Koushik's White Board

Got yourself a new Android phone? Start here!

2011-06-27T12:04:00.001+05:30

After lots of confusions and dilemma you've finally settled on an Android phone! Good job! Now what next?

I'm sure you're confused by the abundant level of customization and settings available within the phone and would love some kind of orientation. Let me give you the basics you need to know to keep you glued to your mobile for the next few days (if not months).

Android is one OS which provides a deep level of customization from the basic themes and ring tones to the home screen launchers and font types. The deeper the level of customization you'd want, the more your need to root your phone (I'll talk about that in a different post).

The android market has lots of apps to give you basic level of customization such as wallpapers, live wallpapers, ringtones and themes. The apps are of .apk (.Android Package) format and most of the android phones has a inbuilt installer for .apk files. One thing about these Market apps is that since Google does not cleanse the apps and almost anyone can upload apps to the market, many of these may be Trojan laden. Be cautious about what apps to install by reading through a couple of user reviews and also check the number of downloads that app has had so far. If the app has been downloaded around 50,000 times, chances are that it is a very safe app.

Here are the list of essential apps for your Android phone:

1. The first thing you'd need on your Android phone is the Zedge app. It is a splendid little tool and lets you choose from a huge collection of wallpapers, ring tones and notification sounds classified under functional categories.

2. If you get bored with your default launcher (Motoblur, Samsung Touchwiz, HTC Sense or the like) then you should check out my previous post on Home screen replacement apps. My personal favorite is Launcher pro but if you want lots of themes then GO Launcher is the No.1 choice.

3. Advanced Task Killer : Lots of people think this is not really useful but I'd suggest you install this app to reclaim memory fast. Consider this, You are playing some graphic intensive game and find it to be laggy sometimes. Chances are that the phone memory has filled up completely. Advanced task killer lets you free up the used memory real fast so that you can continue your game without any hiccups.

4. Photoshop Express : This is a good tool for those who take a lot of snaps on their mobile. Gives you a medium level of photo tweaking including the ability to upload to Photoshop.com.

5. Fancy Widget : Really beautiful widget collection for those non HTC phone users who would like to add bling to their home screen. Lots of skins available for both the clock and the weather widgets.

6. Minimalistic Text : My favorite widget app solely for the amount of customization it offers on how to display the text. You can display the time, date, weather, battery, custom text, all in a very simple and sleek format. If you have lots of free time, check this app out for sure.

7. Poweramp : The default android music player is good for sure but good is not always good enough is it? Poweramp is the souped up super music player you were always longing for. It is such a powerful music player that you will not repent purchasing it from the market after the trial period. In its latest update gives the power to crossfade and cut silence between tracks too.

8. Pulse News : Whether you read the News daily or not, Pulse News is a must install app. With ability to add literally every news source there is on the web and a smooth and fun interface, you'd become the walking BBC within your friends circle in no time.

I think these 8 apps will definitely make sure you go for physiotherapy for your neck very soon ;) Install these and give me your suggestions too.

Android Home Screen Replacement

2011-04-14T20:21:00.002+05:30

A Launcher is pretty much like the desktop screen on Windows or Mac OSx from where we launch applications and view important statuses such as current time, running applications, battery left, etc.

Android is a highly customizable OS out of the box unlike iOS devices which need rooting/jailbreaking before we can change most of the stuff.

In this post I will try to cover some of the popular and useful launchers that are available on the Android Market (There a hundreds of home screen launchers in Android Market).

ADW Launcher: This is a light weight application that allows the user to customize the number of home screens and dock bar applications apart from the numerous other functionalities being offered The best thing about ADW Launcher is that it supports hundreds of themes that can be downloaded from the Android Market. The themes not only change the color of the UI elements but also the icons which gives a complete feel to the phone.

Go Launcher Ex: The Go Team has always been at it to improve the usability of Android by offering many apps from Home screen replacement to SMS and Contact app replacement. The best thing is that all the apps are for free. Go Launcher Ex is one of my favorite home screen replacement apps because of the long list of features it offers without hogging lots of phone memory. It is a must try for anyone unhappy with the default Android Home screen. Though Go Launcher does not have as many themes on the Android Market as ADW, it sure has a good list. Go Launcher also gives the home screen preview similar to that in HTC Sense. The best thing about Go Launcher is that it also has a Task killer built in. When you open the Applications dock there is a tab that lists the running apps and the user can kill any unused app from there itself.

Launcher Pro: This is the rock star of home screen apps and probably the most downloaded of them all. The reason? It is very light on the resources and also very responsive. Features on this one is similar to Go Launcher and ADW Launcher such as scrollable dock bar and screen previews. The special thing about Launcher Pro is the Launcher Pro widgets. The developer of this app has created many useful widgets which are actually a rip off of the HTC Sense widgets, but who cares as long as they are useful. Friends Stream, People, SMS, Twitter, Facebook are some of the widgets on offer. The full set of widgets are only available on the Pro Plus version which costs around Rs.150 ($3.5) but in my opinion it is worth it.

In my personal opinion Launcher Pro is the very best and I’d suggest it to anyone interested in Home screen replacement. Some of the other popular home screen replacement apps are Android 2.3 Launcher, Open Home, Zeam Launcher, Launcher 7, etc. You can experiment with them safely but quite a few of them have their share of minor bugs and niggles.

Motorola Defy Review

2011-04-08T16:25:00.001+05:30

There are phones that claim to do it all and then there are phones that claim to do only one thing but be the best at it. Rarely do we ever come across phones that claim to do it all and be the best at them all. This is where Motorola's newest rugged phone enters the scene. Lets see how it fares right after setting the tone for it.

I am sure you would have heard a lot about the Samsung Marine phone and less frequently about the Sonim brand of rugged phones. These things have only one purpose and that is to weather the elements of nature. These phones can be dipped in water (or put into the washing machine), used for catch practice, bumped around (accidentally of course) and still when you really want to make a call, they can do that with ease.
In the Indian mobile owner scenario, men put their phones in their shirt pockets and bend down every now and then, dropping their phones on anything from the wash basin to the hard tarmac.
The women of the world are a little sophisticated in that they put their phones into their handbags along with the many mysteries that take abode inside.
The first thing that gets damaged because of this is the phone screen. It gets scratched by the keys and pins, cracked due to the drops and drenched occassionally.
The second most vital component is the battery which shorts the moment it tastes a drop of water/liquid.
With these many potential hazards looming around your phone, the concept of rugged phones should have become a huge hit in India but did not.

So what really went wrong? There was just a single big reason.

Many Indians don't settle with a bang for their buck but need a Big bang at that. Irrespective of whether we use all the features or not, we prefer to have Quad Band, Bluetooth (version 1.2 will not suffice), FM Radio, GRPS/Edge (Class 10 will not suffice), A-GPS, maybe a touchscreen too. All these just for the bragging rights that come attached. That's where Micromax, Spice and Lavas of the world became a hit and that's an entirely different topic of discussion altogether.

Gadgetholics and tech enthusiasts who really appreciated all the latest technologies did not have a choice at all when they wanted their phones to be rugged. It was either the small screened, feature deficit Marine and Sonim or nothing at all. That is when someone deep down at the Motorola labs (in some cold desert ;) maybe) thought about adressing this one problem and the Motorola Defy is the result of that.

The phone has Gorilla glass covering the display and the phone is sealed tight by the back panel which can be opened by sliding out the bar at the bottom. The back panel has some lubricating oil in the inner edges to keep the internals air and of course water tight. This is the reason the memory card will be found under the battery within the panel and not outside one the phone. The camera also does not have a physical button for the same reason. You can click on the screen to capture a photo/video.
I have immersed the phone numerous times in water just to look at the reaction of my family and friends(they did not know it is a waterproof phone). I've seen people say they see water in the edges of the phones once they take the phone out. It is quite natural. Motorola did not say Defy will completely defy water. Obviously the connecting panels and the earpiece are areas where drops of water will stay but that will not deter the usage of the phone and the water will evaporate in a few minutes. Don't worry about that.
Also you may not need to laminate your phone screen with the screen guard and don't even bother checking whether you've put any keys or sharp items along with the phone. The screen will never show a scratch.

Now on to the review.

Physical and Hardware - The phone is of the candybar form factor and the front has just a huge screen (huge atleast in terms of the dimensions of the phone itself). Around 93% of the phone front is the display screen, with a thin bezel where the earpiece and the buttons reside on the top and bottom respectively taking the rest 7%. The back of the phone is wrapped in ah-so-awesome rubber that Motorola has used in many of their previous phones. The sides have these cool screws that hold the phone together and also add some rugged factor to the looks. The top has the lock/unlock button and the 3.5mm audio jack. The right side has the volume rocker and the left side has the micro usb port.
Overall the phone is very very light for a rugged phone and that too a phone with so many features.

The screen is 3.7 inches long diagnolly and the capactive TFT display used here with a resolution of 480*854 is the same one found on the original Droid/Milestone. I don't need to mention how good the Milestone screen was with respect to brightness, contrast and crispness of the images. In fact it rivals some of the best AMOLEDs in the business. Thumbs up to Motorola for that.
Based on my personal use I can confidently say that the screen brightness is more than sufficient at its lowest level that you'll never need to notch it up under most situations except under direct sunlight. The auto brightness feature is cool but might not be required at all.

The screen also supports multitouch input for all those pinch zoom fans.
The phone sports a dual mic for noise cancellation and after using the phone for more than a month I can confidently say that the dual mic does what it advertises perfectly. Even when I was in a very noisy environment, the caller on the other side could hear my voice perfectly.
Out of my personal experience I can say that the speakerphone is loud and does not crackle at high volumes. Many times I've used the phone for official conference calls when the VOIP phone did not work properly.

