Give me one, I'm ready to get ripped-off.

A Customer walks into a Airtel/Aircel showroom to buy Iphone4.

Cust: Sir, I would like to buy Iphone4 can you explain me the offers.

Airtel/Aircel rep: Sure Sir, Welcome. We've very good plans for IP4. First we'll rip you off with Rs34,500 for 16Gb model/ Rs 40,900 for a 32Gb model. Good thing is the price is same for both pre-paid and post-paid customers.

Cust: What about money back plans which you people are advertising about?.

Airtel/Aircel rep: Sir, we'll give discount for the amount YOU recharge(for pre-paid) and for Post-paid  discount will be given in your monthly rental, for two years we'll give discount on your bills. BASICALLY WE"LL SAVE YOU, for 2 years, FOR THE RIP-OFF we did.

Cust: Sounds like a good offering. Let me buy one.

Now tell me who will be that customer?.

A blog post about Nokia E7.

After using 5800XM for an year I acquired the latest Eseries communicator flagship by Nokia, the E7.

Note: This entire post(text portion) was typed using the E7's QWERTY keypad.

Hardware&Design:

  E7 is built like a tank, it has a slide-out hardware, four rows, QWERTY keypad with Chiclet style keys. The aluminium uni-body design makes it look like a premium device and feels great on your palms, all this in an amazingly slim profile. Needless to say, E7 is a beast, coming under the enterprise series it is also a capable multi-media device, a 4' inch AMOLED capacitive touch-screen with Clear Black Display(CBD), HDMI port output, 16gb mass memory, 8mp camera with dual-LED, 720p video recording and playback etc... are few note-worthy features. Under the hood you have 680Mhz ARM11 processor, Broadcom GPU and 256MB RAM out of which more than 140MB is available for the end user.

Software and usability:

After using it for few weeks now it is growing on me well, I'm loving the qwerty keypad and it is my first ever phone with a qwerty keypad I've used, the experience is really great.

On the software part it runs the latest and greatest Symbian^3 OS which is a functional, capable and feature-rich OS. With live multi-tasking this aspect of Symbian phones has been taken to a new level with Symbian^3 devices.

Visual Multi-tasking on Symbian^3

Symbian^3 is a vast improvement over s60v5 a.l.a Symbian^1 especially to those early adopters of S60v5(devices like 5800XM). Symbian^3, utilising in-built GPU to the full-effect, is very responsive and applications loads faster. There are numerous tweaks done to UI to be more intuitive, as a Symbian^1 user in the past I'm finding some noticeable improvements in Symbian^3 on the whole, but on the competitive part it still lacks behind the best out there in some aspects, especially the web browser. Nokia have promised that there will be updates improving UI, fingers crossed on that.

Multi-media:

E7 is good in both media creation and consumption. Supporting wide range of audio and video formats you hardly need converter software to make it play on the device. Watching videos on the large AMOLED CB display is a true pleasure. E7 can also play 720p HD videos, provided the size of the video is less than 2GB, at present the video player doesn't support sub-titles sure Nokia can sort this through an update. Overall you've got a pocket-able movie player in your hands.

E7 has a 8megapixel fixed focus camera with dual-led flash, the technology EDoF(Extended Depth of Focus) as Nokia claims is good for point and shoot photography but with no auto-focus objects within 30cm are not in focus, in simple terms you can't take a close-up/macro shot, using E7's EDoF camera, the details become blurry. It can shoot HD(1280*720p) videos and you've got continuous auto-focus here, no matter how close you point the camera, in video mode, towards an object it is focussed. Video quality is crisp and clear and there is an additional noise-cancelling microphone at the back to producing some crisp audio too.I've added few camera samples taken with E7 in low-light and in sun light conditions.

Music player on Symbian3 devices has been improved, including eye-candy album art cover-flow. As said before Music player supports wide range of audio formats and with 16GB mass memory there is ample space for songs and videos storage. Lack of folder support and equaliser modification are the few draw-backs in the music player. Audio quality is top-notch as always with Nokia devices and the supplied WH-201 ear-phones do produce good bass at higher levels but I'm going to buy WH-701 ear-phones, which usually comes with Nseries devices, with audio controls on it . I was impressed with the quality of it when I used it before.

Full office suite:

All Nokia Eseries devices comes with full office suite with editing functionality. E7 comes with the latest version of Quickoffice suite, with a hardware QWERTY keyboard there is no need to do your heavy typing work on your PC, slide-out the keyboard you won't feel tired of typing on this. Entire text part of this post was typed using my E7 in quickword. It also comes with a zip manager and Adobe PDF reader. Nokia have also bundled a third-party F-secure anti-theft application for device protection in case of theft, you can password protect the device, the application also sends a message to a registered mobile number if the SIM card is changed.

