The best gadgets to give a college student

If you're shopping for a gift for a college student over the holidays, consider gifting a gadget rather than a pair of fresh bed sheets.

As CNBC's in-house gadget reviewer, I have a few ideas that I think college students will really love, from streaming TV sticks to smart speakers and portable gaming systems. And if your student is planning to spend any time abroad, I even have a good idea on an unlocked cellphone so you don't need to worry about paying for expensive roaming fees.

Here are the best gadgets to give a college student.

• Google Chromecast

  In other gift guides, I've recommended the Amazon Fire TV and the Apple TV, but I think the Chromecast is the best streaming TV bet for a college student. It lets them stream movies, TV shows, pictures and more from a smartphone to their dorm room TV. And, if they have friends, they can enable a guest mode so that others can get in on the fun. It's only $35, so it won't break the bank, and you won't have to worry about it if your kid's roommate runs off with it at the end of the year.

  Price: $35
  Buy Now: Google Chromecast

  

  Google

• Motorola G5S Plus

  The Motorola G5S Plus is an unlocked cellphone that works on all major U.S. carriers (without a contract) and can also be used abroad. It's perfect if you have a son or daughter getting ready for a semester abroad, since it costs only $240 but offers all the basics, like fast charging, decent cameras, a fingerprint reader, a large 5.5-inch 1080p display and a premium all-metal design. Once your kid sets foot in Europe (or elsewhere) just buy a local SIM and you'll save big on data and roaming fees you might otherwise pay some U.S. carriers

  Price: $239.99
  Buy now: Motorola G5S Plus

  
  

  Motorola

• Apple AirPods

  Every kid needs a decent set of headphones and, while they're still kind of silly looking, Apple's AirPods are my top choice for most activities. They're compact, offer great battery life and work with iPhones and Androids. Sure, you might want a set of noise-canceling cans for longer trips, but they cost more and aren't as portable as AirPods. Plus, now that smartphones are largely ditching the headphone jack, it's time to get on board with Bluetooth headphones anyway.

  Price: $159
  Buy now: AirPods

  

• Nintendo Switch

  I don't often write about video game systems, but the Nintendo Switch is too great to ignore. There are plenty of awesome new games, including my favorites: "Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" and "Super Mario Odyssey." The Switch can plug into a TV and serve as a regular gaming console, or can be carried around as a portable system with the controllers locked into the sides. It even has a built-in kickstand on the back for gaming on the train or on an airplane. Just beware: It might be hard to find, so keep an eye out for retailers that have stock.

  Price: $299
  Buy now: Nintendo Switch

  Sonos One

  
  

  Nintendo

• The Sonos One is Sonos' latest speaker and, this time, it includes support for Amazon Alexa. Just speak what you want to hear: Say "Alexa, play Miles Davis on Spotify," and the speaker starts spitting out tunes. You can even use it to control smart lights, check the weather and more. You'll get the same great audio Sonos made its name for from earlier Play:1 speakers — that is to say full sounding with plenty of bass — and support for multiroom audio for when your kids move into their own home.

  Price: $199
  Buy now: Sonos One

  
  

  Sonos

• Kindle Paperwhite

  You can't go wrong giving a Kindle, and the Kindle Paperwhite remains one of my favorite models. It offers a backlight for nighttime reading, plenty of battery life and a really comfortable form factor for binge-reading. If you're willing to splurge, check out the new Kindle Oasis, which is the best eReader I've ever used, though it costs a good deal more than the Paperwhite.

  Price: $119.99
  Buy now: Kindle Paperwhite

  

Nikon D850: Best full-frame DSLR now in town

New Delhi: Japanese major Nikon, which is celebrating 100 years in business this year, has unveiled its high-end "Nikon D850" -- the first full-frame DSLR to earn a perfect score of 100 from the independent ratings website DxOMark on both colour and dynamic range coming from the sensor.

The FX-format (full-frame) camera has an impressive 45.7MP sensor (up from its successor D810`s 36.3MP) with a native ISO sensitivity range of 64-25,600 and an upgraded 153-point autofocus system.

The device has seven frames per second (7fps) with continuous autofocusing (AF) which can be upgraded to 9fps with an additional battery grip.

