A good place that plays my kind of music
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Getting my car fixed
Apparently the rest of my family gets work done by this guy. Tabrez, of Auto Trim, is our family auto guy! He tries hard to up-sell stuff if you walk into his store. But I have majored in marketing and was wise to his ways... No, I didn't buy too much... only the things I REALLY needed! :)
Friday, March 13, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Things that please or bother me about the SonyEricsson K810i
I'm a gadget freak and I admit it! There's nothing cooler to me than some electronic device that does a whole bunch of things. And if it does it in a user friendly manner, it's nirvana! So, after much research all over the internet, I finally bought myself a Sony Ericsson K810i. So why do I want to bother writing ANOTHER review though I read a whole lot, well, it's because all those people failed to mention a few important things, which I want to cover here.
Just so you don't have to spend all your time reading a whole bunch of reviews, let me just point you to the ones that I found useful:
Here's one from the UK. And here's another from some place else. And just for spite, don't bother with the CNet video reviews of this phone. It's pointless. :P
So having covered what most other people have said, I will add to it and mention the things I would like to say. Because strange things bother and intrigue me, and if you're anything like me, then I guess it would bother you too. So read on... freak!
THE TOP 20 THINGS I LIKE:
1. The camera on the phone is pretty decent. Having not owned a good camera phone before, I was thrilled that it came with a 3.2 mega-pixel camera, which apart from the rating alone, does a fine job with pictures. The camera's got settings that I've only seen on regular digital cameras. The one's that were impressive were:
- Macro shooting mode for taking close-up shots
- Document setting, for taking pictures of.. *ahem* documents but the point is that the writing on these documents is real clear
- And finally the Best Pic setting, which takes a series of 9 shots in a second so you can pick the best and discard the rest. A very useful feature and you may begin using it far more often than you think.
2. Another cool aspect of the camera is it's ability to save the data real fast. So there's no lag between looking at something you want to shoot and then actually clicking a picture of it. It's pretty quick and you will more often than not, end up with the picture you wanted to take.
3. Yet another great feature of the camera, is the quick access buttons all over the place that allow you to change shooting modes (Normal, Best Pic, Panorama, Frames - why frames I don't know, but whatever, we'll get to that later). Scenes (Portrait, Landscape, Twilight Portrait, Twilight Landscape, Beach/Snow, Sports and Documents settings), Resolution (3 MP, 2 MP, 1 MP and VGA), Automatic/Delayed Shot mode, and the much needed, turn off the flash button - which I don't understand why it's usually hidden in regular cameras!
4. The colours on the camera are pretty close to real life, erring on the higher side of colour saturation. The pictures look just great!
5. This is also a sign of a great screen. The pictures look so bloody nice on it. Take a look at some of the photos I've posted on this blog prior to this post.
6. The finishing of the back of the phone is pretty darn neat. It's got this rubbery feel to it making it feel soft. The colour (I've got the deep blue phone) also looks nice.
7. The sides of the phone are not tapered, but flat. This is useful when you want to take a picture in automatic (delayed shot) mode. You can place this phone on a flat surface and predictably position yourself in front of it. Resulting in nicer pictures that you want to keep.
8. Then, the little feature built into the phone that allows you to post your pictures straight to a blog is nice too. Because I wanted to buy myself a camera phone, so that I could take pictures and then post them online for my friends to see. This feature makes it very easy to post a picture you've just taken, to your blog in a matter of seconds. But let me warn you, you can only post to blogger.com, if you use some other service, or want to post them to Facebook, you would follow the slightly cumbersome older method of downloading pictures to your computer and then uploading them to your service of choice.
9. Bluetooth headset integration is easy. But it also sounds clear and crisp. I don't know how much of this to attribute to the phone, but when I used to use the same headset with my older phone, there was a lot of static.
10. The battery life is pretty good. I used the phone with GPRS internet and Bluetooth on, while connected to my headset and my computer at the same time. This kind of usage found the phone performing well for about 8 hours. I mean I wasn't on a call or browsing the web ALL that time, but I used it frequently enough as one would during the course of a day.
11. The Track ID feature is nice and useful too. For the uninitiated, this feature allows you to record a sampling of a song that may be playing around you so that you can identify the artist and the song - for later piracy... I mean purchase from iTunes. I expected that it would simply be a feature included on the phone to make the phone sound very capable. But it's actually pretty good. Especially for english songs. I never tried it with Hindi or Kannada songs as yet, but I have a feeling that Gracenote (the service the phone uses to identify the songs) is not filled with information about songs in other languages. But to get back to the point, I tried it out using the in-built Radio, where it worked very well, but also in a noisy coffee shop, where it successfully identified the song in a second attempt.