CPU/GPU - The phone sports an ARM Cortex A8 processor clocked at 800Mhz. The best part is that the processor is the same as the HTC Desire and the Samsung Galaxy S and hence all the phones can be overclocked to at least 1.2Ghz without frying the CPU ;)
Having 800Mhz processor does not mean it is not powerful enough in any way. The phone comes with PowerVR graphics chip and it can play some really intensive 3D games without any hiccups. The phone generally performs without any freezes and just like all Android phones it rarely freezes a bit when the RAM is filled up and while the memory manager is in the process of killing stale processes. This happens in a jiffy and does not pose a hindrance to the general operability of the phone.

RAM/Internal Memory - The phone also has 512 MB RAM which will be more than enough for heavy gaming too.
The internal memory is 2GB out of which 1.4GB can be used straight away. The rest being used by the default apps installed by Motorola. The box comes with 2GB micro SD card and the phone supports upto 32GB.
The headset that comes along with the phone is of decent quality and is good only for voice calls and not for listening to music.

Software - The phone comes with Android 2.1 Eclair installed and though 2.1 is a little outdated, one of the major things that come with Android 2.2 is already there on the phone and that is Internet tethering. The other advantage of Android 2.2 was the ability to install apps onto the memory card directly and thus making sure the internal memory is not filled up. Again Defy has solved this issue partially on the 2.1 version by giving us ample internal memory of 2GB. I'm an Apps freak and have installed and uninstalled atleast a few hundred apps till date and never ever came across the "Memory full" message till date.

Motorola has confirmed that Android 2.2 will be coming to Defy in around three weeks from now and so cheer up guys.

MOTOBLUR - I would like to confirm one thing about the phone at this point. The phone does NOT support Motorola Blur service in India. The OS installed is a Non Blur package. So if you were dreaming about using the remote locator/wipe and Happenings widget those things are not available in the Indian Defy but nevertheless those features are available as third party apps in the Android Market.
Another thing I would like to confirm is that the Blur skin IS installed on the phone and hence the super useful light weight widgets created by motorola can be used and resized on the defy.

Multimedia - Since the phone has a large screen watching videos/youtube streams is a pleasure. The processor is fast and hence good quality Divx/Xvid videos can be watched without a problem. The default video player does not support Divx/Xvid but you can download Rockplayer or Arc Media for free from the market.
The audio quality is stellar and clear though not very loud. Installing PowerAmp will let the audioheads blast their ears with loud music but otherwise the loudness is more than sufficient for everyone. The phone does not have any equaliser presets such as Rock, Pop etc but has some kind of Audio effects option that lets the phone emulate different aural environments. It is effective but if you want the usual preset PowerAmp comes to the rescue.
The phone also comes with DLNA and it is an awesome feature when you have a gaming console like PS3. You can stream movies/music and photos to the TV from the phone via the console. Freedom from wires for sure!

Browsing/Apps - As everyone knows Android uses the Webkit browser which tries to emulate desktop like web experience on a mobile device. The phone has a high resolution and hence removes the need for constant zooming of the web page. The phone also comes with Flash Lite for the majority of flash based sites and to add to that Andriod 2.2 will bring Adobe Flash 10.1 to Defy which will enable complete freedom to use any flash based site :-)

Android Market is not as good as App Store but at the same time available on even phones that cost less than Rs.10,000. I'm sure Apple cannot brag about that ever. The latest count of apps on Android market was close to 1,50,000 and that is no normal feat. The Android Market has apps catering to every kind of phone user from the downright Nerd to the more laid back Casual user. The number and quality of games is not as good as iOS but the Android Market is evolving and growing fast. Its just a matter of time before we get some high end games on Android thanks majorly to Sony for bringing Xperia Play and the Playstation One games along to the Android Market.

Camera/Video Camera - I accept the camera quality on the phone is not so great but that is mainly due to the compression techniques used and not because of the hardware. There is lots of information suggesting that Motorola is bringing a better compression algorithm to the Defy in their Android 2.2 update in April. The phone takes excellent shots in daylight and noise creeps in only when photos are captured in low light and dark situations. The LED Flash is sufficient for close objects but does not have enough throw to capture anything beyond portrait photos. This is the case with almost all phone models that have LED flashlight. To circumvent the problem with low light there are many apps on the market that provide lots of options to tweak the camera.
The video can be captured at upto 480p at 30fps and I should say the video quality is excellent. No worries in this department.

Battery and Conclusion - The phone has a With a smartphone 3.7V battery with capacity of 1540mAH. This is huge and the proof is in the battery backup. I've used the phone more than one and a half days with heavy usage. I constantly keep locking and unlocking the phone which usually drains the battery a lot but defy goes on to see another day with a single charge. I'm confident 85-90% of android phones from other brands cannot say the same about their battery lives.

With a phone like the Defy it is never easy to finish off the review quickly. There is so much more to mention about the phone that it becomes difficult to cut the review short. Any way overall this is the phone to get at the price at which it is being offered. Rs.18000 is cheap for a rugged large (beautiful) screen Android phone. Android 2.2 is around the corner and that will further improve the performance of the phone by a large extent. You may get many phones with a meatier camera or processor but as I mentioned in the beginning there aren't many phones that claim to do it all and be the best at them all. So go ahead, there is nothing that can disappoint you in this phone. If you have any specific doubts on the phone just post it in the comments and I'll reply back.

The Mobile phone era

2010-08-08T21:38:00.001+05:30

Recently one of my dear friends asked me to suggest a good mobile phone within his budget and I suggested a Samsung phone that crams everything you can think of except the kitchen sink ;-). He asked me why not one other Motorola phone that is doing the rounds in newspapers and TV ads frequently, and then I realized that both the phones were in fact loaded with similar features and fell within the same price band.

My topic for today is exactly on this situation that technological innovations has left us with.

If we go five years back in time when mobile phones having a megapixel camera was a rarity, this situation didn't seem to exist. Samsung phones were marred by poor battery backup, Motorola had the slowest UI response. Sony Ericsson was the only brand that sported a decent music player which was its USP and Nokia's smartphone abilities were meant for business people. Heck, Blackberry was not even within the reach of Indian consumers.

In the early 2000s having a phone that did not weigh more than an oxford dictionary and barely fitted into our pockets was fad. Slowly we moved onto color screens and cameras. In built music players that supported mp3 files was the next step and then came megapixel cameras.
Second half of the decade saw the rising of Bluetooth, Mp4 Video players and touchscreen.

Zooming back to 2010, Samsung is a market leader in both feature and smartphone segments, Motorola sports the most cutting edge hardware and both phones largely use Android OS. Nokia, LG and Sony Ericsson are on the brink of being neglected. The biggest thing seems to be social networking. Phones from every price segment seem to sport a basic facebook or twitter link and some even have dedicated apps for the same speaking of which Mobile Apps have become one of the most important factors in choosing a smart phone. (thanks almost completely to the Apple's App Store)

So where is technology taking us in the future?
I, for one, feel that mobile phones will completely replace desktop computers for casual computing (Browsing the internet and checking emails). Desktops will only be used where heavy computing power is required such as for gaming or media rendering.
With the ease with which mobiles phones render web sites these days and thanks to browsers like Opera and the newer web kit based browsers, it will seem Neanderthal to boot your bulky computer, login to your profile, click on the browser and wait for it to load and then check your mails. With the migration of most of our data onto clouds it will makes more sense to depend on these pocket sized devices though they lack the storage capacity of full fledged computers.
Microsoft Kin was an example of where future mobile phones will go. Though the Kin series failed to rake in enough cash for the Redmond giant, it sure made other brands wake up and reorient themselves to the direction of cloud computing.
Everything that the user consumes or produces on the Kin was stored on the cloud and literally removed the need for gigabytes of memory built into the phone.
Apps have become as popular as social networking if not more, though I seriously do not understand the hype given for the latter (Especially Facebook).
The differentiation in hardware that the phone brands used to advertise some years ago has completely gone and even rookies in the business come up with cutting edge hardware, take for instance the 12 megapixel phone S1200 by Spice Communications.
The future belongs to software the example of which can be seen in Android OS and Apple's App Store.

The rise and fall of brands will be decided by factors hitherto unexplored in the industry such as:
How big is the application market for the phone brand?
How easy to use is the OS?
How many services can the phone integrate (Social networking, Microsoft Exchange, RSS)?
How sound is the Syncing system?
What else can my phone do apart from the plethora of functionalities already offered? (Phones are being used in telemedicine and as a replacement to credit cards)

These are questions that will be in the minds of every educated consumer. The Indian market will expect not much lesser than the western countries (India is the second largest and the fastest growing mobile phone market)

The leaders of the past are struggling to gain back their lost market share and questions like these are good starting points for them to relook at their strategy.

At the end of the day, consumers like you and me will be getting the maximum bang for the buck with competition scrambling for all kinds of differentiation. The future is bright for every mobile phone buyer :-D

HD Pocket Camcorders

2009-12-12T12:25:00.005+05:30

Did you ever miss catching that special moment or hilarious thing because of your slow mobile phone camera or because you couldn’t carry a bulky video camera around?Maybe it is time for you to check out pocket camcorders.

Pocket camcorder as the name suggests is compact in size and carries a small screen for the purpose of view and preview. Instant startup and record is what makes gives these pocket camcorders the edge over other camcorders. These things support HD resolution, still photography, stereo audio recording and external memory cards too. Hi quality video sensors, low light compensation and anti blur are recent additions to the features. Flip Mino, Kodak Zi and Creative Vado (not in that order) are the best pocket video cameras in the market and in some ways trump full fledged video cameras. The camcorders usually carry 8GB internal memory and store upto 2hrs of Hi Def 720p videos in .mov or .mp4 file formats which are universally compatible with MACs and PCs. The camcorders sport a mini USB or USB interface for connecting to the computers and also have embedded support software for editing or uploading videos when you connect the camcorder to the computer.

The best thing about these pocket camcorders is that they are really cheap when compared to full fledged camcorders even though they don’t compromise on the video quality. So why settle for bulky camcorders when you know you can get your job done at half the cost. Try one of these (Kodak Zi6, Zi8, Flip Mino HD, Ultra HD, Creative Vado, Vado HD) and post your comments later.

Its raining Android phones

2009-12-10T21:10:00.002+05:30

Yes it certainly is raining android phones and HTC and Motorola seem to be leading the OEMs churning out these phones.

