| | | Good morning!  “At Jio, we bear the responsibility of launching products that can scale to millions and millions of Indians at giving the best customer experience and at a very affordable rate,” the words of Akash Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, during a fireside chat at the Mumbai Tech Week. It is impossible to disagree. An era of affordability ushered by Jio’s 4G network, and then with 5G when they led the way with unlimited data usage bundles. The JioPhone and JioBharat mobile phone attempts as a bridge between feature phones and often more expensive smartphones. Yet, it is clear to me that Jio is now looking at the future too. Perhaps they’re more sure of their hardware game, likely they feel confident of the quality they can deliver. JioAirFiber tries to take broadband connectivity to every potential user who either doesn’t want a wired broadband line, or isn’t residing in the vicinity of a fiber network. JioBook affordable laptops, are a good example of that. As would be the nifty JioTag Air and JioTag Go luggage/object trackers.  The reason I begin our conversation this week with Jio’s widening tech portfolio, is because of something Akash Ambani said. “We have an application that we'll be shortly launching, which is a cloud PC, which is a complete PC in your cloud that is accessible in each of your homes, but really be device agnostic,” he revealed. Quite what the specifics of this are remains to be seen, but the take could be relevant for many a user. Here’s some perspective — India’s PC market saw 14.4 million units shipped through 2024. Jio, on its part, has more than 450 million subscribers across India — a base they can easily tap. This is not to be confused with JioCloud, an online storage platform sprinkled with some AI features (of course) and DigiLocker access. | | Priced well, this could immediately have a much wider impact on India’s PC landscape than any PC maker has had till now. And that includes attempts at affordability by many a Chromebook (these are laptops running Google’s nimbler Chrome OS), and those underpowered ‘netbooks’ from a few years ago. | | | | | Whether Jio relies on Microsoft or Google for the underlying cloud PC operating system, or uses their own, remains to be seen. They’ve done the latter previously too. Just for context, the JioBook uses JioOS, an Android-based operating system. | The cloud PC promise to have a potential computing experience on any device with a screen, may sound too good to be true to you — but I wouldn’t at all bet against Jio delivering something no other computing device brand has been able to piece together. More than jolting a slumbering PC ecosystem, it’ll immediately be relevant for students, home entertainment and even workplaces. Cost-wise too. | | EDIT After desktop and the web, Adobe’s finally unlocked a proper Photoshop experience for the iPhone. And indeed the iPad. That’s proper competition for the iPhone focused Photomator, LumaFusion, Darkroom and pretty much every platform that brings imaging and design tools to editors. Layering, masking and of course, generative fill flexing its capabilities with Firefly as the underlying AI model. As of now, a few of the Photoshop for iPhone functionalities are free to use, while others require either an Adobe Creative Cloud plan or a new Photoshop mobile and web plan (that’s onwards of Rs 733.96 per month). Remove tool, content-aware generative fill, object select and magic wand are premium features which need a subscription. It is never a bad thing to have cross platform compatibility. Soon enough, you’ll notice how well Photoshop on the iPhone integrates with other Adobe products, including Lightroom. An Android version of Photoshop arrives later in 2025. | | Our extensive coverage of AI in Adobe’s platforms, in a pivotal year…  Adobe is releasing Firefly Video Model to everyone, but as another subscription We aren’t building AI models for the sake of it: Adobe’s Deepa Subramaniam With AI as a foundation, Adobe gives its creative apps a broader feature suite | | RELEVANCE In April, Apple Intelligence adds support for English (India). This AI wrapper for iOS is very much work in progress, and the tech giant understands it too (you may have seen some online media mentions about Gemini too; but that’s for another day). Also in April, users will be able to set from Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, or Urdu as the primary iPhone language. HT has seen a first glimpse at iOS working in these languages, and the language implementation is deep — it extends to all Apple apps, including Weather, Health and Settings. We don’t have the exact dates yet, but the iOS 18.4 update as well as the iPadOS 18.4 updates will bring along this linguistic feature set. The timing for this experience was the arrival of the iPhone 16e in India, which went on sale Friday past. We want Apple Intelligence to be locally relevant: Apple’s Bob Borchers As I sat down for a conversation with Bob Borchers, who is Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, there were quite a few pertinent questions and little time to waste. I asked Borchers if the expansion of Apple Intelligence’s scope of language understanding also requires a change in any approach of training the generative models to factor for regional and linguistic nuances? Borchers doesn’t believe the basics of AI training change, but there is of course wider training and the need for more care. Being locally relevant, he says. “We want it to respect the traditions and the cultures. We want all of those nuances to be ready. It takes time to do them, and to do them right,” he explains. There’s a lot more in that conversation, including about Apple’s first C1 modem which is sure to worry Qualcomm. | | More coverage of the iPhone 16e, and Apple’s broader India plans… We’re particularly keen on India: Tim Cook Apple assembling iPhone 16e in India firms up foundation for retail expansion iPhone 16e launched in India, Apple aims for performance-focused refresh | Check price and specifications | | ROADMAP Many, many years ago, Xiaomi took India’s TV market by storm. It was the year 2018, to be precise. That set off a chain of events which saw a transformation — larger screen sizes at much lower prices than conventional wisdom that preceded it. Every brand had to follow, and the TV market (and neither the consumers) haven’t looked back since. More than the product, I reference this memory from the past, because it has a link to the future. The people behind that evolution, and having left Xiaomi since, are back at it. Tech start-up Circuit House Technologies has unveiled a consumer tech brand Lumio. Home entertainment category is in focus, and TVs shall lead the way. The people behind include Raghu Reddy and Kailash S who are co-founders, while product focus is led by Sudeep Sahu, Abhishek Kumar and Vaibhav Gupta. The keys to success, they say at least with TVs, include different screen sizes with 4K which you’d expect with an assortment of HDR tech, QLED/OLED/MiniLED displays, Google's TV software to define the smart TV functionality, and installation as well as service available across the country. The first TVs are expected later this month. I’ll most certainly review them for you. | | KNOW | | Mozilla is updating the Terms of Use for Firefox, and this doesn’t seem to the Mozilla of old which seemed to have a different approach to handling user data, than some of the more commercially oriented web browser rivals. “You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content,” the wordings now read as this. | | | | | | | | | The much-delayed and perhaps somewhat awaited Amazon Alexa+ evolution has finally seen the light of day. Not that you or I will get to use it anytime soon — it begins rolling out in the US over the next few weeks as an early access period. Global availability? I wouldn’t even waste my breath with that question, for now. Anyway, Amazon insists they’ve rebuilt Alexa as more conversational, personalised and with agentic capabilities. It’ll cost $19.99 per month separately, but if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber in the US, then it is bundled. Quite where it is in the pecking order that also has Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok 3, remains to be seen. Amazon’s advantage would be availability on 600 million devices with Alexa — that’d include smart speakers, smart displays and Fire TV devices they’ve been selling for years. | | | Read more of our AI coverage… New AI models drive workplace transformation Exclusive | This is just the start of an AI tech cycle: Google’s Pat McCarthy Data centres: Balancing AI needs with sustainability | | | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here. | | Written and edited by Vishal Shanker Mathur. Produced by Md Shad Hasnain. | | | | | | | Get the Hindustan Times app and read premium stories | | | | | | View in Browser | Privacy Policy | Contact us You received this email because you signed up for HT Newsletters or because it is included in your subscription. Copyright © HT Digital Streams. All Rights Reserved | | | | |
