Missing App Store on iphone

I recently encountered a problem on my ipod touch where the App Store was completely missing from the device. In addition, when I plugged in the touch to my computer, the Application tab was rendered read-only. This meant that I was not able to add any new applications or rearrange the icons through iTunes. A google search did not offer much advice except to restore the device to factory settings. But that would mean that all data would be lost and have to be retransferred, which could take a long time on my 32 Gig touch.

I set out to explore a little more and I found a suggestion on the Apple support forums that it could be related to Restrictions. So, I set out to explore that under Settings->General->Restrictions and voila, I found that the setting for Installing Applications was Off. A quick change to On and the App Store icon came right back on.

Evolution of PC

I was reading yet another article on the relative merits of Mac vs PC. There were many comments that made the point that Macs lost a lot longer than PCs. That got me thinking of whether that was really the case. How long had my PC’s lasted? I realized that I didn’t really know and set out on a trip down memory lane to catalogue the various computers that me and my family have owned.

Siva PC: This was bought by my father in the 80s as an office computer. It cost almost 60,000 rupees (in 80’s money). I think it had a 8086 processor, 640KB of RAM, a 20 MB hard disk and a green screen monitor. Needless to say, it only ran DOS and software like Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar etc. I don’t think we got too much of usage out of it while my father’s factory was operational, except for some financial accounting. After we closed the factory, we brought the computer home and I remember playing around with it for a few years before it died a natural death.

- Assembled PC #1: The next computer I bought was an assembled PC in 1996. I boasted a 100 Mhz Pentium processor, a massive 4 MB of RAM, a 1 GB hard disk, CD-ROM and a colour monitor. It cost me almost 40,000 rupees back then. I used it till around 2000 when I upgraded to Assembled PC #2. I don’t remember what I did with it, most likely we just gave it away.

- Computer in US : When I went onsite for the second time in late 1996, I bought a computer at Fry’s electronics. It was a slightly more powerful version of the one I had at home with a 133 Mhz processor. I sold it to my roommate when I returned for good. That was also the trip where I bought a 16 MB RAM stick for my PC in India for an unworldly price of 350 dollars.

As Built PC #1: In 2000, it was finally time to upgrade my PC and Vidya and I decided to build a PC together. I had bought a CPU and hard disk from the US and we went to SP Road to buy the remaining parts. We ended up with a Celeron 667, 128 MB of SDRAM (which I later upgraded to 384 MB), a 4.3 GB hard drive and a CDROM (later upgraded to a CD-writer). We retained the 15 inch monitor from the PC which we later upgraded to a second hand 17 inch in 2003. We used this PC till the end of 2004, but when we came back to Bangalore, we stopped using it. I used some of the parts (memory, hard drive) on PC#3, and to my surprise, managed to sell the remaining parts in 2006 for around 1000 rupees.

- Australia PC: When we went to Australia in 2002, we initially picked up a cheap second hand computer, a Pentium 2 model. A few months later, when it seemed like Vidya’s work from home plan would fructify, we invested in a proper model, a Pentium 3 – 700 Mhz monster with 512 MB of RAM, 20 GB hard disk, 17 inch monitor etc for 700 australian dollars. When we returned back to India in 2003, we sold it to my friend Venky.

- PC Build #2: After returning back to India in 2003, we moved to Mangalore. In Bangalore, my mother was left without a PC. In 2004, I built the third computer. Unlike the previous computer where I salvaged a lot of parts, this was a complete unit, with a Athlon XP 2000+, 512 MB of RAM, 40 GB hard disk, DVD drive and a 17 inch Samsung monitor. This computer survives till this day, though in a very different form. The guts of the machine (MB+CPU, RAM, HDD) are now in my father-in-law’s machine at Chennai.I’ve upgraded those to a 2.66 GHz Core2Duo E6700 with 2 GB of RAM and 570 GB of hard disk space. The monitor has been exchanged for a 19 inch Viewsonic LCD. The case, keyboard, mouse, speakers and UPS remain functional a full 5 years later. The OS has also evolved, I initially used a copy of Windows 2000, switched to a legal OEM copy of Windows XP in 2006 and when I upgraded the CPU in late 2007, bought a full version of Windows Vista Home Premium.