Priced at Rs 254,950 (body only) and Rs 299,950 with the AF-S NIKKOR 24-120mm f/4G ED VR lens, let us see what this mid-range model in Nikon`s full-frame DSLR camera line-up and successor to D810 has to offer to photo enthusiasts.

Design: The body design of the D850 is similar to the earlier D810, but this time, Nikon has done away with the built-in flash -- keeping in mind the needs of professional photographers.

The D850 is undoubtedly one of the company`s fastest-shooting DSLRs. The camera comes with a touch-enabled, 3.2 inch diagonal tilting LCD with 2,359K dots.

The weather-sealed magnesium alloy body is resistant to dust and moisture.

The camera weighs 915 gms with a dimension of 146 x 124 x 79mm. Nikon has designed back-side illuminated (BSI) full-frame image sensor with no optical low-pass filter.

Sensor: The D850 has Nikon`s first-ever BSI full-frame image sensor (35.9 mm x 23.9 mm) with no optical low-pass filter which will improve the low-light performance and peripheral image quality.

The BSI CMOS sensor delivers superior image quality when compared to traditional CMOS sensors. The D850 offer the lowest base ISO (ISO 64) of any DSLR or mirrorless cameras.

Video shooting: The camera can shoot videos in full-frame 4K UHD with NIKKOR wide-angle lenses as well as full high-definition (HD), slow-motion video recording of up to 120fps.

Perfect for multimedia shooting, the D850 supports 4K videography and 8K time-lapse movie production with silent interval timer photography as slow as 0.5 seconds.

Videographers can easily fine-tune colour, exposure and brightness that is reflected in white blown-out areas with Nikon`s "Flat" Picture Control, all without any hassle.

Card Slot: The camera has two card slots -- one XQD card and the other Secure Digital (SD) card.

Pros: Lowest base ISO, high-resolution and sharp details, new silent shooting mode, large viewfinder, tilt-angle touchscreen LCD, proven AF system, good battery life and 4K UHD video shooting.

Cons: No built-in flash, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connection lags.

Final Take: The D850 is probably the most well-rounded, full-frame DSLR camera from Nikon after Canon launched its 50 MPI (EOS 5DS) a few months back.

We, however, think Nikon has a slight edge when it comes to image quality.

The flexible shooting position and more focus points are helpful if you are covering fast-action games like football, hockey and badminton.

The continuous shooting mode is really fast and flawless with low sound. A small in-built flash could have make it much more attractive but the ISO expansion limit is so high and with good quality that the flash will not required in most of situations (at least in news photography).

The D850`s key strengths are its outstanding colour and dynamic range at base ISO where it edges past its rivals.

Overall, we recommend hybrid photographers and multimedia creators to opt for the best DSLR experience so far in Nikon D850.

Phablets to hit 1bn units by 2021: IDC

San Francisco: Phablets (smartphones with screen size of 5.5-7 inches) will far outpace total market growth by climbing from 611 million units in 2017 to one billion units in 2021, representing a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.1 percent.

In comparison, the total smartphone market is expected to grow at three percent CAGR during the same period, while normal smartphones (under 5.5 inches) will decline 7.4 percent, the International Data Corporation (IDC) said on Thursday.

The smartphone shipments will grow from 1.5 billion units in 2017 to 1.7 billion units in 2021 globally.

In 2012, phablets were just one percent of smartphone shipments and now they are approaching 50 percent of the market.

"The rapid transition to bezel-less smartphones will help minimise the device footprint while growing the screen size from previous generations," said Ryan Reith, Programme Vice President with IDC`s "Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers".

Android-based phablets have been the primary driver of large-screen smartphones and IDC expects this trend to continue in the years to come.

Samsung`s early dominance of the phablet category has been short-lived as other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) - many of which are Chinese OEMs - quickly pushed the category into the mainstream and even low end.

As a result, China consumed 50 percent of the 437.4 million phablets shipped in 2016.

IDC expects China will remain the largest market for large-screen smartphones and to grow at a CAGR of 12.6 percent.

"There is no doubt that 2017 gave birth to the new ultra high-end segment of the smartphone market," said Anthony Scarsella, IDC Research Manager.

