Search is on...

It has been a long time since I have covered a gadget on this blog. I have been on the hunt for a good TV media player which has the required HD play power and at least DTS downmix if not decoding capabilities. There are quite a few pretenders, like the Asus O!Play, Ryan AC PlayonHD etc, and I had almost narrowed down on the WDTV Live, but my perennial indecisiveness ensured I didn't jump the gun and boy am I glad I didn't!

A couple of days later, I see this! Now, this thing is super cute, super powerful (for its size) and feature rich. And as luck would have it, it is also super costly, approx $500. But as a colleague of mine at office suggests, you can never get more future proof (at least w.r.t media players) than a comp as upgrades are more easily available. Maybe I will wait for a few more months and see if more like these crop up and if they can be price competitive with the current slew of TV media players.

Until such a time... droooooooool! :-P

Competition...Maybe

The ipod/iphone mania never seems to subside and probably for good reason. I used the 1st Gen and 2nd Gen ipods and absolutely hated it. They were so high on fluff and so low on actual features or for that matter music quality that it was almost insulting to see tech geeks go for it! I usually try to place the geeks above the fad factor.

But seems like a lot has come off age at the ipod circle. I recently used an ipod touch which a friend got from US and also iphones which many in my office own. I was pleasantly surprised by their sound quality and the apps support on them. In my opinion, the app support alone is a HUGE factor to its continued growth. But, it still sucks w.r.t to value of money, at least in my opinion, but it is in many ways the 'only' option for folks who need a relatively complete solution.

Creative which not so long ago was doing pretty good for itself in the mp3 player market and has slipped off late has come out all guns blazing with Creative Zii Egg, their first multi touch mp3 player (and more). The SW and HW specs on this are drool material. They have mixed Andriod with the new Zii chip interface and the Plaszma reference platform to give 1080p nirvana! The rest of the feature set indicates a keenness to go over board and beat ipods out of the market. They have also priced it attractively with a purported starting price of $199, sweet! They have dual camera, one for video conferencing and one for HD recording. They have got wifi, bluetooth and some version of GPS which I didnt go into details off. They have also provided SDHC based expandability over the 32GB of internal storage and most importantly have introduced the now buzz word touch interface.

The video and the link should give you the rest of the story. Lets see how far this one goes, but on the face of it, seems like a winner...

Outsiders...

I came across an article in New York Times today, and it absolutely surprised me. Just last week, I was discussing with a cousin of mine on what is the laptop he should be buying and I told him, "Go HP, else Go Dell else Go anything else, and buy Acer if you are strapped for cash". My statement was not based on market share or any such thing. It was purely based on personal experience using these products in India (bought in the US) and their technical pros and cons and most importantly their support responsiveness. Yet, very quietly Acer has moved up the ranks and is now challenging Dell, the rags to riches american story for the No.2 slot in PC/Lappy sales! Quite commendable, especially in this economy.

I was similarly caught on the wrong foot when I was making another buying suggestion (I do that a lot :-)) on a MP3 player, and I said "Go Ipoo if you want to follow the trend, Go iriver/cowon if you want quality (and feel geeky) or Go Sandisk if you are strapped for cash". Very soon I got to know that Sandisk has grown to be next only to ipod in mp3 player sales across all models of mp3 players! Its a different matter that Sandisk seem to have given up on their mission to be the "ipoo killer", but none the less, this latecomer and ranked outsider had played the market right, more with respect to pricing than with innovation and won (for most part)!

I suppose its these kind of stories that smaller companies and ranked outsiders need to think that they can make it big some day, though thinking and getting there are very very different ball games. :-) BTW, I am thick skinned enough to continue with my "buying suggestion" sessions. ;-)

Could it be any simpler?

Blackberry takes its first (of possibly many) potshots!



Now, if the product can live up to this, that would be something!

Obvious Design... but, money ?

I use skype everyday mainly for office and sometimes personal stuff. A lot of the time on skype is spent on conference calls and I have many a time felt a need to avoid the headset with mic as I don't have access to it all the time.

Some company has apparently seen a significant enough business case of people who will pay to solve this problem.



Though the pic is obvious, a little explanation. This special keyboard automatically selects the onboard receiver to be the audio in/out for skype and makes skype more mainstream, so to speak.

Smart idea but wonder if people will spend money for it! I love it, but I won't pay for it if I have to spend 10% more than a normal keyboard.

Not Funny!

I initially intended to post the new concept DAPs at CES 2008 by iriver, but was halted and veered away to another post by this rather bizarre happening at the CES this year.

Gizmondo is a very respected gadget guide website, one which I frequent often for getting the latest on gadgets or to catch a review of something I wanna buy. This being said, they released the below video on their blog of the bizarre happening I was talking about and I certainly didn't enjoy it!



