Google is Bringing Video Guides to Maps

If you use any of Google’s apps you will know that they constantly get updates. This time around Google is updating Maps with the ability to add videos to places around you.

While ratings and photos are usually a good enough indication of what to expect, videos will be much more immersive in not only providing non-visitors a tour of places they’ve yet to visit, but also for businesses to showcase what they have to offer.

How it Works

The process is simple enough, being integrated in the already-available “Add a photo” option which comes up after you’ve selected a place in Maps.

Rather than simply taking a photo, users can hold the shutter key for up to 10 seconds to upload a video instead.

Upon holding, they’ll see a prompt saying “New! Hold for video.”. Alternatively, users will also be able to tag along a 30-second video they’ve recorded previously of the place.

Limited to Local Guides

The process is available to people in its Local Guides program. It was made available a couple of weeks back, though, a notification is being sent via email only now. As a reward, Local Guides get seven points for each video that they upload as an incentive.

However, as TechCrunch reports, Mountain View also plans to partner with businesses and encourage them to upload videos themselves showcasing their services the way they want. After all, Local Guides can only cover so much and can only give an outside-in view of places they visit.

Available on Google Maps now

The feature is already rolling out to Google Maps users throughout the globe. It is currently available only on Maps for Android as of now, though, it should come to other platforms sooner rather than later.

Note: You can use the feature only if you’re signed up as a Local Guide.

10 Ways to Spend Less Time With Your Smartphone

An average smartphone user checks their phone about 90+ times a day. If you think this statement isn’t true, you can download Checky (for Android users only). This application tells you how many times a day you check your phone.

No matter what anyone thinks of smartphones but one thing is for sure – we’ve become inseparable from them.

Psychologist Dr. Deepika Chopra sees a strong link between social media and the time spent on smartphones. She says,

Too much social media or smartphone usage may be costing you more than just time. Studies show it may be stealing your happiness, stunting development in children, and decreasing academic and social potential in our college student population.

Based on these findings, the question inevitably becomes – how can we spend less time on our phones?

We take a look at 10 ways to help you get over your smartphone addiction.

1. Give Yourself Rewards for Spending Less Time on Your Phone

This concept is called positive self-reinforcement and is used in therapy to encourage positive behavior through a reward system. We usually do this to train our pets but it works for us too. For example, every time you go through a day without hitting your previous smartphone check number, treat yourself to something.

2. Create a To-Do list For Yourself

Make a to-do list of things you need to do around the house, or your everyday chores. And no, do not make it on your smartphone, make it on a piece of paper so you don’t have an excuse to check your phone every time you’re done with a task. Then make a rule for yourself that you are not allowed to touch your phone until you are done with your list.

3. Lose The Friends You Do Not Know

Unfriend people you don’t really know on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. When we’re on our smartphone, 70% of the time we’re just looking through our news feed, and most of the time we’re looking at posts by people who we don’t really know. This will help reduce the time we spend on our phones.

4. Turn Off Push Notifications

Now this one is super simple, we all know how annoying push notifications are AKA all those notifications that are distracting you. By turning them off you save your battery as well as your time and focus.

5. Read a Book

A book can be anyone’s best friend provided you don’t let your smartphone get in the way. You can get lost in a good book, and reading actually helps you expand your vocabulary. Everything you read fills your head with new bits of information, and you never know when it might come in handy. The more knowledge you have, the better-equipped you are to tackle any challenge you’ll ever face. If you would like a suggestion, here are the 10 best books of 2016.

6. Uninstall Apps

If turning off the notifications doesn’t really work for you, uninstall unnecessary apps completely. Do you really need Facebook and Twitter on your phone as well as your laptop? If you haven’t run a recent audit of all the apps on your smartphone, now might be a good time to decide what you really need and what you can live without. If you haven’t reinstalled it in a month, you almost definitely didn’t need it in the first place.

