Microsoft has launched the Xbox One X in India. The console is priced at Rs 44,990 and will be available both online and offline. To put things into perspective, the Xbox One X is available internationally for $500 (Rs 32,000 approximately, directly converted). However, you should be aware that the price of $500 is before tax. The India price is about Rs 10,000 more than the US price which is in line with the India price of PC hardware. 

The new console boasts of 6 teraflops of graphical prowess. To put this into perspective, the PS4 Pro boasts of 4.2 teraflops of graphical power. To achieve these powerful graphical abilities, Microsoft is using a custom GPU engine that runs at 1172 MHz on the Xbox One X. The console will ship with an Ultra HD Blu-ray drive (something the PS4 Pro lacks) for 4K movies, and a 1TB HDD. The One X has eight custom x86 cores clocked at 2.3GHz. Coming to the RAM, the device has 12GB GDDR5 memory. The memory bandwidth of the RAM is 326GB/s. You can check out our breakdown of the Xbox One X’s specifications here. 

It’s nice to see Microsoft launch the Xbox One X a mere two months after its international debut. If you are wondering, yes, the Xbox One S is still selling in India between Rs 22,000 andRs 30,000 approximately depending on the bundle you choose.

Will my current Xbox Games work on theOne X?

Yes. Backwards compatibility is something Microsoft has worked very hard on. Your current Xbox games will run on the One X but don’t expect them to magically run at 4K 60fps. That’s up to the developer to patch. Although, you should see some improvements in load times. Games that support dynamic resolution will work better on the One X out of the box, without a patch from the developer when compared to the One or the One S. So for example games like Battlefield 1 and Doom work with a dynamic resolution to maintain frame rates. If the action gets too hot on screen, the resolution of the game is lowered to maintain the desired frame rate be it 30fps or 60fps. In the case of One X, your current Xbox games will run at the maximum frame rate and resolution as intended by the game engine. It’s pretty similar to how boost mode works on the PS4 Pro. Although, you need to enable boost mode from the settings of the PS4 Pro. On the Xbox One X, you don’t need to do anything in the settings to take advantage of the hardware. The Xbox One X is backwards compatible with a large library of Xbox 360 and some orignal (first generation) Xbox games

Will there be Xbox One X exclusives?

As of now, that doesn't seem to be the case. Just like the PS4 and PS4 Pro, all the games that will launch in the near future will run on the Xbox One, Xbox One S and theone X. They will however run best on the One X, thanks to the hardware at the consoles disposal. There will be games exclusive to Microsoft’s platform but they will run on the Xbox One, One S and One X along with Windows (thanks to Microsoft’s play anywhere initiative). This will include franchises like Gears of War, Halo, and more.

What about my Blu-ray movies?

Your current 1080p blu-ray movies will work on theone X. You can also play UHD blu-ray movies on the One X and the Xbox One S, something the PS4 Pro lacks. Remember, UHD blu-ray playback is not available on the original Xbox One.

Can I expand the storage of the Xbox One X?

Yes, you can but not the internal hard drive. As mentioned above, the system comes with a 1TB HDD of which users get a little more than 800GB for games. You can use a USB 3 external hard drive to store and play games on the console. You can connect any USB 3 hard drive, even a 6TB one. We have been using the One X with a 2TB external hard drive and have faced no problems with load times. The experience is smooth whether you run the game off the internal drive or the external drive. It is advisable to invest in an external hard drive as some Xbox One X enhanced games can take up as much as 100GB.

Does theone X support Dolby Atmos?

Yes, it does. And if the game supports Dolby Atmos encoding then you can make the most of your Dolby Atmos home theatre or Doly Atmos enabled headphones too. As of now, there are a handful of games that support Dolby Atmos. Overwatch is one of them. Dolby Atmos enabled Blu-ray movies will work on the console too. You need to purchase the Dolby Atmos app from the store on your console to enable the feature.

Is Microsoft giving any free games with the Xbox One X?

Sadly, no. There are no bundles that have been announced for the console. You will spend about 45k on the console, but it does come with 14 days Xbox Gold membership trial and 14 days Xbox Game pass in the box. With Xbox Gold, you can play online with your friends. You also get about 5 free games every month with your Gold membership. That includes three Xbox One titles and two Xbox 360 titles, which you can play using backwards compatibility. You don’t have a say as to which games you get free every month. That is decided by Microsoft. Remember, if you stop your subscription, you can’t keep playing these games that are a part of games with Gold. Being a Gold member, you get special discounts on games every month. 

