GadgetByte Nepal

Apex Digital, a subsidiary of Apex Group, has now officially inaugurated its another new Smart Store at Dang today. It is their 7th Smart Store and the second biggest after Narayanghat. It can be taken as a remarkable milestone in their target of opening 40 of such stores in two years of time.

Apex Digital’s first 6 smart stores are up and running since early October of this year. Those are located in Pako (New Road), Thimi (Bhaktapur), Pokhara, Dharan, and Damak. This new 7th Smart Store of Apex Digital is now open at NewRoad, Ghorahi, Dang. These stores are one of their kind and offer real friendly environment inside for reviewing different brands in one location.

Mr. Prakash Subedi, Brand Manager of Apex Digital said, “The new Smart Store at New Road, Dang, Ghorahi – a place you must visit. It is indeed spacious area with 850 sq. ft. where Customer engagement and experience zone will be available on this Smart Store to ensure convenience and Smart service to our Smart customers.”

Apex Digital is displaying smartphones from Apple, Samsung, Gionee, HTC, ZTE, Xiaomi, Lenovo and ZOPO at a separate smart table, which the company claims is the first of its kind in Nepal. “Biswash Chhari, Nepali Bhari” is the mantra of Apex Digital which is getting more relevant each day.

On the occasion of the opening of this new Apex Digital – Smart Store, the company has announced various attractive discounts and special gift hampers on every purchase of a smartphone. The customers will receive FREE tempered glass, mobile back cover, cash discounts of up to 50%  and a coupon to enter a lucky draw.  One lucky winner will get a 32-inch LED TV and as a bumper gift hamper, one winner chosen randomly from the lucky draw will receive a scooter. But keep that in mind, this offer is valid for a limited period only.

Images from Apex Digital, Dang

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Gotta Catch’em All!

Yes, the Pokémon Go is now officially available in Nepal. You can download it from official  Google Play Store or iOS app store.

A lot of us (Pokémon fans)  used to play the game (downloading it from unofficial stores) until, all of a sudden, Niantic decided to remove all the Pokémons, PokéStops, and Gyms from Nepal. I don’t know about you guys, but it was a very disappointing experience for me– all my hard work (long walks), money on mobile data and favorite Pokémons vanishing into thin air.

Well, now that it is officially here in Nepal, we can enjoy it again! The good news? If you had played using your Google account, you can resume your game (start from the level you left).

Also, it looks like we have been missing out a lot. There are a lot of improvements. The great thing is that you can now keep a Pokémon beside you while walking. This feature is called Pokémon Go Buddy. Your buddy will not only walk alongside you but also help you earn candies.

What is Pokémon Go?

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game developed by Niantic. The gameplay is pretty simple. You create your avatar, catch wild Pokémons, visit Pokéstops, and join a team to fight in battles with your Pokémons. Overall, it is a great game and easy to learn. You will get the hang of it pretty easily.

Smartphones used to be this thing of wonder which amazed us every day. Things we thought we couldn’t do on the go, well, smartphones pretty much proved it wrong. Now, you don’t need to carry a separate camera, music player, voice recorder, entertainment system or anything, everything you ever needed is neatly sitting in your pocket as a single device right now. But to reach to this state, there was a successive development, every year we saw a new feature that usually required a separate device: like the first year, it was a camera, then music player, voice recording, video recording and app support that pretty much opened up a whole new world.

Gartner’s study has shown that people use the same smartphone for the span of 2 to 2.5 years and will remain same till 2020. People are even skipping few generations to finally upgrade when they see something innovative. The growth of smartphone will not be in double digits, worldwide smartphones sales have grown only 7% to reach 1.5 billion units in 2016 which is a serious decline from 14.4% in 2015. Smartphone sales growth was highest in 2010 reaching 73% but ever since there has been major ups and downs in the market.

Smartphones have really gotten boring, every smartphone is the same piece of a rectangular metal slab with a giant screen up front. For the past few years, the only change in the smartphones has been a more shinier display, more powerful processor, more RAM and more megapixels! You can’t even distinguish between a midrange and a premium phone these days. People are happy with what they’ve got, be it a midrange or flagship. They can easily comply with our day to day usage pretty good. In a mature market, people don’t change their smartphones yearly like they used to, and every year the iPhone or any other phone isn’t getting any more innovative or smarter which at this point we all have realized.

The market penetration in European nations, North America, and developed Asian countries have reached 90% where users are sticking with their flagships longer. So manufacturers are targeting India and China where the consumers are high where they could boost their sales. But even doing so, most of the smartphone sales will be budget oriented in these regions and that won’t have much effect on the declining profit.

The future of smartphones is in VR, AI-powered devices and something that can provide real usefulness like the Windows phone which can also be used as a full-fledged Windows PC. For now, the path that smartphone development is taking seems pretty awesome but there are also other things we can expect which may possibly remove the need of smartphones like smart glasses and wearable tech.

According to a recent report from a United Nation agency, almost half of the world population will be online by the end of December (i.e. the end of the year 2016).

This is probably due to the decreasing price of mobile phones and mobile internet’s prices, the report by the United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) stated.

Even with half of the world population set to go online by 2016, the number of the users are still concentrated in the developed countries. As the year comes to an end, about 80 percent of the people from developed countries are using the internet. The number computes to around 40 percent in the developing countries and only 15 percent in the less developed (or underdeveloped) countries.

When combined, all this calculates to about 47 percent of the world’s population going online, which is still 13 percent short of one of United Nation’s target of 60 percent population going online by 2020. The data shows that about 3.5 billion people are expected have internet access by the end of this year.

The report has mentioned that only 1 person among 10 is online in Africa, and other poor and fragile countries.

According to the union, a specialized agency for information and communication technologies, the offline population mainly consists of less educated people, poor people, people living in rural areas, the female and the elderly.

Even with more than 50 percent of the population offline, 47 percent is still a good number. This has happened mostly due to smartphone manufacturers decreasing their mobile phones’ price, and telecommunication companies providing cheaper mobile internet to their users.

Although there is a trend of most of the less developed nations’ population not having access to the internet, the number of Nepalis having access to the internet is increasing. A research conducted by Nepal Telecommunication Authority in 2015 showed that nearly 44.11 percent of the population had internet access. This surely has increased in 2016 with the increased number of budget smartphones entering the nation every now and then.

Talking about the less developed nations, the report stated, ‘Internet penetration levels in less developed countries today have reached the level enjoyed by developed countries in 1998, suggesting that the less developed countries are lagging nearly 20 years behind the developed countries.’

2016 was a fruitful year in the internet sector. With 47 percent of the world already online, the 60 percent target set by U.N. isn’t that far away.