From the official release of Android OS and the HTC Dream till date, over a dozen android phones that have released. Some were hugely popular (HTC Dream) and some not so popular (Lenovo Ophone). So let’s see what Android is all about and what all it has in store for a potential handset customer.

What is Android?

Google’s very own mobile smart phone OS. The best thing about Android is that it is open source unlike Apple’s OSx or Windows Mobile. People can tweak the code however they want and thereby tap the true powers of the underlying hardware.

The OS can be seen on some of the popular phones such as HTC Tattoo, Samsung Spica and ‘the iPhone killer’ Motorola Milestone. The phone supports multi touch, accelerometer, proximity sensors, megapixel camera, Wifi, GPS, HTML5 and Bluetooth 2.1 (iPhone or Pre doesnt have it).

The splendid App Store that Apple has is unbeatable no doubts but Android platform has its own Applications store called the ‘Android Market’ which seems to be doing a decent job for a rookie.

Android phones are slowly picking up in India thanks to Service providers such as Airtel. Unlocked phones such as Tattoo are also selling like hot cakes here because of the do-it-all specifications.

If you’ve been thinking about getting a new phone or smart phone, I’m confident that Android will do justice for your money. Give it a shot and comment on whether you like it.

Best Value – All in One mobile phone

2009-09-19T18:10:00.003+05:30

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music does not need any introduction. The all in one touchscreen mobile phone from Nokia was released a year ago and was received very well especially in India because of the hype that Vodafone and Airtel had created for Apple iPhone and finally spoiling all that with a insane Rs. 30000/- price tag.

Many who could not afford such an expensive touchscreen mobile phone were desperate to get into the touchscreen band wagon and went for Moto’s Rokr E6 and Sony Ericsson’s P1i until Nokia released 5800.

5800 XpressMusic has everything that Apple iPhone had except for the eye candy UI. The phone was priced competitively at Rs.19000 and came with 8GB memory also.

Some of the features of 5800 that iPhone lacked were:

Full flash support in browser
MMS support
Bluetooth file transfer
Video recording
Autofocus camera with LED Flash

Now that I’ve given an idea of what the phone is all about, let me get to the news. 5800 has had a Rs.5000/- price cut and now sells all over India for Rs.13600/- (along with a sexy Sennheiser Headphone in certain outlets). This price cut will make 5800 the hottest selling phone all over the world. Also since Nokia recently launched X6 and N97 mini touch screen phones this will complete Nokia’s touch screen lineup from the lower end to the higher end. Phones from competitors Samsung and LG do not come under this price bracket and even if they do, they do not offer so many features for this price. So what are you waiting for. Get the most popular Nokia phone on earth now!

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music Specs:

Symbian OS v9.4 with S60 5th edition UI
3.2 inches TFT resistive touch screen @ 360 x 640 pixels
MicroSD memory up to 16GB supported
3G, Wifi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS with A-GPS
3.15 MPx autofocus camera with LED flash and video recording at VGA resolution and TV-out
3.5 mm audio jack and tereo FM radio with RDS

Coming soon…

2009-09-19T11:31:00.001+05:30

The best ‘value for your money’ phone

An awesome android qwerty phone

and

The most powerful PMP there is.

All these in my next three posts.

Nokia World 09

2009-09-05T17:07:00.003+05:30

Nokia World this year had some really interesting offerings and the biggest surprise for many in the form of a mini laptop. Nokia has been losing market share to Samsung and Apple these days and some brave steps had to be taken by Nokia to make sure it retains the No.1 spot in the mobile market.

Nokia World 09 sure proved that Nokia means business and they are not going to be pushed off by some newbies and reverse engineers. The conference also saw the unveiling of Nokia’s plans to enter the mobile computer business in two ways. One was introduction of a mini laptop – Nokia Booklet 3G and the other was Nokia’s Internet Tablet N900 first time with GSM abilities.

Highlights of Nokia World 09 were :

Nokia Booklet 3G
N900 (Internet Tablet)
N97 Mini
X6
X3

The Nokia Booklet is a mini laptop similar to the famous netbooks of Asus and Acer. It is powered by Intel Atom processor and has a battery backup of upto 12hrs (even netbooks cannot match this kind of battery backup) The booklet is very thin measuring at around 2cms and weighs just 1.25 Kgs. The booklet as the name suggests comes with 3G apart from HSPA and Wifi. The standard features like memory card reader, Bluetooth and webcam are also on board. The mini laptop is HD ready and comes with HDMI port and also a HD resolution glass display suitable for video viewing.

N900 is one of a kind Internet tablet in the sense that its really hard to find any shortcomings in this device. It has everything you can ask for in a computer and at the same time has a GSM antenna which was not available in previous Nokia tablets. The tablet runs on Linux powered Maemo OS but the UI is really responsive and as good as the UIs of Apple iPhone and Palm Pre.

The specs list includes :

A 3.5-inch 800x480 pixel touchscreen
Full QWERTY keyboard
32GB memory with expansion upto 48GB via microSD
GPS/A-GPS
FM transmitter
TV-out
Bluetooth 2.1
WiFi
1320mAh battery
5 megapixel camera with LED flash

N97 Mini again has a similar specs list like N900 but the smartphone runs on a Symbian 5th edition OS and has a marginally smaller screen at 3.2 inches and smaller resoultion at 360x640. Also the maximum memory supported is 16GB. Both the phones have a digital compass and FM transmitter also.

Nokia has brought a new naming convebookletntion for XpressMusic handsets called X series. Nokia X6 is a touchscreen phone that is very similar to 5800 in the specs but is a lot slimmer. The Xpress Music phone has a scratch resistant glass surface and runs on a Symbian 60 5th edition OS. Everything else is almost similar to N97 mini with a 5 megapixel camera, GPS, Wifi etc.

The final product in the list is Nokia X3. The phone is not a smartphone and is powered by Symbian 40 OS. The phone has a smaller 2.2 inch non touch screen at a 240x320 resolution. The phone has a 3.2 megapixel fixed focus camera and of course comes with a 3.5mm standard earphone jack which has become a standard mobilephones. The phone gives a battery backup for music playback of more than 26hrs and comes with 70Mb internal memory with support for upto 16GB MicroSD memory cards.

Smartphone OS Wars

2009-08-07T19:54:00.003+05:30

I never thought I’d be covering this topic till today because I never felt that mobile phone OSes were competing much but anyway here goes.

Smartphones are those mobile devices that give the PIM (Personal Information Management) functionality apart from the basic telephony features that the dumbphones provide.

“Personal information can include any of the following:
Personal notes/journal
Address books
Lists (including task lists)
Significant calendar dates
Birthdays
Anniversaries
Appointments and meetings
Reminders
Email, instant message archives
Fax communications, voicemail
Project management features
RSS/Atom feeds
Alert messaging” -from wikipedia.org

The computer OS wars has been usually fought by only a couple of major players (duh! of course Apple and Microsoft) but in the smartphone OS segment it is entirely a different ball game. The market leader as of now is Symbian but its competitiors, Apple’s OS X, Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Palm’s webOS are catching up fast.

Symbian : At one point of time Symbian was the market leader with almost 65% of market share. This was largely because Symbian foundation had a tie up with Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson back in 1998. Then on almost all Nokia phones were based on Symbian platform either in the form of S40 dumbphones or S60, S80 or S90 smartphones. Now the game has changed a lot and some really neat OSes have entered leaving Symbian scrambling hard to get back its lost share of the market. Now they’ve released Symbian S60 5th edition which is specially for touch optimized phones such as 5800, 5530 and N97. Though the OS is not full fledged and has a lot of minor problems to iron out it still has a lot of promising features that in the longer run may help Symbian regain its lost territory.

Pros: Tried and tested OS, Support for thousands of apps thanks to their early mover advantage.
Cons: Not much eye candy in the UI, default internet browser is so-so.

OS X : Apple’s iPhone is what a dream product is all about. It had a dream campaign, dream sales, dream revenue, dream fan following but then not a dream OS if you ask me. Nevertheless the OS is backed by a really fast processor, great UI and support for millions of applications from AppStore. OS X’s major strength would be the User Interface but its major weakness as of now is the inability to support multi tasking and even Adobe Flash in the browser.

Pros: Easily the most beautiful interface backed up by iTunes and App Store
Cons: No support for multi tasking, Many good apps are rejected by apple for stupid reasons.

Android : Google’s Android is a really powerful OS in terms of extendibility. This OS has been installed from Mobile phones to Netbooks and the ability to add extra functionality to the OS is there since the OS is open source. Some of the best phones with Android OS are T-Mobile G1 and HTC Hero.

Pros: Open Source, Lots of flexibility offered to apps developers.
Cons: Anroid Market is not so great, Eye candy is missing.

Windows Mobile : Microsoft has been working hard to improve their already stalwart Windows Mobile by concentrating on the user interface and features. Windows Mobile 6.5 will bring improved Touch capabilities and Gesture control. They’re also planning to bring in support for widgets. Though 6.5 is not yet out everyone is eager for Windows Mobile 7 to be released in 2010, as announced by Steve Ballmer.

Pros: Lots of hacks and apps available.
Cons: Till OS 6.1 their User Interface sucks.

webOS : The most promising mobile OS of the lot is Palm’s webOS. Palm had been struggling for sometime with respect to their handsets and webOS will be their pathway to success again. The OS garnered a lot of interest among developers and gadget freaks like me for the eye candy interface and zippy performance. Coupled with the awesome OS is the new Palm pre phone with excellent design, processor and capabilities that have put Palm back on the radar.

Pros: Super UI, Developer friendly.
Cons: Amateur App store, As of today Palm Pre is only available in US.

One thing that you would notice in all these OSes is the touch capabilities. Thanks to Apple’s iPhone now every smartphone and dumbphone manufacturer is brining touch capabilities onto the OS. Whether it is desirable or not is debatable but at the end of the day the user interface gets a shot in its arm thanks to touchscreen support. So the next time you are planning to get yourself a phone I hope you’d be evaluating a smartphone thanks to this post ;) and if at all you do plan to get a smartphone you can very well see that almost all the major players have done a decent job and its just your personal choice and of course the phone hardware that may help you decide on the purchase.

