Android Apps in Windows 11. How it works?

Microsoft announced at its recent event that Android apps are coming to Windows 11. So while they are going to be brought over by Amazon, Intel to power the technology that is going to make them work.

Microsoft is bringing Android app support to Windows 11, as it announced at the Microsoft Event on June 24. And it is a big deal. Now, to get the job done, Microsoft has two other companies helping it out - Intel and Amazon. Amazon’s role here is considerably simple, its app store is going to bring the Android apps to the Microsoft Store. Intel, on the other hand, is going to do all the technical heavy-lifting. So how is this going to work? Here’s an explainer.

Intel is going to use something called “Intel Bridge” that will allow apps to “conform with hardware”. “Intel and Microsoft’s long-standing approach to OS, system architecture, and hardware integration enables the best PC experience for customers. The combination of Windows 11 and Intel technologies and platforms offers unmatched performance, compatibility, and experiences on Windows, and we’re bringing people’s favourite experiences from the phone to the PC with IntelBridge Technology,” Gregory Bryant, Intel Executive Vice President and General Manager, Client Computing Group, explained in a blog post.

Intel Bridge tech is essentially a compiler. A compiler is a tool that converts computer software written in one programming language to another. By using Intel Bridge, Windows 11 is incorporating a compiler that will allow software written for Android to work on Windows and Windows devices that are powered by ARM and x86 processors.

Now, ARM and x86 are different processor architectures that are used in mobile and PC processors. While Qualcomm uses ARM architecture on its Snapdragon chips, Intel and AMD use x86 for their chips. For Android apps to function properly on devices running Windows 11, they will have to recognize all kinds of hardware. This is what Intel Bridge will make possible.

“Intel Bridge Technology is a runtime post-compiler that enables applications to run natively on x86-based devices, including running those applications on Windows,” Intel explained in a blog post. “Intel’s multi-architecture XPU strategy provides the right engines for the right workloads by integrating leading CPU cores, graphics technology, artificial intelligence accelerators, image processors, and more, in a single, verified solution,” it added.

But, this doesn’t quite tell us how well Android apps will perform on Windows 11 devices. Microsoft’s collaboration with ARM processors has not delivered the kind of performance that processors from Intel and AMD have, yet. And most reviews are of the opinion that the problem lies in compiling x86 apps for ARM architectures.

“Intel believes it is important to provide this capability across all x86 platforms and has designed Intel Bridge technology to support all x86 platforms (including AMD platforms),” Intel told The Verge, and added that the technology “vastly expands mobile applications to run right on the PC”.

Chip shortage to go down in second half of 2021 says: Intel CEO

Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger predicted the shortage of semiconductors that’s hurting industries from automotive to consumer electronics will bottom out in the second half of this year before starting to improve. “I don’t expect the chip industry is back to a healthy supply-demand situation until ’23,” he said in an interview. “For a variety of industries, I think it’s still getting worse before it gets better. ”The economy’s rebound from the depths of the pandemic has caused a flood of demand for the components that are the heart of all modern electronics. Lockdowns and changes in the way that large chunks of the world’s population work has speeded up a shift to digital systems that has further stretched the semiconductor industry’s ability to keep up with the flood of orders, according to Gelsinger.

Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, gets the majority of its sales from providing processors that run personal computers and servers, machines that are central to data centers and corporate networks. Gelsinger said Intel’s ownership of its factories has left it better placed to keep up with demand than other companies that out-source production, but supply of the other components of computers has fallen short. Longer-term, the chip industry is positioned for a period of growth, Gelsinger predicted. Over the next decade, the increasing uses for chips – including 5G phone systems, electric vehicles and expanded artificial intelligence – will drive strong demand, he said. That view makes Intel’s CEO a leading voice among executives who’re arguing that the current boom in demand for chips is more than just a short-lived supply crunch that will inevitably lead into another of the industry’s periodic cyclical slumps. Others are less sold on the idea that the industry can continue to grow more than 5% annually as Gelsinger and some suggest. Broadcom Inc. CEO Hock Tan earlier this month stuck to his position that the current supply crunch hasn’t changed the industry into the high-flier that Gelsinger and others predict. While his company posted a 15% sales increase in its most recent quarter, Tan said that fundamentally chip production is a mature industry that will return to lower growth.

Amazon Web Services acquires Wickr

Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, has acquired Wickr, the encrypted messaging app founded in 2012. The company made this announcement through an official social media post that read, "We are excited to share that AWS has acquired Wickr, an innovative company that has developed the industry's most secure, end-to-end encrypted, communication technology."

