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Ford Goes Electric with its Utility Vehicles; Plans to Bring 40 Electric Vehicles by 2022

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At the Deutsche Bank Global Auto Industry Conference (2019), the American multinational automaker Ford announced that it’s going to electrify its most popular F-Series pickup trucks. The rising fuel price has encouraged the company to enter into the business of electric vehicles, and it has been working towards the plan for past one year.

Ford f-150
Image Source: businessinsider.com

Last year, Ford had announced that it has the plans of producing 40 electrified vehicles, by 2022, with an investment of over $11 billion. According to the company, it will manufacture 16 fully electrified vehicles and 24 hybrid vehicles. It has already launched an all-electric CUV with 300 miles of range, under the same program. The early versions of the F-series pickup trucks, including the latest F-150, are going to be the hybrid ones. Those hybrid vehicles may have their fully-electrified versions launched in the coming years.

Jim Farley, Ford’s president of global markets, said, “We are going to electrifying the F-Series with battery electric and hybrid, and we are doing the same for Transit. We launched a PHEV version of Transit, and that will be on a journey of electrifying Transit globally.”

Last year, the company had sold millions of the F-series trucks, and its popularity made Ford initiate the experiment with the same. Since it won’t be fully-electric, there is the least scope of failure.

Farley added, “We have the F-Series, the world and America’s best-selling truck. More than a million units were sold last year. F-Series core strength at the end of the day is: There’s a truck for every customer, and we know those customers really, really well. From the F-150 all the way to the F-750. They all matter to us.”

Tesla is the biggest electric vehicle manufacturer and has been giving tough competition to other automotive companies. But it is more inclined towards the production of luxury cars. Although Tesla and Rivian have also come up with their electric trucks, Ford being an oldie and an expert in the manufacturing of heavy motor vehicles, like trucks and utility vehicles, knows how to build a product that will appeal to people from every class.

Google Assistant’s Expansion to Reach 1B Devices By the End of January

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The CES 2019 is already started, and even before Google’s real product launch in the conference, the company has made news with its announcement about the rolling out of Google Assistant, in more than a billion devices, by the end of January.

Google assistant

The google assistant is an AI assistant that runs on various Android and iOS devices, including the smart speaker, home hub, headphones, TV, smartwatches, etc. As of October 2018, the company introduced the same for the home gadgets and the home appliances such as dishwashers, oven, bulb, etc. According to the reports Google Assistant was already running on more than 500 million devices from 1000 different brands in May last year. And, for the last month, Google reported having over 900 million devices enabled with the Google Assistant.

It has been two years since Google Assistant was launched, in 2016, and following then Google is trying really hard to beat its rivals. In a revelation, Amazon has also reported that it sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices last year, making the competition further tougher for Google.

Google has also made some updates to the Google Assistant, along with the support for 22 new languages. From now on, it will also be available for 66 countries. It means, Google Assistant will be supporting 30 languages in total and will be actively working in 80 different countries.

There has been a significant change in the number of Google Assistant enabled devices since last January when the total number of users was over 400 million. The main reason behind the rising number of Google Assistant users may be the Android smartphones that also run the Google Assistant on them.

Manuel Bronstein, the Vice President of Google Assistant, said, “The biggest footprint right now is on the phones. On Android devices, we have a very, very big footprint.” Google Assistant has played a vital role in the growth of the company. Although the smartphone users may not be using the assistant actively, the home devices from Google are becoming really popular, and adopting the AI for its devices is really paying it off well.

5 Best Smartphones of the Year : Our Pick List for the 2018 Smartphones

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2018 had been a tough year for tech giants like Facebook and Google, especially due to the raised security concerns. But at the same time, the year had new inventions and launches, too, especially the launches of new smartphones, including the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. Many of the smartphones became the best sellers of the year, and many failed the expectations of its users.

2018-best-phone
Image Source: newatlas.com

After evaluating the specifications, performance and the selling rate of the smartphones, we are here with the top 5 smartphones that were incredibly good and will remain in the favourite’s list of its users in 2019, too.

Google Pixel 3: The Google Pixel 3 was launched in October 2018. The phone is a real challenge for the new iPhones with its impressive features at such a price. The phone ships with a 12.2-megapixel primary rear camera and with two selfie cameras, one for the normal selfie and the other for a wide-angle selfie. Both the front cameras are of 8 megapixels. With excellent build, the phone is a pure Android device, embedded with all the latest software updates. The smartphone has a 5.8-inch OLED display with a 2,260 x 1,080-pixel resolution. The outstanding camera and the unique A.I. features, of this phone, made Google Pixel 3 top our best 2018 smartphones list.

iPhone XS: An elite phone having not much upgrade to the iPhone X, iPhone XS is the most-awaited device for the iPhone lovers. The excellent camera quality and the top-notch performance of the phone is everything a user demands at such a price. The high range of the price does complete justice with its attractive design, outstanding camera and faster processor.

OnePlus 6T: The OnePlus series has been around for a couple of years now and are continuously surprising its users with its performance. The latest addition to the series was the OnePlus 6T phone, that was also launched in October 2018. As soon as the phone arrived it was in the list of the best sellers. The 6.41-inch display phone provides you with the resolution of 1080×2340 pixels. The phone is known for its excellent dual rear camera (16-megapixel and 20-megapixel ), and a 16-megapixel front camera.

Samsung Galaxy S9: The Samsung Galaxy S9 was released in the early March of this year. The phone is the successor to the Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Note series. It has a beautiful sleek design (similar to the early phones in this series) and is high on performance, too. The latest features added to the phone are facial recognition and biometric security, wireless charging as well as the water resistance. The phone has a 5.8-inch display with a Super AMOLED panel, providing resolution of 1440×2960. Its high performance makes it one of the most powerful Android phones of 2018.

