Make hay while the sun shines.

Since the inception of 3G service in Hyderabad I have been using 3G on my phone and when I want to browse on my laptop I tether my phone to it as a modem. I was using BSNL 3G and was pretty much happy with the quality and speed, they were the first to launch 3G here, and their data plans were nominally priced. Few months later Airtel, Aircel, Vodafone etc. followed, I was never bothered about it as I knew their prices will be complete rip-off  considering humongous money they paid to get 3G licenses. As I rightly guessed, I simply laughed at the data plans of Airtel which read '1.2Gb for 799Rs', I was getting four times the data they offered with lesser price with BSNL(6gb for 606Rs).

Since one fine day, not sure what happened, BSNL 3G speeds were dropping, on few occasions it wouldn't connect after all. Things went from bad to worse, even my Airtel GPRS was faster than BSNL 3G, I thought I've had enough with all this. I decided to bite the bullet and activated 3G on my Airtel SIM card, their data plans aren't economical but still I wanted to have 3G on my phone. After activation, I streamed a video on youtube to check the transfer speeds, data transfer speed was very good and higher than BSNL 3G. I was very much astounded to see that I wasn't charged for the data usage, instead my GPRS data balance reduced.

Long story short. If you have a 3G phone and if you are using Airtel GPRS for 98Rs, which gives 2Gb/month, you can consume that 2Gb data with 3G data transfer speed(100kb/s download speed minimum) by changing your mobile network mode to 3G only. Prior to doing this, you should activate 3G on your SIM by sending 3G to 121. You will receive a message saying "existing 2G data plan will be deactivated, send 1 as reply to confirm this" reply with '1' boldly, this doesn't work as it says, you will still have your GPRS data count intact(dial *123*10# to check data balance). This is not a hack or a trick to fool around the system this works out of the box and I'm using it without problems/threats of hefty bill. I guess there is some flaw in the way Airtel have implemented 3G for existing customers, unlike BSNL where you need to get a 3G sim card to have 3G services.

This is working flawlessly with Airtel pre-paid connection, Andhra Pradesh, not sure it is the same for post-paid. You pay for a GPRS plan and consume that data in 3G with higher transfer rates. When you go for vanilla Airtel 3G data plan you need to cough out 799Rs for paltry 1.2Gb data.

For one more time, I'll simplify things.

I have a 3G phone > I have a Airtel pre-paid SIM card, I've not activated 3G in it yet > I'm using GRPS, let it be any plan, say 2Gb for 98RS (very slow) here is what you've to do. Activate 3G by sending message 3G to 121 > let the 3G activation be done(read para 3 for more) > Change your mobile network mode to 3G/UMTS > start browsing at 3G speeds. Use Mobile Office as the access point.

Here are some screen shots from my E7 showing transfer speeds.

You/I don't know how this happening and do I dare to think that a company like Bharthi Airtel is so naive that they allow customers to use 3G for bargain prices? before they pull the plug out make full use of it. Now there is a GPRS data plan costing 251Rs(AP circle), giving you 8Gb for 3 months does it ring a bell?. What are you waiting for? go and recharge.

Please post your comments and clarifications. Thanks.

Dual-SIM phones.

Mobile phones are ubiquitous so have become the dual SIM phones lately. There are many cheap, Chinese dual SIM phones in the market selling for rock bottom prices, with features which major phone manufacturers don't give on their phones, they are selling like hot cakes. This blog post is also about disadvantages of buying these Chinese fake phones and why dual SIM phones are popular, especially, in India and not that popular in other markets.

Many prefer dual-SIM phones so that they don't need to carry two phones for their work, with dual-SIM phones one can have both work and personal numbers on a same phone, which sounds more productive. In recent times even major mobile manufacturers have joined the dual-SIM band-wagon, they have realised the importance and demand, though lately, of dual SIM phones to give these Chinese ones a run for their money. On any day I would go for a dual SIM phone by a major, reputed manufacturer instead of buying these Chinese ones.

Semi-active and active Dual SIM phones: One should be careful with this, few dual SIM phones are semi-active means they can take two SIM cards but only one will be active at a time, you need to manually switch to make calls with the other SIM card. On the other hand you have proper dual SIM phones where both SIM cards are active at a time.

Fake and China-made dual SIM phones: Well they are in hands of everyone from a daily-wage worker to professionals. The have dual SIM(even three SIM cards support), touch screen/QWERTY, dual/three/four speakers some advertise they have built-in woofer, TV antenna, memory card support, Megapixel level camera and they can make calls, all for a bargain price, now what on earth will stop anyone buying it.

These phones have note-worthy drawbacks, they don't have IMEI number, no warranty, no manufacture support, bad quality components/accessories etc. Setting up GPRS on these phones is not simple and straight forward unlike phones from major manufacturers. All they can do is make and receive calls, with not so good call quality, output songs loudly through their woofer(a gimmick really) enabled speakers which aren't pleasant to ears. These phones are good, if not OK, for a normob but for people who like to use their phones more than for calling they are not capable, they simply don't follow any standards.

Dual SIM phones popularity: India and other Asian countries are the market for dual SIM phones. One reason is how service providers operate here, especially in India. In India you can buy a phone from Nokia/Samsung/LG or which ever manufacturer and get a prepaid/postpaid connection from Airtel/Vodafone/Aircel etc. You are not, in anyway, locked into a contract or constrained by a service provider or manufacturer. If you don't like one you can switch to another over-night. So buying a dual SIM phone you can have two connections from different network service provider and it's uber productive.

That's not the case in Europe, U.S.A and other countries, there the service providers are the ones who sell phones and they tie you up for a contract for atleast two years with them, charging a fee on a monthly basis for calls, messages and mobile internet for that two years period, while giving the phone free of cost. The actual phone cost is subsidised by the network providers. This sort of subsidised-contract-based phones won't work for dual SIM phones because a service provider can't give two connections for a contract or allow you to use the phone, bought from him, to work with another network provider in the country. This makes dual SIM phones a less feasible option for mobile network providers in developed countries.

Dual-SIM phones to consider buying: Micromax and Samsung have been dishing out dual-SIM phones in various price range, Micromax has dual-SIM functionality in all of their phones. Nokia recently launched two dual-SIM phones C2-00 and X1-01, just to clear things up Nokia C2-00 is a dual-SIM phone whereas C2-01 isn’t dual_SIM phone, be careful before you buy it. Nokia’s naming convention is a shambolic mess, well that’s a topic for another day. Currently X1-01 isn’t listed in Nokia-India website I’m sure both  will be available in the stores in few days.

I’ll give a short cover-up on Nokia C2-00 and X1-01 dual-SIM phones. Both are active dual-SIM phones.

My pick would be Nokia C2-00 for its design and features, good thing is you get a industry standard microUSB connector even on the low-end models which other manufacturers don’t give for the same price. C2-00 support memory cards(microSDHC) upto 32Gb, hot-swappable. One other unique feature of C2-00 is a hot-swappable SIM card slot located outside the phone, this comes handy when you want for a quick SIM card change without switching off the phone and pulling the battery out.

Nokia X1-01 is a budget music-centric phone with dual-SIM support. Nokia says X1-01 as the clearest and loudest speaker on phones Nokia has ever produced, so literally it is a pocket sized boom-box. X1-01 supports memory cards upto 16Gb and you get a standard 3.5mm headset jack where you can plug any standard headphones other than Nokia ones. There is no information about the pricing yet on the Nokia-India website.

Well I'll wind-up this post with that, If there is anything I've missed out about dual-SIM phones/functionality please comment about it. Thanks.

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...