"The latest flagship devices from Samsung, Apple, Google, LG, and others has pushed the high end to the $850-plus level for the first time."

Android-powered smartphones have already captured 85 percent of total market volume and IDC expects this share to remain relatively stable.

OnePlus 5T gets over 450,000 reservations for first sale in China

OnePlus 5T, the recent flagship smartphone from the company that was launched last month has made its debut in China after being released in the global markets such as India, Europe and the US.

In China, the first sale happened on Friday via the online retailer JD.com via GizmoChina. The retailer has announced that over 450,000 reservations were made ahead of the sale. The registrations were open on November 28 and within 48 hours, the OnePlus 5T has got over 450,000 registrations.

Notably, both the 6GB RAM and 8GB variants of the smartphone were available for sale in the Midnight Black color variant. The Lava Red color variant of the smartphone that was announced in the country is slated to be made available from December 17.

In terms of specifications, the OnePlus 5T is pretty similar to its prequel - the OnePlus 5 except for the changes in the display and camera.

The OnePlus 5T flaunts a 6.01-inch Optic AMOLED display with the front panel being occupied predominantly by the display. The device features a full-screen design with an 80% screen-to-body ratio. The display has a FHD+ resolution of 2160 x 1080 pixels and an aspect ratio of 18:9. In terms of camera, there is a dual rear camera setup with a 16MP primary sensor and a 20MP secondary sensor both with f/1.7 aperture. The selfie camera is a 20MP sensor with f/2.0 aperture.

Other specifications are similar to those of the OnePlus 5. There is an octa-core Snapdragon 835 SoC teamed up with 6GB/8GB RAM and 64GB/128GB storage space. The smartphone runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat topped with OxygenOS 4.7. The device is all set to get the Android Oreo beta within this month. A 3300mAh battery powers the OnePlus 5T with the Dash Charging technology. And, there is a fingerprint sensor at the rear as the device does not have a home button at the front due to the full-screen design.

OnePlus 5T, the recent flagship smartphone from the company that was launched last month has made its debut in China after being released in the global markets such as India, Europe and the US.

In China, the first sale happened on Friday via the online retailer JD.com via GizmoChina. The retailer has announced that over 450,000 reservations were made ahead of the sale. The registrations were open on November 28 and within 48 hours, the OnePlus 5T has got over 450,000 registrations.

Notably, both the 6GB RAM and 8GB variants of the smartphone were available for sale in the Midnight Black color variant. The Lava Red color variant of the smartphone that was announced in the country is slated to be made available from December 17.

In terms of specifications, the OnePlus 5T is pretty similar to its prequel - the OnePlus 5 except for the changes in the display and camera.

The OnePlus 5T flaunts a 6.01-inch Optic AMOLED display with the front panel being occupied predominantly by the display. The device features a full-screen design with an 80% screen-to-body ratio. The display has a FHD+ resolution of 2160 x 1080 pixels and an aspect ratio of 18:9. In terms of camera, there is a dual rear camera setup with a 16MP primary sensor and a 20MP secondary sensor both with f/1.7 aperture. The selfie camera is a 20MP sensor with f/2.0 aperture.

Other specifications are similar to those of the OnePlus 5. There is an octa-core Snapdragon 835 SoC teamed up with 6GB/8GB RAM and 64GB/128GB storage space. The smartphone runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat topped with OxygenOS 4.7. The device is all set to get the Android Oreo beta within this month. A 3300mAh battery powers the OnePlus 5T with the Dash Charging technology. And, there is a fingerprint sensor at the rear as the device does not have a home button at the front due to the full-screen design.

And Here's Another PayPal Phishing Scam You'll Want to Avoid

The holidays are upon us, and so it is to remind ourselves once again of just how much cyber criminals enjoy playing on the very fears of consumer fraud they elicit. If the last thing you want interrupting your time with friends and loved ones is a slew of fraudulent bank charges, you'll need to keep your wits about you. 

As you read this, an illicit campaign is underway to deceive PayPal users into believing recent transactions they've made "could not be verified." In emails bearing PayPal's logo, consumers are warned that PayPal has detected suspicious activity on their accounts and that the company requires updated information to avoid fraudulent charges.

This is a classic phishing scam, one you should become accustomed to recognizing on sight. 