Stephen Schmidt, Amazon Web Services' Vice President, continued to nod the company's ever-deepening relationships with the military, and Washington in general, and said that Wickr's features give "security-conscious enterprises and government agencies the ability to implement important governance and security controls to help them meet their compliance requirements."

The Wickr app is an encrypted messaging app used to secure messaging competitor Signal. It has been popular with journalists and whistleblowers. The Verge said that through this move, it is unclear if the proximity to the tech monolith will impact the app's popularity for free users.

Nifty new Android feature works even when phone is locked

The new Android feature is called ‘Lock Screen’ and it is available in Google Assistant’s Popular Settings menu under Voice Match and Languages options, 9To5 Google reported. The new Lock Screen menu, as the name suggests, enables users to use ‘Google Assistant even when a user’s smartphone screen is locked.’

On tapping on the new Lock Screen Menu for the first time, users are greeted with a splash screen that talks about the feature in length. “Get hands-free help from your Assistant when your phone is locked. You can always turn this off in your Assistant settings...For help with personal info, like calling and messaging your contacts, turn on Voice Match and say “Hey Google” so your Assistant can recognize your voice,” says the text in the splash screen.

t this point, users can either tap on ‘No, thanks’ option to exit the setting or ‘Yes, I’m In’ button to get to the settings. Tapping on the ‘Yes, I’m In’ button takes users to the Lock Screen settings that has two toggle buttons. The first toggle button allows the Google Assistant to answer users’ requests even when their phones are locked. All users need to do is say ‘Hey Google’ followed by their request. The other toggle button enables Google Assistant to give users personalized requests even when they hadn’t used the ‘Hey Google’ .

Google has started rolling out the feature to all the Google Assistant users across the globe. All you need to do is download version 12.24 of the Google app to be able to use this feature.

 Setup a Raspberry Pi MYSQL Database

MySQL is one of the world’s most popular relational database system and is a common inclusion in most LAMP ( Linux, Apache, MYSQL, and PHP) stacks. It is one of the pieces of technology that helps drive the modern web.

Step 1: Before we get started with installing MySQL to our Raspberry Pi, we must first update our package list and all installed packages.

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

 Step2: In this step is to install the MySQL server software to your Raspberry Pi.

Installing MySQL to the Raspberry Pi is a simple process and can be done with the following command.

sudo apt install mariadb-server

 Step3: After MySQL server software installed to the Raspberry Pi, it is need to secure it by setting a password for the “root” user.

By default, MySQL is installed without any password set up meaning you can access the MySQL server without any authentication.

Run the following command to begin the MySQL securing process.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Just follow the prompts to set a password for the root user and to secure your MySQL installation.

For a more secure installation, you should answer “Y” to all prompts when asked to answer “Y” or “N“.

These prompts will remove features that allows someone to gain access to the server easier.

Make sure to write down the password you set during this process as we will need to use it to access the MySQL server and create databases and users for software such as WordPress or PHPMyAdmin.

Step 4:. Now if you want to access your Raspberry Pi’s MySQL server and start making changes to your databases, you can enter the following command.

sudo mysql -u root -p

 You will be prompted to enter the password that we just created in step 3 for MySQL’s root user.

Note: Like most Linux password inputs, the text will not show up as you type.

Step 5:. You can now enter MYSQL commands to create, alter, and delete databases. Through this interface, you can also create or delete users and assign them the rights to manage any database.

Step 6:. There are two different ways you can quit out of the MYSQL command line, the first of those is to type “quit;” into the MySQL interface.

The other way of quitting out of the MYSQL command line is to press CTRL + D.

Step 7:. At this point, you will now have successfully setup MySQL on your Raspberry Pi. Our next few sections will go into making better use of this database.

Creating a MySQL Database and User

Before we proceed to create a MySQL user and database on our Raspberry Pi, we must first log back into the MySQL command-line tool.

Run the following command to log in to the MySQL command line. You will be prompted to enter the password for the “root” account that you set up earlier.

sudo mysql -u root -p

1. Let’s start by creating a MySQL database using the following command.

This command is super simple and is just “CREATE DATABASE” followed by the name that you want to give the database.

In this example, we will be calling this database “exampledb“.

CREATE DATABASE exampledb;

2. Next, we will create a MySQL user that we will assign to our new database. We can create this user by running the following command.

For this example, we will be calling the user “example user” and giving it the password “pimylifeup“. When creating your own, make sure you replace both of these.