12. The calendar, contacts, tasks and notes perform in a pretty standard manner. Nothing much to say about there, but a surprisingly cool feature is in the alarms settings. Some phones are an all or nothing alarm settings i. e. it will wake you up the same time everyday whether it's a Sunday or not. And if you forgot to turn off the alarm on the previous night, you will be woken up bright and early even though you intended to stay in bed that day.
My Windows Mobile phone that I had before had gone one step further and allowed me to set an alarm for weekdays only - all fine until you realise that weekdays in American terms doesn't include Saturdays, which for most people in India and many other parts of the world, is a working day. So you may sleep in on Saturday while your boss is fuming at the office. But the K810i is amazing. You can set up to five alarms and not only that, you can *choose* the days you want that alarm to operate on. How's that for customisability. And moreover, seems like the engineers at Sony have actually asked people what they want rather than assuming what they want.
13. This phone has a stopwatch AND a timer. Very useful while playing certain board games.
14. There's also something called the Code Memo, which seems to be a feature where you can store encrypted messages such as credit card numbers and passwords of your plethora of accounts for the oh-so-many online services.
15. Oh, and most importantly, for me, this phone syncs with a Mac! So my address book, calendars and tasks are always synchronised. And yes, it doesn't mention it on the Apple iSync Website, but you can download a plug-in from the SonyEricsson support site by clicking here. Life is wonderful again! And no, it doesn't synchronise your contact photos to or from the Mac. And no, it doesn't synchronise the photos you took on the phone either.
16. In case you need to use the internet connection from the phone, probably provided by Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL or who else have you, you can easily set up a Mac to do so. In case of Windows, this statement remains true, but I would just remove one word from it, which is "easily". However, if you have the Desktop Suite software installed, this job becomes easy. :)
And the cool thing is, if you initiate the connection from the Mac, the phone's screen changes to the one where you can just select "Turn on connection"! Nice huh.
17. You can transfer photos and files to/from the Mac using the "Browse device" option in the bluetooth menu item. It's fairly easy, but slow if you are dealing with a lot of photos. But hey, it's possible.
18. I got the phone configured to my Gmail account. But the cool thing is that in Bangalore, India, Gmail offers push email service. And since this phone is capable of it, I've got the push email service! This means that I don't have to keep hitting the Send/Receive button every time I want to check my email, (which is an exaggeration because there is a preset that I can check which allows me to check every X minutes, but hey let's complain about it because there is a better alternative already built in). I didn't even know this before buying the phone, now I am pleasantly thrilled.
19. This feature may be commonplace, but when I dial someone and that person is busy, the phone offers to keep trying until it goes through. This feature is just so nice and convenient that I had to mention it.
20. The voice dialing, voice answer and voice hang-up features are all pretty cool. When you're driving, this is a boon as you don't even have to look at the phone to find the contact!
NOW COME THE BAD STUFF:
1. To top any such list, it's got to be the interface. You can easily spend a lot of time clicking several buttons in order to achieve something. For instance, if I want to read the email that just arrived, here are the clicks - Menu > Messages > Email > Inbox. However, there is a handy shortcut button on the right of the centre navigation joystick in which you can define a shortcut to the Inbox. But the fact that they needed such a shortcut feature in itself speaks of the poor interface planning. But this has been the case since the SonyEricsson T300 which I used to own.
2. The interface still uses comic styled icons. This doesn't go very well with the external styling of the phone which is far more serious.
3. The faceplate of the phone has a shiny plastic. Apart from being a finger-print magnet, I am always scared that I am going to scratch the phone. If I were to put this thing into my jeans pockets, they would undoubtedly come out scratched. Even though I completely hate putting scratches on anything I own, and sometimes go to great lengths to keep it that way, I have already, in a matter of five days, put a dink into the screen. Not one to ever buy a case (because it's lame), this therefore is a design flaw in my opinion. Anyone wanna trade?! Anyone????
4. The buttons don't look too good nor do they feel too good. The clicking is a little stiff in my opinion and sometimes feels like I am literally 'punching' numbers into the phone. The gap between the buttons and the plastic faceplate is a trap for dust. Once dust settles there, I know it's never coming out. So eventually, I am going to be discarding this phone because it "looks" old rather than because it IS old.
5. There is no way to share the broadband internet on your computer with the phone over bluetooth. You are forced therefore, to use the internet service which is Rs. 100/week in Bangalore (pre-paid plans), for what is known as Mobile Office on Airtel. I am still looking for a hack around this. I will update this post when that happens. But the good thing is, now my laptop has internet access anywhere I go - like now.
