In my earlier review of HTC Touch, I had hoped that the phone would last for couple of years; it did last for more than couple of years – 2.5 years to be exact and got replaced by a much superior, nicer, faster Blackberry Bold 9700

HTC Touch was a nice phone but not a useful device. The messaging capabilities were very limited partly because of the touch interface and partly because of the almost useless OS – Windows Mobile. The processor was too slow to run applications and it was a pain to watch the device load the applications.

I have been using the Blackberry for almost a week now and it has been an amazing experience till now !

• The messaging capabilities in Blackberry is something that can’t be even experienced on an iPhone. I could quickly configure all my E-Mail accounts via the Blackberry Internet service and now new E-Mails are pushed to the device as and when they land on the server
• The physical keyboard is a pleasure to use when compared to the touchscreen keyboard.
• Blackberry Messenger is an excellent tool to chat with your other Blackberry friends.
• Facebook App is developed by RIM and does integrate nicely into Blackberry. You can even link Facebook contacts into Blackberry contacts which in turn pulls information like phone number, photo etc from Facebook onto the device address book.
• There are quite a few useful applications which can be downloaded from Blackberry App World (like iPhone App Store) . There are few others which can be downloaded OTA.
• I love keyboard shortcuts and Blackberry has taken care to incorporate the same in most of the applications – Messaging, Browser, Home Screen etc.

The only problem I had was with respect to the boot time. Every time I uninstall an application, you have to reboot the device and this is something which does take a lot of time.

I don’t intend to write an exhaustive review of the device hardware and capabilities. In case you are interested to know more about this phone, do read the reviews done by Phone Arena and Crackberry.

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)

Sadder is the fact that I have to return using my HTC Touch. Believe me, HTC Touch UI is nothing compared to iPhone; same goes for the user experience.

Using iPhone in India

We all know that iPhone is available only in a few select countries and its also bound/locked to a particular carrier in that country. And if you are not lucky to be in that country, the only way to use an iPhone is by “hacking” it.

I spent almost 3-4 hours by going through the various forums to find the safest way of hacking the iPhone.

As you read more and more into these forums, rather than being informed, you end up in a confused state. You really can’t decide as to what method to use to hack your 500$ iPhone.

I am in no way an iPhone hacking expert but this is what I understood by going through tons of articles and forum posts. (Disclaimer: The information might not be 100% accurate)

First thing is to understand some of the terminologies associated with hacking the iPhone.

If you are planning to use iPhone in India you need to do all of the above. For some legal users of iPhone hacking might only involve “Jailbreak” which allows them to install third party applications.

Tools to hack iPhone

After going through the various forums, I narrowed down onto two tools to hack the iPhone (on Windows)

1. ZiPhone 2.6b
2. iPlus 2.0b

There is one set of users who have had success with ZiPhone and there is one set which believes that iPlus is the safest way of hacking iPhone.

The way ZiPhone breaks iPhone is different from the way iPlus does; ZiPhone permanently downgrades the bootloader from version 4.6 to 3.9 whereas iPlus downgrades it to a fake blank 3.9 bootloader. With iPlus you have an option to go back to 4.6 bootloader which is probably required to shield against future firmware updates from Apple.

Many believe that iPlus2.0b is the safest way to hack iPhone; however note that there is one issue found with using Fake Blank Bootloader. More details on this post. The issue is more of a warning and might occur only if you try to downgrade to 1.0.0 or 1.1.1 firmware.

ZiPhone has a very nice user interface and it almost tempted me to use it rather than iPlus. (Note: ZiPhone is probably an ideal tool to break iPod Touch)

However the inability to restore back 4.6 bootloader prompted me to use iPlus2.0b with the international payload. Though iPlus2.0b is command line driven, it did its work of breaking, activating and unlocking the iPhone with zero trouble.

The iPhone is currently activated on Airtel network and it should also work with the following service providers:

• Spice
• Vodafone
• CellOne

For using iPlus2.0, I followed the instructions given on this post:

• How to activate, jailbreak and unlock 1.1.4 firmware with iPlus (3.9 / 4.6 bootloader)

Also note that I skipped the loading of 1.1.4 firmware; You can skip this after confirming that you have 1.1.4 version of the firmware on your iPhone. To confirm the firmware version, you need to type in this code: *3001#12345#*

Also if you are not comfortable with this command line interface, the same developers of iPlus have come up with iLiberty+.