- Laptop #1: I’ve never been a fan of laptops, despite using a laptop as my primary work machine since 2002. In my view, they were slow and expensive. I finally bit the bullet in 2007 and bought a HP dv6516 tx as a birthday present for Vidya. It cost almost 60000 rupees and had a 1.5 GHz Core2Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drive, 15.4 inch screen and a DVD drive. It came with Windows Vista Home Premium. Except for some reliability with wireless networking, it has performed flawlessly over the past 2 years. I upgraded the machine to the RC version of Windows 7 and intend to upgrade to the full version in October. At the same time, I'll probably upgrade the hard drive to a 500 GB one.

- The Future: Both of my computers are fast enough for anything that I throw at them, whether it is browsing or playing games or encoding movies (OK, the laptop is not, but I would not ever transcode a movie on a laptop when a desktop is available as an option). Another big change is the rise of portable computing through devices like the iphone and Nokia internet tablet. As they evolve, they make the case for a full sized desktop or laptop that much less compelling. So, I don’t see myself upgrading my current setup anytime soon, unless something breaks.

Looking back, I see that pretty much every computer has lasted me atleast 3-4 years, so much for PC’s being unreliable. I’ve also had a lot of good luck with components, very few of them have failed on me. Just listing them down has shown how much progress the PC industry has made in terms of speed and specifications. I remember encoding mp3 in 1997, it used to run at 1/3 speed (i.e. over 15 minutes for a 5 minute song). My current computer can transcode video at 5x speed (120 fps for H.264 compression).

Taking Internet video to the TV

Internet video has really hit the mainstream in the last couple of years. Whether it is the regular “legal” avenues like Youtube (www.youtube.com) or P2P networks like bittorrent, there is a vast plethora of content to be found. The challenge has always been on how to bring it into the living room, as most people are not that comfortable watching long form video on their computers. They would much rather sit on their sofas or lie on their beds to watch the latest blockbuster.

Over the years, a lot of effort has gone in to solve this “last-metre” problem. A few notable attempts at solving this are

Apple TV : is a small book sized device that connects to your TV. It can also connect to your network and download movies from your Itunes library on your computer. It provides the ability to purchase movies and TV shows from the Itunes store. As with all Apple products, the process works flawlessly. The catch as always is in the lack of flexibility. It can only play the type of content that Apple allows, which limits its utility. The vast majority of Internet video is encoded in the AVI/XVID format which the Apple TV cannot play. In addition, since the Apple TV lacks a DVD drive, you will need a separate DVD player. The Apple TV is also expensive at over 200 dollars, and is not available in India.

Game Consoles (PS3/XBOX 360) : In addition to being awesome game consoles, both the PS3 and XBOX 360 can also serve as media players. They can play quite a range of video files including most of the common formats found on the Internet. In addition, they have their own video stores where you can pay and download movies and TV shows. If you’re a gamer and already have these consoles, this is the way to go, especially as you get the ability to play games and watch DVD’s on the same device (in the case of PS3, you also get a Blueray drive). However, they are limited in their ability to browse sites like youtube.

Media center extenders: A number of companies (Linksys, D-Link) have launched media center extender products. These connect to your home network (wired or wireless) and can play the video files stored on your computer. Typically this requires some software to be installed on your computer, though Vista has the media sharing feature built in. These have received mixed reviews, the most common complaint is the slow response time.

WD TV: This is a product that was launched in late 2008 and has got very positive reviews. It works like a media center extender without the network capability. You copy the video files to a USB device (pen drive or hard disk) and plug it into the device. The device will scan and play back the file. This approach removes the weakest link of the media center extenders which is the network. The other reason why this has been very successful is the support for virtually every kind of video file (except the copy-protected ones). The downside is that you need to buy an additional USB device and have to spend the effort to copy the files that you want to watch to the device. So, it is not that great for impulse viewing. The lack of any kind of network access is also a negative, as you cannot watch video from any of the online sites like youtube.

Despite all these choices, the best option still remains the Personal Computer. It provides the widest compatibility and support, playing back virtually every form of media. The challenge is to bring the personal computer to the TV and remove the parts that don’t fit in the living room space. Microsoft has done a lot of work on their Media Center software, to the point where the computer can be controlled using just the remote, but until now the hardware has lagged. The average desktop PC is too clunky and noisy to fit in the living room. However, many companies are introducing Home Theater PC’s (HTPC), which are very sleek and do not look out of place in the living room.

