Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 04 Dec 2012 10:09

Marten wrote: One more generation and the cellphone will be the device bringing literacy to rural India.

It already does on both small and large scales. These 'low-end' smartphones now come equipped with social, basic productivity and other apps including browsers (and ofcourse that most necessary app, Angry Birds!

).

ArmenT · Post by **ArmenT** » 04 Dec 2012 16:12

I'm staying off the Windows 8 smartphones for the near future. Why? Because we use a browser-based app at work to manage/queue alert notifications from servers in various data centers. Guess what? That app doesn't work right with mobile IE9 or IE10 and we have to wait for a while for that fix to come out (if it ever will). Therefore, no Win8 based phones for us tech guys in the near future.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 04 Dec 2012 19:09

Raja Bose wrote:Smartphone Buyers Guide

Only applicable for US and not for those who travel internationally.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 04 Dec 2012 21:58

What do they mean by dual SIM and quad SIM operationally? I have not used/read it hence the question. Is it that I can slam couple of SIMs (say one for massa and another one for desh), and I am all set for either place [with respective services based on the SIM]?

RamaY · Post by **RamaY** » 04 Dec 2012 23:11

^ Yep.

Many people in India use duel sims. they use one for business and another for personal. that way they can ignore calls from one side when needed.

You can also have them from different carriers. That makes it even better for people who travel within desh with roaming charges etc.,

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 05 Dec 2012 10:46

my sister is choosing between an iphone 5 and a samsung 3GS.

The sammy, has a large screen, better camera, more customizable features. This is a small feature but a big one, IMO...it can act as a USB hard drive.

The apple. Cannot.

But, it appeals to my sister...she is a designer and uses imacs a lot. She thinks that it gets her one step closer to an all apple ecosystem as she wants to buy a mac later. and its easy to use.

Any suggestions and comments , O wise ones?

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 05 Dec 2012 11:33

What is the dope on the samsung galaxy camera? Novelty passing fad or future megatrend in terms of wifi connectivity and smartphone or atleast dataflow integration into cameras...

Would love to own a dslr with a note phablet glued to the back..if i got it free ie

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 05 Dec 2012 11:56

^^^ note aapke pocket main kaise aathi hai?

Deep pockets I guess

.

but seriously. Why the note?

negi · Post by **negi** » 05 Dec 2012 11:57

GD you still lugging around the D70 brick ?

Prasad · Post by **Prasad** » 05 Dec 2012 12:16

Singha wrote:What is the dope on the samsung galaxy camera? Novelty passing fad or future megatrend in terms of wifi connectivity and smartphone or atleast dataflow integration into cameras...

Would love to own a dslr with a note phablet glued to the back..if i got it free ie

The new Canon 6D is a step in that direction. Has wifi and GPS built-in. Wifi works for control via smartphone/tablet and transfer images. Canon M camera has a touchscreen on the back. Usually this sort of tech flows from the $100 cameras to the $5000 ones though.

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 05 Dec 2012 14:57

Lumia 620 (WP8,1 ghz dual core s4, 8gb expandable, 5MP camera,800 x 480 3.8-inch screen, Rs ~13,000) :-

sampat · Post by **sampat** » 05 Dec 2012 17:23

mahadevbhu wrote:my sister is choosing between an iphone 5 and a samsung 3GS.
But, it appeals to my sister...she is a designer and uses imacs a lot. She thinks that it gets her one step closer to an all apple ecosystem as she wants to buy a mac later. and its easy to use.

Any suggestions and comments , O wise ones?

In this case, iPhone is better option. She will get benefit of icloud Sync (Contacts, pics, appz, ibook etc). I am on linux and use dropbox or direct wifi tansfer to move files from linux to iDevice. On mac or windows with iTunes, you can also use IDevice as harddrive. There are actually few appz on appstore that does that. Also, don't give credit card to apple, instead buy iTunes gift card. Sometimes, there are discounts on cards and it also minimises impulse buys.

