Redmi Note 14 series was launched in China in September comprising three models: a base, a Pro, and a Pro+ variant. It is now expected to make its debut in India soon as the successor to the Redmi Note 13 series. Xiaomi India has now teased the forthcoming arrival of the purported smartphone lineup on its social media handles. This development comes amidst the imminent launch of the Redmi A4 5G as an entry-level 5G handset with a Snapdragon chipset in India.

Redmi Note 14 Series Launch Teased

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Xiaomi India teased the upcoming launch of a smartphone. An image accompanying the teaser carries the text, “Ready for a Noteworthy Rival?”. While it does not explicitly reveal the smartphone’s name, it is speculated to be a reference to the upcoming Redmi Note 14 series that was previously confirmed to make its India debut in December.

Redmi Note 14 series has already been launched in China, but it remains to be seen if the Indian variant will have similar specifications as the Chinese models. Redmi Note 14, Note 14 Pro and Note 14 Pro+ are expected to make their debut in India, replacing the Redmi Note 13 series.

Redmi Note 14 Series Specifications

All handsets in the Redmi Note 14 series are equipped with a 6.67-inch OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. The Redmi Note 14 Pro+ and Note 14 Pro are powered by Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 and Dimensity 7300 Ultra chipsets, respectively, while the base model has MediaTek Dimensity 7025 Ultra SoC under the hood.

Both the Redmi Note 14 Pro models have a 50-megapixel primary camera and an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera. The Note 14 Pro+ has a 50-megapixel portrait telephoto camera, while the Pro model has a 2-megapixel macro camera. The former packs a 6,200mAh battery with 90W fast charging support, while the latter is backed by a 5,500mAh battery with 44W fast charging capability.

The sudden closure of several video-game studios at Microsoft’s Xbox division was the result of a widespread cost-cutting initiative that still isn’t finished.

This week, Xbox began offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax, which it purchased in 2020 for $7.5 billion (roughly Rs. 6,26,28 crore), according to people familiar with the company’s plans. Others across the Xbox organization have been told that more cuts are on the way.

A spokesperson for Xbox declined to comment.

Employees were shocked by the unexpected shuttering Tuesday of three Xbox subsidiaries and the absorption of a fourth. The closures included Tokyo-based Tango Gameworks, which last year released the critically acclaimed action game Hi-Fi Rush. Tango was in the process of pitching a sequel, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information.

During a town hall with ZeniMax staff on Wednesday morning, Xbox president Matt Booty praised Hi-Fi Rush but did not specify why the company had shut down the development studio behind it, according to three people who were in attendance.

Speaking about the closures more broadly, Booty said that the company’s studios had been spread too thin — like “peanut butter on bread” — and that leaders across the division had felt understaffed. They decided to close these studios to free up resources elsewhere, he said.

Booty added that the shutdown of subsidiary Arkane Austin, the longtime developer of games such as Prey, was not connected to the performance of its new multiplayer game, Redfall, a critical and commercial flop.

Before its closure, Arkane had been looking to return to its roots by pitching a new single-player “immersive sim” game, such as a new entry in the Dishonored series, according to the people familiar.

Jill Braff, head of ZeniMax studios, said in the town hall that she hoped the reorganization would allow the division, which also develops Fallout and Doom, to put more focus on fewer projects. “It’s hard to support nine studios all across the world with a lean central team with an ever-growing plate of things to do,” she said, according to audio of the meeting reviewed by Bloomberg.

“I think we were about to topple over,” she added.

Both Tango and Arkane released games last year and were looking to hire additional staff as they pitched new projects, which Booty and Braff suggested was the main factor behind their closures. Shinji Mikami, Tango’s founder and studio head, departed last year.

These cuts at Xbox come amid a wider contraction in the video-game industry due to economic shifts following a period of rapid growth during the pandemic. Recently, Microsoft’s gaming division has expanded more than any of its competitors via the acquisitions of ZeniMax and Activision Blizzard for more than $76 billion combined. In February, Microsoft cut 1,900 jobs, mostly at Activision Blizzard.

The massive Activision Blizzard acquisition has ramped up scrutiny on the Xbox division from leaders at Microsoft, according to people familiar.