E-mail is the first priority when it comes to enterprise devices and the E7 delivers well here, by declining the terms and conditions of Nokia messaging you can get additional options in the e-mail client and can use the in-built client to push e-mails from any IMAP/POP servers by-passing from the Nokia servers. E-mail client   display e-mail in HTML, formatted text, with attachments. Option to display images, when needed , is a nice touch  too. Using Mail for Exchange application you can sync e-mails from any exchange servers. There are options to sync e-mail at custom intervals with minimum sync interval being every 5 min. Typing long e-mails, posts such as this, is a superb experience on the stellar hardware QWERTY keypad which gives nice tactile feedback. At any point of time, anywhere in the world, a hardware keypad completely trumps any on-screen QWERTY keyboard no matter how it's designed and how fluid the experience is. 

Excellent keypad of E7.

Features which no other mobile OS has at present:

USB-OTG(USB- On The Go) means all Symbian3 devices, including the Nokia E7, can host a USB device on it. Using the supplied USB-OTG adapter you can directly connect a pen-drive and transfer files to E7 and vice-versa, you can format your flash drive too. If that's not enough connect a USB mouse and browse the device without the touch screen, connect a USB keyboard and start typing if your fat fingers are finding difficult to type on the E7 keypad, I'm thoroughly enjoying this feature and at times boast about it.

8Gb Flash drive connected to E7 showing up on the file manager.

Option to format the flash drive.

  Pentaband 3G- all symbian3 devices works in almost every 3G frequency out there, buying an E7/N8/C7/C6-01 you can almost use the phone around the world, in 3G, which isn't possible with dual-band or tri-band 3G devices.

Recent firmware update:

E7 got an update recently, it got updated to V14. Update was released via FOTA to address some bug fixes and performance improvements.

Version 14.002 update.

Battery life: This is one aspect always depends upon the usage limits of an individual. In case of me, where the device is connected to Internet all time pushing e-mails, refreshing twitter timeline, browing web etc well for that's what the modern devices are made for, I get only less than a day out of it. Using power-saver mode you can drag it slightly more than a day.

All that being said E7 isn't the device for all. There are few drawbacks which may turn down one's choice of E7.

No auto-foucs camera on a high-end device is a complete bummer, I felt the pinch recently when I tried to scan a bar-code using E7's camera it simply won't scan, later I used my Nokia 5800 to scan it and it scanned in seconds, the same applies for scanning some documents or text/picture on a paper.

No memory card expansion, E7 comes only with 16GB mass memory for storage, this isn't a big deal for me as 16GB is enough for my media collection. Device back-up can't be done on to the mass memory, you need to insert a flash drive if you need to have a back-up of the phone memory.

No data encryption. All Eseries devices, except E7, have got data encryption. It's been rumoured that this feature is going to come in a future firmware update.

Non-replaceable battery, no more mocking at Iphone. Any freezes you need to press the power button for 8sec to revive the device.

Final words:I would say E7 is the best ever mobile hardware made so far. Though it has its own demerits, considering what it delivers and it does I don't see them as short-comings. Also the Nokia-Microsoft partnership has dampened the expectations of this device. I'm really worried and sad that such a good, capable and feature-rich OS is counting its days. Nokia have promised to support and release devices running Symbian for an year or so. I bank my hopes on Nokia and wish they optimise Windows Phone OS to match the functionality of Symbian or even better it. If that doesn't happen then many Nokia-Symbian users may bid adieu to Nokia.

 Camera samples

 

Panorama shot of NTR memorial.

Low-light with Flash

New year and dawn of new life.

Wishing a very Happy new year 2011, this is my first post in 2011 with a bit of news too.

I was contemplating  about whether to post about it or not, finally decided to post. To those who don't know, I will be a married man by the end of this month, all my bachelor life enjoyments and advantages will come to an end on Jan 24th. Well as a bachelor, I didn't enjoy much like others. Sitting in home, not going out for movies and places etc., I was only a bachelor for name sake and to be honest I was always been like that. This married life is going to be a challenge, ***cough cough*** , as always for anyone and striking a chord between the families is what I need to do in the future, it is not going to be easy as it sounds. With Almighty's grace, I hope everything turns out well and good, blessings of my elders and well-wishers will help me to step into, a wonderful, married life.

p.s. Watch out if there are any changes in me in the future and take a call when it comes to your marriage(just kidding).

Endhiran Jaw-dropping

I watched Endhiran movie today and was thoroughly satisfied for the money I gave for it. I've a special liking to Shankar's movies because, every movie of his is different and special, one out-performs the other Endhiran surely has out-performed his previous movie Sivaji- The Boss.