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 05 Dec 2012 17:35

Marten wrote:
anmol wrote:Lumia 620 (WP8,1 ghz dual core s4, 8gb expandable, 5MP camera,800 x 480 3.8-inch screen, Rs ~13,000) :-
That's the direct USD conversion price. It'll be priced higher despite whatever Nokia says at the moment. Same pattern as earlier phones including the awesome AaTh-SaU-AaTh.
Mighty fine specs for a WP. Would take this any day over the same device running Droid.

Well, some article claimed that they will sell it for that much in Asia and Middle East. Also their 610 sells for ~11k and 710 sells for ~14k.. so it has to be somewhere in between. If this was the price in USA, in that case they would certainly price it lot higher in India...

BUt then this is all based on some blog..

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 05 Dec 2012 17:59

The screen is the downer. Need a 4" screen to fly up and play with the eagles in air.

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 05 Dec 2012 20:24

^^^ Raja Bose..that article was fan-freakin tastic about how to choose a phone. Much gratitude.

Thanks for the opinions folks. The iphone looks like an increasingly good choice, over the SGS 3.

And my SGS 1 vibrant keeps causing a pain in the ass with its OS cyanogen Mod 7 point someone and makes me want to switch, along with my family.

someone develop a painless, smooth CM for the vibrant ....which ROM...any opinions, apart from CM7 and Bionix? The ICS Zen ROM on the vibrant again had a lot of forced closing apps.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 05 Dec 2012 23:27

mahadevbhu wrote:my sister is choosing between an iphone 5 and a samsung 3GS.

The sammy, has a large screen, better camera, more customizable features. This is a small feature but a big one, IMO...it can act as a USB hard drive.

The apple. Cannot.

But, it appeals to my sister...she is a designer and uses imacs a lot. She thinks that it gets her one step closer to an all apple ecosystem as she wants to buy a mac later. and its easy to use.

Any suggestions and comments , O wise ones?

If she is a designer then she is already a part of Apple-verse so iPhone is a no-brainer choice for her. Go for it.

Marten wrote:"Nexus 7 3G has shipped". After promising the mahdi's gift to the universe, got shq this! Am hoping she will like it and get the xperia ion. Boy, I am so frikking cheap!
Oh, and the Asha series seems like actually good buy, but why spend on a touchscreen that I will damage within the month? Have had 4/5 well built HTCs and all of them are now in an unholy incestuous position with their innards mixed and rolled up into a nice crinkly bubblewrap envelope.

I love my Nexus 7 - its a good lil' tablet though service offerings especially in media content suck (that's a larger Android/Chacha problem, not a Nexus 7 problem). After the initial quality problems they seem to have fixed the issues, this is my 2nd one and has not given any trouble. Don't the Asha series have touch-and-type combos? Comparing HTC with GB in build quality is like comparing Habib Sitara with a real car.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 06 Dec 2012 00:53

Might Apple lose the iPad trademark? Welcome to the Twilight Zone
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-573797 ... ight-zone/

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 06 Dec 2012 01:16

Mbhu,

Yes. iPhone 5 is correct for your sis based on sentiment. Although there is overlap in the Mac OS X and iOS ecosystem, they are different. You can be in the OS X ecosystem and have it work well with Google ecosystem. I have been whittling down my iOS devices slowly, but surely. I've taken away the kids iPod touch devices and have been giving them Nexus devices in return. I'm down to the iPad 3 at this time.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Dec 2012 01:52

Dunno about this Xperia but the others were kinda crap.

Once folks get sucked into the Apple chakravyuha they stay there unless they can keep their original allegiance strong like Mullah Mort. Apple devices work best with Apple devices. Zimble onlee.

Looks like the trend is getting clearer...non-touch Win lappies are slowly becoming history.

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 06 Dec 2012 11:00

^^^ win 8 . Will people buy it for business use? I find it too toyish. And distracting. And painful .

BhairavP · Post by **BhairavP** » 06 Dec 2012 17:50

Marten wrote:
anmol wrote:Lumia 620 (WP8,1 ghz dual core s4, 8gb expandable, 5MP camera,800 x 480 3.8-inch screen, Rs ~13,000) :-
That's the direct USD conversion price. It'll be priced higher despite whatever Nokia says at the moment. Same pattern as earlier phones including the awesome AaTh-SaU-AaTh.
Mighty fine specs for a WP. Would take this any day over the same device running Droid.