In recent years, Xbox became deeply invested in Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service that offers unlimited access to hundreds of downloadable games for a monthly fee. To fill the service with new enticements, Xbox acquired dozens of studios, including outfits known for making smaller games, such as San Francisco-based Double Fine.

While most game publishers are looking to take big swings with games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Xbox promised to support less sprawling creative titles such as Hi-Fi Rush with smaller budgets and lower sales expectations. It didn’t matter if a game sold tens of millions of copies as long as it helped bolster the Game Pass library.

But Game Pass has not seen the massive growth that Xbox boss Phil Spencer may have been hoping for.

Mat Piscatella, executive director of analysis firm Circana, said that monthly, non-mobile, video-game subscription spending in the US “has been flat to low single-digit growth” since the middle of 2021.

“In our data, Game Pass spending really had its big growth period in late 2019 through early 2021 and has since settled,” Piscatella said. “Purchasing games and add-on content as well as free-to-play models are still the vastly preferred method of getting to video games by US consumers, at least for now.”

While there’s no indication that Xbox plans to ditch the Game Pass model, there are hints that its big bets have not paid off. During the most recent quarter, sales of Xbox content and services were up 62 percent, but as Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out last month, the growth was entirely due to the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. On social media, he noted that without sales from that deal, Xbox gaming revenue would have been down approximately 5 percent year over year, “with no software and services growth and sharp hardware revenue decline.”

With console revenue down, the company recently began releasing some of its games on competing platforms. In a March interview with the gaming site Polygon, Spencer said that “the thing that has me most concerned for the industry is the lack of growth.”

© 2024 Bloomberg LP

YouTube announced several new and updated features in October. Among them were a new sleep timer, a resizable miniplayer, and some visual improvements. The Alphabet-owned video streaming platform has now reportedly started rolling out a redesigned version of the playback speed box. This is said to allow users to control the playback speed more intricately. This feature was teased by the company previously. A report claims that it is now coming to Android and iOS users. It is expected to be available to all users globally soon.

YouTube Playback Speed Feature Redesign

According to a 9to5Google report, YouTube is rolling out a redesigned version of the playback speed feature. The report adds that the feature is available for YouTube version 19.43 on Android and 19.44 on iOS. With the updated version, if users go to Settings > Playback Speed, a rectangular pop-up box appears at the bottom of the screen.

Within the box, a row of five preset speed options are shown as pill-shaped buttons — 0.25, 1.0 (Normal), 1.25, 1.5, and 2.0. Besides these, the box shows an adjustable slider. It allows users to fine-tune playback speed in 0.5 increments. The selected speed is shown above the slider, and adjustments can be made by dragging the slider or by tapping the plus and minus buttons on either side of the slider.

Previously, the Playback Speed menu opened in a long pop-up box that covered almost half of the lower half of the screen. The layout resembled the design now used for the sleep timer feature. Users were offered only specific preset speed options (0.25x, 0.5x, 0.75x, Normal, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, and 2x) to choose from. 

Notably, YouTube mentioned the “fine-tunable playback speed” feature in a blog post in October this year where it announced that it will start rolling out about two dozen updates across web, mobile, TVs, and YouTube Music apps.

Dell’s XPS lineup is known for its premium design, high-end hardware, and being at the top of most ‘best ultrabooks to buy’ lists. The company has updated its popular XPS 13 with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor. While the new laptop has the same design and build as last year’s model, it is now claimed to be much faster and more efficient thanks to the ARM chipset.

The Dell XPS 13 (9345) starts at Rs. 1,39,990 in India, and you can also deck it up with a tandem OLED display, which I think is a first on a laptop. I used the laptop for over a week and tested all the claims made by the manufacturer regarding performance and battery life. Is this the best ultrabook that you can currently buy? Find out below.

Dell XPS 13 (9345) Design: Gorgeous

• Dimensions – 295.3mm (width) x 199.1mm (depth) x 14.8mm (height)
• Weight – 1.18kg
• Colours – Graphite

If I were asked to describe the design of the Dell XPS 13 (9345) in one word, it would be ‘gorgeous’. Thanks to the matte black colour, the build quality, the slim and compact form factor, and minimal styling, the laptop looks like a thousand bucks. Yes, it looks exactly like last year’s Intel Core Ultra model (9340), but why fix something that’s not broken (at least on the outside)?

