From the category archives:

Gadgets

iPhone in India - Breaking, Activating and Unlocking

by venukb on March 29, 2008

A 16 GB iPhone just made its way to my home today all the way from an US store. Even though I had "experienced" iPhone by reading about it and by seeing tons of videos on YouTube, using it live was a totally different experience.

iPhone is an amazing, astounding, remarkable, wonderful, incredible, marvelous product from Apple!

The sad fact is that I can use this phone only for the next 20 days after which my brother would take ownership! (He is the actual owner of this phone)

iPhone (2)

Sadder is the fact that I have to return using my HTC Touch. Believe me,

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SharePod

by venukb on February 29, 2008

In one of my earlier post I covered some of the tools that can be used to copy songs from iPod to PC. Most of the tools available are shareware and there are very few free quality applications. Sharepod is one such quality application for iPod. It's a lightweight music management tool for iPod which you can run from within the iPod disk. This circumvents the necessity of having iTunes on every other system for managing your iPod. Image_venukb Below is the list of Sharepod features which might motivate you to install and use it :-) Track tag editing Video import support iPod Shuffle supportDrag and drop tracks to Explorer Completely rewritten codebase to safely ...

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Staples - Now In Bangalore

by venukb on January 6, 2008

I have been planning to write about my visit to Staples from quite some time and now I have finally found some time :)

Staples is one of the worlds largest office supply retail store chain and they entered India via a joint venture with Kishore Biyani's Pantaloon Retail Limited. The biggest store in Bangalore is located on the Sarjapur Outer Ring Road (Next to Reliance Fresh/Opposite Innovative Multiplex).

Update - Staples has now opened a new store in Koramangala (near Forum Mall)

A store like Staples is tailor made for a gadget freak like me. When it comes to electronic goods/computer accessories, I am not constrained by my bank balance,

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New Printer - HP C6188

by venukb on November 18, 2007

Just got myself a new printer : HP Photosmart C6188

IMG_1775

By the way its not just a printer, its also a copier,scanner and a fax machine !  The scanner and copier is definitely of some use; not sure how extensively I would use the fax feature, but I did manage to get it up and running ! (with my existing DSL setup)

I did spend considerable amount of time researching the printers available in India before finalizing on HP C6188 !

And currently I am spending more time to get "all" the features of "all in one" printer working on Vista :( (There are issues when I switch

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HTC Touch Smartphone

by venukb on July 24, 2007

HTC Touch, also known as the HTC P3450 is a Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone designed and manufactured by HTC (A Taiwanese based manufacturer)

I heard about HTC Touch Phone from my brother when he returned from Taiwan. When we stopped by a shopping mall we even had a check on the HTC Touch in a mobile phone shop.

However due to the unavailability of a demo phone, we were not able to get a good overview of this touch phone and hence decided to defer the purchase until we had good knowledge of its features and shortcomings.

htcorig

I came back and had a look at all the

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LCD Monitor - Which one to go for ?

by venukb on July 17, 2007

I have been finding my laptop's 15.4" display too small to work on and hence was thinking of buying a Flat Panel LCD monitor. From the past 2 days I have been researching on products from different vendors and I finally ended up in a confused state. At my workplace they have 19 inch Dell monitors (recently widescreen versions also arrived) and these monitors are a treat to work with. So first I went to check on Dell monitors available in India. dell Paul's review of Dell's 30 inch LCD display was also one of the factors for checking out Dell first :) . 17" and 19" inch ...

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Sandisk Cruzer Micro

by venukb on July 2, 2007

I have been planning to buy a USB flash drive from quite some time now. My current 256MB flash drive is of no use in the sense that it runs out of space too quickly. My 30GB iPod could have served as an alternative; however its little bulky to carry around and the "proprietary" cable that has to be tagged along with the device makes it much more difficult. Transcend and Sandisk are the 2 major vendors of USB Flash drives. I had a look at the products offered by both vendors and was more impressed with the Sandisk range. Sandisk flash drives looked much better; cute and compact. However compared to Transcend they are priced on the higher side. The other reason for choosing Sandisk was because of the 2 Year International warranty. Transcend provides lifetime warranty only at the place/country where it is bought (The one I got was bought in Taiwan :D ) After going over the entire product portfolio, I finally settled on a 4GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro. Let's go over the specification first :)

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Walt Mossberg reviews iPhone

by venukb on June 27, 2007

Walt Mossberg of WSJ is highly regarded as one of the most influential writers on information technology. After trying out iPhone for 2 week, he has his say on this post

Checkout this video too :)

Points to note from the video:

He was able to get in terms with the virtual keyboard after 5 days of usage Access to Internet using EDGE is slow (However there is an alternative way to connecting using WiFi which is faster) The phone is locked on AT&T and if the AT&T coverage is not good, its not worth going for the lusty phone as of now. ...

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USB Thumdrive from China

by venukb on June 21, 2007

Check this picture !

china_thumbdrive

 

Now read this story :)

Some guy went to China and bought it for very cheap. It is supposed be able to store for several GB of memory. But as much as he tried, it didn’t work so he decided to to open it up and that’s what he saw. So please if you go to China or planning to try stuff you buy even though it is very cheap. But anyway I think it’s hard to return stuff there. This is like the extension cord for the USB cut and put inside, how did they even think of doing this?

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Bose SoundDock - Speakers for iPod

by venukb on April 24, 2007

Apple's iPod has become a huge cultural phenomenon similar to what Sony's walkman created few decades back. The success of iPod also has bought in a lot of players in the iPod accessories market. The Bose SoundDock digital music system is one of the accessory specifically designed to expand and enhance your enjoyment of the music stored on dockable iPod'sBose SoundDock Thanks to my brother; this accessory is now part of my big list of iPod accessories and at 300$ is probably one of the most expensive one too.

Key feature of Bose SoundDock

Bose proprietary acoustic design: Rich, full ...

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