The human interface challenge still remains. Though the Media Centre functions can be controlled with a remote, there will still be occasions where you will need to go back to a keyboard and mouse. Having a regular keyboard + mouse in the living room is a no-no for most people. Logitech has the excellent diNovo, but it is an extremely expensive solution. A more elegant solution may be a software based, running on a smartphone that connects to the PC using Bluetooth. 

The company that can package all of this together into an integrated solution can make a lot of money. I’ve seen some movement towards this by companies like Acer (Acer Revo) and Asus (EEE Box)

This has been an area of much interest for me, mainly because my TV viewing mostly consists of downloaded TV shows (though these are available on some channels, they are aired much later and not in a widescreen ratio). I’ve hesitated in adopting any of the solutions because the area is very immature and the products are not available in India. I do employ a variant of the PC solution, sometimes connecting my laptop to the TV via HDMI. I also use a program called BlueMaemo on my N800 to control the laptop remotely. It’s not the most elegant solution but works for now.

Google Android

I watched the live stream of the T-mobile G1 launch, the first Android phone yesterday. The event was almost amateurish, a simple stage, photographers bunching around like they were at an Indian politician rally and there appeared to have been no preparation for possible questions, quite often the various gentlemen were looking around clueless while they figured out a response. You'd definitely never see this happening at an Apple event.

I never had any great expectations from the phone itself. In any case, it is not going to be launched in India anytime soon, but what I am excited about is the platform and the promise it holds. It is only a matter of time before the other partners start bringing their products into the market, and this is going to bring smartphones prices way down. 

The real potential of the platform is the software and the apps. Apple seemed to have that momentum and mindshare but given the restrictions on their SDK and the god-like power they hold over which apps get sold, that could be waning pretty fast. Though WinMo and Symbian have a huge developer community and lots of apps, I predict that Android will eclipse them quite easily.

Joke of the year : iphone India launch

As expected, greedy Apple and even greedier mobile operators Airtel and Vodafone have totally screwed up on the pricing of the iphone in India. At 31000 for the 8 GB version and 36100 for the 16 GB one, I doubt they will be selling more than a handful. Personally, I never intended to buy the iphone, but was hoping for competitive pricing that would force Nokia to cut prices on its other smartphones (like the N82). At this price, I doubt they would even bother.

Only in India

We have this automated bill payment machine from Vodafone in our office. It works fairly well, you enter your number, it connects over the GSM network to the server and retrieves your bill details. You then have the option of paying by cash/cheque or swiping your credit card. All of this works pretty well. The craziness, however, starts after you have paid the bill. Vodafone has employed a person to record the details of your payment on a sheet of paper. He even has columns for recording the number of notes that you insert (10, 20, 50, 100, 500, wonder what he would do if you paid with a 1000 rupee note).

I wonder what prompted such a system, a distrust of technology or the abundance of cheap labour?

Podcasting : An Introduction

Over the last couple of years, I’ve listened to over 1000 hours of audio on my ipod, but fewer than 10% of it has been spent on listening to music. The bulk of it has gone into listening to various podcasts. Podcasts are essentially audio files that are delivered to the listener through RSS feeds. They can be on any topic, ranging from movies to technology to news. There is nothing very technical about podcasting, the actual audio file, it is a plain mp3 file that can be played almost anywhere. However, you need a “podcatcher” program that can parse the RSS feed, make sense of the content and download the audio file for your listening pleasure. The best podcatcher software by far is iTunes. In my view, there are three different elements of podcasting that Apple has really nailed

Subscribing to content: The itunes store is the most comprehensive repository for finding podcasts. It is neatly categorized and subscribing to a podcast is a single click process. In the rare event that you have a podcast that is not present in the itunes directory, Apple allows you to enter the URL of the RSS feed

Tracking episodes: Most podcatchers offer this, but none work as elegantly as iTunes. You can set it to automatically download all new episodes, it keeps track of episodes that have been played and can clean up older episodes automatically. If you are like me and want to control the entire process, you can set everything to manual mode and take care of it yourself.

Integration with portable devices: This is the area where itunes+ipod pulls ahead and leaves everything far behind. You can control how many episodes are downloaded to your ipod, once you hear something on the ipod, it automatically shows up as played content on itunes. If you have heard part of an episode on the ipod, once you sync back to itunes, it even resumes playback at the same place!!!