Now, you can just skip the rest of this article if you're able to follow one simple instruction: Never login or provide any information to a website that you reach by clicking on a link sent to you by email, no matter how official or authentic it seems. If you get an email warning you about a security issue, pop open a new tab, manually type the company's URL in yourself, and proceed from there. Always treat all links sent to you by email-as well as files, for that matter-with the utmost suspicion.

It's not paranoia. It's common sense.

On Friday, this latest of the many, many PayPal scam out there was detected by Christopher Boyd, a malware analyst at FaceTime Security Labs. In screenshots published by Boyd on the website of Malwarebytes, you can see how the fairly convincing scam unfolds.

At first glance, the fake email account alerting users lookxs real. It appears to originate from " service@paypal.com ,"b ut that's just what the scammers typed in as their name. It's not the actual email address from which the message originates. One subject line reads: "[New Transaction Statements] we're letting you know : We couldn't verify your recent transactions". Another says: "You payments processed cannot completed."

You might think that anyone would surely notice the broken English and misuse of punctuation and think, "Gee, that seems strange." Sadly, I can assure you that many people out there are not so scrutinizing, nor is falling victim to a phishing campaign nestled in the forefront of their mind. Below is a copy of one of these fake emails for reference. All said, it's pretty authentic looking.

A message on the page, which is also pretty terribly written, warns that in order to return "your account to regular standing" you'll need to verify a few personal details. (A fake "case ID" number is also provided.)

You'll eventually find yourself on a page that requests your full name, address, date of birth and mother's maiden name-everything short of a Social Security number that a person would need to effectively steal your identity. It also requests that you enter your credit card information, including the full number, expiration date and security code.

"Sadly, anyone submitting their information to this scam will have more to worry about than a fictional declined payment, and may well wander into the land of multiple actual not-declined-at-all payments instead," writes Boyd, noting that despite how obvious this scam appears to people accustomed to being targeted by phishing scams, there will "always be someone who panics" and starts coughing up their personal and financial data.

Spotting a phishing campaign can be difficult, but PayPal has outlined a number of things to watch out for and the first is a false sense of urgency: "Many scam emails tell you that your account will be in jeopardy if something critical is not updated right away," the company says.

If you think you've been targeted by scammers purporting to be PayPal, you should forward the entire email to spoof@paypal.com , subject line intact.

Redbox's Crafty Workaround for Stocking Disney Movies Backfires With Lawsuit

Not only is Redbox still around, it kicked off a big expansion this year. And on Thursday, The Walt Disney Company filed a lawsuit against the kiosk DVD rental company for its practice of reselling digital download codes that come with Disney DVDs. If the house of the mouse succeeds in court, Redbox is in a lot of trouble.

Disney hasn't been particularly friendly with rental and streaming companies lately. Most notably, it cut ties with Netflix in August because it plans to launch its own streaming service. In lieu of a distribution agreement, Redbox has been buying retail copies of Disney DVD and Blu-rays to stock its kiosks. Such copies often come with slips of paper that have a digital download code for the same movie, and Redbox saw an opportunity. Last month, it started selling the codes to its customers for prices ranging between $7.99 and $14.99. Considering the fact that a digital copy of Star Wars: The Force Awakens goes for $19.99 on iTunes, Disney was getting seriously undercut. And Redbox was cleverly doubling its revenue sources because it was renting the DVDs as well.

Disney has asked for an injunction on any further sales of download codes, and it wants either the money from Redbox's sales or $150,000 per copyright infringement. There's a big gap between $7.99 and $150,000, so the judge holds a lot of power here.

When contacted by Gizmodo for comment, a spokesperson for Redbox told us, "While we don't comment on pending litigation, we feel very confident in our pro-consumer position." In a statement, Disney told us, "Redbox is selling our digital movie codes in blatant disregard of clear prohibitions against doing so. Their actions violate our contracts and copyrights, and we have filed this action to stop Redbox's unauthorized conduct."

