Light Start – Ultra-cheap Android, silly AI, Netflix recommends, and Twitter video
Brett Venter
The cheapest Android in the world will set you back about R60
Before you get too excited, you’ve heard the saying ‘You get what you pay for?’. Yeah, that’s probably true in this case. An Indian company, Ringing Bells, will be launching a new handset, called the Freedom 251, for the local equivalent of about R60. For your cash (and that’s the pre-paid price, by the way), you’re getting a 4-inch 960 x 560 screen, 1.3GHz quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. There’s a 1,350mAh battery and a 3.5MP camera. The front camera… we don’t wanna talk about it but the phone costs less than a hundred bucks so… what are you gonna do? The handset launches in India today and it’s running Android 5.1. Honestly, we’re skeptical about its performance but we’d like to get our hands on one. Call it professional curiosity.
Artificial intelligence will have to do some more studying before we can be really scared of it
So about those fears that an artificial intelligence system is going to become self aware and take over the world… those will have to wait until they get a little smarter. A recent contest took a bunch of artificial intelligence systems and gave them an eighth grade test. The winner of the contest managed to get a score of 59%, meaning that it still performs better than most of the people we remember from that period of our lives. While the score seems almost apathetic for a computer, MIT claims that it’s actually impressive for the systems. Computer learning systems can, in fact, be taught in similar ways to high-school students. It’s just nothing to worry about now. Unless you’re also worried that some eighth-grader will suddenly become sentient and take over the planet.
Netflix is now global, so it’s time for a global recommendation system
If you have been using Netflix since its official local launch in South Africa last month, you’ve probably noticed that it recommends new shows. Based on what you’re watching, usually. Those recommendations come by way of other users in your country and some countries have very silly users indeed. So Netflix has, according to a new announcement, made recommendations global. Data is going to be taken from countries all over the world in order to serve up improved recommendations for you, the end-user. Which would be awesome and all if it didn’t take about 20 minutes to flip through everything Netflix SA has to offer. So the feature should be even more impressive once we get a little more content online.
Prepare to catch video via DM as Twitter brings new feature to… everyone
There’s no way this can possibly be used for evil, right? Regardless, this is actually a pretty cool feature from Twitter: The ability to record and send video to other users via DM. It’s on its way out to users on both Android and iOS, so you might already have access to the feature, and stands alongside Twitter’s new GIF button. Why the new features? Probably because everyone is predicting the demise of the service. Still, the ability to record and send video to other Twitter users in a DM is going to be an interesting one to see. Probably NSFW, but interesting.
