets of speakers, both 4-ohm and 8-ohm. Of course, amplification is so good across the board these days that it’s hard to call out one high-end product over another. At least if you have average hearing. Golden ears? I think they’d still like the M10.
Despite the 100-watt-per-side rating, the M10 didn’t really sound all that loud to me. At perhaps 75 percent, listening through speakers in my rather small test room was still more than bearable. It’s certainly loud enough for any average listening experience, if not a full-on rave (or whatever kind of parties are in vogue these days).
NAD
The logo on the top of the M10 is backlit and serves as a status indicator for the unit.
I tried Dirac and the resulting impulses several times. There was a noticeable difference, but being perfectly honest, I couldn’t tell you which I preferred, or that I didn’t prefer the unaltered sound. Tastes vary, and so do my moods and EQ tastes. Some might call me sonically fickle, but I also suspect I’m not alone in this.
Case in point: I once told someone I was going to work on a mix they didn’t like that night, but didn’t get the chance. I fired up the old mix for them the next day and was about to make excuses when they told me how much better it sounded. I kept my mouth shut.
Great, but please make the box standalone
I quite liked the M10 in action. It looks nice, sounds great, and the Dirac was fun to play with, even if the results weren’t particularly important to me. If you don’t care about phone/PC dependency, or perhaps even prefer it, the M10 will make n excellent addition to your audio setup, both audibly and visually.
But I have to be honest. If I pay $2,750 for a streaming amp with a touch display, I want to use said display. For everything.
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Google is testing an experimental Chrome feature that lets you delete third-party browser cookies with a single click. This is a big improvement on the existing ‘Clear browsing data’ options, making it easy to stop companies tracking you around the web, without logging you out of any sites you’re currently using.
The new option is available in Chrome Canary – an early release of the browser intended for developers and contains features that are still in testing. It’s not enabled by default, but can be toggled by activating a new Chrome Flag.
To give it a try, download Chrome Canary and enter chrome://flags/ in the address bar. Search for ‘Enable removing SameSite=None cookies’ and set the drop-down menu to ‘Enabled’.
Restart the browser, then enter chrome://settings/siteData in the address bar to access the full list of cookies, and click the new ‘Remove third-party cookies’ button to erase them.
The way the cookie crumbles
We recently saw another experimental Chrome feature that will let you block third-party cookies completely with the click of a button, but it’s good to see that Google is giving us granular control over how (and if) our activity is tracked.
Firefox now blocks all third-party tracking cookies by default, but understandably for a company funded largely by advertising, Google isn’t keen to take such drastic action. It recently proposed an idea for a ‘privacy sandbox‘, which would allow advertisers to serve targeted ads without receiving detailed information about an individual user’s browsing habits.
It’s an interesting idea, but would require an overhaul of the whole online advertising industry. For the time being, we appreciate Google putting control in our hands, and determine who has access to our data.
Microsoft said that it is pleased with the impact that the data centres had in such a short period of time in the UAE.
The US technology giant opened its hype-scale or elastic data centres in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in June this year.
“We have seen massive interests in the data centres, surprisingly, and not just from the regulated industries such as the governments, banking and healthcare for data sovereignty but are also seeing an equal interest from other industries for latency, security and performance,” Sayed Hashish, General Manager for Microsoft UAE, told TechRadar Middle East.
Moreover, he said that the third area the company is seeing a lot of interest is from international customers that either have setups in this part of the world or want to be closer to their stakeholders and customers in neighbouring countries.
“They are also very interested to put their solutions and their data on our Middle East data centres in the UAE. It has exceeded our expectations,” he said.
Microsoft’s target is to support 1m small- and medium-sized business in the Middle East in the next three years.
“We are on track with that number,” he said.
Quoting a research firm IDC’s report, he said that 55,000 jobs will be created by 2022 with the opening of the two data centres and the Microsoft ecosystem.