There is a veritable treasure trove of content out there and most of it is free. Some of the podcast feeds that I listen to are

CNN-IBN : This is the feed from CNN-IBN. They mainly feature programs like Devil’s Advocate with Karan Thapar (I hate his interview style, but I still listen to him) and some interviews with prominent personalities from the film and arts world. They like to throw in their news bulletins, which is one of the main reasons why I resort to manual control of downloads.

TWIT: twit.tv is a podcasting network started by Leo Laporte, a prominent tech journalist for many years. He produces over 20 shows a week and I listen to a few of them like This week in tech, Windows Weekly and Macbreak Weekly

Buzz out loud: My favourite source for tech news is cnet.com, this is their daily podcast that presents tech news in a light hearted manner. They are up to episode 780 now, I’ve been listening since episode 380, which means that I’ve devoted almost 300 hours of my life listening to BOL.

NPR Science Friday: I believe this is a very popular science program in the US, the podcast is just another distribution medium for them. I have learnt more things about more subjects in the two years that I have been listening to this podcast than in the previous 15 years since I left college.

The one caveat to keep in mind with podcasting is the bandwidth. Each episode is usually around 10 MB, so you could easily use up over 1 Gig a month just keeping up with your favourite shows. That’s one of the reasons why I always prefer an unlimited slower connection over a faster metered one.

Sadly, there is very little quality Indian content, I wish other networks like NDTV, Times now etc start putting some of their content on the Net soon.

Video podcasting is an offshoot of podcasting with video files (usually MPEG4) instead of mp3s. They haven’t taken off because they are extremely bandwidth intensive (a typical episode is > 100 MB) and unlike audio files which you can listen to while doing your other tasks, you need to be actively watching the video. I’ve usually given up on most video podcasts after a couple of episodes and switched to the audio version.

Vista hate - Part 1

Contrary to the major negative press that Vista gets, my experience with the OS has been generally positive. I have used Vista on two machines, a HP laptop and my custom built desktop. I have faced some issues with wireless networking on the HP laptop where it would lose the network settings and force me to manually connect every single time. However, that problem went away after some driver updates and it is working great. On the desktop, my experience has been fantastic, so far. The thing that people don’t realize is Vista is extremely resource intensive and needs a fast processor and lots of memory. Most people who face problems are trying to run it on older slower hardware.

Atleast that’s what I thought, because yesterday I had my first hair-tearing experience with Vista. I had got a couple of 8 GB SDHC cards and wanted to transfer some videos to them. I hooked them up through my card reader and began the transfer process. It was a simple file copy procedure, open the folder on my local hard drive in one window, select the files and drag it to the window where the memory card’s drive was mapped. That’s when Vista’s problems reared its ugly head. Initially, I got the file copy dialog, where it just got stuck at the message “Discovered 0 items”. I then tried doing it one file at a time, it worked for files smaller than 100 MB, but just wouldn’t start for larger files. I googled for “Vista slow file copy” and discovered a setting for “Remote Differential Compression”, which is meant to optimize bandwidth but ends up killing file copy speeds. My experience improved after turning it off, but it was still a hit and miss affair.

Disgusted, I gave up and tried to do the same with a 2 GB standard SD card. This time, the files copied without problem. Thinking that it may be a problem with the 8 GB card, I tried using it with my laptop and this time, the file copy went through without problem regardless of the size. So, now I have got two versions of Vista that behave in totally different ways with the same hardware. No wonder, so many people feel that Vista sucks.

N800 vs ipod touch

I’ve now had an ipod touch for a couple of weeks. Here is my comparision of the ipod touch with the N800. Rather than compare the two feature for feature, I have attempted to compare their capabilities for some common usage patterns.