Switcher

2009-08-03T19:23:00.002+05:30

Do you have Windows Vista but your heart still goes out to Apple’s stupefying Mac OS X just for all the transitions and animations that it offers?

Well I for one love Apple’s Mac OS X especially for all the glitter and effects but never had the money to buy myself a Mac Book Pro ;) Anyway this little tool that I’m going to review about right now is something that will get you a little bit closer to Mac OS X.

Switcher for Vista by Bao (i tried getting more info about this guy but this is what i could get after all) is an amazing little tool that gives you a lot cooler way of switching between various windows than the Aero 3D that Vista offers.

Switcher lets you to easily switch between the innumerous applications that are currently open, with a nice preview of what the window is, that too in OS X style.

Also the tool offers a lot of customization in the form of

User colors for the window previews and window labels
Specific fonts for window labels
Application switching transition
Multi monitor support
Numbered application windows
Search between applications

The ability to search for one of the open application by just typing the name. When you have opened around twenty windows and now find it tough to search for that one word document you just switch the windows and type in WORD and your application will appear in front of you and that too with neat transitions

The three transitions that are provided along with the tool are really cool and can be customized further to fit your needs.

Down Switcher right now and let me know what you think about it.

iPhone 3GS

2009-06-09T10:33:00.002+05:30

It was the invention of the year in 2007. It broke all sales records of phones and made the whole RAZR campaign of Motorola look shoddy.

Yes, I’m talking about the iPhone from the stables of the juggernaut Apple. Their phone is not perfect and Apple doesn’t sell it as a perfect phone either. Today Apple released their latest incarnation of their already popular iphone, the iphone 3GS. S is for speed since the new device has a really fast processor and also provides 3G speeds of 7.2Mbps.

The new iPhone is a commendable upgrade in the iphone family because Apple has addressed all the shortcomings in their previous phones and have also brought good innovative features in the new version. The iPhone OS 3.0 which was shown to developers few months back has addressed the software issues such as MMS, Background notification service and of course the Copy Paste functionality.

The hardware has also been updated with a really fast processor (the processor details are unknown as of now), good 3Mpx camera with auto focus and auto white balance and Video recording in VGA resolution @ 30fps. The camera can be focused on an object by a single touch on the screen. They’ve improved the battery on the iphone 3GS and now the phone goes on for another 2hrs.

A really interesting feature that the new iphone has is the Find my iphone which helps to track the phone and do a remote wipe of data. This is useful when your phone gets stolen and you have lots of personal details and data on the phone. Another nifty feature is the digital compass which orients the map based on your position. Voice commands is another thing that Apple promised in their iPhone OS 3.0 and now is available in the new phone. You just press and hold the Home button a little longer and the Voice recognition activates.

The cost of the new iphone is $199 for 16gb and $299 for 32gb. The cost of older iphone 3G has been slashed and is now $99 for 8GB. The new phone will be available in US by June 19 and all over the world by August. For details check up Vodafone or Airtel site.

Save Energy by using Hibernate

2009-04-22T12:44:00.006+05:30

Energy conservation and minimum use of non renewable resources is the need of the hour. Global warming has been increasing at an alarming rate and it is high time we did something to save our future. I've been wanting to write many posts on how to reduce the power consumption on a daily basis. Here goes my first post on energy conservation.

The world has entered the Computer age and we see computers in almost every class of the society thanks to initiatives like 'One Laptop Per Child' (OLPC). The increase in computer manufacture by itself has contributed a lot to the global warming but now computer usage is also contributing to the increased power consumption with new age ultra powerful graphics cards and surround sound speaker units.

To top this all we humans use computers in the most reckless way possible. Whenever we move away from the computer we care not to switch off the monitor or the speakers. When we start home for the day we leave the system in idle state and don't even switch off the monitor.

The most power consuming hardware on a computer is the graphics card followed by high output speakers and the display monitor

Monte Enbysk, the Lead Editor of Microsoft.com wrote an excellent article on Power consumption of our PC and from that I realized that one of the best options we have when we need to be away from our computer is the Hibernate feature that is available for all PC, Mac and Linux users. This one feature has more than one advantage to it. It requires almost nil power and waking out of the hibernate feature is faster than turning the computer ON (hard booting).

Technically Hibernate saves all the work that you're currently doing from the RAM onto the hard disk and turns of the system. When you turn the system back on it restores your previous work. The whole process of waking the system from Hibernate takes less than twenty seconds. If you frequently move away from the computer then you can at least modify the power management settings such that the monitor turns off if the system is left idle for say 10 minutes. Microsoft windows provides an extensive set of options to tune your power usage. Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Power Options to open the utility. There you can set timing for Standby, Hibernate, Monitor Off and Hard disk off.

The pre requisite for Enabling Hibernate mode is to have on your operating system native drive (Mostly C:) free space equal to the system RAM capacity. If you find all the details a little too confusing then there are many third party softwares that accomplish the above mentioned steps in a simple way. I recommend DirectShutDown. This small freeware utility for Windows Operating system does all the work and resides on the system tray after you install it.

You can set shortcut keys for each option and also make it prompt on whether you want to perform that particular action. Try this and let me know if you like it. Think green, Act now.

Cooliris’ Cool 1.10 Update

2009-04-19T23:47:00.002+05:30

Have you heard about this little plugin? Does PicLens sound familiar?

If not then maybe you’ve missed one cool way of searching for media on the net. Never mind there is always time to get acquainted with it.

CoolIris (formerly PicLens) is a media plugin for the famous Internet browsers Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. The initial version of the plugin was made to only display the images that you search on sites like Google and Yahoo on a stunning 3D wall.

Whenever you see a image on one of the search sites, all you need to do is just click on the small green-blue icon on the top of the image to enter into the 3D world of Cooliris. You can directly search on the Cooliris environment for Videos and Photos and they’ll open with cool transitions and effects. The later versions of the plugin also brought online shopping and Preinstalled searches by default.

So what’s new with the plugin now?

Cooliris 1.10 brings the much awaited media viewer for the local files present in your computer. When the people behind Cooliris brought out their very first version itself I saw this coming. So now we can view all our photos on a totally cool 3D wall. The current version of Cooliris works for hundreds of sites and now supports MySpace and Facebook too. But the bad news is that the plugin currently works only on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Flock. Hope they extend the support for Chrome too. Get it here and tell me what do you think of it.

Which is the best mp3/pm player your money can get you?

2009-04-15T20:35:00.002+05:30

Mp3 players are becoming as common as cell phones which in turn became as common as a wallet or purse in the past eight years.

The first portable audio players used to play audio CD’s and later on MP3 compatible CD players became famous. It took sometime for flash and hard drive based mp3 players to reach the market because of the cost of storage media. Now since the cost of storage media has plummeted the direct effect on the sale and popularity of mp3 players can be seen as well.

Getting to the topic in hand it is not easy to conclude a single mp3 player as “the best” because all the big brands bring their own set of positives and negatives in the hardware and software as well.

The popularity of Apple’s mp3 player iPod is such that many people around the world think iPod is the term to define an mp3 player.

The top 5 leading brands with respect to the market share are:

Apple
Creative
Sandisk
Zune
Sony

So if you are planning to buy a PMP (Portable Media Player) then read on to see the brand wise pros and cons.

View Full Album

Apple iPod : iPod comes in more than one flavor. They’ve one for everyone. The smallest and lowest capacity iPod shuffle has stayed popular for three generations and the latest one even lets to say the name of the song to play it. The mid level iPod nano is small on the screen real estate but has everything that a PMP needs except for a FM radio. The high end iPod classic and iPod touch provide maximum storage capacity and large screen respectively. iPod touch is a true media device though with features like internet browser, wifi and touch based games but it costs more than some decent mid level mobile phones.

Pros: Super design, Good feel, Great audio quality

Cons: Expensive, No built in FM Tuner, Impractical iTunes

View Full Album

Creative: The makers of the popular Zen and Muvo range of mp3 players, they’ve been around for a really long time and know a thing or two about audio equipment. Zen is one of my personal favorite PMPs and their recent Zen X-Fi player raises the bar in audio quality. Creative players are a lot cheaper than Apple and Sony PMPs and also they provide you all the basics such as an FM Tuner and Voice recorder by default. One thing I like about the Zen is that it feels so light and also it has an expansion slot so that you don’t run out of storage space.

Pros: Cheaper, Stellar audio quality, Lots of models to choose

Cons: Cannot think of any but sad to see they’ve not got into the Touch screen PMP bandwagon.

View Full Album

Sandisk: Sandisk is the leading flash memory cards maker so one thing you can be sure of is the quality of the storage in their Sansa players. The audio quality is up to the mark and I should say the volume is a little on the louder side. Sansa has a number of PMP models and cost wise they’re on the cheaper side.

Pros: Cheaper, Good audio quality, Compact

Cons: All their players have smallish displays, dull User Interface

Zune: Zune is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s iPod. The new version Zune was almost my favorite PMP and it deserves a lot more attention than it actually gets. The earphones that come along with the 80GB Zune is top class and the user interface is really eye candy. In fact they thought of Wifi based audio file sharing first. The only scruple is the lack of Equalizer.

Pros: Clean design, Great earphones, Nice UI

Cons: No equalizer settings 8-O

View Full Album

Sony : Sony’s CD walkman player was hugely popular because of the nice design and great audio quality. Sony has been a little lazy in the PMP front when all others had been fighting for the No.1 spot. I guess that was because the Sony Ericsson Walkman phones were taking too much of their time but recently they’ve released a slew of mp3 players that cry out for attention. The audio quality is great no doubts but the cost of these players is what is questionable.

Pros: Super User Interface, Great audio quality, Super display

Cons: Expensive, Lack of large screened PMPs

Now that you’ve read about the top 5 brands its time to suggest the best PMP.