More jobs will be created in medium- to long-term
When asked whether it is feasible to create that many jobs with the current economic situation, Hashish said that there are areas where jobs have changed but in general, “we are seeing that the opportunity and the potential in our market is very large and even if we sometimes get under economic pressure, just like anywhere else in the world, companies are still investing looking at the longer term.”
Microsoft is a good example; he said and added that the company had done a massive investment.
“We were not worried because the fundamentals in the region are quite strong. The aspiration of the country is quite large and we are seeing a lot of steps that are being taken to really continue to differentiate the businesses and encourage more startups that we are seeing out of the UAE, across Dubai and Abu Dhabi. It is really encouraging us to invest more, so I am quite optimistic about the creation of jobs in the medium- to long-term,” he said.
Security and privacy top priority
Security is one issue which is forcing many organisations not to move to the cloud but Hashish said that security fears to move to the cloud is becoming less and less every year.
“I think a lot of organisations understand that the level of security that we are able to provide through our data centres is quite far stronger than the level of security that each organization can do on their own because of the massive investment and the massive resources we have in this area,” he said.
He said that Microsoft is investing more than $1b on security every year so “we are very conscious about that”.
However, he said that security is a big issue but privacy is the other one.
“We focus lot privacy and comply with GDPR. We understand that the data of our customers is the data of our customers. We are just hosting that on their behalf and deal with it with good respect and transparency and do not monetise the customers’ data,” he said.
Furthermore, he said that more and more customers are shifting from on-premises to the cloud from this region.
Jyoti Lalchandani, vice-president and regional managing director for research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), said that on-premise [non-cloud] spending is declining quite rapidly and a lot of spending is moving to the cloud as a subscription-based model.
“Speed and agility are the key drivers for the cloud,” he said.
According to IDC, public cloud services in the UAE are seeing a big uptake and it is expected to grow by 35% to $406m in 2020 compared to $299m this year.
The fifth generation of cellular technology (5G) is use-case driven and is not similar to 4G and 3G networks where it gets consumed when rolled out, Ericsson told TechRadar Middle East.
“The intake of 5G is in our hands as technology vendors and service providers to create a small ecosystem, work together and develop new use cases,” Wojciech Bajda, Vice-President for Middle East and Africa, and Head of Gulf Cooperation Council countries at Ericsson, said.
However, he said that the main monetisation or new revenue stream is in industrial applications.
He said that service providers in the Middle East and Africa can benefit from an addressable potential of up to $15-$46b by 2030 and this growth will offer service providers a revenue opportunity of an additional 35% in addition to the telecom service revenues forecast.
Moreover, he said that transportation (sea ports), mining and oil and gas have no idea what kind of value 5G can bring to them.
“So, it is our job to go and make sure that they understand the technology and the potential applications in case of their business. First kind of prototypes and trials are happening now in this region with certain verticals such as mining, oil and gas, and sea ports mainly while Oman is also looking at agriculture,” he said.
He said that Ericsson has been working across different industries and doing the same here in this region.
“We are proposing ideas to different sectors and work with telecom providers and make a prototype on a very small scale, test it and then how to scale it up in a bid to monetise it,” he said.
(Image credit: Future)
Video traffic to surge
Bajda said that the intake of 5G has been slow so far but will see a major breakthrough next year when a new 5G chipset is released and more smartphones will be available at an affordable price point.
He said that mobile data traffic is predicted to reach 131EB per month by the end of 2024 globally, at which time 35% is projected to be over 5G networks and of that, 74% will be video compared to 28EB in 2018 and 60% of the traffic was video.
According to the Ericsson Mobility Report, close to 20% of mobile subscriptions were for LTE in the Middle East and North Africa in 2018 but it is projected that by 2024, 90% of subscriptions are expected to be for mobile broadband.
“The major new revenue stream for telecom operators will come from industrial digitalisation with consumer mobile data being complemented,” Bajda said.
