Spice launches Stellar Guide Mi-438 smartphone at Rs 5,199

Spice has launched a new entry-level smartphone, Stellar Guide Mi-438 at a price of Rs 5,199.

The phone sports a 4-inch OGS display. Powered by a 1.3GHz dual-core processor and 512MB RAM, the phone comes with 4GB internal storage expandable up to 32GB via microSD card. It also offers 2GB free storage space on Spice Cloud, the company's cloud storage service.

The dual-sim phone (3G+3G) runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. It sports a 2MP rear camera with LED flash and a 1.3MP front-facing camera. The phone comes with a 1,350mAh battery, which the company claims delivers a talk-time of up to 4.5 hours and up to 170 hours standby time.

In terms of connectivity options, Stellar Guide Mi-438 offers Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi and HSPA. Spice is offering a free flip cover worth Rs 500 and a screen guard with the phone.

Facebook to clean up News Feed

Facebook has announced that it is cleaning up its News Feed to weed out spammy posts, so that users of the social networking website don't miss important and relevant stories and to penalize spammers.

Elaborating on the move, Facebook posted on its blog that it's introducing a series of improvements to News Feed to reduce stories that users frequently flag as spam. "Many of these stories are published by Pages that deliberately try and game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would," said Facebook employees Erich Owens and Chris Turitzin.

Facebook will essentially take steps to counter three kinds of news feed spam - Like-baiting, frequently circulated content and spammy links.

Facebook says "Like-baiting" is when posts explicitly ask readers to like, comment or share the post, to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive. " The improvement we are making today better detects these stories and helps ensure that they are not shown more prominently in News Feed than more relevant stories from friends and other Page," said the Facebook executives.

The update will not impact Pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, Facebook clarified.

Facebook is also improving News Feed so that it doesn't focus on pages that reshare content as most users do not find such content relevant.

Stories that misguide users into clicking on links to pages that contain only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads, will also be restricted. For instance some stories may claim to link to a photo album but instead take the viewer to a website with just ads, the social networking giant iterated.

"By measuring how frequently people on Facebook who visit a link choose to like the original post or share that post with their friends, we've been able to better detect spammy links," it added. According to Facebook, the update improves News Feed to reduce cases of spammy links, and in early testing it has witnessed a 5% increase in people on Facebook clicking on links that take them off of Facebook.