LG V40: The LG V40. The smartphone is one of the best smartphones built by LG. The smartphone renders the best performance, outstanding camera quality, best display and certainly a beautiful and sleek design. The phone has a 6.4-inch QHD+ OLED Display and offers a resolution of 3120×1440. It is the first phone having the wide angle (16MP) and the telephoto lens (12MP) rear camera, together. It supports the wireless charging for its 3,300 mAh non-removable battery. The phone is already out in the markets outside India, and release date for the phone in India is 26 December. So even being a 2018 phone, it will be the newest for the year 2019.

Microsoft Edge will be Soon Replaced by a Chromium-powered Web Browser

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Microsoft-Edge
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Three years ago, the software giant Microsoft introduced its Edge browser, in order to replace its own old Internet Explorer and also, give a competition to the Chromium Browser from Google. Though the design and appearance of the browser had an impressive impact on its user, its browser engine (EdgeHTML) could not match the level of the Chromium-based browsers.

Now, after three years, Microsoft has given up on the Edge browser, and currently, it is working on a new chromium based browser that is codenamed Anaheim. The Edge browser was developed in 2015, especially for the users of Windows 10, and also, as an alternative to Chrome, Firefox, and other. But now, the new Anaheim browser is going to replace the Edge browser as it has been facing some compatibility issues, and has brought Microsoft under a lot of businesses and consumers pressure for the improvements.

The new browser from Microsoft will use the browser engine Blink from Google, which is used to interpret the website coding to display it on the screen. As soon as the browser is launched successfully, the developers will be more happy, as the testing work will be reduced to an extent. Microsoft had tried hard to encourage Windows users to adopt Edge as their default browser, but failed most of the time, because of the availability of more popular browsers like Chrome and Firefox.

Maybe because of the popularity of Google Chrome, Microsoft has decided to develop its new browser on the same Chromium technology. There have been no official comments on the matter from Microsoft. But considering the reports from the Windows Central, it is estimated that Microsft will announce the browser in the coming week, and it may be out in the early half of next year.

Intel’s 9th Gen Core i9 9900K; The Fastest Gaming Processor Ever

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Intel
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Intel, the 800-pound gorilla of the processor world, is back with a substantially higher clock speedCore X microprocessors lineup, including the $263 Core i5-9600K, the $385 Core i7-9700K and the $499 Core i9-9900K. The new processor chip is high at performance, providing new levels for the power users and the gamers. The chips are considerably powerful than the AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X, and the Core i9-9900K is the fastest of them all.

The Coffee Lake architecture based processor has the Base Frequency (GHz) of 3.6, and the Boost Frequency (Active Cores – GHz) of 1-2 Cores – 5.0, 4 Cores – 4.8, and 8 Cores – 4.7. It is using the Solder Thermal Interface Material (STIM), to facilitate the better thermal transfer, on the Core i9 and i7 models without disrupting a 95W cover at base clock rates. The processor has the eight Hyper-Threaded cores (8C/16T) and comes with better frame rates.

The Core i9-9900K has been manufactured on the Intel’s 14nm++ node and supports the dual-channel DDR4-2666 memory. The chip is integrated with the UHD 630 graphics engine and provides with the facility to double the memory capacity support to increase the RAM density up to 128 GB. It consists of the Dual-Channel Memory Controller and x16 PCIe Lanes. The processor is accompanied by two additional 2MB slices of L3 cache.

The processor is considered to be providing the best performance than its contemporaries, especially to play games on the 4K or HDR. But, the extra frames offered with it are not making much of the difference comparing to the 8th Gen processor, and are not worth spending this much money. The chip has introduced various features against its competitor AMD, but still the processor is at a higher price.

General Motors Stepping into E-Bike Business; Unveils the Models of First Two

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ebike
Image Source: mashable.com

Every business tends to walk forward and try to achieve new big things. But, as Elon Musk has already expressed his intention to bring new Tesla electric bike, the General Motors, has also released the prototype of their upcoming electric bikes, hence, moving from building big cars to developing smaller and convenient smart e-bikes.

The company has unveiled the prototype of two of their e-bike, one of which is the compact one, and the other is the foldable bike. The bikes are said to be smart e-bikes that are inspired by the company’s subscription-based communications, in-vehicle security and emergency services feature, seen in the OnStar cars. The bikes are designed keeping the security in mind and has the USB device charging points at the front. The bike is also equipped with the LED lights.

On the release, Hannah Parish, the Director of General Motors Urban Mobility Solutions, said, “As an avid cyclist and urban commuter, I know how great it feels to get where I’m going easily and to show up sweat-free. We blended electrification engineering know-how, design talents and automotive-grade testing with great minds from the bike industry to create our e-bikes.”

The GM’s electric vehicle team, including the engineers behind the Chevy Bolt, will be responsible for the development of the bikes. The bikes consist of a mid-drive electric motor and have got its battery mounted above it. The battery is a bit smaller and hence, needs to be re-activated by peddling the bike after the battery drains out.

The company has not revealed much about the e-bikes, and we have to wait to find out the full specifications of the bikes. But, the company has given a chance to the public to have an impression of their creativity on the bikes, as it has organised a campaign, in which people are welcomed to participate with their suggestions, for the name of the bikes, and the selected suggestion will win a prize worth $10000. And, that is not all, the nine runner-ups will also win $1000 as the prize money for their suggestions. The candidates can apply through www.eBikeBrandChallenge.com.