Tech Roundup: iPhone 5se, Zika Virus & More

Weather on Android

We are already almost one month into 2016, and it remains to be seen as to what the big five - Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft - have in store for us users and consumers this year. New phones and tablets, new versions of their operating systems, new services, new means to share and collaborate, new ways to lock-in to their ecosystems etc. etc., are definitely a given, but I also want them to get better at what they are doing right now. For instance, it wouldn't hurt Apple to up its software game a little bit and open its offerings like iTunes, Apple Music and News on the Web, Google and Amazon to figure out their hardware/product strategy, for both Android One and Fire Phone/Tablets went nowhere, but had unexpected sleeper hits in the form of Cardboard, Chromecast and Amazon Echo, and Microsoft, its whole approach to mobile. After all, a third successful alternative to Android and iOS can only be a good thing.

In other news:

• Brazil experiences the largest known outbreak of Zika, a virus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes and previously thought to be relatively benign, but now potentially linked to an illness called microcephaly that's characterised by abnormally small heads in newborn babies.
• Prof. Stephen Hawking gives black holes "soft hairs" in an attempt to solve information paradox.
• Google revamps weather search for Android with detailed forecasts and a weather frog.
• Yahoo! to decide its future after quarterly earnings call on Feb 2 as the company continues to resist investor calls for a potential sale of its core internet assets.
• Google Chrome to get much faster than ever before, thanks to a new lossless data compression algorithm called Brotli released by Google last September.
• Google launches first ever free public WiFi in Mumbai Central railway station in partnership with RailTel.
• Google paid Apple $1 billion in 2014 to remain the default search engine on iPhones, according to courtroom transcripts from Oracle's copyright lawsuit against Google.
• Apple's next-gen 4-inch iPhone to be called iPhone 5se, reports 9To5Mac.
• Twitter stock price tumbles after CEO Jack Dorsey announces departure of four key executives over the weekend.
• Music streaming service Spotify to introduce video content on its mobile apps this week, per Wall Street Journal.