Saar, actually I got my 808 within a week of release for 28k. There was a promo running on ngPay, and the item was an India-model piece, with full local warranty. Cheaper than pretty much anywhere else.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 06 Dec 2012 22:50

Raja Bose wrote:
Once folks get sucked into the Apple chakravyuha they stay there unless they can keep their original allegiance strong like Mullah Mort. Apple devices work best with Apple devices. Zimble onlee.

This is because iTunes works best on a Mac and iTunes on the desktop is the way you interface and transfer content from your computer to your iToy. It just happens the Mac also works great with my Google devices.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Dec 2012 23:33

That was the Mahdi's ultimate chankian strat-e-jee.

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 07 Dec 2012 04:05

Raja Bose wrote:Dunno about this Xperia but the others were kinda crap.

Once folks get sucked into the Apple chakravyuha they stay there unless they can keep their original allegiance strong like Mullah Mort. Apple devices work best with Apple devices. Zimble onlee.

Looks like the trend is getting clearer...non-touch Win lappies are slowly becoming history.

Didn't we say the same couple of pages ago? MS strategy is working.

^^^ win 8 . Will people buy it for business use? I find it too toyish. And distracting. And painful .

The current Win8 phone apps consists of CRM, Sharepoint, Lync (a.k.a Sametime in IBM/corporate collaboration tool). Most of the yahoos around the world still use the "so called useless " MS office instead of " bright and brilliant " open office. That is super advantage on the Win 8RT and Win 8PRO. I am sure it will not be such a big deal to get the entire Microsoft server management tools and snapins to Win8 apps.

Emerging architecture for MS will be:
(1) azure (cloud) - not services (like sky drive) but real cloud that can be created by corporates
(2) It spend 30% of previous decade's investments on Data Data Data. SQL Server is very matured product. Now it has provided native support to Hadoop (google's open standard) for big data. SQL Server 2012 parallel datawarehouse is pretty good on Win based MPP
(3) Win server 2012
(4) Tools and API to develop apps in RT and Pro. Visual studio, team dev environments beats out any product in the world by miles. ( I did work on either side of world (J2EE & .NET) with same passion.)

I do not see a great future for Apple. Sorry for being blunt. It was great once and it fell to poop. Now with all its girle-toys it is up and very good too. However, it will go to poop again.

I only see two worlds MS world and google world. All the open source, Oracle doos, erstwhile J2EEs, UNIX/Linux types and who-hates-MS-for-fun&Jealosy will be with google. Google does have a strong forward looking path and it is in right direction. It will kill/swallow all the junk emenating out from open-source-gobar for sure and that is the right thing to do for standardization. This methodology was not adopted by SUN-Oracle-IBM-Netscape in the past and they are the losers anyway.

MS is having a huge advantage as long as basic company computing is not switched to Linux/Chrome based machines with seamless integration to Corporate enterprise systems. The basic folks who goes to work are still MS word, excel, PPT and IE folks. Touch with METRO is looking very promising for this saga to continue. Another advantage is it has certain server products like Exchange, Sharepoint, ActiveDirectory are all well oiled and integrated into Win Server. This advantage will go away from MS if and only if google (others are all jokers and they don't even have a chance) can come with:

(1) A good document and content management server with extreme easy of creation and deployment.
(2) Some thing equivalant to MS Access and SQL Server Express (Oracle personal, My SQL are miles and miles away)
(3) MS Project's equivalant
(4) Cheaper and easy integratable alternatives to MS CRM and scores of such enterprise products

and then google also has to take 50% of market share of the above. That is when MS will be dented. Otherwise it is all soar grapes onlee.