Buying retail copies to stock its machines is nothing new for Redbox. When we spoke to Mitch Lowe, current CEO of MoviePass and former president of Redbox, he told us he started the practice in 2010. Warner, Fox, and Universal were all refusing to work with him. They wanted a 28-day delay before offering the films in kiosks, and started advertising their movies as "not available at Redbox or Netflix." He said he lost $28 million in revenue that quarter, "Solely due to consumer confusion, when in fact, I really did have those titles because I gave 1,800 credit cards out to my field employees to buy every copy at Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy every Tuesday."

In the long-term, Lowe's decision to lose money paid off, allowing Redbox to maintain customer loyalty by staying stocked. But this situation with Disney is an entirely different beast. It seems possible that Redbox was making more money than it would have in a standard distribution agreement.

The resell of digital copies has been controversial in the last few years. In 2016 , a judge ruled that the first-sale doctrine didn't apply in a case of people reselling music files they'd downloaded from iTunes because transferring digital files from one storage device to another constituted unauthorized reproduction. But if a person just sells a one-time use download code, nothing is being reproduced. It'll be interesting to see these two well-funded companies slug it out in court over whether Disney even has the right to say that you can't sell these codes.

What Do the AI Chips in New Smartphones Actually Do?

Artificial intelligence is coming to your phone. The iPhone X has a Neural Engine as part of its A11 Bionic chip; the Huawei Kiri 970 chip has what's called a Neural Processing Unit or NPU on it; and the Pixel 2 has a secret AI-powered imaging chip that just got activated. So what exactly are these next-gen chips designed to do?

As mobile chipsets have grown smaller and more sophisticated, they've started to take on more jobs and more different kinds of jobs. Case in point, integrated graphics-GPUs now sit alongside CPUs at the heart of high-end smartphones, handling all the heavy lifting for the visuals so the main processor can take a breather or get busy with something else.

The new breed of AI chips are very similar-only this time the designated tasks are recognizing pictures of your pets rather than rendering photo-realistic FPS backgrounds.

What we talk about when we talk about AI

AI, or artificial intelligence, means just that. The scope of the term tends to shift and evolve over time, but broadly speaking it's anything where a machine can show human-style thought and reasoning.

A person hidden behind a screen operating levers on a mechanical robot is artificial intelligence in the broadest sense-of course today's AI is way beyond that, but having a programmer code responses into a computer system is just a more advanced version of getting the same end result (a robot that acts like a human).

Google, show me some dogs. Image: Screenshot

As for computer science and the smartphones in your pocket, here AI tends to be more narrowly defined. In particular it usually involvesmachine learning , the ability for a system to learn outside of its original programming, and deep learning , which is a type of machine learning that tries to mimic the human brain with many layers of computation. Those layers are called neural networks, based on the neural networks inside our heads.

So machine learning might be able to spot a spam message in your inbox based on spam it's seen before, even if the characteristics of the incoming email weren't originally coded into the filter-it's learned what spam email is.

Deep learning is very similar, just more advanced and nuanced, and better at certain tasks, especially in computer vision-the "deep" bit means a whole lot more data, more layers, and smarter weighting. The most well-known example is being able to recognize what a dog looks like from a million pictures of dogs.

Plain old machine learning could do the same image recognition task, but it would take longer, need more manual coding, and not be as accurate, especially as the variety of images increased. With the help of today's superpowered hardware, deep learning (a particular approach to machine learning, remember), is much better at the job.

Apple introduces its Neural Engine. Image: Apple

To put it another way, a machine learning system would have to be told that cats had whiskers to be able to recognize cats. A deep learning system would work out that cats had whiskers on its own.

Bear in mind that an AI expert could write a volume of books on the concepts we've just covered in a couple of paragraphs, so we've had to simplify it, but those are the basic ideas you need to know.

AI chips on smartphones

As we said at the start, in essence, AI chips are doing exactly what GPU chips do, only for artificial intelligence rather than graphics-offering a separate space where calculations particularly important for machine learning and deep learning can be carried out. As with GPUs and 3D graphics, AI chips give the CPU time to focus on other tasks, and reduces battery draw at the same time. In also means your data is more secure, because less of it has to be sent off to the cloud for processing.

So what does this mean in the real world? It means image recognition and processing could be a lot faster. For instance, Huawei claims that its NPU can perform image recognition on 2,000 pictures every second, which the company also claims is 20 times faster than it would take with a standard CPU.