If you like to show off your PMP and love to accessorize it a lot then Apple or Zune players maybe the best option. Mind you there is no FM tuner and you need to go through the ordeal of iTunes in the case of Apple iPod.

If value is your top concern then the Creative line of players are the best because they offer a lot for a little. Also they’re my recommendation for a PMP.

There are many other good brands such as Transcend and iRiver that I’ve not mentioned about because they didn’t make it tothe Top 5. Also if you go to the local flea market you may get a local brand/china make mp3 player for a lot lesser but think about what will happen to your delicate ears ;)

doubleTwist Beta

2009-04-09T16:00:00.002+05:30

Take the features of iTunes, the smooth interface of zune.net and add the simplicity of Windows explorer. The concoction is what they call doubleTwist. It is such a wonderful media manager that I can double dare that you wont uninstall it once you get it onto your PC.

What is doubleTwist? It is a simple to use media manager that can play almost all the popular media files but at the same time lets you sync the devices and also share the media with your friends.

The makers of doubleTwist have a very clear purpose. They say

“Our vision is simple: to create a unifying media platform that connects consumers with all their media and all their devices, regardless of whether they are online or offline.

We feel that just like you don't have to use a different browser for every web site you visit (Firefox to read the NY Times, IE to stream Hulu, Chrome to browse YouTube, etc) you shouldn't have to use iTunes for Apple products, Nokia software for Nokia phones, Sony software for Sony products, etc. The typical household today has many such devices and there is a need for a simple and powerful software that connects them.”

If you ask me that is the winning formula. Imagine how many people hate it to install the PC Suites of Sony and Nokia, iTunes and Zunes of PMPs just so that they can manage their media. I for one had been installing the proprietary software of each and every gizmo and I know what a pain in the neck it is.

I installed doubleTwist on my PC yesterday and I feel it truly is a single stop solution for connecting all your media devices. I tried using the software with my phone, digital camera, thumb drive and ipod. No issues with any of those devices. Also since the tool supports sharing of media files to GMail and Yahoo mail ids you can select any file and directly send it to your friend all from within the tool. All the things you do on the tool are displayed on the main screen so that you can keep track of things and also easily forwards the media from there.

The tool is available for download for both Mac and PC and its in the public beta stage. Try the tool and post back comments about it.

Bumptop – the 3D desktop

2009-04-09T12:04:00.001+05:30

Earlier we’d seen about one nice way to arrange all the desktop icons into neat little containers that fade away with just a double click of your mouse. Now I’m going to introduce a graphic intensive but really cool way to portray your desktop.

Bump Technologies Inc., the creators of Bumptop sure know how to mix fun and work. Bumptop is a 3D environment that looks like a room with walls and all the icons, folders, shortcuts and files that were on your desktop are available inside this room. You can throw the icons onto a wall and they’ll stick there. You can stack them into piles and they’ll stay that way. Put stickynotes onto a wall, watch slideshows from the adjacent wall, share pictures with your friends and what not. All this is possible from the comfort of a single room.

You can pile the files and folders, make them into grids, fan them out in various shapes or there is always the clean wall for you to stick them into. You can throw files onto the recycle bin to delete files or just toss documents into the printer icon to print them. Other intuitive features are support for touch screen monitors (imaging multi touch of iPhone on your desktop), gesture based control and support for various themes. All these are for free. You can download the software from here. There are many more possibilities with Pro version of Bumptop which will set you back by just $29.

This is my Bumptop desktop complete with slideshows from various feeds, a stickynote, my facebook and twitter profiles and my email. Just download the cool tool and let your imagination run wild. Oh and for Mac users, as of now there isn’t a Mac version of Bumptop but something tells me there’ll be one very soon.

Budget phones from Sony Ericsson

2009-04-07T23:55:00.002+05:30

Sony Ericsson today announced two mobile phones that are targeted at the budget conscious consumers. The S312 and the W205 are not revolutionary design wise which is a pity since Sony Ericsson seems to be mimicking their designs for awfully too long.

First up the S312. It is a candy bar phone that has a decent 2” screen with a not so bad 176*220 pixel resolution. The phone has a video recording key and illuminated photo shortcut keys on the numpad just like C902 and K850 but the dampener is the 2 Mpx camera that lacks autofocus. The camera has a LED flash which might not be of much use but fits nicely on budget phones like these. FM Radio with RDS, Bluetooth with A2DP and support for memory cards upto 4GB complete the feature list. My guess is that the phone will be sold in India in the Rs.7000/- to Rs.8000/- bracket.

The W205 is a budget walkman phone similar to the W350 and W200 but this comes in a slider form factor. The phone has a 1.8” 128*160 pixel resolution screen that can display upto 65000 colors. Since it is a W series phone it comes loaded with a walkman player and special W series in-ear headset. The phone supports Memory stick, Bluetooth with A2DP and also has FM radio with RDS (no surprises here).

Sony Playstation 2 price cut

2009-04-07T21:45:00.001+05:30

Sony Playstation 2 the most popular gaming console which has gone beyond its age and still reigns the hot favorite has been given a sweet price cut last week and now the console can be bought in any Sony World across the nation for just around Rs.5500/- or $99.99 in US. The box contains the console and one controller. Additional accesories range from extra controller, memory, remote, headset, microphone to web camera and can be installed for some extra money of course. The color options available are Black and Silver. There are also Playstation bundles that contain along with the console an original PS2 title also.

The Sony Playstation 2 apart from playing a wide range of game titles also doubles as a DVD player for watching your favorite movies. Some of the popular games that are playable in the PS2 are God of War series, GTA series, Metal Gear series, Pro Evolution Soccer and Tekken.

Sony Playstation 2 was introduced in 1999 and has been around for 10 years now. It has some 1900 game titles and more than 140 million units have been sold world over.

So if you are planning to while away your time on the couch then this is one safe bet. Let’s all hope Sony plans for a price cut on the Playstation 3 soon.

Motorola Evoke Q4 preview

2009-04-03T00:00:00.002+05:30

Finally!!! A Motorola phone with a built in accelerometer for auto rotate (Krave ZN4 aside). Moto fans have been praying for this one feature for a very long time. Motorola has been taking all the beating for the past few months because of lack of any innovative mobile phones (remember their MWC stall). Well… it looks like things are going to change for good or at least that’s what i hope.

Motorola is previewing its newest handset the Evoke QA4 and from the initial impressions this phone seems to be one smooth operator. I totally fell in love with this phone because of more than one thing.

Superb original design.
Superior build quality and materials used. (as is always the case with Motorola phones)
Fast and Snazzy User Interface similar to the iPhone and Palm Pre.
Threaded messaging. (iPhone style)
Gorgeous 2.8” full touchscreen display.
Nice and handy widgets to keep you connected always.

Check the video to see what i mean.

Other features of the phone include a 2Mpx autofocus camera, full touchscreen with haptic feedback, aGPS, 256 MB internal memory with support for upto 8GB.

The widgets that come preloaded with the US version of the phone are :

Google Quick Search
Follow Me Weather
Picasa
MySpace Mobile
RSS Reader
YouTube
USA Today Mobile

The biggest party pooper with respect to the phone is that the Moto site lists the phone under the CDMA based phones. With so many things done correctly I really hope that Motorola does not forget to release the phone at the right locations too. Praying for a GSM version to be released worldwide.

Computer Maintenance part 2

2009-03-25T10:06:00.001+05:30

For those who don’t have the time to download and invoke each and every tool and wait for it to get completed, there are myriads of software solutions you can buy online to keep your computer in shape. Some of the award winning and effective ones that provide an All in one solution are :

TuneUp Utilities : This one does all the tuning up but doesn’t sport an antivirus or firewall. The interface is easy to use and the software overall is very light on resource usage. Comes at $49.95 for 3 PC license.
System Mechanic : The mother of all system maintenance software, this one is heavy on CPU usage but provides a native firewall and antivirus along with the usual tools to keep your PC cool. The interface is really intuitive and hence the heavy CPU usage I guess. The tool takes care of your security, privacy, maintenance, configuration and souping up of your computer in a single tool. You get the software for $69.95 with a 1 year license but right now some kind of discount is offered so that you can get 1yr license for $48.97.
Uniblue PowerSuite : The minds behind SpeedUpMyPC and RegistryBooster have come up with a package called PowerSuite that includes the SpeedUpMyPC, DriverScanner and RegistryBooster. This package will in turn make sure that your system is juiced up, registry is cleaned and repaired and drivers are periodically updated and backed up. The suite costs $120 but again special offer gets the entire suite for just $59.95.

Computer Maintenance part 1

2009-03-25T10:03:00.001+05:30

Keeping our desktop clutter free is just the starter if you want your computer to be healthy. You have to clear up your registry every now and then, Uninstall the unnecessary software, Defrag your hard disk, detect and fix any hardware problems, keep your hardware drivers up to date and lets not forget installing an antivirus and keeping it up to date.

Most important things related to computer maintenance are:

Hard disk defragmentation
Registry fixing and cleaning
Unused files and clutter removal
Firewall and Antivirus installation

All these are the most important things related to Computer maintenance and there is no priority among these. Everything has to be done. But amazingly most of the Maintenance related tools come along with your original Windows OS or can be downloaded for free from the internet.

Hard disk defragmentation : We need to defragment our hard disk to keep our data access times really low. Defragmenters ideally collect the various bits of a single file strewn around the hard disk into contiguous locations so that the hard disk doesn't need to run crazy to open a single file. Whether you have Windows XP or Vista, Home edition or Professional, hard disk defragmentation tool can be invoked from Start-> All Programs (Program Files) –> Accessories –> System Tools –> Disk defragmenter. You can also type “dfrg.msc” from Start –> Run. The tool has all the required info regarding the hard disk space usage neatly displayed graphically. There are many other third party Disk defragmenters available on the internet for free but the Windows Disk Defragmenter though without any bells and whistles does its job.

Registry fixing and cleaning : *WARNING* This is one of the more sensitive areas of computer maintenance that should not be done manually unless you are an expert with it. Careless manual modification of the registry may render your Operating system unusable.