By the way I work in a very anti-MS (religiously anti) organization. The IT folks will not even wipe their trenches if they come to know that the paper is created by MS. However, they use Windows desktop, IE is the standard enterprise browser, SharePoint is loved by the users and there are several other such things. Folks are all addicted to Lync and most of the work from home became productive after OCS/Lync became enterprise standard.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 07 Dec 2012 06:35

Quickly scanned the above post. One point that caught my eye is clouds for corporates. I think that is DOA as none of the corporates would put their data on the cloud. Even a very remote possibility of either accidental or hacked leak of data is too much for most corporates.

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 07 Dec 2012 07:11

matrimc wrote:Quickly scanned the above post. One point that caught my eye is clouds for corporates. I think that is DOA as none of the corporates would put their data on the cloud. Even a very remote possibility of either accidental or hacked leak of data is too much for most corporates.

Come on.

No one is saying that people will put their stuff on Skydrives. I am talking about private clouds. Conceptually cloud is nothing but a old wine in new bottle. It is like centralized data center and nothing on your personal computer just like the days of mainframe with big central computer accessed by a dumb terminal. With the advanced growth of hardware and virtualization, they will move even your desktop/laptop to a virtual desktop/laptop to a central location. You will be just be left tablet/phone and you can securely log in to network by clicking (sorry touching) on an app. There are several other ways to do the same. The industry in moving towards this architecture.

Cloud is just a new type of data center. All those small/midlevel companies who are hosting their data centers in shared mode will still host their private clouds on hosted networks.

By the way both harware and sorware companies are investing tons and tons towards this architecture. The change is all not that mythical anymore and we will see this where you will have a corporate cloud and a corporate tablet connecting over vpn apps via WiFi or home office netowrks.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 08 Dec 2012 04:13

Muppalla wrote: Come on.

No one is saying that people will put their stuff on Skydrives. I am talking about private clouds.

My argument was a straw man. Just testing to see if I can sneak it

past your sharp gaze.

The M$ vision of the private clouds will come with its own problems especially due to licensing costs. M$ seems to be keen on raising these for their enterprise customers. Even though M$ has taken a few pages from it's guru the IBM, people at M$ are so hubris laden that they think they can become "guruvunu minchina sishyudu" (teacher bettering desciple).

When IBM was the undisputed king of the industry back in mid 1980s, the situation was different. There was no alternative to IBM in the enterprise DB and TP space. They had a lock even with a older hierarchical DBMS technology in IMS because it inter-operated with CICS which was the de facto messaging/TP system. Everything was centralized for production TP. They also had the VM/CMS (guest OS) running on OS/VM systems with minidisks quotas for each user, completely configurable for each user, these were the private clouds at that time which were used for developing software but not production TP. At the time when they introduced DB2 all their competitors had network DBMSs, which were superior to IMS but could notget a foot in the enterprise door (other than some niches like Burroughs in Banking, Univac in Airline Reservation, CDC in Sceintefic Computing) because they could not inter-operate with IBM proprietary CICS. In this mix they added DB2 which could inter-operate with CICS and also more flexible than the network DBMSs due to its relational nature. The only lacuna was that it was slower than IMS.

Had they acted the way M$ is acting today, they would have had zero penetration of DB2 in their IMS shops, but IBM was lot more cunning. They gave away DB2 for almost no cost (IIRC it was $500 lease per month) for 2-3 years to their enterprise customers. That was the end of not only some of the up and coming DBMS companies but also some of their MF competitors.

Right now M$ is vulnerable and they should be decreasing prices rather than increase them. Otherwise, the push-back is going to be from their own customer base.

As the rise of DEC, DG, Tandem, Sun, broke IBM MF lock, so do alternatives today will break M$ platform lock-in. By raising prices, M$ is only helping it's competitors. Another main difference they seem to be missing is that the rise of the internetz strengthened standards in all aspects of platform interoperability which are lot more mature.

This is not to say that M$ would disappear in a flash. My prediction is that M$ is going to decline in slow motion just like IBM did in spite of all it's cunning ways and lobbying in DC against anti-trust breakup. We will live to see a severely reduced M$.

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 08 Dec 2012 05:38

^^^
You can wish for MS decline and I have no problems with that.