No surprises that this one is the highest budgeted film in Indian cinema, jaw-dropping graphics and special effects are a treat to watch, needless to say the songs locations and sets are simply stunning which only director Shankar can come up with. 

This blog post will be bashed left, right and center if I don't mention about Rajini. To sum up his performance in this movie in three words "Stellar performance ever" by thailaivar. Chitti character fits Rajini perfectly than anyone. Despite all the technicalities put in for the movie Rajini simply steals the show with his charisma and acting. This movie again shows "this" 60+ year old can act as hero whenever he wants.



One thing which I wanted to ask, this may sound silly to someone. Chitti says "The Robot" Speed: 1 terahertz and Memory: 1 Gigabyte(?) correct me If I'm wrong. Is 1Gb of memory enough to store amount of data/information that chitti was fed with?

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Edit: Later I found it is not 1GB instead 1ZB(zeta byte)  which seems sufficient.
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Endhiran: A complete family entertainer. Watch it, in theaters, for efforts put in by the movie team and Rajini.

My last words to friend Thulasi... :-(

I was totally sad and dejected while I wrote this, I came to know the demise of my college friend Ilayadhulasidharan(we call him "Thulasi"). 

I was shocked to see a tweet about his demise by my friend. The saddest part of all is that he expired on 22nd September because of Pneumonia and we came to know only today.

                                    Hailing from a town called Kallakuruchi, Tamilnadu, Thulasi was working for Cognizant technologies in Chennai. I would call him at times and we share a lot of things, he was the only person with whom I had occasional contact after my college days, it's disheartening I can't do it any more. Needless to say, Thulasi was a very-hard worker and he made up his mind that he should get employed in a Software company after completing his UG. After months of hard-work in improving his communication skills, finally 9 months after his B.E completion, he got employed with CTS. It is such a commendable achievement as English was not the medium in the school he studied. He was doing well in his job before this Pneumonia plucked his life out of this world. 

                                  My regret is that I and my friends couldn't even see a final glimpse of him, by the time we came to know it was too late, nevertheless let his soul rest in peace. I convey my deep condolences to his family and relatives.

Thulasi! September 22 will always be remembered. This night is a saddest one in my life so far and I doubt I'll sleep without reminiscing those days of campus interviews which we attended together...

Tablets, what's the point?

It all started in Jan 2010 when Apple.Inc announced the launch of  Ipad, which received mixed opinions. Many technology bloggers didn't see a point in this as it was a nothing but an Ipod touch with bigger screen size . Apple's marketing skills and fanboism led to ipad success and they sold 3million Ipads in 80days, thats truck loads of it.

Smartphones > Netbooks > Laptops/PCs is how the anology goes, now it stands like Smartphones > Tablets > Netbooks > Laptops/PCs.

My question is, are Tablets really needed there in between?. After ipad's success story every other manufacturer planned to release a Tablet to catch-up with the competition. At present scenario a Tablet is a multi-media device, with bigger screen size, which does the same functions of a smartphone. Ipad didn't differ much, it ran the same OS on the iphone with no GPS, 3G/wi-fi only. A user normally can do anything what they can do on a Tablet with their Smartphone sacrificing screen size which isn't deal-breaker for many.

Samsung too has jumped into the Tablet band-wagon, with their Galaxy Tab they have streched a bit far and added phone functionality to it, which IMO is totally meaningless, imagine you making calls with a 7inch slab next to your ears. This device is a bigger sized one of their own GalaxyS smartphone. Every specification word by word, albeit the screen size, is same for both the devices. 

Cost factor: Is it any good investing in a Tablet considering the requirements of a normal user who wants to browse web, handling multimedia etc. Netbooks fits in this case undoubtedly with decent value for money, better specifications, smaller size(compared to laptops) with Windows or any Open source OS. In a long stretch Netbooks offer better functionality over these Tablets. Having said that our Government is planning to launch a low-cost Tablet which is for a different cause altogether. 

There are many tablets by different manufacturers namely HP, Notion-Ink, Toshiba etc. in the pipeline. I wish they come up with something which is an exact alternative to Laptops, netbooks atleast, instead of bigger sized smartphones. How many would prefer a Tablet over Netbook? comments welcome, I would not prefer it for now.

Thanks....

There is no point in crying over spilled milk.

Hey can you give me your office phone number; Sure. Wait a moment let me see it from my phone's contacts book.

The above conversation clearly says we are now more dependent on our gadgets(mobile phones for that matter)for storing Phone numbers than our flesh weighing 1.2kgs. Your contacts' information including Mobile, Office, Residence phone number, e-mail address, house address etc., can be stored on a Mobile phone and no one would disagree with me that these days people don't even bother to carry a contact book, why should one carry that? if a phone can store umpteen contacts with ease.