This prank to shut off some of the LCD screens at the CES show was the brainwave of editor of Gizmodo! He has since been banned from this years show and the site probably has a lawsuit on their hands. If you have seen the above video, you would see many of the presenters being presented with their worst presentation nightmare, and not just once! The motorola guy tried to recover by moving from his primary LCD, which had stopped working, to the secondary LCD, which also went off within seconds.

Pranks are fine if this was a convention for college kids. But this is CES, one of the most looked forward to events of the tech calendar. There are serious companies showcasing there path breaking or at least money making (hopeful) products for the coming year. And to have such a serious event be disrupted like this is just childish!

Edit:
The above video has been removed by youtube. Here is a link for the video right from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Lets Wi-Fi'fy the Cams

Digital Camera having Wi-Fi capabilities is not new. But they haven't caught on as much, because the consumers don't see the need to pay the extra bucks to get just wi-fi transfer feature.

But here is something that I think can definitely catch on. An SD card which has Wi-Fi in it. This means, even those digital cameras, considered archaic by the bleeding edge standards of the day, can have wi-fi upload services on them. Now, only if they could bring down the price from $99. ;-)

Once M$ always M$

Micro$oft released the next gen of its Zune media player, Zune 2. Though they have managed only some 3% of the number of Ipods sold, they are not giving up without a fight. They have added wireless sync to PC and also opening an iTunes like store for songs. The best thing about the store is that it sells DRM Free music. This means that you buy a song from the Zune store and transfer it out of your Zune player and still hear the song. You can give it to your friend too, but here is the fun part. Your friend can hear the song, but only 3 times, after which it will be automatically locked! I don't understand how they would do it, but they allegedly do it.

Trust Micro$oft to make DRM-free music DRM!

Mystery revealed...

... for the uber geeks among you. Any mobile aficionado worth his/her salt must have kept track of the iPhone release on June 29th. Here are the gory details of the iPhone. Remember, some company sponsored away 50K Rupees($1200 for two 8GB iPhones) to bring you this one pager. :-) On the other hand the share prices of companies whose components have been used to make the iPhone have started sky-rocketing. If the sponsor was one of them, this was a very wise move.

Loving it!

I have always been a huge iriver fan and each year their products just keep getting better and better. As the brain washed ipod lovers start wondering, 'what the hell is an iriver', they make music players. :-) I can see only one reason why anyone would buy an ipod over an iriver and that would be storage. iriver stopped their hideous looking hard drive players (H series) a while back and are only flash based now. This means, almost all their offerings come with a maximum of 4GB which is good for daily use, but not good enough as a music collection storage device. But these players are way way better in terms of music quality and now looks (may be subjective :-) ) over the ipod nano (compare to clix) or shuffle (compare to s10). Even though the famous 'click wheel interface' of ipod is truly innovative, anyone who uses the 'D Click interface' of iriver will feel no different.

Before I have all the ipod loyalists blast me, let me give them a taste of this korean manufacturer's innovativeness. Here are pics of the next slew of products lined up by iriver.

From weird(proposed T70 on left ) to funny("twist" on right),





to cute(disneys mouse), these guys are truly innovative.



Now all I need from them is a flash based or hard drive based big storage audio player and I am set!

Gadget Burn

There are ideas and there are IDEAS



There are gadgets and there are GADGETS



There is weird and then there is NABAZTAG!!!!



Its interesting, its kinda useful, its as geeky as it gets and it helps you burn more gadget money. Go through the site and be amazed or laugh or be puzzled. :-)

Smart Cheats!

I have always been a deal hunter and there are sites that I visit regularly looking for the stuff I yearn for. One of the sites I regularly visit is bestbuy. They are big online and also have just as many stores as circuitcity or frys. They house all kinds of gadgets and have some good deals every now and then especially on laptops. But last week some news broke out which really changes my opinion!



Bestbuy confirms that they have a secret website. Basically, you check out a deal at bestbuy.com from home and it says "$100 discount". You now rush to their store and ask the sales executive for the deal. The executive says that there is no such deal and tells you to show the deal from a kiosk available at the store. You access bestbuy.com and to your surprise the deal is not there! You go home either buying without the discount or thinking that you are blessed with rotten luck. What the folks at bestbuy do is that they route your request from one of their kiosks to a local website which doesn't carry all the deals that you would see at their regular website. The idea being to get you out of your couch and into their store and then betting on your laziness to come in again and just buy whatever is available!



Damn bestbuy.... just when you had gotten the better of circuitcity, you do this?? You deserve to go down cheats!! ;-)

Catch Up?

I am taking another shot at Microsoft... guys have taken shit from so many people over the years and continue to do so, but hey, they are the big guns and its always fun to slander them up, they sure have the money to make them feel better. :-)

Six years since its launch Ipod is one of the most common place gadget in the world, it rocked the music listeners world over. The idea was innovative, presentation was stylish as ever and marketing was spot on. Ipod is an Apple product all the way and it revived Apple to no end. Microsoft had to do something. They did, almost 5 years later... came up with a clone which is a glorified Toshiba gigabeat and called it Zune. Tried to build an industry around it.... still trying.

