The Tech Weekender: PUBG New State, new WhatsApp features, Google Pixel 5a announced, and more

During the outage, Facebook showed the message “We’re sorry, but something went wrong. Please try again.”

PUBG New State pre-registrations have been live since February 2021. The company has confirmed it will conduct alpha testing of its upcoming battle royale in Q2 2021. Alongside, it has also announced that PUBG New State has crossed over 10 million pre-registrations on the Google Play Store. The alpha testing will be conducted in limited regions. Eligible players will get the chance to play PUBG New State ahead of its official release and report bugs if any. Currently, there is no word on the alpha testing of the game in India. More details here.

iQOO 7 launch in India is confirmed for April 2021. The company has also confirmed the iQOO 7 price in India. While the Vivo sub-brand is launching the flagship Snapdragon 888 SoC-powered smartphone under Rs 40,000, it is taking away one of the best features from the device. According to the iQOO 7 official landing page, the device will come with 66W fast charging support. That, by any means, is not slow charging and can charge the 4,000 mAh battery from zero to 100 percent within 30 minutes. However, the iQOO 7 launched in China comes with a 120W fast charging support. More details here.

South Korea's LG Electronics said  it will wind down its loss-making mobile division - a move that is set to make it the first major smartphone brand to completely withdraw from the market. The division has logged nearly six years of losses totalling some $4.5 billion, and dropping out of the fiercely competitive sector would allow LG to focus on growth areas such as electric vehicle components, connected devices and smart homes, it said in a statement.

Google Pixel 5a has been announced. The company decided to make an abrupt announcement of its upcoming Pixel smartphone on late Friday evening. The announcement was made following rumours of the Google Pixel 5a launch cancelled due to chip shortage. Minutes after the rumour went viral on the internet, Google made the Pixel 5a official. A Google spokesperson confirmed that the Google Pixel 5a launch will take place. However, the phone will launch only in the US and Japan. More details here.

OnePlus Nord LE has been announced. The Nord LE is a limited edition smartphone that will be available only for one user worldwide. In case you are wondering, the LE in OnePlus Nord LE stands for Literally Only One Edition. More details here.

WhatsApp Desktop, in March, received support for voice and video calls. The Facebook-owned messaging app rolled out the feature to more users last month. According to a new report, the feature has now been rolled out to all WhatsApp users. Users on WhatsApp Desktop can take voice and video calls. Much like the mobile version, WhatsApp voice and video calls on the desktop are end-to-end encrypted. To know how to make voice/ video calls on WhatsApp Desktop, click here.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users experienced a brief outage during the wee hours of April 9. According to DownDetector, Facebook was down for nearly 30 minutes. The three apps are now back online. A Facebook spokesperson acknowledged the issue and said, “a configuration change caused Facebook services to be unavailable to some people. We quickly investigated and resolved the issue.” More details here.

While they have since been taken down, a couple of Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 support pages had sprung up online, which might suggest a launch is around the corner. The pages were placeholders for the two versions the laptop is likely to ship in. One will be powered by an Intel processor and the other by AMD. More details here.

Realme C25 launched in India today for under Rs 10,000. At the Realme C-series launch event, the company also unveiled the Realme C20 and the Realme C21. Click here to check the price and specifications.

Google has revealed that it will host its annual developer conference 'Google I/O 2021' on May 18. Like most events this year, the Google I/O 2021 will be hosted virtually. Notably, this is the first virtual-only Google I/O. The company had cancelled the conference last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. More details here.

One of the reasons why WhatsApp makes it so difficult to change phones is that there is no official support for moving your chat history from one platform to the next. Currently, there is no way to move your data easily from Android to iOS. However, that may soon change. WhatsApp is now working on an official transfer tool that will help you move your chats between different platforms natively. The only prerequisite for this is that both platforms should have the same version of WhatsApp installed. More details here.