The Registry editor can be invoked going to Start –> Run and typing “Regedit”. The registry contains all the information regarding the hardware, software and settings of your computer. So why do we need to fix the really delicate registry.

Whenever we install a software on our PC the information regarding the software and user created settings for the software gets stored in the registry and when we uninstall the software the registry entries may not be removed. This clutter has to be removed in order to speed up the registry and in turn speed up the system. Whatever happens it is wise to backup the registry before doing any changes to it. Some of the third party registry cleaners that do a splendid job are RegCleaner and CCleaner.

Unused files and clutter removal : This is something we have been doing ever since our hard disks started filling up. All unused data, obsolete files and things that we will definitely not require need to be removed to free up the hard disk. We are able to identify most of the clutter and we immediately Shift+delete them but there are many system files that stay and take up a lot of space. Can you believe that Google’s Chrome takes up more than 100mb to store our browsing preferences and details. Many such software take up space and we will never know. Try browsing to My Computer –> C: or OS native path –> Documents & Settings –> User or Your Login name folderand check the size of the “Local Settings” folder. This is more or less the space that is contained by clutter or data that is obsolete. Our windows operating system comes with a decent disk cleanup tool that can be invoked by Start –> Run –> “cleanmgr” or Start –> All programs (Program Files) –> Accessories –> System Tools –> Disk Cleanup. The Disk Cleanup is not as effective as the third party tools. CCleaner is the best at this job though.

Firewall and Antivirus installation : Why do we need a firewall. Just the same reason why we need doors to our houses. The firewall makes sure that external computers do not access our system without our authorization. Antivirus is something we learnt the very moment we learnt about what a computer is but anyway antivirus programs keep our computer files and hardware from getting corrupted by external malicious content.

The Windows Defender is one of the best Spyware protection tool available in the market and it comes free update with your original Windows XP SP2 or later OS. It is light on resource usage and is really thorough in scanning and removal. Windows Firewall also comes along with windows and can be invoked by clicking on Start –> Control Panel –> Windows Firewall. Windows Firewall does its job of preventing unauthorized access of your computer by external sources from the internet or your network. Apart from that Windows doesn't provide any antivirus program but no need to fret because many good third party antivirus programs come for free. AVG Antivirus, Avast and Avira are some of the best antivirus programs that come free. The best software firewall that is free to download is ZoneAlarm. It is an award winning program that is heavy on protection but really light on CPU usage.

Internet Explorer gets into the act!!!

2009-03-19T16:37:00.002+05:30

Its official folks! Microsoft will be releasing the Internet Explorer 8 full version (read: not the beta) today.

The new Internet Explorer will come along with the Windows 7 OS and is compatible with Windows Vista and XP too.

The market juggernaut in web browsers had released the first beta version more than an year ago and then on released another beta too.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has a market share of a whopping 72.2%. The others in the list of top 5 are Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and finally Opera.

The list of features included in IE 8 are:

InPrivate Browsing : Similar to Incognito from Chrome and Private Browsing from Safari. Useful for those who would want to keep their browsing exploits private.
Accelerators : Microsoft’s reply to Firefox’s add-ons. Helps you in quickly getting the information that you want. Select an address on a webpage and click on the blue icon that appears. A neat little popup showing the address on a 2D map appears within that page itself. Want to translate the content on that korean website. Select the text and again click on the blue icon. As simple as that. There are nearly 100 accelerators right now on the microsoft site.
Web Slices : This one is my personal favorite. Have you constantly logged on to a particular site just to know the updates of a content or a post? Web Slices are like a mini version of a particular page that you can put in your favorites bar. Anytime there is a change or an update in that page then the slice glows indicating the recent update. You just need to click on the web slice and it pops up the relevant information instead of going to that web site and scrolling to that content. Really useful if you ask me.
Search suggestions : This one has been around in google chrome for sometime now. You start typing a particular search keyword on the search bar and dynamically suggestions appear below the search bar. They’ve added a legion of search providers from Google to Wikipedia so that your searches get even more customised.

I’ll post the link of the download once Microsoft puts it there. Use it and give your feedback. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Google Chrome 2.0 Beta

2009-03-18T19:04:00.002+05:30

It is raining Internet Browsers this season. Fast on the heels of Apple’s Safari 4 beta, Google announced its Chrome 2.0 beta today.

Just last december Google removed the Beta from their Chrome version 1.0 but the new Chrome is again a beta. Google claims that the new beta is 25% faster than its previous stable version. The new beta also includes one feature that we saw in Windows 7 which is the window tiling. You can open more than one chrome window/tab and then tile the tabs horizontally or vertically by just dragging each tab to one end of the screen.

Form autofill, Full page zooming and autoscroll are some of the other features added to the new chrome. As i already said the major change in this beta has been the improved speed. You can download the new beta here. Use it and let me know if there are things I’ve missed to mention here.

Update: In the past one month of using the browser, I’ve noticed that the browser seems to crash at least once every day and also the browser sometimes freezes for sometime before letting you scroll through the pages. If you ask me I think the Chrome 1.0 is better as of now. Hope the developers iron out the bugs from this beta soon.

Apple Safari 4 Beta

2009-03-18T18:40:00.003+05:30

Wow is the only word for the new Safari beta. They’ve added so many features to the world’s fastest internet browser that you’ll have to look at it more than once to realize that it is indeed Safari.

Apple has worked really hard and took the feedbacks from the various forums to make the new Safari really a worthy upgrade.

The list of upgrades is really huge as I had already mentioned but some of the really noticeable ones are :

Top Sites – This feature arranges the top sites that you browse in a 3D wall similar to that of the Piclens addon for firefox and it can display upto 24 sites at a time. If the content in a site gets updated then the tile of the site will have a small star on the right top indicating that the latest preview is being shown there.
Cover Flow – The trendy little Cover Flow that many people became a fan of in the iPods and iPhone has been brought to Safari. No, you cannot browse album art using this but the Cover Flow is used to browse through your bookmarks and browsing history in an eye candy interface.
Better Tabs – We’ve come to expect tabbed browsing from the time Opera released their first browser with it. Google Chrome changed the game a little with really intuitive ways of playing around with your tabs like moving a tab from one browser window to another and sorting the tabs within the browser. Now Safari has brought all those features into Safari 4 and made it look nice too.
Windows Look and Feel – Yes now Safari browser will look just like your Windows Paint or Wordpad in that the title bar, browser borders and minimize, maximize and close buttons will have the same style as your native windows theme.

The new Apple Safari 4 Beta has 150 new features that cater to all the aspects from Security and Privacy to Graphics and Navigation.

To top it all the new beta is the fastest browser ever on both the Windows and Mac systems. Neither did i believe it till i saw the mind boggling numbers put up in their site. Really, IE and Firefox have a serious competition this time around.

iPhone OS 3.0 Finally!!!

2009-03-18T17:05:00.002+05:30

Yesterday the Apple keynote event happened at the company premises and it was really eventful because the guys behind the iPhone OS have really outdone themselves and made a neat little OS that we should’ve got with our iPhone First Gen anyway.

After hearing all the boos and cries from iPhone users and developers alike Apple has finally brought the Cut, Copy and Paste feature to their phones. Apart from that iPhone 3.0 brings a slew of much anticipated features like MMS functionality, Bluetooth with A2DP, Spotlight (the one available in your MAC computer) and a lot more.

What it means to the thousands of the iPhone users?

We’ll be able to extend our use of coveted iPhone in ways we could never have imagined. Use it as a flute and blow into the microphone to get music! That is just the starter. Stick your iPhone or iPod touch into an external speaker dock and see the dock’s personalized interface on your phone! The iPhone OS 3.0 has been completely redesigned to make it really flexible for the developers to push the limits of the phone.

Apple has sold 17 million iPhones in both its variants. At the same time 800 million apps have been downloaded for the iPhone and the iPod Touch

Very soon we’ll be able to use the phone as a fully blown GPS navigation device with turn by turn directions, keep track of your sugar levels, connect the phone as a 3G modem to directly browse on your PC and even have some multiplayer gaming fun (thanks to peer to peer bluetooth connectivity).

One really trendy feature that is possible now is the ability to access your music collection from within applications or games. One neat demo they showed was that of a sim (from Sims game) switching on the radio in the game to listen to the songs that were present in the iphone. Thanks to the Push notifications that have been brought to the new OS as promised, we are kept notified of all the updates even though we are not connected to the net always.

Things that are still missing in the new OS are:

Ability to run applications in the background
Video Recording
Adobe Flash Support

Easiest way to tidy up your desktop

2009-03-18T16:07:00.003+05:30

How many times would we have got irritated to see all the shortcuts and file icons teeming on our PC’s desktop but ended up saving even more files on the desktop just because we are in a hurry. It happens to everyone because “desktop” is the most easiest target location to save your important word document or the nice forwarded video you received.

I always like to juice up my desktop with lots of launchers, widgets and sidebars but somehow with all the icons spewed on the desktop it becomes really shabby to have these add ons. I have many a times ended up spending time on the weekends sorting the content on my desktop and moving the files into their appropriate folders but for a frequent user of a computer it is too much to ask for such maintenance every weekend. Recently I bumped into this nifty little tool called Fences from Stardock (The guys behind Windowblinds). This is a freeware that can be downloaded from here.

What makes it very useful for all those with dirty desktops is that it organizes all the files and shortcuts and what not into neat little containers. To top it you can make them disappear by just double clicking on an empty area on the desktop. Complete control over the containers, easy docking, color customization, neat fading animation and easy to use sliders for those containers that have a lot of files are the features you can look out for.

If you are wondering whether your system can take all the animation and transitions that come with this tool then don’t fret at all because this tool can run on almost any machine and i tried it in a system with just 512 MB RAM and a basic Intel processor.

Just for you to get an idea of what it can do to cluttered desktops, here is a Before and After (Newspaper Ad Style ;-P )

BEFORE AFTER

If you liked this software then the credits go to STARDOCK but if you have any doubts or suggestions then feel free to comment.