Apple rocks the boat again with iPhone. A fancy phone, all classy, all featured and all costly. Does Apple see a huge market for it?? Sure it does! Microsoft doesn't want to be left behind and guess what! Playing catch up? Not so nice Microsoft... for a change, try being the innovator. :-)

p.s: BTW, I don't like Ipod and I don't fancy Zune either. ;-)

SE strikes back!

Its been a while since I had any gadget on this blog. Here is something from CES 2007 which is of relevance to the Indian mobile buyer. Sony Ericsson has had quite a bit of success with their walkman series of phones, but most of the phones are in the 10K plus range which is not volume market in India yet(but the ante is being upped everyday). The low end market leader is still, Nokia, the made for India range of phones.

Here is SE trying to dent this market, and by the looks of it, there is potential here people!







At the start of last year the thought of a below 10K Walkman phone would have been outrageous! This baby should be around the 6-7K mark and has all the whistles needed to make a mark.

Changing times

Back to India and the vibrancy of businesses here is so obvious. Things are constantly looking up here. Sometimes it looks like a bubble, too good to be true. But then, for e.g. I have been spelling doomsday in my limited knowlegde of the real estate boom in Bangalore since 2003 but nothing really seems to slow down. The congested Bangalore domestic airport is now congested so much more. Emirates is flying out of Bangalore now and we don't have an international airport even. We have SMS services revenue being figured in the pie chart from Zee and Sony. I can go on and on, in short the economic vibrance in relatively affluent India is just amazing!

So, in India we have basic services coming into play and resulting in revenue while in the US the saturated market is being squeezed to shell out for non-sensical products! :-)

Categorized As:

• web2.0
• gadgets

A gadgetry oxymoron

How many of you have heard of or seen a Vertu? Don't feel left out if your brain just went "What the heck is a vertu?". Thatz what majority of the world would say. These are really high end phones with all the ultra necessary mobile phone features like rubies and diamonds in them and none of the useless features like bluetooth, EDGE etc. A Nokia company, the vertu phones are so costly that only people who are filthy rich give it to people whom they really care for, like Karan Johar to SRK.

To woo the mere mortal public, like us, Vertu have now come up with an affordable range called the constellation series. Though the price is not disclosed, my guess is that we will all be able to afford a 10 lakh rupees phone.

Categorized As:

• Gadgets

Lets sue....

Thanks to the pervasiveness of the Internet and the growing urge to be connected, the laptops have come a long way in the last 2-3 years. We now get some really great computing power and they don't cost the world. When the volumes increase so very much the manufacturers slip up every now and then, and did Dell screw up or what!

The guys in US are suing Dell for this goof-up, which is expected. But how much more can you make Dell feel sorry and how much more can you squeeze out of Dell?? This guy shows the way....

Categorized As:

• Gadgets
• Currentaffairs

New Joinees

Its been a while since I bought something gadgety. or maybe not....

After 3+ years I said good bye to my beloved Sony Ericsson T610. Its not gone too far away, my wife is going to be using it. And this gave me a reason to finally buy the mobile I have been tracking for almost a year, the Sony Ericsson K750i!







I had been reading up on it on forums even before it got released and when it got to India it was 22K! I bought the T610 for 19K in 2003 and its now worth the same as a Nokia 1100. I somehow didn't want that feeling of "oops, have I gone overboard" all over again. Hence I waited and waited and waited... Then came along this deal of 0% interest EMI scheme, which compounded with the price drop to 11.5K are all the reasons I needed. I am happy!

I also did some gadget shopping on impulse... yup on impulse, quite unbecoming of me, but it happened and I think it turned out ok. I got myself "Altec Lansing" headphones.



I am yet to use it much, but plan to use this in office which is where most of my music time is anyway.

Categorized As:

• Gadgets

SE .. Yawn

This is now getting boring. Another walkman based, candy bar phone from Sony Ericsson, K618.







C'mon SE, we got the point! Walkman branding on phones is good and the phones are also decent. But its about time SE started innovating! All they are doing is adding a button here, removing a button there! Look at the competition... as much as I hate to say this, Nokia N Series is really good! N60 is kinda sucky and slow, but the rest of the phones are impressive! Look at the N9* series, outrageous designs, the N8* series, a slider with a difference and the N73 is the most compact candy bar style feature rich phone I have seen in a while.

I also came across, this "lifestyle" product from sony.



Its basically a gaming + music console with WiFi to connect to the net for emailing. A weird mix of features... but I guess you never know what the people may take fancy to.

Categorized As:

• Gadgets