This UI wrapper for iPlus was released a week back and I thought it might be risky to try out a new untested tool. However I do like the concept of iLiberty+ where they have tried to design it as an extensible tool; users can download and place the payloads of their choice and select the same from the “Advanced” tab.

Disclaimer: This post is just my experience of breaking iPhone using iPlus2.0, if you bricked your iPhone using iPlus2.0 or ZiPhone I am not liable

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.

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 import files to your iPod
• Play Count, Last Played Date support
• Volume Adjustment support
• Faster loading/sorting time!
• Built-in Media Player
• Tag Editor to edit track tags : Title, Artist, Genre, Volume Adjustment, Media Type etc.

SharePod has almost all the features available on iTunes and has the additional ability to backup/copy songs from iPod to PC.

If you know any other such quality free tools for iPod, please feel free to suggest the same in the comments section.

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, I’m only restricted by the limit on my credit card

However I was more than disappointed with the store and I believe Staples would be more disappointed with the amount that I spent. More details on my shopping experience below:

1. First of all I had no trouble in getting the parking space. Other than the space available in front of the store, part of the service road is “officially” used for Staples parking. In fact, even the main outer ring road itself is misused for parking.
2. As soon as you enter the store, you are greeted with LCD monitors on the left. I have been thinking of buying one from a long time and was excited to see this rack first; however it was only short lived since Staples has only stacked 17″ – 20″ monitors. Also the vendors were restricted to Acer and HP ! What about Dell ? Well I had read that Staples will start selling Dell Monitors, but I guess its probably not applicable in India yet.
3. Going ahead you will find the left part completely filled with software and game CD’s/DVD’s. I checked on the price of Vista Ultimate and it was mentioned as 24K INR. I asked for more clarification on the price only to find that the staples workforce was not that educated ! (Indiatimes is selling the same for 15K INR)
   In fact one common problem I noticed was that the entire sales force was not educated/trained to sell the items stocked up in Staples. I guess they were expected to learn over the period of time. Every time you ask something, you find them running towards some other sales guy for more clarification. And when none of them are clear about what the customer is asking, they finally flock towards the manager of the store !
4. There is a small section for laptop’s, digital cameras and camcorders which I conveniently skipped.
5. I have been wanting to buy an external hard drive from quite some time and when I asked about Western Digital Passport drive, the sales guy gave me a “what is that” look !
6. I got the same kind of look for the following items
   • Duplex Accessory for my HP C6180 Printer
   • Compressed Air (which I thought I could use to clean my laptop keyboard)
   • Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard
   • HP Photo Printing Paper – Staples which has received 100 million USD from HP to sell only their ink cartridges hasn’t received the same kind of payment for photo paper I believe. After being recently sued over the printer ink prices, I am not sure HP and Staples will again pair up for exclusively selling the HP photo paper.
7. What you do get is :
   • A good enough collection of web cameras
   • Writable CD’s /DVD’s
   • Small collection of Printers
   • Shredders
   • Label Makers
   • Ink Cartridges (HP/Epson/Brother)
   • Wireless Routers – Again restricted to only Netgear and Linksys
8. The second floor of staples has :
   • Print Center
   • Apple “Corner” – The small corner with Apple products is probably enough for marketing Staples as the official Apple distributor in India, but might not be enough for a Mac Fan.
   • Lots and lots of office supplies – Paper/Envelopes/Labels/Whiteboards/Pens/Staples/Clips etc etc
   • Nilkamal Computer Tables – Totally sucks
   • Unbranded Chairs – Some of them were good looking and they were unfortunately attached with a big price tag.

To summarize, I would say that it was definitely refreshing to see Staples in India; However me personally didn’t find many of the items that I wanted to buy. It might not be the same for everyone, so go checkout Staples and have fun

If you already visited Staples and had fun, please do share you experience in the comments section.