Music Player: The ipod touch is so far ahead that there is no comparision here. The ability to organize music on a PC through itunes and sync automatically has no parallel on the N800, where you need to manually manage your music. Most of my listening involved podcasts and there is no better solution than the ipod for podcast management. Period. Verdict: ipod touch

Video Player: Viewing video on a portable player is a much more involved exercise due to the plethora of formats and limited horsepower of these devices. The first thing is to get videos onto the device. The ipod has more capable hardware and can handle higher resolution/bitrate/framerate videos than the N800. However, its support for video codecs is limited with only H.264 and mp4 support. This means that most videos need to be transcoded, just like on the N800. The N800 has an extremely slick free transcoding solution provided by Nokia (Internet tablet video converter), I’ve found that to be a better solution than the various third party solutions for the touch (I use a program called Videora). Once the files are on the device, I find the experience to be comparable with the N800 having a slight edge due to the larger screen and built in speaker. I also like the fact that it has a stand, this makes for a more pleasurable experience. Verdict: Nokia N800

Browsing: The ipod touch has a Safari browser while the N800 has a Firefox based browser. Both are full fledged browsers and can display web pages just like on a desktop rather than the modified mobile phone version. In terms of performance, the touch Safari browser feels snappier and more responsive than the Firefox browser on the N800. However, I’ve not found a huge difference in the overall time taken to render the pages. The N800 can play flash content which the touch lacks. On the other hand, a lot of websites have iphone/touch optimized versions which makes the overall experience better for those sites. On the whole, I think the experience is comparable and I’d rate both devices equal for browsing. Verdict: tie

Youtube: The ipod touch has a dedicated youtube player, while the N800 can play youtube videos through the web interface. Youtube videos on the N800 were jerky and took much longer to load. I found the performance of the touch youtube player to be far superior and the experience to be much better. It is without doubt, an ideal youtube player. Verdict: ipod touch

Email: The ipod touch client offers support for Gmail, Yahoo and a number of other email services. In addition, with the 2.0 firmware, it offers support for Exchange. The N800 on the other hand, has a plain IMAP/POP3 email client. I’ve never bothered to use this, but I’m hooked to email on the ipod touch. Verdict: ipod touch

Applications: The App Store is one of the most important developments for the iphone/ipod touch family of devices. The store opened just 3 days back and the number of apps already greatly outnumbers the N800. With the number of iphones sold approaching 10 million and probably an equally large number of ipod touches, the gap is only going to get wider. Nokia has a good platform and an extremely competent device, but it has never moved beyond niche status, hence the apps available for it will continue to be limited. On the other hand, due to the open nature of the device, there are applications available on the N800 that will never make it to the touch (e.g. VOIP, GPS apps like Maemo mapper). Still, this doesn't affect the healthy lead that the touch has Verdict: ipod touch.

So, ipod touch wins the comparision 4.5 to 1.5. The margin is unfair to the N800, which is a very comptetent device in its own right. If I had to make a decision on which of the two to buy today, the choice would be clear, it is the ipod touch. But, since I already own both these devices, I will continue to be a happy user of both the platforms.

ipod touch 2.0 software

I was really looking forward to the iphone 3G launch last Friday, mainly for the added functionality it would bring to the ipod touch. Like the millions of Mac faithful, I started checking sites on Friday morning for pointers to when the software would be released. I soon discovered that Apple had launched the itunes store in India and was able to create an Itunes account by entering my credit card details. But, there was still no sign of the new ipod touch software. It finally became available on Friday evening, coinciding with the launch of the iphone 3G in the US. However, the update experience was anything but smooth. Over the next few hours, I encountered a variety of errors, ranging from “Itunes store is unavailable” to “Your version of ipod software (1.1.4) is the latest”. Disappointed, I gave up and decided to try again the next day.

The experience was completely different on Saturday morning when I tried again. This time, I got the notification about the update and quickly got through the payment formalities and started the download. The update was 223 MB in size and downloaded in just over 20 minutes at an average speed of almost 1.5 Mb/s. The entire process of updation was completely automated with no interaction required from my side. The longest part was the backup and restore, which seemed to take forever. I guess transferring over 20 gigs over a slow USB connection to a flash based device will always be slow.

The biggest change and the most expected feature of the 2.0 software was the App Store. Frankly, I was a bit disappointed with the app store, as most of the good apps were paid ones. I wanted to wait for a few days before purchasing any software as I am not sure how it will work for India (exchange rate etc). There are quite a few free apps but very few of them are any good. Though I installed quite a few, I don’t see myself using them on a sustained basis. So, for me atleast, the biggest feature of the update was a bit of a letdown.

The other feature that I was really looking forward to was the Exchange support. I had a few issues setting this up, mainly because I did not have the required information to set up the VPN to my company’s network. But once I got that, it was extremely straightforward. Checking my official email has now become a quick and simple exercise. The mail client is not very full featured and this is mainly useful for monitoring email and sending out quick replies rather than lengthy emails.