The only downside of the gorgeous design is the lack of ports and a cramped keyboard

There is no flex anywhere on the laptop, thanks to the CNC-machined aluminium construction. The hinges are solid and require a bit of pressure to open and close, which is good. However, the lid would stay open with the laptop shut and held facing up. The XPS 13 9345 weighs just 1.18 kg and is 14.6mm thin. It’s one of the lightest and smallest 13-inch laptops in its price segment. The only downside of it being so thin and compact is that this laptop only gets two USB Type-C ports. There’s one on each side, and that’s it. The sides of the laptop also house the speaker slits and intake vents.

The laptop is smaller than an Apple MacBook Air 13

You also get minimal branding on the laptop, with the lid carrying the Dell logo, an XPS logo at the bottom, and a Snapdragon CPU sticker on the bottom right side of the keyboard. The Graphite colour option has a matte finish all over, which keeps fingerprints to a minimum.

Dell XPS 13 (9345) Display: Stunning

• Display type- 13.4-inch full-HD+ IPS or Tandem OLED touch
• Resolution – Up to 3K
• Refresh rate – Up to 120Hz

The XPS 13 9345 features a fantastic display. Our review unit came with a 3K Tandem OLED touch display with 400 nits of brightness, up to 60Hz refresh rate, Dolby Vision certification, HDR support, and touch support. The panel also gets Corning Gorilla Glass Victus protection.

The display bezels are slim on all four sides, and there is no branding anywhere on the display. The anti-reflective coating also does a good job when using the laptop in well-lit rooms. The brightness is nothing out of this world, but it’s plenty for indoor use. I never used a laptop with more than 50 percent brightness when working or watching content, especially with the lights turned off.

This is one of the first laptops to feature a Tandem OLED touch display

Dell has used the Tandem OLED technology, which offers higher brightness while using less battery. There’s also a variant with a full-HD+ IPS panel that offers up to 120Hz refresh rate. Watching movies and shows on Netflix and YouTube was an excellent experience on the XPS 13. The colours are punchy, the blacks are deep, and the HDR mode enables brighter visuals.

The display’s touch response is also quite good, but I didn’t find myself using it as much as I thought I would.

Dell XPS 13 (9345) Keyboard, Touchpad, speakers, and webcam

• Keyboard – Backlit with touch function row
• Touchpad – Glass touchpad with Gorilla Glass 3
• Speakers – 2 x Woofers and 2 x Tweeters
• Webcam – 2-megapixel with Infrared sensors

The keyboard on the Dell XPS 13 looks slick, is compact, offers a touch function row, and has a fingerprint scanner, and you get keys with decent travel. However, the keys are also crammed because the laptop is compact. While it’s an excellent keyboard to type on, I hit the nearby key more often than I’d have liked. The backlight is enough at night, but it’s not super bright. The touch function row looks cool and switches between F functions and other action keys. However, there’s no feedback when you press the capacitive touch keys, and they don’t work when the laptop is in sleep mode, which is a bit disappointing. Luckily, it does function when watching anything on fullscreen.

Where’s the touchpad?

When you first open the lid of the XPS 13, you might be taken aback by the touchpad because, visually, there isn’t one. The entire section below the keyboard is protected with Gorilla Glass 3, and the touchpad is merged seamlessly with the glass. It looks beautiful, but using it is a guessing game of sorts. You don’t know where it begins and ends, which can be frustrating when you’re trying to drag and drop files. Everything else about the invisible touchpad is fine. You get decent haptic feedback support for multitouch gestures, and it’s super smooth.

The sound on the Dell XPS 13 is quite good. The laptop gets quad speakers placed under the keyboard, which include dual 2W woofers and dual 2W tweeters, bringing the total output to 8W. These are some of the better-sounding speakers I’ve heard on a 13-inch laptop. There’s some bass, the dialogue is clear, you get Dolby Atmos support, and I didn’t notice any crackling even at high volume.

The XPS 13 has quad-down-firing speakers

Finally, the web camera is supposedly better than previous generation XPS 13 laptops, and I found it good enough for video calling. It’s a 2-megapixel sensor supports 1080p video recording and Windows Studio effects. Daylight performance is good, but things get noisy in lowlight conditions. You also get infrared sensors for Windows Hello face recognition, which works extremely well even with all surrounding lights off. There’s no camera shutter or a quick disable key, though, which would’ve been nice.