Just got myself a new printer : HP Photosmart C6188

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 the printer from Wireless to Ethernet and vice versa)

More on it in the coming posts !

Meanwhile how many of you own a printer ? How useful is it ? Which model do you own ? Which model/manufacturer would you recommend ?(I might as well have put this question before I bought one !)

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.

I came back and had a look at all the HTC videos uploaded on YouTube. It did look cool. After reading reviews including the one from MobileBurn I came to the conclusion that HTC Touch was a worthy replacement for my 2 year old Sony Ericsson T630. And at 20000 INR, its probably one of the cheapest slimmest smallest smartphone available in the market.

Here is my quick take on HTC Touch !

Packaging

The packaging is an extremely sturdy all black box is contained inside a logo sleev; Opening the top flap reveals the Touch staring you in the face with the two earphones on either side.

The other package contents include:

• User Manual – I was also surprised to see a color manual
• 1 GB Micro SD Card
• Power Adapter
• USB Cable – To connect the device to the PC.
• Extra Stylus
• 1 CD Containing ActiveSync 4.5 and Outlook 2007 Trial Version (3 Months)
• Another CD containing GPRS Monitor and Sprite Backup Software. These 2 application setup files use only 10MB on a 600MB CD !!

Specification

• TI’s OMAP 850, 201 MHz Process- The processor is probably on the slower side;
• Windows Mobile 6 OS
• 128MB ROM and 64MB SDRAM
• 112g with Battery
• 240 X 320 dots resolution – With the removal of the hardware keyboard, you now have more space for the display.
• Supports Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth
• 2MP camera
• Rechargeable Li-lon battery with an estimated Talk Time of 5 hours
• Micro SD Expansion Slot – The device can support a maximum of 2GB memory cards on this slot.

Features
HTC Touch is supposed to be first touch phone released and I have seen in many places where this device is compared to Apple iPhone. Mac Fans even have accused HTC of copying features from iPhone.

However going by iPhone’s announcement date, I wonder if HTC had time to come up a phone design and release it before Apple released iPhone.

One of the features highlighted in HTC’s marketing is the TouchFLOW feature. TouchFLOW features the Touch Cube which is a 3 Dimensional interface that gives you one touch access to your messages, Internet , Contacts and more.

The home screen also looks stunning. It features a instant local weather widget along with a customizable program launcher.

The home screen also features a shortcut via which you can easily stop the running programs.

The phone feature worked pretty well. The phone pad is large and hence I faced no trouble in typing the phone numbers.

However the Speakerphone doesn’t work that well. There is a shrill noise along with the audio output. I still have to test the camera !

To get a quick overview of other features, check the following video.

The below video is my first directorial venture . YouTube seems to have screwed up the video while processing the uploaded WMV file. I suggest you to view the video in the Full Screen mode. If it still looks odd, have a look at the original video here

The software used to capture the actions does not capture the touch navigation clearly and the screen changes might get confusing at times.As you can see from the Video, the UI is rarely sluggish and even if you did observe few, they were due to the simultaneous video capture.

My Initial 2 days with HTC Touch

As with any HTC Touch owner, I first tried out the TouchFLOWfeature. I immediately got used to it and had no trouble in bringing the cube to the foreground. I switched on the Wi-Fi via the communication manager. The weather widget immediately refreshed with the latest weather update. The Bluetooth pairing also went fine with my notebook.

On the applications front I tried out mobile versions of GMail and Google Search and yes I didn’t forget to download a Sudoku game app . I even synchronized all my Plaxo/Outlook contacts onto the handset.

Typing SMS was troublesome with the small keyboard and hence I installed the HTC T9 Phonepad (Usage of same can be seen in the above video). If any of you are using a smartphone/Pocket PC let me know if there some “must have” mobile applications.

Conclusion

At my workplace we do develop and test handset applications and till now HP iPaq was the popular choice. In terms of build/size and features I should say that HTC Touch does beat HP iPaq by a huge margin. The same even applies for the pricing. As of now I am happy with my choice and hopefully this phone would last for another couple of years

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.