Other than these two features, I didn’t see anything else of note. There’s the Mobileme, but I’m not going to pay 4000 rupees a year for that functionality. There are still quite a few features that I didn’t find. Here is my top 3 wishlist

- Itunes store: I stopped buying CD’s a while ago because I found it to be a complete waste of resources, as I was just using them once, to rip them to my computer. I would love to have the ability to download legal mp3 at Rs 10 per song. I can do it today through Soundbuzz or mobile companies stores, but they are completely locked down with DRM. I understand our music companies reasoning that it will lead to widespread piracy. However, I don’t think they should worry about piracy, as pirated mp3’s of their songs are available everywhere on the Internet and on every street corner. If they only opened up their closed thinking, they will find this to be a very good revenue stream

- Ability to download podcasts over the air. As the touch has a wifi connection, I should be able to manage my podcasts from the device rather than from my computer

- Enhanced video file support (esp .avi files and the xvid codec): I was initially very thrilled about the video viewing experience on the touch, but I’ve cooled down a bit. The first problem is the restriction on the video format and codec support. This means that I have to transcode most of my videos before I can watch them. The second issue is my Nokia N800. Quite frankly, I find the video viewing experience to be better there as it has a bigger screen and a comfortable stand to seat the device. The one advantage that the touch had over the n800 was the higher capacity, but I’m getting a couple of 8 GB SD cards, which should make it a non issue. For now, I think the N800 is going to be my primary video device.

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...

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.

GPS is so cool

In India, GPS receivers are still very rare and proper maps are rarer still. Even when available, the receivers are too expensive, so unless you really have a compelling need, you're unlikely to invest in one. So, though I've been reading about GPS for over 10 years now, I've never ever seen it in action. Until now.

Last week, during the Savandurga ride, I saw Rohan checking out his GPS receiver periodically. At the end of the trip, he had produced a map layered over a Google Earth image of exactly where we had been during the ride. I was suitably impressed and wanted to try it out for myself.

By sheer coincidence, my friend Shashi had bought a GPS receiver from China. It was a simple Bluetooth receiver that hooked up to any external device like a mobile phone or PDA. He's also just invested in an unlocked iPhone, but because its so badly locked down, he just couldn't get it to work with the receiver. So, he had resigned himself to just watching his stationary position on his laptop and was getting very frustrated about not being able to use it to the fullest potential.

In the past, I'd considered getting a GPS receiver for my Nokia N800. In many ways, it is an ideal navigation tool, with a large screen and adequate storage capacity. Maps were always going to be a problem, as the few solutions for India obviously didn't support the N800. At that time, I had thought that if someone could write a program that would use publicly available maps like Google maps or Yahoo maps, it would be very useful. I had not researched further, as I didn't have a GPS device to play with. However, now that Shashi had one available, I asked him lend his GPS receiver, and started googling for N800 GPS solutions. Very quickly, I came up with a program called Maemo-mapper.

Maemo-mapper is a mapper application that can interact with a GPS and plot the current position on a map. A lot of other applications can do this, however, the beauty is that it can access many publicly available maps like Google Maps, Google Satellite view, Yahoo maps etc. Amazingly, this was just what I had wished for a few months ago!!!

It is fairly simple in that it can only display your current position and route on a map. It cannot create driving directions automatically, this needs to happen in an external program and can be imported into this. It does, however, have the ability to export your location data as gpx files, which can be imported by any mapping program or a number of Google maps mashups and shared with others. This is a much more likely usage in the Indian context as driving directions are unlikely to ever
be reliable given the ever changing urban landscape.

I borrowed the GPS receiver for the weekend and took it with me everywhere. It was a lot of fun sitting in a car and watching it move on the map.

Computer Woes etc

It has been rough over the past few days. I came down with cold and fever on Thursday, which continues till today. Though it was mild, it totally wrecked my plans to take part in the half marathon this year.

To top it off, the new computer that I built had been behaving very badly since Wednesday. It would start up fine, but if I left it running for more than a couple of hours or did anything memory intensive, it would almost always end in a Blue Screen of Death. I tried a number of things likr refixing the RAM, removing the video card and uninstalling software that could have caused the error, but it was all in vain. Finally, as all indications were pointing to memory errors, I decided to run a memory test on the RAM modules, and voila, came up with almost 2 million errors!!! I then did a check on each module individually and identified the culprit, a bad RAM stick. I removed it and have been running Vista with 1 GB since this morning and no lockups. Funnily enough, despite all the stories I've read about Vista being a dog on 1GB, it isn't all that unusable.

