By Ryan Woo and Liz Lee BEIJING (Reuters) -Beijing and other cities braced for severe flooding on Friday as summer

Floods in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region could have caused damages to crops for about €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion), according

MANHASSET, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 22, 2023--

Buying a new phone will likely have you thinking about two types of features: On

PEACHTREE CORNERS, Ga.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 25, 2023--

If you're a big-picture sort of person, you need a laptop to match. You yearn

Apple Inc.’s most important new product unveiling of the year gets underway on Tuesday, when the company will

SANTA ROSA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 13, 2023--

WhatsApp will finally stop ruining people’s photos. The messaging app is a hugely popular way of sharing images and videos with friends. But it also shrinks those photos and clips down into a much smaller size, meaning that they are lower quality when they arrive on people’s phones. Now WhatsApp says it is rolling out an update that will let people send pictures in “HD quality” and “high resolution”. The update is coming for images in the “next few weeks”, WhatsApp said. HD videos will be “coming soon”, presumably on a longer timescale. All of the images will be protected with end-to-end encryption, as with messages sent on the app. WhatsApp will still make standard quality the default option when people are sending photos. It said that remains the way to “ensure sharing photos over WhatsApp remains fast and reliable”. Users will also have the option to receive images in standard definition – even if it has been sent in HD. If a person is being sent pictures but have a bad connection, they will receive it in standard quality and be given the option to upgrade it to full resolution. WhatsApp has long offered the option to change the quality that images are sent in, or to have the phone automatically choose between sending better images or saving data, depending on the connection. But even choosing the “best quality” option means that they are heavily compressed, and will lose the details and resolution of the original picture. Until now, users have been forced to use a complicated workaround to get images to send in full quality. That meant using WhatsApp’s options for sharing documents, and then sending an image through that – a fix that will no longer be required. WhatsApp has required some notoriety for shrinking down and compressing the images that are sent through it. Most other messaging platforms – including those made by Meta, such as Instagram and Messenger – are much better at preserving the quality of images sent through them. Read More WhatsApp rolls out AI tool for creating custom art iPhone 15: Global smartphone demand collapses as Apple aims to take top spot World’s first ‘superfast’ battery offers 400km range from 10 mins charge

NICHOLASVILLE, Ky. & QUINCY, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 18, 2023--

Uber Technologies Inc. is developing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot to integrate into its app, joining the long list

Apple has blamed Instagram and other popular apps for an overheating issue with the iPhone 15. The US tech giant said a software bug tied to the Meta-owned app was among the reasons for users reporting that its latest range of smartphones, unveiled last month, become “too hot to touch” while performing certain tasks. The company is working on an update to its latest iOS 17 operating system, which serves as the software for the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Meta has acknowledged the issue, which some users have dubbed “heatgate”, and modified its Instagram app in an effort to prevent it from heating up the device. Other apps blamed for the problem, including Uber and the video game Asphalt 9, are yet to roll out updates, according to Apple. There is also no timeline for when Apple’s own software fix would be issued but the firm said no safety issues should prevent iPhone 15 owners from using their devices while awaiting the update. “We have identified a few conditions which can cause iPhones to run warmer than expected,” Apple said in a short statement. It’s not unusual for new iPhones to get uncomfortably warm during the first few days of use or when they are being restored with backup information stored in the cloud – issues that Apple already flags for users. The devices also can get hot when using apps such as video games and augmented reality technology that require a lot of processing power, but the heating issues with the iPhone 15 models have gone beyond those typical situations. In its acknowledgement, Apple stressed that the trouble isn’t related to the new titanium casing that houses the high-end iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max instead of the stainless steel used on older smartphones. Apple also dismissed speculation that the overheating problem in the new models might be tied to a shift from its proprietary Lightning charging cable to the more widely used USB-C port that allowed it to comply with a mandate issued by European regulators. Although Apple expressed confidence that the overheating issue can be quickly fixed with the upcoming software updates, the problem still could dampen sales of its marquee product at a time when the company has faced three consecutive quarters of year-over-year declines in overall sales. The downturn has affected iPhone sales, which fell by a combined 4 per cent in the nine months covered by Apple’s past three fiscal quarters compared with a year earlier. Apple is trying to boost its sales in part by raising the starting price for its top-of-the-line iPhone 15 Pro Max to $1,200, an increase of $100, or 9 per cent, from last year’s flagship model. In its acknowledgement of the iPhone 15 overheating issue, Apple said the planned software update would not impact the phone’s performance, which analysts had warned is a possibility. Additional reporting from agencies Read More Tim Cook interview: Apple boss talks trillion-dollar transformation and ushering in new era of computing