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 monitors were ruled out and so was the 30″ monitor !. Dell India currently has about 5 monitors in the 20-24″ range and are not selling the 30″ LCD monitors.

After reading reviews on each of them, I finally shortlisted Dell 2007WFP 20″ UltraSharp Wide Screen Flat Panel LCD Monitor and Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP- HC 24″ Wide Screen Flat Panel LCD Monitor.

Now for the surprise: Dell 2007 WFP 20″ costs around 25000 INR (625USD) while the same costs only 339$ in Dell US store. Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP costs around 40000 INR (1000USD) while the same costs 670$ in US.

There is a huge price difference and I guess its just not worth buying a Dell in India. I guess Dell hasn’t factored in the strong India Rupee while fixing the price.

ViewSonic also had a couple of good monitors as part of their X Series. ViewSonic VX2245wm (22″) did seem like a nice choice; It also had an integrated iPod Dock. However the reviews of this model weren’t too great and the price was also high at around 30000INR (750$).

The other monitor I checked was the Samsung SyncMaster 244T (24″). TrustedReviews had a pretty detailed review of this display and they even put this monitor ahead of Dell 24″ display. PC World, in one of its old reviews quoted a price of 80000 INR. Again shocked

Looks like I checked on a wrong segment of LCD monitors.None of them were within my budget of 20000 .

How many of you are using a LCD monitor ? What size of monitor are you using ? Share more details on your experience; Hopefully it will help me to decide on one

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 )

After going over the entire product portfolio, I finally settled on a 4GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro.

Let’s go over the specification first

Dimensions: 7.94mm x 20.6mm x 57.15mm (D x W x L) (Please note that my photography skills are limited)

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.
• The web browser is in a league of its own and so is the E-Mail application.

I am wondering how much time it would take for the iPhone to arrive in India !

Meanwhile if you want to know more about Walt Mossberg, read this article. (Thanks to Apurv for pointing out this article)

Check this picture !

 

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?

China was the first place where I saw a 70 floor electronic market (known as Seg Plaza). It was a huge building and you could find any electronic item you want. In fact you could even assemble a Nokia mobile phone of your choice!!

Me and my friends have shopped extensively in this market and we rarely have been duped.  

Anyway I would still recommend anyone buying a DVD player to buy it in China.

I for one own a BBK DVD player and it plays any damn scratched CD/DVD with no issues.

I have another Philips DVD player which sometimes is not even able to recognize a partially scratched DVD, let alone playing it.

What is your view on Chinese Electronic Items ?

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’s

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 sound from a relatively small enclosure.
• Docking cradle: Holds and automatically charges your iPod, iPod photo, iPod mini or iPod nano whether its playing or not.
• Infrared remote control: Controls the system and basic iPod functions from across the room.

Unit Specification

• 6.65″ H x 11.91″ W x 6.48″
• 4.56 lb (2.1 kg)

Pros

• Very easy to setup. Also connectors are provided(3 connectors) so that the different types of iPod’s can be docked.
• I have been continuously listening to music (not typical of me) from the past few days and I am totally impressed by the sound quality. The audio is clear and not a strain on your ears even at high volumes.
• At 2kg’s its totally portable and is an ideal choice for people on the move.
• The dock charges the iPod automatically and is probably this is probably one of the easiest ways of charging the iPod.

Cons

• Can be used only with iPod. There are no other auxiliary inputs into the system.
• Even though the connectors are provided to accommodate the different generation of iPod’s, my video iPod was not sitting properly in the dock. I have to literally struggle everytime to see that its docked properly.
• The SoundDock is not portable in the sense that you have to always carry it around along with the power adapter. A built-in battery would have made it more attractive.
• Its very expensive; There are couple of other alternatives listed at the end of the post.
• The remote is of limited functionality; you cannot switch between albums/playlists. You cannot change the Equalizer setting.
• Even though you can play videos, you can’t navigate between the different videos in the library.

Alternatives to Bose SoundDock

1. Altec Lansing has a lot of products targeted for iPod’s. You can find the list of all the models at this link
   
2. Apple iPod Hi-Fi
   
3. JBL – On Time and Radial Series
   
4. Logitech