Upgraded PC

My old pc, an AMD Athlon 2000XP was getting on in years, it was the slowest processor available in 2004 and though I had no problems with mundane stuff like browsing etc, it was struggling to run anything more processor intensive. I'd considered upgrading for many months, but somehow it was always the lowest priority and I never did. Finally, I got to it last weekend and took the plunge.

I went for the high end this time. For the CPU, I was torn between Intel and AMD. I've been an AMD fan for many years and have been rooting for them to come back strong over the last year or so, ever since Intel came out with the Core2Duo. The prices are that much better on the AMD as well, but the performance difference is significant. I finally decided to go for the Core2Duo E6750, which is the fastest non-Extreme dual core processor available today. To it, I added 2 GB RAM and a mid-range graphics card (Nvidia 8600GT based) and I got one hell of a beast.

Last year, I had made a resolution not to run any pirated software on my pc. I'd gone out and bought an original WindowsXP license and wanted to transfer it to this PC from the old one.
That's when I realised a) I'd bought an OEM version which was non-transferable and b) I'd kept the certificate of authenticity in such a safe place that I couldn't find it at all!! I decided to go with Windows Vista, as I felt that it would be more future proof, despite all the negative press and my previous bad experience with it.

The OS installation went off very smoothly and I was done in a little over an hour. I was amazed by how sweet Vista runs on this machine as compared to my laptop, which is also a dual core with 2 GB of RAM. Must be the faster processor, RAM and hard disk. I'm really excited because now I'll finally be able to play the Orange Box games that I bought recently:-)

Airtel broadband

Airtel has announced a 8 Mbps broadband offering. That's good news, but as I expected, they are announcing a puny 7-8 GB download limit. Essentially, this means that if you use your connection to full capacity, your monthly quota is over in a little over 2 hours. You have to wonder at the special breed of dimwits that we have in allthe Indian telecom providers.

It'll be interesting to see the kind of pricing that they will have for this speed and whether it will translate into lower pricing for the lower speed plans. I'd also like to see them change their download policy, rather than charging extra for the excess downloads, they can throttle the connection to a lower speed of 512 kbps or 1 Mbps. If that happens, I would definitely consider moving to the higher speed plans. Until then, I'm sticking to my pathetic low speed unlimited plan.

Apple's new ipod range

Apple has formally launched its ipod range in India. The prices and the corresponding prices in the US

Model	Price in INR	Price in USD	Converted Price in INR	Premium
ipod Nano 4GB	8800	149	6000	2800 (45%)
Nano 8GB	11400	199	800	3400 (42%)
Classic 80GB	14500	249	10000	4500 (45%)
Classic 160GB	20400	349	14000	6400 (45%)
ipod Touch 8GB	17700	299	12000	5700 (47%)
ipod Touch 16GB	23600	399	16000	7600 (47%)

I wonder what the justification is for such a premium on what is already a premium line of products. Where is the incentive for anyone to buy it in India, they will just pick it up on their next trip to the US or Singapore.

Nokia N800 tablet

I recently got a Nokia Internet Tablet N800. After a couple of days playing with it, I am truly loving it.

At first, one might wonder about the point of an internet tablet. It's not quite as powerful as a laptop and not as mobile as a mobile phone. Why have it at all? I think that it has defined a niche market for itself, to provide a full featured web experience in a gadget that you can hold in your palm and can easily get out of the way when you don't need it. Try finding a laptop or a mobile phone that does it at this price point. Here's a brief review of the device

Hardware

The device looks super cool. I think I have fairly large hands, but still found it difficult to hold it lengthwise. It's dominated by a large 4.1" touchscreen LCD with a resolution of 800x480. The 800 pixel horizontal resolution is important, because it means that virtually all mainstream sites can be displayed without any horizontal scrolling.

It has 2 memory slots to add additional storage capacity. With the latest software upgrade, it now supports upto 8 GB memory cards (SD, micro SD, MMC etc), making a total of 16 GB of memory if you want. A rocker button on top adjusts the zoom from 80% to 200% in a seamless manner.