Nokia’s trio of Xpress branded phones

2009-03-11T20:16:00.003+05:30

Nokia keeps releasing so many phones these days that its getting really hard to keep count of the model numbers.

Today the world No.1 phone maker released the much hyped alpha numeric cum full qwerty 5730 Xpressmusic phone that comes with as you might have guessed it a full QWERTY slider keyboard along with a alphanumeric keypad. The phone comes with all the bells and whistles that you can expect from an XpressMusic phone that include a 3.5mm audio jack, stereo speaker phones, dedicated music keys on the side, FM with RDS, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and a 8gb memory card (max 16gb). The phone surprisingly is targeted as a XpressMusic Ngage gaming device with specific gaming buttons on the top, similar to those you can find on an N81.

A-GPS, Wifi, 3 Mpx Autofocus camera and 3G complete the features department. The spoilsport if you ask me is the smallish 2.4” screen. The S60 based smartphone brings in the home screen of the 5800 XpressMusic but adds a few functionalities to it too.

The mid segment 5330 XpressMusic slider phone has a really different design with clear cut top edges but curved edges at the bottom. It has the usual 3.5mm audio jack, FM with RDS, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, A-GPS but lacks WiFi. The phone has a 3 Mpx fixed focus camera and this one has some illuminating lights that flash according to the music.

The lower end 5030 XpressRadio phone (that’s right XpressRadio) is the first nokia phone under this new branding and also the first to have an internal FM antenna. This obviously eliminates the need for a headset to be connected every time you want to listen to radio. The phone has dedicated FM keys on the side and has a huge square loud speaker on the back. The much used and abused flashlight that became famous in the Nokia 1100 is also present. The phone will set you back Rs.2500 when it gets released in India.

What is a Netbook?

2009-03-05T13:57:00.003+05:30

These days eee pc, mini and wind have become a part of our vocabulary and we hear the word netbook a little too often. With the advent of technology and really dropping memory prices the Moore’s law is slowly getting disproved as there is rapid reduction in the size of computers and exponential increase in the power of microprocessors. Dual core, Tricore, Quad core and now they’re working on an octa core processor. Imagine the possibilities with such sheer power. As expected newer technologies have been concentrating on the electronic storage medium too. We are now able to see 8 TB hard disks doing the rounds in our local computer store. Without further deviation from the topic let us try to understand what a netbook is all about.

The word netbook was first termed by a company “Psion” for its small sized, limited power line of laptops ( I would rather consider them to be MIDs because of their limited processing abilities ). The company was able to sell a decent volume of these devices before they discontinued the model completely. After around half a decade, the computer Motherboard manufacturing major Asus (pronounced Aah-Soos) released its first netbook the Eee PC. The rest is history ;-).

So what is a netbook?

A netbook is a light laptop that is smaller in dimensions, has lesser processing power and limited storage in the form of fixed hard disk. One other limitation that the netbook has is the lack of an optical drive. These limitations in turn make the netbook consume very little power.

Hard to believe but every single computer manufacturer from Dell to HCL created a netbook to take their share of the pie. We have the Wind from MSI, the Mini from Dell and HP and the Aspire One from Acer. Just like Laptops outsold PCs recently, the netbooks are ready to take on the laptops and it’ll not take too long for them to become the best sellers.

To top it all, market experts are saying that the people are now interested in netbooks with larger screens, more hard disk space and an optical drive. I think they’ve forgotten what a laptop is after all ;-)

Knock knock… Is Motorola there?

2009-02-27T17:58:00.003+05:30

Unfortunately this is what the Fortune 100 company has left us to assume. Almost one year ago Motorola Inc was split into two independent companies – Motorola Mobile Devices and Motorola Broadband & Mobility Solutions. The reason? Apart from the many other reasons for the decision to be taken, the Q4 results of 2007 was the most critical one. Loss of around $1.2 billion was reason enough to get worried about the future of the company. Apart from that a series of lay offs and really boring product line that lacked innovation and competitive features had brought down the company’s global market share from around 18.7% in 2007 to a measly 3.44% in 2009. The company has been pushed from its long time 2nd spot to fourth spot in the major cell phone brand ranking. It is almost neck to neck with the 5th place Sony Ericsson.

This year at Mobile World Congress :

It was the most surprising thing to know that Motorola was having a very modest stall which portrayed some of its WiFi and LTE equipment. The phones that were on display were all announced previously and no surprises from them this time. Come to think of it even some new companies cooked up great phones this year.

What went wrong ?

Before i talk about what went wrong I’d like to mention the positives and negatives of the product line so far.

Pros -

There is no other mobile phone company that can match the solid build quality of Motorola phones.
The TFT display is one of the best from the E398 days.
The music department is another strong point of Motorola. Think about the Moto Rokr E2 and Rokr E8. The audio quality in these phones parallels some high end mp3 players.
Recently the Kodak branded ZN5 is a top class imaging device which has the fastest auto focus lens. (Hope they don’t change the camera hardware in future phones)

Cons –

Very boring and redundant UI. They’d been sticking to the proprietary P2K OS for an awfully long time. The OS was unresponsive and slow and it lacked the innovations that the other mobile OSs had. It may sound trivial but even support for themes and customization was a major reason for people to go for Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones.
Poor Battery life. Almost all their products had an abysmal battery backup till their recent phones like RAZR V8.
Lack of new hardware features and functionalities. No Wi Fi, flash support, GPS, Geo tagging. The list goes on.

If you ask me, the biggest mistake with respect to Motorola’s product line has been the unusually long time it takes from the conceptualization of a product to launch of it. Take for instance the first 5 megapixel phone ZN5 from Motorola. When it was launched last year there were at least half a dozen 5mpx phones in the market from the N95, N82 from Nokia to the Viewty from LG and F480 Tocco from Samsung. These other phones had established themselves and obtained a good market when ZN5 launched. It was too late for Motorola to establish this phone because already Samsung and LG has released information about their 8mpx phones.

ZN5 is supposed to be the best 5mpx camera phone but the time of launch has made the monster of a camera phone into just another mobile phone with a camera on it.

“The Motorola ZN5 was compared head on with the Samsung Innov8 (8Mpx phone) by CNET and no surprises here. Motorola ZN5 won hands down.”

This is not just the first time Motorola failed to innovate on time. They haven’t brought out a good OS on any of their phones till now and they’re still deciding on Android OS when already LG and HTC have announced their Android phones.

What can be expected this year from the company ?

A decent line up of Windows Mobile and Android based phones are expected at the end of this year. Definitely they’ll launch an 8mpx phone too but again timing is something we’ve to be on the watchout for. As any ardent fan of motorola would want, i also want the company to get back to its No.1 spot soon not just because they’ve already been there for a long time but because they deserve it the most. They invented the mobile phone and heck they need to rule the roost.

My two cents for Motorola :

Change the OS to Android or Win Mo. Add Wifi, GPS, >= 5mpx camera, eye candy UI (Similar to TouchWiz, S-Class or atleast Sony Ericsson A200), Accelerometer based auto rotation of screen and 3G. You’ll definitely have a winner there. (Or for the least i’ll not hesitate to buy it ;-] )

Mobile or MID or UMPC or PMP?

2009-02-18T15:55:00.004+05:30

I think you would be confused by the title of this post. But the fact is that Mobile phones have entered the territory of every other electronic device category and right now they are threatening the stand alone devices too. Call it high level integration or an attempt at becoming a Jack of all trades.

This year at MWC there were a slew of mobile phones that did fit with the title of my blog post. Phones that broke into the market of point and shoot cameras, phones that challenge the turn by turn navigation of a GPS device and phones that provide real internet experience.

A preview of some of the outstanding and not so great phones displayed this year at MWC.

Sony Ericsson :

IDOU is the code name of this media monster. It has got a couple of firsts of its kind. First ever Sony Ericsson phone to be based on Symbian S60 5th edition. First 12 Mpix phone in the world. The UI used is Sony Ericsson’s proprietary UI on top of Symbian OS. Its got everything that you can imagine from a large 3.5” touchscreen, 12 Mpix cam with xenon flash, Geo tagging, Face and smile detection, Accelerometer, 3G, Wifi, GPS. Really loaded i would say. Check the video below.

W995 from the Sony Ericsson stable is almost similar to the Idou with respect to specifications sans touch screen.

The screen size is 2.6” and the camera is 8.1 Mpix with an LED Flash.

Samsung :

Samsung hasn’t introduced any double digit megapixel camera this year and they’re still sticking to 8Mpix but they’ve brought advances in their own style. Touch and HD video are the magic words for Samsung this time.

Samsung Omnia HD is the world’s first phone to be able to record videos in HD resolution. That is a really big leap for a mobile camera.

Samsung Ultra Touch S8300 M7600 Beat DJ M7610 Beat Disc

Samsung Ultra Touch S8300 is the other high profile phone from Samsung with almost all the functionalities similar to Omnia HD. The only difference is that it misses Wifi functionality.

M7600 and M7610 carry the tradition of the samsung BEAT lineup of music phones but both are touch screen based. 7600 does not have a keypad whereas the 7610 is a slider phone that carries a 10key keypad.

LG:

LG has been one of the companies that introduced 8Mpix camera phones first and this time around they’ve concentrated more on the UI and OS.

KM900 Arena is a not a media monster bearing in mind that it has only a 5Mpix camera but this is the first phone to sport the new S-Class UI from LG. S-Class is similar to the TouchWiz and the TouchFlo components that were devised by Samsung and HTC respectively. It is a touch optimized front end flash based UI that is more snazzier than the underlying native operating systems’ UI. The phone sports a 3” screen and has GPS and Wifi too.

GM730 is another phone from LG which is almost similar to the KM900 and i found it really hard to find any differences except for the fact that the GM730 sports only a 65k colors display.

GD900 is a real head turner because it is the first phone in the world to have a transparent keypad. The detailed specs of the phone are not yet released.

LG’s might also announce their first Android based phone soon it seems.