Xbox Live Gold membership is priced at Rs 699 per month, or you can pay Rs 3999 for 12 months in one go.

Xbox Game Pass

Xbox Game pass is a Netflix-like subscription service for games. You pay Rs 699 per month (this is separate from your Gold subscription) and you get access to a large library of games (more than a hundred) to download and play. The library is refreshed every month (just like Netflix). This doesn’t mean that all the games change every month. A few are added and a few are removed. If you like a game that you are playing with Game Pass and would like to own it, you will get it for a discount. This is a great option for those that are new to gaming and new to Xbox and want instant access to a large library of good games and don’t want to spend a bomb on them overnight.

The latest leak about the Galaxy S9 has ironically come from Samsung’s own website. In the run-up to the launch of the phone at an event in Barcelona, we now have more information on the camera hardware of the Galaxy S9 and the Galaxy S9 Plus.

 the website revealed Samsung Semiconductor’s new ISOCELL range of camera sensor, and one of them is likely to feature in the upcoming flagship. Among them, one of the sensors can record and process videos at super-high speed. The website names it ISOCELL Fast that is essentially a 3-stack fast readout sensor that can record videos in Full HD at 480 frames per second. This indicates the phone can record super slo-mo videos at high resolution.

Another sensor is the ISOCELL Bright that is supposedly for low-light shots. The sensor will combine four normal-sized pixels into one large pixel, which is not really a new thing.

The ISOCELL dual, also mentioned in the website, will expectedly improve the dual camera performance with better light sensitivity, depth effect and sharper brightness.

Lastly, there is ISOCELL Slim that will allow high-quality images on cameras with modules as small as 0.9 microns.

Going by the recent leak of the retail box, the Galaxy S9 is likely to come with 12-megapixel rear cameras with OIS and variable apertures. The box also mentions a Super Slow-mo feature, that corroborates with the capabilities of the ISOCELL Fast sensor mentioned above.

The Galaxy S9 and the Galaxy S9+ will launch at the sidelines of MWC in Barcelona at the end of February.

The chief executive officers of Alphabet Inc’s Google and YouTube pledged to scour videos and other content more closely for misleading news and inappropriate messages on their web services ahead of elections in the US later this year. “We have more elections coming, so we’re all working harder,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during an interview at an event in San Francisco on Friday hosted by MSNBC and Recode. “We feel a huge sense of responsibility.”

Later this year, midterm elections will determine which party runs Congress, now controlled by Republicans. YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki said the online video service is trying to hire as many employees as possible to scrutinize videos in tandem with computers running artificial-intelligence software to identify and quickly remove offensive and inaccurate material.
“It has to be humans and you need to have those machines,” she said.

Google’s search engine and its news-aggregation service have been criticized for showing misleading answers and distributing false stories online. Meanwhile, YouTube is facing one of the worst crises in its roughly 18-year existence after advertisers found their marketing messages running alongside extremist and offensive videos. YouTube has also been swept up in investigations into whether Russia used social media to influence the 2016 presidential election.

“All of us are obviously very upset that somebody could have influenced the election,” Pichai said. However, he warned that it’s difficult for such a large company to decide what is true or false. “Drawing the line is becoming increasingly hard,” he said. “We’re a global company. We operate in many countries. People disagree.” Still, Pichai said extra scrutiny of technology companies is important to maintain trust.

“We all need to be careful,” he added. “We don’t want people to reject technology. Technology is the source of progress.”
Artificial intelligence is the most important technology, and the source of much anxiety about how work and broader human society will change, the CEO added. “It’s fair to be worried about AI,” Pichai said. “I don’t think any single company should control it.” Pichai noted that his cousin is training to be a radiologist, a job that AI is already beginning to automate. “This is going to make her job much easier. She’ll get to spend more time with patients,” he said.

The CEO has been promoting new ways to train the technology workers of tomorrow. Last year, Google committed $1 billion in grants and employee-volunteer hours over five years to use technology for education, economic opportunity and inclusion. Earlier this week, Google unveiled a new online education program to certify people for work in information technology support – positions with solid pay that don’t require full software coding skills. “It’s a new job category that didn’t exist before,” Pichai said on Friday. “Over time, the nature of work will change.