The buttons on the left aid in scrolling horizontally and vertically. In addition, they can also be used to jump between hyperlinks on the page that is being displayed.

It supports wi-fi connections and can also connect to a cellular network through your mobile phone using Bluetooth.

Software

This device runs a modified version of Linux and comes with the Opera browser with Flash 9 support. At this time, there is no support for Java.

It comes with a media player (supporting mp3 and many other audio formats and mp4 video support). The media player acts as a uPnP client, so you can stream media from your PC to the device, provided it is in the right format. There is a news reader, email client and a few games that come out of the box. In addition, there is a fairly vibrant community at www.maemo.org that has developed many more applications for this device.

User Experience

When i first started using it, the experience was a bit underwhelming. The rave reviews that I read on the Net had pumped up expectations to such an extent that the device could not possibly live up to them. But, once I reconciled myself to the fact that this was not a PC replacement but a complementary device, I really started appreciating its features.

The browser works great, but this is Opera and though its fully standards compliant, it will not work as well as Firefox on some sites. I found Web 2.0 Ajaxy sites to be less than optimal, Google Reader was almost unusable. Youtube was not as smooth as on a real computer, but was usable. The clarity of the screen was phenomenal, text and images were razor sharp and even sustained bouts of surfing on the small screen did not cause any eye strain.

The other application that I used extensively was the media player. The player is fairly basic without any advanced features like playlists. I specially liked the uPnP support, I was able to browse the media collection on my desktop without any problems. Audio streaming worked flawlessly, but I didn't have much luck with video streaming. Mostly, it was due to the fact that most of my video collection is in Divx/xvid, which this does not support. I copied a couple of mpeg videos and it played them without any problems.

When I discovered how bad Google Reader was, I thought of using the built in feed reader. However, I found that it does not offer the ability to import OPML files. That was the last time that I used that one!! Luckily, a bit of Googling revealed that Mobile Google Reader is a much better bet for devices like this. I've tried it and found that it works really well.  It doesn't offer all the cool features, but will do atleast till Google gets it working with Opera.

The latest version adds Skype to the device. It really works well and the calls sound great.

I haven't had time to install any additional apps or play with any of the other applications.

Gripes

I'm still in my early days of usage, but a few things that I'd like to see improved really stand out
- Firefox: I'd like to see Firefox ported to this device. I believe that it may have already been done, I need to check it out.
- I've sometimes found that tapping on a link does nothing and you really have to tap multiple times to activate it
- I've mainly been using it on wifi and find it much slower than my laptop. I'm not sure if its just a processor thing, because once a page starts loading, it proceeds fairly quickly. But the initial load can take a while, maybe its due to the overhead of establishing a connection.
- i wish it had Java support. Lack of it means that I still need to use my laptop to follow F1 Live timing:-(

My daily office commute

I was playing around with the "My Map" feature of Google Maps. Here is a map of my daily trip from home to office.

Story of my ancient computer

Last weekend, I was finally able to dispose off my Celeron(P3) computer. It was the first computer that I built from scratch. I first built in in 99-00 and over the years upgraded many of the components. We started with a 4 GB hard drive and 128 MB of RAM and by end 2004, it was up to 384 MB of RAM, a CD-RW and 80 GB of memory. Through our stay in Mangalore, this was the primary computer that I used and it ran without skipping a beat (well, if you exclude 1 crashed hard drive and a couple of failed optical drives). When we returned to Bangalore, we found ourselves with 2 computers, and since the other was a Athlon 2000+XP, that I assembled in 2004, I couldn’t really find a reason to continue using this one. I stripped out the parts as best as I could and distributed them to various people. I bought a HDD casing and made an external drive out of that. I found a buyer for the monitor and speakers in late 2005, but there were absolutely no takers for what was remaining.

I toyed around with the idea of converting the computer into a file or media server but space is at a premium at my house. So, the computer was gathering dust. When my brother’s computer went on the blink, I took back the memory I had given him and advertised for the case+mb+cpu+memory bundle on various sites like craigslist, indiaconnect etc. Nothing happened for a few months, but then last week, I got a call from a prospective buyer. He finally came down on Saturday and bought the computer for the grand prize of 1000 rupees. Imagine, parts which cost me over 20000 rupees just 8 years back now worth little more than scrap value.