CREATE USER 'example user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'pimylifeup';

3. With the user created, we can now go ahead and grant all privileges to the user so that it can interact with the database.

This command will grant all permissions to our “exampleuser” for all tables within our “exampledb” database.

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON exampledb.* TO 'exampleuser'@'localhost';

4. The final thing we need to do for both our MySQL database and user to be finalized is to flush the privilege table. Without flushing the privilege table, the new user won’t be able to access the database.

We can do this by running the following command.

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

If you rather not use the command line to administrate your databases then you can always install PHPMyAdmin instead.

iPhone to allow the users to send WhatsApp Sticker packs to their contacts and other updates - Coming Soon

WhatsApp stickers are an important tool for people who are quite expressive. It also saves the lazy ones from typing out sentences because the sticker, with animation as an added advantage, does the job quite well. But now sharing stickers can get a lot more interesting because you might just get the option of sharing the entire sticker pack and not just one sticker. The feature was spotted during one of the beta tests, and it would be limited to iOS initially.

As per Wabetainfo, WhatsApp might soon roll out the ability to share sticker packs on the app. “WhatsApp is rolling out a new feature today, that allows you to quickly forward official WhatsApp sticker packs to your contacts.If you want to verify if the feature is enabled for you, just open the WhatsApp Sticker Store and select a sticker pack to see its details. If you see a forward button, it means the feature is available for your WhatsApp account,” the wabetainfo report read.

Before you get too excited, the feature has been rolled out for iOS beta users only. If you are a beta tester, update your WhatsApp to WhatsApp beta for iOS 2.21.120.13 to get the feature. Some existing beta builds may also get this feature soon.

For those of you who have updated to the latest beta version, you would notice a forward icon next to a sticker pack. When you tap on the forward icon, you can select chats where you can send the sticker pack to. When you tap on the send option, WhatsApp will to quickly view and download the sticker pack.

Notably, only the WhatsApp sticker packs can be forwarded to contracts. Users cannot forward sticker packs that have been downloaded using third-party apps. The feature is currently available to iOS users but the features' tracker reports that it would soon be rolled out to Android beta testers. WhatsApp is yet to make an official announcement about the same no we don’t know yet whether the Facebook-owned messaging app will consider a stable rollout or not.

Apart from this, other features that WhatsApp is reportedly working on is the multi-device support, disappearing mode and view once feature. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart had confirmed launching the above-mentioned features official soon during an exclusive chat with Wabetainfo.

 Realme-Dizo to launch first smart product in India on 1st July

Realme’s all-new brand, Dizo, is going to launch its first product on July 1. Dizo has announced an event for the first of next month but has not really said what it will launch. Dizo-branded wireless earbuds, smartwatches, and feature phones have leaked abundantly, so it is going to be one of these products. I am more interested in feature phones from Dizo because that is something that will bring Realme to a whole new market where phones from iTel, Jio, Samsung, and Nokia rule, at least in India.

The Dizo-branded wireless earbuds are two models likely, the Dizo GoPods and the Dizo GoPods D, while the smartwatch is called Dizo Watch. The Vietnamese e-commerce website Shoppe has been teasing them for a long time, and the teasers for these products have revealed that they are nothing but rebranded Realme Buds Air 2, Realme Buds Q2, and Realme Watch 2 with minor design changes. If that is the case, the purpose of the Dizo brand and the need for products like TWS earbuds and smartwatches do not seem justified.

But for feature phones, Dizo may open the doors to a category that is flourishing away from the world of smartphones. The feature phones have come a long way, so much so that they can now support WhatsApp, Google, YouTube, Gmail apps, among others. All of that is possible because of KaiOS, which powers select Nokia handsets and the JioPhone models. However, there is no information on whether Dizo’s feature phones will support the operating system or if they will be regular feature phones with calling, texting, voice recording features.

Some leaked information also points out Dizo will launch a Bluetooth speaker and a vacuum robot, but there are not enough details about them. It is possible Dizo refers to these products at the upcoming launch event but does not unveil them there and then. Realme has already launched a couple of portable speakers and a vacuum robot, so maybe Dizo will rebrand and sell them, much like the GoPods and Dizo Watch.

Dizo, particularly, is teasing a pair of truly wireless earbuds with all music-related tweets, so maybe Dizo GoPods and Dizo GoPods D are the first products under the new sub-brand while the rest of the products will arrive later. We will find out more as the launch event will draw closer and Dizo will share more teasers to build the hype.