The Huawei Kirin 970 has a dedicated AI component. Image: Huawei

More specifically , it can perform 1.92 teraflops, or a trillion floating point operations per second, when working with 16-bit floating point numbers. As opposed to integers or whole numbers, floating point numbers-with decimal points-are crucial to the calculations running through the neural networks involved with deep learning.

Apple calls its AI chip, part of the A11 Bionic chip, the Neural Engine. Again, it's dedicated to machine learning and deep learning tasks-recognizing your face, recognizing your voice, recording animojis, and recognizing what you're trying to frame in the camera. It can handle some 600 billion operations per second, Apple claims .

App developers can tap into this through Core ML , and easy plug-and-play way of incorporating image recognition and other AI algorithms. Core ML doesn't require the iPhone X to run, but the Neural Engine handles these types of tasks faster. As with the Huawei chip, the time spend offloading all this data processing to the cloud should be vastly reduced, theoretically improving performance and again lessening the strain on battery life.

AI chips, recognizing faces now, and much more soon. Image: Apple

And that's really what these chips are about: Handling the specific types of programming tasks that machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks rely on, on the phone, faster than the CPU or GPU can manage. When Face ID works in a snap, you've likely got the Neural Engine to thank.

Is this the future? Will all smartphone inevitably come with dedicated AI chips in future? As the role of artificial intelligence on our handsets grows, the answer is likely yes. Qualcomm chips can already use specific parts of the CPU for specific AI tasks, and separate AI chips is the next step. Right now these chips are only being utilized for a small subsection of tasks, but their importance is going to only grow.

How Dolby is innovating in India

Dolby is a brand that doesn't need any introduction. Over the last two decades, its surround sound expertise made the company a household name. However, Dolby isn't stopping at audio, in fact, it wants to provide a complete immersive content experience on whichever platform you choose. Here are 5 ways in which Dolby is making that happen in India

Dolby Atmos is an end-to-end audio solution, which enables the engineers to get a new level of creative control with directional object-oriented sound immersing the audience further than any other cinematic audio technology. Introduced in 2012 in India, Atmos has become an industry standard across the various film industries in the country.

Although a feature found on premium devices in initially, Atmos has reached the masses as a result of various implementations on smartphones and laptops,thus simulating the audio effect that one gets in a cinema with more than 50 speakers on something that works with headphones.

Dolby was at the forefront when the Indian cable television industry was transitioning towards DTH, starting with Sun Direct. Today all HD broadcast channels in India have Dolby Surround sound.

If Dolby's surround sound technology and Atmos revolutionized how we experienced audio, Vision is geared towards accomplishing the same with how we experience content visually. Vision is a technology based around HDR and can provide up to 10,000 nits of peak brightness and REC 2020 color space, showing content with better contrast and more natural colors.

Earlier, Dolby Vision technology was found only in premium televisions that cost over a lakh. However, accessibility to Dolby Vision is no longer a privilege for wealthy few after LG adopted the technology to its G6 smartphone. More recently, Apple has adopted the standard in the new Apple iPhone X, making it more prominent.

Dolby prides itself on being more than just a feature or technology found in a device, but rather a creator of industry-wide norms that in return provides complete and immersive content to the audience.Dolby creates the tools for the content creators, they work with the content delivery platforms and work with OEMs to integrate their technologies in hardware that consumers end up buying or consuming.

With the creation of low bit rate AC4 codec and over 13 mixing facilities across the country, Dolby played a key role in transforming the audio post-production process for television.

Dolby was at the forefront when the Indian cable television industry was transitioning towards DTH, starting with Sun Direct. Today all HD broadcast channels in India have Dolby Surround sound.

Dolby currently dominates the HD content space with over 15 million set-top boxes delivering Dolby powered content. According to Dolby's senior director for emerging markets Pankaj Kedia, Dolby is working towards sports broadcasting with the Atmos technology, with English Premier League at the focus.

Dolby plays an end-to-end role in the media consumption process. Another key area Dolby is making serious strides forward is in over the top (OTT) content space. In recent times, Dolby has been working closely with Netflix so as to provide an immersive experience to the viewer, especially on the Netflix only movie Okja. Currently, Dolby has a similar arrangement with Amazon for Prime video also.

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