oppo upcoming F1 Plus with 5.5" FHD Display, 4GB RAM

After just releasing the Oppo F1, today the OEM announced that it plans to out an upgraded F1 Plus version soon. The handset should arrive this April and is said to offer a bigger 5.5" display with FullHD resolution and 4GB of RAM, compared to the smaller 5" HD panel and 3GB of memory on the F1.

The announcement took place at the company's Mumbai launch event for the Oppo F1 today. The provided teaser also mentions an improved selfie experience for the Plus model. The basic F1 is already marketed as a selfie expert phone and packs an 8MP f/2.0 front snapper with a 1/4" sensor, so the Plus could potentially upgrade the front camera even further, or at least, improve the software side.

Other than that, we can only assume that the F1 Plus will share the rest of the specs with its sibling, as well as most of the Oppo R7 line. This includes the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 SoC, a 13MP main shooter with f/2.2 aperture, also LTE connectivity and Dual-SIM support. Design-wise, we expect little change as well, meaning that overall the F1 Plus could be somewhat of a mirror image of the R7s, just like the F1 is to the R7 in a lot of respects.

As already mentioned, the new device should go on sale in India this April for INR 26,990 or around $395, which is quite a big of a markup from the INR 15,990 (around $235) the F1 is going for.

Upcoming Bikes in India: Ducati XDiavel and XDiavel S

Literally named after the devil, the Ducati Diavel is a power cruiser with road presence like no other. With its hunkered-down profile and brutish proportions the Diavel is a motorcycle that was designed to never fail at catching attention and arresting it there. Despite its obvious high price tag, the motorcycle has been a runaway success not just over the globe but in India too. Recognising that, Ducati India will be bringing in the XDiavel, the latest iteration of the Diavel, into the country soon.

First unveiled at the EICMA motor show in Milan a few months back, the XDiavel is the first Ducati to come with a final belt drive. This technology, already made popular by Harley-Davidson models, guarantee reliable and safer power transmission over a long time compared to chain drives.

Powered by the new Ducati Testastretta DVT 1262cc engine, the XDiavel churns out 158PS of power and a tree-uprooting 128.9Nm of torque. Ducati claims that the increase in engine capacity compared to the Testastretta 1200, together with the use of the Desmodromic Variable Timing system, has enabled supply of incredibly full and at the same time fluid torque at low running speeds, while also guaranteeing sports performance when the throttle is fully opened. In addition, the Ducati Testastretta DVT 1262 has a particularly detailed design which, thanks to the repositioning of the water pump inside the V of the cylinders, does away with the cooling system pipes on the left side.

Visually, the XDiavel looks pretty similar to the standard Diavel, and only a Ducatisti would be able to tell them apart. The cooling system has been rerouted to give it a cleaner overall look, and the twin exhaust pipes now peek out from behind that monstrous engine in a much subtler manner. That said, the mean all-black theme and the full-LED headlights should serve as additional differentiators for the XDiavel over its bog-standard sibling. The alloys also have a new multi-spoke pattern. Oh, and the XDiavel S sets some more upmarket components as well as inverted daytime-running-lights.  

When it goes on sale in India, expect the XDiavel to cost a bit more than the standard Diavel that currently retails for Rs 14 lakh (ex-showroom, Mumbai). 

Ninth planet may exist and it is not Pluto

There might be a ninth planet in the solar system after all — and it is not Pluto.

On Wednesday, two astronomers reported that they had compelling signs of something bigger and farther away — something that would definitely satisfy the current definition of a planet, where Pluto falls short.

“We are pretty sure there’s one out there,” said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.

What Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet, so it would be premature to revise mnemonics of the planets just yet.

In a paper in The Astronomical Journal, Professors Brown and Batygin lay out a detailed circumstantial argument for the planet’s existence in what astronomers have observed — a half-dozen small bodies in distant, highly elliptical orbits.

What is striking, the scientists said, is that the orbits of all six loop outward in the same quadrant of the solar system and are tilted at about the same angle. The odds of that happening by chance are about 1 in 14,000, Prof. Batygin said.

A ninth planet could be gravitationally herding them into these orbits.

For the calculations to work, the planet would be quite large — at least as big as Earth, and likely much bigger — a mini-Neptune with a thick atmosphere around a rocky core, with perhaps 10 times the mass of Earth. It would dwarf Pluto, at about 4,500 times its mass.

Pluto, at its most distant, is 4.6 billion miles from the sun. The potential ninth planet, at its closest, would be about 20 billion miles away; at its farthest, it could be a trillion miles away. It would take from 10,000 to 20,000 years to complete one orbit around the sun.

“We have pretty good constraints on its orbit,” Brown said. “What we don’t know is where it is in its orbit, which is too bad.”

Alessandro Morbidelli of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, an expert in dynamics of the solar system, said he was convinced. “I think the chase is now on to find this planet,” he said. — New York Times News Service