Nothing is permanent. People die and companies are not immortal. However, you are very wrong regarding costs. MS products in enterprise world are dead cheap and give away.

Few examples:
Look the cost between SharePoint Vs its nearest products such as Documentum or some other doc mangement/content management product. Miles apart. I know you can come with some open source free product

that to without considering the cost of implementation, expertise costs and support costs. Another common argument is that the non-MS products are some super-duper toppers. I worked on end-to-end implementations of SP and Documentum. When I was a kid I also worked on Broadvision.

Let us come to database (do not come with some arguments such as SQL Server is some crap etc) - Even the MPP version of SQL Server with everything you wanted is 50K. However, see the bundle it comes with - (1) SSIS (beats out Informatica on any day except in the MS-hate crowd) (2) SSRS (see its features and compare to Business Objects) (3) Entire range of BI tools.

Most of the needed versions of SQL Server are less that 15K with the above bundle. The bigdata one is the only one that is even 50K. I worked on large databases in SQL Server, Oracle and now EMC Greenplum (all 10TB + data)

Nothing is expensive as any other product. The cost of integration in non-MS world is very high and in MS world it is all on same .NET platform which is built into its OS.

Another advantage is that you need to have seperate support agreements with a host of vendors in J2EE/Open world. A blanket support agreement is all that is needed with MS.

My point is cost is one area where MS has advantage.

The problem in my view in the enterprise world is that no company other than MS and google has the wherewittal to have a long term strategy and also bear losses in the short run. It is all quarter to quater and shareholders pulls and pressures. What they are ending up are buying off some products and creating some integration. In the end at the time of customer implementation things like this version of JBOSS will work only that version of Greenplum. Support stuff is so fishy and exorbantly expensive. Good for Indian IT DOOs though. Lots of money to make with a lot less expertise.

See Oracle, instead of buiding an MPP engine, it just bought exadata and raised a green flag saying "I have it", "I have it"

. Purchases SUN and Java and thinks it has a WIntel type advantage with a .NET framework. Oracle a database stalwart purchases something else to handle bigdata and that is the truth

IBM purchases SPSS and Netezza and tells the world that it has world's greatest analytics and greatest appliance. Still it can't beat slow and sustained SAS analytics because there is plan in SAS world. See IBM instead of developing DB2 into an MPP and with a great hardware background goes with a shortcut of acquiring Netezza. I attended their sales pitch when we are deciding on suite. Both Netezza and DB2 guys promote for the same solution. IBM is the company that boasts of watson and it cannot give a sustained analytics solution

. It can give but not interested to build from groundup because its shareholders do not approve.

See Informatica, it is no more interested in writing new stuff. It just goes off and purchases b2b for ETL of unstructured data. I started using it. Entire Informatica is written using Java for frontend and C++ as its engine. This b2b is written with Windows perspective. The UI behavior is way different in Powercenter Vs b2b. By the way Informatica XML handling is DOM parser as opposed sax type stuff. If you have a large XML for ETL they ask you consider XML as unstructured data and use b2b. Isn't it a shame for a company whose core-value is ETL?

Another myth in the hate-MS crowd is that MS products are some closed and non-open standard stuff. They always go back to its worst technology days of COM/DCOM and still drifts the argument. Today's MS products are complete open standards based products and are driven by XML written on XML.org standards and other similar browser, document standards. Now the gripe is that it did not open its code

I can go on and on...

krisna · Post by **krisna** » 09 Dec 2012 03:50

has aapil reached its peak or it is just a minor blip.
some dont like aapil.

Meanwhile chacha plans to stop google apps for free to individuals soon.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 09 Dec 2012 06:14

Chacha wants to stop it for small companies, they want them to pay for it. Individuals will still be able to use the free apps.

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 09 Dec 2012 15:53

how does one resize the boot partition to install win 8? i have a 30 gb boot ntfs. all other partitions are fat32 on my 750 gb hdd. so not having partition magic in win xp...i went to gparted in linu and reduced the size of some of the fat 32 partitions ...and now i have some unallocated space which i would like to add to the c:\ drive such that it increases in size and allows me to install win 8. but right now. in gparted. it only allows me to reduce the size of the 30 gb boot ntfs partition...not increase it.

help!