So what is this "no point in Crying over spilled milk" if you haven't guessed by this time its BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP. People store contacts on their phones but seldom they take a backup of it. All mobile manufacturers do provide facility to connect the device to a compatible PC to take back up of conatcts, messages, calender entries, Notes etc. So how do you take a backup of all these? what are the ways through which one can do it?, let me tell you some.

1. SIM card: Yes, don't under-estimate this small piece of plastic. SIM cards can store some good number of contacts, depending on its capacity, an 8K capacity SIM card can store upto 100 contacts, now SIM cards(GSM) are coming with 16k capacity so you have room for storing 200 contacts on to it. A 3G sim card, like the one i have from BSNL, is a 32k SIM card and the numbers double. Always, copy all your phone contacts to your SIM memory too, this would be helpful in occasions where you may need to swap SIM cards to phones, so if your contacts are stored on it simply you can copy them on to the current phone in no time.

                  

Some downsides of SIM card storage are,

• Only the phone number can be stored and not any additional information.
• If you lose your phone or the SIM card your have to say goodbye to your contacts.
• Storage numbers are dependent on its size hence you can't store more number of contacts.

2. PC-suite or PC-studio or PC-sync:  Now comes the Mobile manufacturers' part in backing-up your information, as stated earlier they provide an application which can be installed on to your PC/MAC and by connecting your phone through an USB cable/Bluetooth connection. Starting from basic entry level phones to high-end smartphones can be connected to a computer for this purpose. Go and search your phone box, if you haven't thrown it yet, which would have come with a CD containing the application. Installation isn't that difficult, inserting the CD to your PC would guide you with the procedures of how to do it.

 Advantages of using this backup service are,

• All your data including Contacts, Calender entries, Notes, Bookmarks etc are backed-up.
• Connection to the PC can be done via both USB cable and Bluetooth(provided the phone has Bluetooth).
• If your phone's display fails you can still view and take print-out of your contents.
• Your data is easily accessible and can be retrieved at any time when you want.

Some downsides are,

• If you lose your data cable, and if your phone don't have Bluetooth, then its difficult to further take backup or to retireve it.
• You still depend on your computer for things to happen.

3. Online services: Use your e-mail provider's address book, take some time to update all your contacts' phone number, e-mail address etc. this serves for good purpose incase your phone is stolen /lost,  you can even export all your contacts in a .csv format excel sheet. I use the one such as this and my phone has good integeration to that service. 

Downsides are,

• An Internet connection is needed and you can't view details offline.
• Still you need to search for a computer to backup and get your information.

4. Memory card: Mobile devices, even basic ones(not very basic though), comes with memory card facility(atleast 2Gb) and they can be used to take backup of your data on the phone. It still depends on the phone manufacturer to give such a facility and AFAIK all major manufacturers do provide this facility.

Advantages of using this,

• Everything on your phone, including contacts, calender entries, notes, bookmarks, is backed up on the memory card.
• Restoring the backup is an easy task, with a touch of a button, as the card is always inserted on the Phone.
• No need to depend on a PC to restore your contents.

Downsides,

• If your Memory card gets corrupted you need to depend on the file recovery softwares to get your data.
• If your lose your  Memory card, you lose your data too.

5. Service provider: Some service providers have Mobile phone backup service like this one, contact your provider for such a service. If, none of the above mentioned methods are working and if your data is sensitive enough that it shouldn't be known to others this backup service helps but be ready to cough down the amount your SP demands as this is a premium service.

6. Third-Party applications:

Note: This is applicable only for phones running on a dedicated Mobile OS(Smartphones).

There are number of third-party vendors with security applications supporting multiple Mobile OS platforms, yes, indeed applications aren't free but you get  your bucks worth for it. They provide advanced level security and features, having used one personally(got a promotional free one with license, so didn't pay for it) i was very much satisfied with the features and functionality, you can set password for your Messages, Gallery, e-mail applications on your phone.

If you are a Symbian-Nokia smartphone user check the Ovi store

                    Windows Mobile user user check the Windows Marketplace

                    Google's Andriod smartphone user check Andriod market

                    Balckberry User check BB app world 

I am not a Smartphone user where do i go?. All feature phones("non-smartphones") support Java you can search for Java applications, you can find some free here getjar.

There are six ways which i found, though i use only three on a regular basis, there are many available, if you are using any other way than mentioned above please let me know and put it across in your comments i would be interested in trying it. Always backup your data with more than one source/method there is nothing which is secure and trust-worthy in this case.

If you find any difficulites, I am glad to help in this regard. So, have you started to backup, do it now if you feel intimidated by my post.  Happy backing-up, good luck.