Monday, June 30, 2008

ipod touch

I lost my beloved ipod nano last Monday during my trip to Delhi. In some
ways, it was a fortuitous as I got to replace it with an ipod touch 32
GB. I purchased it from JJ Mehta, a Mumbai based camera store, for 21500
rupees on the Internet. I can't remember the last time I bought
something other than travel tickets on the Net. It was an imported gray
market item as the MSRP for the ipod touch in India is 24700+tax. I was
apprehensive initially, especially with respect to the warranty, but
this store has got a lot of good reviews, so I decided to go ahead with
the purchase.

One of the main reasons that I went for the Touch rather than a
replacement Nano was for the video capabilities. A couple of years ago
when I got my first video capable phone, I was wondering how anyone
could watch video on such a small screen. But, having experienced it
over the past few months, I am hooked and find it difficult to watch it
on a PC or laptop anymore. I think the combination of portability and
comfort is hard to beat and when you're watching from 8 inches away, the
screen size and resolution does not matter that much.

Once I started using the Touch, I was floored by the interface, not only
was it gorgeous to look at, the way you interact with it is something to
be experienced. It makes other touch screen devices look pre-historic in
comparison. I spent 3 hours downloading album art for all my CDs from
the internet just so that I could browse them through the Coverflow
interface.

I was expecting to be disappointed with the Safari browser given the low
screen resolution, but the zoom capabilities make it surprisingly
usable. Also, given the popularity of the iphone, a lot of websites have
tailored their design to the screen making for a very usable experience.

The one standout app for me is the Youtube viewer. Searching for youtube
videos has never been this easy and I have never seen their videos look
as good as they do on the touch. I can easily see this becoming the no 1
use case for me.

My #1 reason for buying this was for viewing videos. Frankly, I was a
bit under whelmed, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I already have a
N800, which is as good when it comes to picture quality and portability
and has the advantage of a slightly bigger screen/resolution. Secondly,
the range of codecs and file formats that are supported in the touch is
limited, so I need to transcode most of the videos before I can watch
them, like in the N800. Given these factors, the experience of watching
video on the touch is just a little ahead of the N800, but not the light
years that I was expecting. So, I think I'll end up using the N800 for
watching movies at home and take the ipod on the road, giving me the
best of both worlds.

I have to end by comparing the touch with the N800. Somewhere, I'd read
about the ipod and the N800 being competitors for the other pocket, i.e.
not your phone. I'm finding it difficult to really compare the two, as
they are two different devices. The N800 is really a miniature computer,
extremely open with a wide variety of apps, but a mediocre media player.
The touch is a fantastic media player with quite sophisticated general
computing capabilities. I wouldn't give any of them up for the other.

But, I hear Apple is launching the 2.0 firmware in a couple of weeks. If
that delivers on the promise and makes the touch a truly extensible
platform, I can see the N800 gathering a lot of dust...

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Long day yesterday

I flew to Delhi for a day trip yesterday for a meeting with a prospective client. For that, I woke up at 4:00 am. I'd planned to take the bus from Hebbal but once I reached there, decided to ride all the way to the airport. Just as I reached the airport, the Activa started giving some problems. I hoped that it was just overheating and would sort itself out later and boarded the flight. Incidentally, I had no complaints about the flying experience from the airport.

The meeting in Delhi went really well. I was done by 2:00 pm and had 5 hours to kill. The meeting was at Pitampura right next to the Metro station. I had heard a lot about it and decided to check it out. I went to Palika Bazaar, which was very impressive in its day, but has now become a seedy place full of shops peddling pirated DVDs and smuggled electronics. Rather than take a taxi from CP, I took the Blue line to Dwarka and took an auto to the airport. Overall, I was very impressed by the Metro, it is
clean, cheap, fast and comfortable. If our Namma Metro is anything like it, it will revolutionize Bangalore like nothing else.

Our plane was late and landed close to 11:00 pm. As I had feared the scooter's problems were bad. The clutch was slipping and the engine was cutting off as soon as I went past 50 kmph. As a result, the trip back home took a long time and I finally reached home at 12:30 am, making for a very long day.

Monday, June 9, 2008

Iphone 2.0 impressions

It was inevitable. Such was the hype that the reality was always going to be anti-climactic. I don’t see anything hugely different from the original iphone, the main talking point is the 3G radio which is useless in India. The GPS is nice, but it will be a battery killer and I find that the triangulation offered by Google Maps good enough for most purposes (it was able to locate my position in places like Dharmapuri and Kaveriatnam).

There are still quite a few big items that give me reason to pause, the lack of a keyboard, no video recording, no removable battery being the chief irritants. On the positive side, it is a wonderful media device, especially for video. Plus with the opening of the app store, it will become one of the pre-eminent app development platforms, with a number of fantastic applications. We've already seen a preview with the jailbreaked apps and the licensed apps will be even better.

I hear that Apple is going to offer it for the equivalent of 199 dollars around the world. At this price, it is obviously subsidized, I wonder what the price in India is going to be, I don't think the subsidy model is going to work here. I expect it to retail at around 16K for the 8GB and 20K for the 16 GB models. At that price, the likes of Nokia and Sony are going to be hit really hard.

The next few months are going to be really good, there are a lot of really interesting phones coming out, like the Nokia tube, Sony Xperia and the many variations of Google Android. With the iphone unlikely to come to India till later in the year, it will give me enough opportunity to evaluate these before making my choice.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Petrol price hike

With oil prices headed to 150 $ and beyond per barrel, the need of the hour is for our petrol and diesel prices to reflect that, so that people will adjust their consumption and when demand falls, prices will fall too. That's how the market works.

Instead of taking the decision, our politicians, including our so-called economist prime minister keep procrastinating, thus ensuring that we pay a much higher price for the indecision in the future.