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

krishnan · Post by **krishnan** » 09 Dec 2012 17:54

http://www.androidauthority.com/samsung ... ce-110968/

The Samsung Galaxy Camera is an Android-powered digital camera that features a 16-megapixel sensor, 23mm F/2.8 lens, 21x optical zoom, and 4.8-inch capacitive touchscreen. The camera connects wirelessly through WiFi and mobile data for image backup and uploading to social networking services.
The Samsung Galaxy Camera is an Android-powered digital camera that features a 16-megapixel sensor, 23mm F/2.8 lens, 21x optical zoom, and 4.8-inch capacitive touchscreen. The camera connects wirelessly through WiFi and mobile data for image backup and uploading to social networking services.

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 09 Dec 2012 18:21

mahadevbhu wrote:how does one resize the boot partition to install win 8? i have a 30 gb boot ntfs. all other partitions are fat32 on my 750 gb hdd. so not having partition magic in win xp...i went to gparted in linu and reduced the size of some of the fat 32 partitions ...and now i have some unallocated space which i would like to add to the c:\ drive such that it increases in size and allows me to install win 8. but right now. in gparted. it only allows me to reduce the size of the 30 gb boot ntfs partition...not increase it.

help!

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Saar Ji I have replied in nukkad (I guess).

RamaY · Post by **RamaY** » 11 Dec 2012 00:20

Apple Maps 'is life-threatening' to motorists lost in Australia heat

Apple Maps 'is life-threatening' to motorists lost in Australia heat

In this picture posted by Mildura police, the purple pin shows the actual location of the town

Inaccuracies in Apple Maps could be "life-threatening" to motorists in Australia's searing heat, police have warned.

Officers in Mildura, Victoria, said they had had to assist drivers stranded after following the software's directions.

Some of the drivers had had no food or water for 24 hours.

Apple's software was heavily criticised by users when it was released in September.

Last week, chief executive Tim Cook admitted Apple had "screwed up" and was working to improve the program.

In a press release, Victoria police's acting senior sergeant Sharon Darcy made her force's concerns clear.

"Tests on the mapping system by police confirm the mapping systems lists Mildura in the middle of the Murray Sunset National Park, approximately 70km [45 miles] away from the actual location of Mildura," she said.

"Police are extremely concerned as there is no water supply within the park and temperatures can reach as high as 46[C], making this a potentially life-threatening issue."

I am planning to rely on Apple maps for my upcoming trip to Kan-A-Da

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 11 Dec 2012 00:54

SaarJi, I hope you don't end up like this

(found on theverge)

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Dec 2012 03:39

RamaY wrote: I am planning to rely on Apple maps for my upcoming trip to Kan-A-Da

Last week I used GB's offline maps in Kanada - worked fine without any problems.

RamaY · Post by **RamaY** » 11 Dec 2012 04:06

What is GB?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Dec 2012 05:35

This. 1000 stribes for not knowing BRF lingo

Mean-e-while, interesting lawsuit against Chacha: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-12- ... rivacy-ads Should Chacha (or SK screaming co. etc.) be allowed to scan email content from emails not originating with their users, for commercial purposes? A lot more factors come into play here apart from privacy methinks.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 11 Dec 2012 12:31

IANAL but this is not so clear cut. Whether the intent is commercial or not, does not determine if privacy is violated or not.

OTOH Electronic communication is routinely stored, scanned, transmitted and copies of it are made. This is irrespective of the origin and end point, it could be stored, scanned, transmitted and copies of it could be made by your email client, the recipient's email client, the browser both people use, the intermediate relays uses for transmission, at the ISP if they cache and ityadi. In all those cases is privacy violated?

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 12 Dec 2012 02:22

Muppalla garu

I have some thoughts on your post. will get back to you...

Meanwhile enjoy the following

OZ police caution against using Apple Maps...
Apple Maps strands motorists looking for Mildura

PS: I see RamaY garu already posted from BBC.