Nokia :

This year nokia has released anything that will make heads turn but N86 was taking care of the job fairly. It is a dual slider just like the N96 and N85 and contains all the basics like accelerometer, wifi, gps and FM transmitter. Also it is the first nokia phone to sport an 8Mpix camera.

I should say that the symbian phones have come a long way from a clinical UI and boring icons. Now even menu transitions have been juiced up and the UI looks a lot slicker. It is a shame that N86 does not have a touch screen nevertheless N97 and 5800 are already market hits with pre booking for N97 just around the corner.

Their business line of E series phone had a couple of new comers in E55 and E75. E55 is supposed to be the world’s thinnest business phone at around 9.9mm. The phone has GPS, Wifi and a half QWERTY keyboard similar to many blackberry phones. A good addition to the phone is the digital compass.

The E75 is a full QWERTY slider phone with specs similar to the E55 sans digital compass. It would have been hotter if the screen size was more than 2.4” though.

6270 Classic and 6710 Navigator are the other two phones that were released. 6710 is a slider phone that has real GPS functionalities that match those on good GPS devices.

HTC:

HTC came onto the mobile phone radar after they released their Touch Diamond phone an year ago. This time around they’ve made progress in the right direction and brought out upgrades to their best selling Touch Diamond and Touch Pro phones.

Touch Diamond 2 has a bigger screen at 3.6” and better camera at 5Mpix than the older Touch Diamond. Apart from that it also brings external memory card option which was missing in its sibling.

The Touch Pro 2 is more of a serious business phone with business functionalities implemented. It also sports a 3.6” screen but has only a 3.2Mpix camera. One nice feature is that if you turn the phone face down during a call it automatically changes to speaker mode for conference calls. Also there is this new Straight Talk technology that helps in moving from email to calls and vice versa easily.

After this really long post i conclude that the mobile majors are focusing more on user experience these days and concentrating on the UI and the OS. Also the biggies seem to be moving to Symbian and Windows mobile for their smartphone needs. Unfortunately no big news about Android OS. The specs of the day is integrated Wifi, AGPS, Accelerometer based auto rotate and 5Mpix camera. Almost all phones had these specs in them. Lets see what these mobile phones will do to the stand alone PMPs, UMPCs, MIDs and GPS devices.

Windows 7 beta – review

2009-01-24T11:36:00.003+05:30

A big step in the journey towards OS acceptance & dominance.

I installed windows 7 even before it was made publicly available from MSDN servers thanks to a pelter.

My initial impressions on the OS were not so great because almost everything felt like the Vista Ultimate I that had. The sound themes, the glass windows with semi transperancy and even the windows explorer.

I was fishing for the major changes on the OS because windows 7 was released a little too early and it was coming in the path of windows vista. So anybody would expect some radical changes because microsoft was cannibalising one of their own OS (vista).

I feel that by far, windows 7 is the most sophisticated and mature OS from the windows stable. They’ve ironed out many of the problems that vista had and brought in new features that are positively user friendly. For example, take Peek (Aero Peek). It is a really useful feature that eliminates mouse clicks to see what is happening in another window. This is a feature that even OS X doesn’t have. You just hover your mouse on the taskbar and a neat thumbnail appears of the particular window. When you move the mouse onto that thumbnail every other window fades away and the focussed window alone comes to the front. No mouse clicks whatsoever.

I personally liked the way the various windows can be maximised and restored in size by just dragging them around the screen. Again reduced number of mouse clicks is emphasised. You just move a window to the left or right edge and it automatically fills one half of the screen. If you move the window to the top edge then the window maximises.

Then there is the Aero Jump that produces jump lists on the start menu and the taskbar icons. You just right click on the windows media player icon located in the taskbar and a list of all the recently played media appears. Right click on the windows explorer icon and the list of recently or most used files and folders appears. Open start menu and hover on the small arrow next to a item and the same functionality of the right click on the taskbar is performed with a neat transition effect.

These might seem to be very minor changes but they add a lot to the user experience.

I liked the concept of Windows Live package that is similar to the iLife package that Apple users enjoy. You get Mail, Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar and Family Safety. All these are available free of cost from the www.live.com for windows 7.

A round of applause for the speed of launch of applications and the overall snazzy feel that windows 7 has brought to the user. Everything loads a little faster than before. Even the installation process was a breeze and rarely do you see the CPU being utilised more than 15% for your basic everyday tasks.

Impressions:

There are a lot of changes in the kernel level and the hardware support and in the security front too but I choose to mention about them in a detailed review once the final version is out. Overall i think Windows 7 is a step in the right direction for Microsoft. I’m impressed by the beta release itself and eagerly waiting for the final version. This is one windows edition that you have to buy because it is worth the money that you spend.

Villu - review

2009-01-16T00:00:00.002+05:30

After a string of failures in the box office, Vijay was banking on Villu to regain his box office status. He seemed to have Prabhudeva the man behind the 2007 blockbuster Pokiri by his side and almost everything seemed perfect for this movie to become another blockbuster. Does it have chances of becoming a superhit again? Read on…

The problem with tamil cinema is that it is heavily dependent on formula movies. The good guy takes on a 100 bad guys but comes out unscathed and truth wins always. Add to that a few fight scenes where the hero glides around on invisible rope, an item number, a romance song and an unnecessary comedy track. Hasn’t it become more than redundant? Yes, it has, but a lot of directors in India don’t think so and prabhudeva is one of them.

Apart from the movie being a clear ripoff of the movie soldier (Soldier plot) the movie is a real pain to watch because of the continuous string of unrelated songs and dull comedy sequences. These days tamil cinema is using a lot of graphics and thanks to them so many graphics and animations industries are popping up on the map but the scenes using the graphics are better off without them and also even though we’ve good animation companies in India the implementation in these movies makes the viewer think we’re still miles away from hollywood.

The first half of the film is filled with a few fight sequences and A rated jokes. These days on screen kisses have become a de facto for the tamil film industry and Nayanthara was used only for the dances and her revealing clothes. She desperately needs to change this image of hers. The second half is fit only for vijay fans and most of the scenes do not have logic. Imagine the hero surrounded by some 10 cars and he escaping without even a single scratch by detonating each and every car. You can see more of such scenes in Villu. Prakashraj was not at his best in the movie too.

At the end of the painful three hours the only thing I can consider a positive is the efforts vijay put for the dance sequences and rare comic scenes of Vadivelu. If you are a Vijay fan then nothing can stop you from watching this movie even ten times but if not then maybe you should think twice before wasting Rs.100 and 3Hrs on this movie.

Eatables.in

2009-01-14T23:42:00.003+05:30

Imagine how many times you and your friends gathered at some place and decided to eat out and the big question popped up… Where to eat? Well for one, i know how it feels. Enter eatables.in!! It is a neat little website that we (me and ganex) created to help out all the junta to find a eatery real fast and that too with the accurate location on a neat little map.

Features of eatables.in :

Lots of Restaurants, Hotels, Pubs and Cafes plotted in Chennai & Hyderabad (Bengaluru & Kolkatta coming soon)
A accurate map representation of where each and every eatery is located
A seperate discussion forum for each and every eatery
An innovative way for users to add new locations (iKnow)
Easy search of eateries in each and every locality (iSearch)

From now on…

2009-01-14T12:07:00.002+05:30

What can you expect from my blog?

Latest technology news especially gadgets
Reviews of gadgets that are making the news
Indian perspective to the technology scene
A tip or two for protecting the environment - I’m a tree hugger :D
Lots of interactive polls for the geeks
Non biased reviews on movies that i saw

Happy Pongal!!!

2009-01-14T09:00:00.002+05:30

Wishing you a very happy pongal and makar sankaranti!!!

RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW

2007-01-24T20:41:00.001+05:30

Hi people,

Rebirth or reincarnation or come back... how ever you call it... the essence is the same. Without this life becomes gray and nothing to look forward to if u r predictable in life. WELL.... you maybe wondering why i'm writing this. Just to let you know that i'm back to blogging after a long break and you can expect some really good posts here... Keep logging in to find out more

2006-08-29T10:01:00.000+05:30

The wise guys...They like night life so much that they're trying to find a permanent solution to that small ball of fire called sun.
They almost succeeded but something went wrong somewhere ;) Anyway these guys are my favorite friends in college and we get together only before the day of the exam in an attempt to somehow crack it.More of an act of desperation i'd say but somehow we manage to crack all the exams.

2006-08-29T09:56:00.000+05:30

This is my PC.Or to say my Powerhorse Computer. I hang around with it almost 24*7 now that i've time to join my company.She's my best time pass ;) and the game on screen is the Xmen Rise of Apocalypse.A totally different type of platform game that i liked playing every bit.

2006-08-26T10:03:00.000+05:30

The mother of all digital semi slr's. It is still the most popular selling cam in US though it got released a really long while ago.Totally cool options even a professional can suffice with.All the snaps here in this blog are from this cam only.My most favorite gizmo for the time being ;)

2006-08-26T10:01:00.000+05:30

My Dell lap packed with a core duo and 1 gigs ram and a totally cool graphics card. I totally love this lap and u gotta check out the external dock altec lansing speakers i bought along with this...The sound is awesome i tell ya.

2006-08-26T09:58:00.000+05:30

This pic i took in my cam when i went for vacation three years ago. Used the basic iso settings without zoom and using a blue tint filter.The white balance was set to auto while the exposure setting was kept in indoor mode ( god knows how it got fiddled )

2006-08-26T09:48:00.003+05:30

This is me,Koushik. One thing that you can notice clearly is that i'm tall.6'2 actually. I just now finished my engineering at Crescent Engg. College Chennai and waiting to join in Satyam Computers this October. It'll be tough for many to believe that i have started a blog of my own but people its TRUE!!! I'm vetti and have nothing better in life now than to open a blog page.

The things u can watch out for in this page of mine :
1.Information on latest technology trends and the coolest gizmos in the market.

2.Occasional events in my life that are worth mentioning.

3.Since i'm a shutter bug, really cool photos that i shot in my s2 camera.

4.My attempts to write stories ;) (i've got this sudden interest towards writing stories)