Apple Watch Gets a Big Price Cut in India

Apple has slashed the retail price of the Apple Watch in India by Rs. 5,000. With the price slash, the cheapest variant - Apple Watch Sport (38mm) - is now available in the country at a price point of Rs. 25,900.

At a media conference in San Francisco earlier this week, Apple announced that it is making the Apple Watch less expensive to purchase. The company announced a $50 cut on the Sports model of the Apple Watch. In line with the announcement, Apple India told Gadgets 360 on Wednesday that it has knocked off Rs. 5,000 from the aforementioned model. The wearable comes in Sport, Watch, and Watch Edition variants. Do note that other variants of the Apple Watch aren't getting a price cut just yet.

Apple India told us that the price cut should be effective across retailers, though Gadgets 360 understands that it will take a few days before different retailers across the country start selling the Sports model at the revised price.

Apple launched the Apple Watch in India in November last year, with the Sport (38mm) variant costing Rs. 30,900, and the Sport (42mm) variant costing Rs. 35,900 At the event, the company also slashed the price of the iPad Air 2 by $100. The price revision, however, isn't currently live in India, Apple India told us.

(Also see: Apple Watch Review)

The price revision makes the Apple Watch, the company's first wearable device even more enticing. For a first generation device, the Apple Watch feels very polished. Apple made its timepiece even more powerful with the watchOS 2 software update, bringing support for native apps, activation lock, and a number of other features and improvements. On Monday, alongside the iPhone SE launch, Apple also released watchOS 2.2, which brought features like the ability to pair multiple Apple Watches to a singleiPhone, the Nearby feature, an improved glance feature, as well as several performance improvements and bug fixes .

If you were on the fence on whether or not you should spring for the Apple Watch, at least the most basic variant, and the price seemed a tad too much, Apple is now giving you a better option.

Vernee Apollo With 6GB of RAM, 5.5-Inch QHD Force Touch Display Revealed

China-based brand Vernee this week unveiled its flagship smartphone, the Apollo. The highlight of the Vernee Apollo smartphone is it packs 6GB of RAM which was seen on the recently unveiled Vivo Xplay5 Elite.

Another notable feature is it packs MediaTek's newest Helio X20 (MT6797) SoC which was revealed at an event in China on Wednesday.

According to Android Authority, the Vernee Apollo smartphone will feature a 5.5-inch QHD display with Force Touch (pressure sensitive touch display) capability and will pack 128GB of inbuilt storage. The handset is said to sport 21-megapixel rear camera with Sony IMX230 sensor and also houses an 8-megapixel front camera. It is likely to come with a USB Type-C port. On design, the Apollo smartphone is said to sport all-metal design. Unfortunately, the Chinese company has not detailed all the specifications of the handset or has revealed details about the Force Touch feature on the Apollo smartphone, though it did confirm the Android 6.0 Marshmallow version.

We can expect the company to reveal all the details on innards as well as pricing and availability at the time of launch.

MediaTek at the same event confirmed that the deca-core Helio X20 (MT6797) aimed at high-end market will hit the market next month. To recall, the Helio X20 is built on top of tri-cluster CPU architecture and was first showcased last year. At the time of launch, MediaTek had also claimed that the Helio X20 was world's first mobile processor to have tri-cluster CPU architecture, which houses three processor clusters.

Google Acknowledges Vulnerability in Millions of Android Devices; Promises Fix

Millions of Android smartphones and tablets are vulnerable to security attacks, Google has warned. The vulnerability, if exploited, gives an app unfettered root access, circumventing various Android security layers. The Mountain View-based company has made available a patch to OEMs, and says it is currently working on a fix for the Nexus lineup.

Security researchers spotted an app in the Google Play, Android's marquee app store, which tries to leverage the vulnerability. Android inherited the flaw from Linux years ago. Interestingly, Linux developers fixed the bug in 2014, and it was later on flagged as a vulnerability - identified as CVE-2015-1805 - early last year.

The vulnerability is present in all Android releases that are based on Linux kernel version 3.4, or 3.10, or 3.14. Android versions based on Linux kernel 3.18 or higher aren't affected, Google assures. Most Android 6.0 Marshmallow-based devices run on kinux Kernel v3.18, however, different OEMs often use different Linux kernel versions - thus, it is hard to correlate Android version with kernel version.

Google acknowledged the existence of the vulnerability in an advisory it sent last week. "An elevation of privilege vulnerability in the kernel could enable a local malicious application to execute arbitrary code in the kernel. This issue is rated as a critical severity due to the possibility of a local permanent device compromise and the device would possibly need to be repaired by re-flashing the operating system," the note reads.

Google didn't disclose the name of the app, though it noted that the offending app was available from Google Play as well as third-party sources, and Nexus 6 and Nexus 5 smartphones were affected. It also noted that it has published the patches for the flaw with OEMs, and also published them to the Android Open Source Project. It is up to manufacturers now how long they take before pushing the updates to their respective devices.