7. Don’t Sleep With Your Phone

Do you sleep with your phone beside your pillow? A lot of people do. A study found that more than 90% of 18-29-year-olds sleep with their phone beside or under their pillow. Using your phone as your alarm makes sense, but it also makes it the first thing you check when you wake up. You hit snooze or turn your alarm off and next thing you know you’re scrolling Facebook even though it’s 7 am and tumbleweed is rolling through your timeline.

8. Ask for Help

Your friends, family, and colleagues can help you with this too. Tell them that you’re making a serious effort to lose this addiction and since they’re all partly to blame for you being on your phone all of the time, they are the ones who should refrain from excessively texting you, emailing you, and tagging you in memes on Facebook.

9. Get a Hobby

Remember those essays you used to write in school about your hobby? Most of us wrote about how their hobby was collecting stamps even though we had never touched a single stamp in our lives. Well, a good way to break up with your smartphone is to get involved in something productive, start writing about things, go out and socialize, be productive and you can even cook to keep your hands off the smartphone.

10. Be Rude

Resist the urge to respond to others messages even if you feel it is rude to wait. This may sound extreme, but it will help break the association in your mind that every message received demands an immediate response and over time will reduce the anxiety associated with replying to messages.

That’s all from us. If you have any other ways you’d like to share with us, sound off in the comments below.

Meet The Two Most Pointless Phones of 2017

The year is 2017. Phone companies are no longer crazy about fitting the biggest screen in a smartphone. The new craze is to fit the biggest screen in the smallest body. Thanks to that, we now have truly beautiful phones whose screens cover every inch of the smartphone’s front — even curving on the edges on some.

Yet, in this day and age, there are two phones that have lost their relevance. In fact, they have lost the purpose of their existence, forcing us to ask the question that, why were they even released?

Samsung Galaxy Note 8

After the infamous Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, Samsung has always been in a tough situation concerning its phablet series. Many wondered if the company would even bother continuing the series and maybe, they were right.

The Galaxy Note series may have made sense when it existed for people who loved huge screens but not any more. Samsung’s own flagship, the Galaxy S8, has a display that is about half-an-inch bigger than what the original Note had.

Even then, it would have been reasonable as a bigger option if it weren’t for one more fact — one introduced by Samsung itself, the Samsung Galaxy S8+.

Galaxy Note 8, Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+ (from left to right)

The “Plus” version of Samsung’s flagship, the S8+’s sole purpose is to exist as an oversized option for people who love big phones. Isn’t that what the Note was all about? A kind of an oversized flagship?

The two phones are like two peas in a pod. Even the Note 8’s display is almost the same as the S8+ (just 0.1 inches bigger). They are so similar in almost every aspect that, if you didn’t really know about the external differences (the stylus and the camera), you would be hard put to distinguish one from the other.

There are only three major differences:

• Camera: Note 8’s primary camera is the same as the Galaxy S8+ but it also comes with a secondary 12 MP camera that has a telephoto lens, adding some extra features like lossless zoom and software-based depth of field. In normal day-to-day usage, you aren’t likely to notice any difference.
• Stylus: The stylus is an integral part of the Note 8 and probably the only reason a person should buy the phone. However, is it really worth the extra money? Not many people I know have bought a Note for its stylus.
  The stylus sounds like more of a luxury than a necessity.

• RAM: The Note 8 has 6 GB of RAM, as compared to the S8+’s 4 GB. For a phone, 4 GB is already considered an overkill, meaning you aren’t likely to notice any speed bumps in normal usage.

Now comes the worst part about the Note 8 — the price tag. The phablet retails for $930, around $80 more than the Galaxy S8+. If you’re in Pakistan, that price gap is likely going to be even bigger, especially considering that the Note 8 was just released.

Why not just do away with the Note 8 and release the S8+ with a stylus?

iPhone 8

Just like Samsung, Apple is itself responsible for making the iPhone 8 (and the 8 Plus) redundant. The iPhone 8 was overshadowed by the stunning and nearly bezel-less iPhone X before the launch event was over. In fact, it was never really the phone that the world was waiting for, and Apple knew that.

