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Three new audio products in India — the Beats Solo Buds truly wireless stereo (TWS) earphones, the Beats Solo 4 wireless headphones and the Beats Pill portable Bluetooth speaker. These items were initially unveiled in the US and other markets and are now available in India. The Beats Solo Buds come with a stemless in-ear design and are claimed to offer up to 18 hours of total playback time. The Beats Solo 4 are equipped with a Spatial Audio feature with dynamic head tracking. The Beats Pill wireless portable speaker arrives with an IP67-rated build for dust and water resistance.

Beats Solo Buds are priced in India at Rs. 6,900, while the Beats Solo 4 and the Beats Pill are listed at Rs. 22,900 and Rs. 16,900, respectively. They are currently available for purchase in the country via the Apple India website and will come to offline Apple Stores starting September 4.

Google Meet is getting a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that will allow users to receive AI-generated notes once the meeting has concluded. On Tuesday, the tech giant announced the rollout of the feature to its Workspace users. Dubbed ‘Take notes for me’, it uses the capabilities of Gemini AI to transcribe and summarise the main talking points during a meeting. Notably, the feature was first previewed by the company last year, however, it was only available in beta till now.

The announcement was made by Google in its Workspace blog, where the company highlighted that the feature was rolling out in a phased manner starting August 27. It might take users up to 15 days before they see it at their end. The ‘Take notes for me’ feature is available for Google Workspace users who have either Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Education Premium, or the AI Meetings & Messaging add-ons.

Xiaomi X Pro QLED series was launched in India on Tuesday. The new smart TV lineup runs on Google TV and has an octa-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor under the hood. They feature thin bezels around the screen and are offered in 43-inch, 55-inch, and 65-inch display sizes with 4K resolution. The Xiaomi X Pro QLED series comes with Xiaomi’s Vivid Picture Engine along with support for HDR10 content. The Xiaomi X Pro QLED series also features a 30W speakers with Dolby Audio.

Xiaomi X Pro QLED series price in India starts at Rs. 28,999 for the base model with a 43-inch screen. The 55-inch variant is priced at Rs. 35,999, while the 65-inch version is priced at Rs. 39,999.

With a special ICICI bank-based discount, the 43-inch version of Xiaomi X Pro QLED can be purchased for Rs. 24,999, whereas the 55-inch and 65-inch variants are available at Rs. 31,999 and Rs. 35,999, respectively. They will go on sale via Mi.com, Amazon, Flipkart and Xiaomi retail stores from August 30.

Google’s latest Pixel 9 series was launched earlier this month at the company’s Made By Google event. This year, the tech giant seems to have quietly unveiled the long-rumoured Adaptive Touch display technology for the latest Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL. Although Google did not officially announce this technology during the grand launch event, it has been spotted by several users on the phone’s Settings menu. This new display feature automatically adjusts touchscreen sensitivity based on various factors.

The Adaptive Touch option can be accessed by heading to Settings > Display > Touch Sensitivity. Turning on this feature will automatically tweak the touch sensitivity of Pixel 9 phones depending on the surroundings, activities and screen protector. The feature enhances the usability of the display in different scenarios, like while using it with wet hands.

WhatsApp has been working on adding support for chat themes on more than one occasion, and a feature tracker has now given us a peek at what the feature could look like when it is launched. The messaging app is expected to let users change the color of the chat bubbles as well as the background using preset themes or pick their own color and wallpaper. The company was also spotted working on the ability to pick a username and set a PIN that protects them from unknown users on WhatsApp.

Microsoft said on Friday it would hold a summit in September to discuss steps to improve cybersecurity systems, after a faulty update from CrowdStrike caused a global IT outage last month.

The conference marks the first big step by Microsoft to address the issues that affected nearly 8.5 million Windows devices on July 19, disrupting operations across industries ranging from major airlines to banks and healthcare.

The event will be held on Sept. 10 at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The company will invite government representatives to the gathering, it said in a blog.

Sony’s Web3 exploration has now come to a point that the Japanese tech giant has announced its own blockchain network, named Soneium. The layer-2 network is being built atop Ethereum in collaboration with Startale Labs, the team behind Astar Network. Sony has established a new entity called Sony Block Solutions Labs (Sony BSL) to oversee the development and deployment of Soneium. This unit is a joint venture between Sony and Startale.

The aim of this layer-2 blockchain is to connect blockchain and Web3 technologies to existing Web3 Internet services. A blog published on the official site of Soneium said this blockchain is being designed on the basics of ‘open Internet’ to encourage the creation of decentralized landscape for entertainment, gaming, and finance sectors among others

Microsoft has revealed the release date for the three new Xbox Series S/X console options unveiled earlier this year. The new variants, which include a 1TB Xbox Series S, an all-digital 1TB Xbox Series X and a special edition 2TB Xbox Series X, will launch on October 15, with select countries following on October 29, Microsoft announced Wednesday. The new console options, however, are not launching India for now. All three new Xbox Series S/X console options are now available to pre-order on the Xbox website.

Xbox Series S/X console options will be available in all current Xbox hardware supported regions and markets, but markets in India, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Israel, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, and UAE are not supported yet, Microsoft confirmed in an Xbox Wire post. The new console options do not show up on the Xbox store in India. The company did not divulge any plans to bring the new consoles to these markets.

The three new console options include a 1TB SSD storage variant of Xbox Series S in Robot White colorway, an all-digital 1TB Xbox Series X, and a 2TB Xbox Series X Special Edition in Galaxy Black color option. These were announced at the Xbox Games Showcase held in June.

Microsoft released the family of Phi-3.5 artificial intelligence (AI) models on Tuesday, as the successor of the Phi-3 models introduced in April. The new release comprises Phi-3.5 Mixture of Experts (MoE), Phi-3.5 Vision, and Phi-3.5 Mini models. These are instruct models, so they will not work as a typical conversational AI but will require users to add specific instructions to get the desired output. The open-source AI models are available to download from the tech giant’s Hugging Face listings.

The release of the new AI models was announced by Microsoft executive Weizhu Chen in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter). The Phi-3.5 models offer upgraded capabilities over the predecessor, but the architecture, dataset and training methods largely remain the same. The Mini model has been updated with multilingual support, and the MoE and Vision models are new inclusions in the AI model family.

Coming to technicalities, the Phi-3.5 Mini has 3.8 billion parameters. It uses the same tokeniser (a tool that breaks down text into smaller units) and a dense decoder-only transformer. The model only supports text as input and supports a context window of 1,28,000 tokens. The company claims it was trained using 3.4 trillion tokens between June and August, and its knowledge cut-off is October 2023.

A four-person crew for SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission arrived in Florida on Monday ahead of their August 26 launch to space for a mission that includes the first privately managed spacewalk, a risky endeavor only government astronauts have done in the past.

The crew – a billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees – neared the end of more than two years of training for the mission, in which they will venture out of their Crew Dragon capsule in Earth’s orbit for a tethered spacewalk.

The mission will be a major first test of SpaceX’s new astronaut spacesuits and marks the latest risky, high-stakes commercial milestone that Elon Musk’s space company is looking to clinch on the billionaire’s path to eventually building colonies on Mars.