Dell XPS 13 (9345) Software: Sprinkled with AI goodies

• OS – Windows 11 Home
• AI features – Copilot+, Cocreate, Windows Studio effects
• Other software – MyDell

The Dell XPS 13 runs Windows 11 Home out of the box and has several AI features. Since it has been labelled a Copilot+ laptop, you can access the Copilot+ chatbot, which can be summoned via the Copilot key.

You also get the useful Cocreator feature in Microsoft Paint and built-in Copilot in Microsoft 365 Office tools. I tried the Cocreator feature, and it worked quite well in helping me bring my imagination to life. The Windows Studio effects also let you blur the background, cut out background noise, and improve lighting in video calls. There’s also a Live caption feature that gives you instant English subtitles on any video service or app. Microsoft will also roll out its controversial Recall feature on the laptop once it has sorted out all the privacy concerns.

The MyDell app lets you toggle between the four available performance modes

The laptop also comes with the MyDell app, which lets you change power modes and adjust display colour settings with ease.

Dell XPS 13 (9345) Performance: Pretty good, but not there yet

• CPU – 12-core Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100
• RAM – Up to 32GB LPDDR5x
• Storage – Up to 1TB PCIe 4
• Graphics – Qualcomm Adreno GPU

The Dell XPS 13 is one of the first laptops to be equipped with the new ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chipset. The 12-core CPU is paired with a Qualcomm Adreno GPU and also features the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU that supports up to 45 TOPS. Meanwhile, the CPU is claimed to offer sustained performance at up to 25.5W max power. During my time with the laptop, I found that it offers excellent performance for day-to-day tasks and work. I could run multiple tabs with ease on Chrome alongside other apps. However, the browser would hang every time I woke the laptop from sleep. Apart from that, I did not face lag when using any other software.

The laptop does heat up, especially on the top underside

I ran a couple of synthetic benchmarks on the laptop and found that it mostly did better than other non-ARM 13-inch laptops and even the M3 MacBook Air.

There are a couple of power modes available in the MyDell app, and I noticed that the fans mostly kicked in only with the Ultra Performance mode enabled. The fans aren’t super loud, though. The bottom front of the laptop and the touch function row area did get hot when running some benchmarks and resource-intensive tasks, but when using the laptop normally, it never got warm. Normal use would mean running multiple tabs on Chrome, watching YouTube or Netflix, listening to music, and using a bunch of apps.

I haven’t tried to test any games on the laptop, as that’s not what the XPS 13 is meant for, but looking at the benchmark numbers, I’m sure it can run basic games and get playable frame rates.

In terms of connectivity, the laptop comes with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, and both of these worked flawlessly during the review.

Dell XPS 13 (9345) Battery: All-day champion

• Capacity – 55Whr
• Charging – 60W adapter included

According to Dell, the battery life on the new XPS 13 has seen a significant boost thanks to the Snapdragon X Elite chipset. It claims the laptop can deliver up to 35 hours of video playback on the full-HD+ display variant. However, our review unit came with the 3K Tandem OLED display. During my review, the laptop would easily last an entire day of work and about an hour or so of YouTube streaming. I binge-watched a season of Rick and Morty on Netflix without charging the laptop. All this was done with the Balanced performance mode and about 50 percent screen brightness.

The display can be plenty bright indoors

Charging the laptop’s 55Whr battery from 10 to 100 percent takes about 1 hour 30 mins, and you can also get about 50 percent charge with just 30 mins of charging. The XPS 13 is bundled with a 60W compact charging adapter.

Dell XPS 13 (9345) Verdict

The XPS in Dell stands for Extreme Performance System, and for a long time, most XPS machines have stood by that. The latest XPS 13 9345 with the Snapdragon X Elite chipset continues to do that but now does things better. The battery life is much better than Intel CPU options, and you get an excellent form factor. Although the AI features aren’t there yet, the XPS 13 is a good machine for anyone looking to buy an ultrabook that offers style, good performance, excellent battery life, bright and colourful display (OLED), and is sleek and compact.

As for alternatives, you can look at the Asus Zenbook S13 OLED, which costs less, offers good performance, has more ports, and has a keyboard that’s not as cramped. Then there’s the Apple MacBook Air 13 M3, which is similarly priced but once again offers a better keyboard experience, extra ports, and better app support.