The iPhone is more of a brand statement than a smartphone choice these days. People buy the latest iPhone to own the latest and the greatest iPhone, not just to buy a good phone.

But with the iPhone 8, there is really no point buying because as soon as it was released, there was already a much better choice — the iPhone X. Nobody is going to fawn over the 8, with its giant last-gen bezels and a design that is already a bit on the dated side.

Here are some reasons why the iPhone 8 is the most pointless phone Apple has ever released,

• There is a better option — the iPhone X (If you only want the best iPhone and are willing to spend 2x the money you would on an arguably better bezel-less phone – Xiaomi Mi Mix 2)
• It looks and feels exactly the same as the iPhone 7 (including the giant bezels).
• If you are going to buy the cheaper iPhone, you may as well buy the iPhone 7 which now costs $549 ($150 cheaper than the cheapest iPhone 8 and would feel almost the same.

Final Remarks

Apart from the number at the end of their names, the iPhone 8 and Galaxy Note 8 have nothing in common — except that both don’t really have a good reason for existing. Whatever my opinion may be about the two phones, one thing is for sure! Samsung and Apple are still going to sell millions and millions of Note 8’s and iPhone 8’s.

The Note 8 has already broken the record for being the most pre-ordered Note phone ever, proving that as long as you are a global smartphone giant, people don’t really care if your last smartphone was prone to exploding whenever it felt like it.

Moreover, it also goes on to show that companies like Apple and Samsung, who now operate a smartphone duopoly, have a way of convincing people to shell out money that no other company has mastered. Who would have thought that people would be actually willing to buy a $1,000 phone in 2017?

Saudi Arabia to Unblock Skype, WhatsApp & Viber

Good news for Pakistani expatriates in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom has announced that it will be unblocking Skype, WhatsApp & Viber, a development that is sure to make the lives of the many expatriates easier who live and work in KSA.

Gulf Countries Relax Strict Rules on Chatting Apps

WhatsApp was unblocked from the UAE back in June, and now Saudi Arabia is hoping to do the same. The Saudi Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Abdullah bin Amer Al-Sawahah said,

Coordination between the Communications and Information Technology Commission and telecommunications service providers is underway to enable everyone to benefit from applications that provide voice and video communications over the Internet.

He also said cooperating bodies had confirmed their commitment to enable all users in the Kingdom to use applications to make voice and video calls of the highest quality. He added that all applications will be monitored and reviewed periodically.

Blocked Since 2013

WhatsApp, Skype and Viber were blocked back in 2013 by the Saudi government because they “did not meet the regulatory conditions” of the Kingdom.

‘This cooperation between the Kingdom’s telecoms partners comes under the umbrella of ‘Customer First,’ a policy in which everyone works in order to give all telecom subscribers in the Kingdom the best services that meet their expectations and satisfy their needs,” said Al-Sawahah.

via Dawn

Pakistan’s First Subway Train Rolled Out of Production Today

The first train for Lahore’s Orange Line Metro project has rolled off assembly lines in China today. The train was produced in a factory based in the Hunan province in China. It comes with 5 coaches attached to it.

This is the first of 27 trains for the Orange Line Metro and its design is inspired by the national flower of Pakistan (which is Jasmine) and the shape of the dome of Badshahi mosque in Lahore.

It was designed and produced by the CRRC Zhuzhou Locomotive Co Ltd, according to Xinhua news agency.

You can take a look at the new train in all its glory:

From the driver’s perspective:

As mentioned earlier, the train will be used for the 25.58 km long Orange Line Metro project. An engineer at  CRRC Zhuzhou said that the train will feature an energy saving air-conditioning system. The air conditioning is designed specifically with the constant high summer temperature in mind. It also factors in the unstable voltage in Pakistan, said the engineer.

Another important feature of the design are the heat resistant bogies that aim to increase the train’s durability. The train will run at a maximum operational speed of 80 km/h.

This particular train will be delivered in Pakistan in July this year. The remaining 26 will be delivered at the end of the year.

Hidden Feature Of Youtube Android Application