6. The photos have a blue outline around the edges of objects when viewed in a highly enlarged mode. But then again, this isn't meant to be a professional grade camera and for the purpose it was designed for - general purpose everyday use, it does a fantastic job.
7. The Radio only works if the wired headset is connected because it acts as the antenna. So if you've already got a bluetooth headset, you may still need to carry around the wired headset just to get the radio working. Stupid design in my opinion.
8. Also, what's with the proprietary headset connection to the phone. Why not just use a standard 2.5/3.5 mm jack.
9. Oh, and the SonyEricsson's 'My Phone' feature is mostly pointless. If you're not into photo blogging, don't bother signing up.
Some Caveats:
1. Since we don't as yet have 3G service in Bangalore, India (as of this writing, BSNL has announced that it will be launching 3G soon, which means that the other service providers will soon follow and I'll get to try it out), I haven't had a chance to try out the video calling feature which it's built to handle.
So as you can see, there is a lot to like about the phone. And at Rs. 10,300 (from Sun Times, Jayanagar), this phone is packed with the right amount of useful features and the ones that I would like on my phone. The reason I didn't go for the K850i is that the difference seems marginal and there are some problems with the camera on that phone. And being 5000 bucks more expensive, I didn't want to be experimenting.
Got a K810i? Want to get a K810i? Love it? Hate it? Got it cheaper some place else? Got questions? Post your comments, I'd love to know what you think.
Just so you don't have to spend all your time reading a whole bunch of reviews, let me just point you to the ones that I found useful:
Here's one from the UK. And here's another from some place else. And just for spite, don't bother with the CNet video reviews of this phone. It's pointless. :P
So having covered what most other people have said, I will add to it and mention the things I would like to say. Because strange things bother and intrigue me, and if you're anything like me, then I guess it would bother you too. So read on... freak!
THE TOP 20 THINGS I LIKE:
1. The camera on the phone is pretty decent. Having not owned a good camera phone before, I was thrilled that it came with a 3.2 mega-pixel camera, which apart from the rating alone, does a fine job with pictures. The camera's got settings that I've only seen on regular digital cameras. The one's that were impressive were:
- Macro shooting mode for taking close-up shots
- Document setting, for taking pictures of.. *ahem* documents but the point is that the writing on these documents is real clear
- And finally the Best Pic setting, which takes a series of 9 shots in a second so you can pick the best and discard the rest. A very useful feature and you may begin using it far more often than you think.
2. Another cool aspect of the camera is it's ability to save the data real fast. So there's no lag between looking at something you want to shoot and then actually clicking a picture of it. It's pretty quick and you will more often than not, end up with the picture you wanted to take.
3. Yet another great feature of the camera, is the quick access buttons all over the place that allow you to change shooting modes (Normal, Best Pic, Panorama, Frames - why frames I don't know, but whatever, we'll get to that later). Scenes (Portrait, Landscape, Twilight Portrait, Twilight Landscape, Beach/Snow, Sports and Documents settings), Resolution (3 MP, 2 MP, 1 MP and VGA), Automatic/Delayed Shot mode, and the much needed, turn off the flash button - which I don't understand why it's usually hidden in regular cameras!
4. The colours on the camera are pretty close to real life, erring on the higher side of colour saturation. The pictures look just great!
5. This is also a sign of a great screen. The pictures look so bloody nice on it. Take a look at some of the photos I've posted on this blog prior to this post.
6. The finishing of the back of the phone is pretty darn neat. It's got this rubbery feel to it making it feel soft. The colour (I've got the deep blue phone) also looks nice.
7. The sides of the phone are not tapered, but flat. This is useful when you want to take a picture in automatic (delayed shot) mode. You can place this phone on a flat surface and predictably position yourself in front of it. Resulting in nicer pictures that you want to keep.
8. Then, the little feature built into the phone that allows you to post your pictures straight to a blog is nice too. Because I wanted to buy myself a camera phone, so that I could take pictures and then post them online for my friends to see. This feature makes it very easy to post a picture you've just taken, to your blog in a matter of seconds. But let me warn you, you can only post to blogger.com, if you use some other service, or want to post them to Facebook, you would follow the slightly cumbersome older method of downloading pictures to your computer and then uploading them to your service of choice.
9. Bluetooth headset integration is easy. But it also sounds clear and crisp. I don't know how much of this to attribute to the phone, but when I used to use the same headset with my older phone, there was a lot of static.
10. The battery life is pretty good. I used the phone with GPRS internet and Bluetooth on, while connected to my headset and my computer at the same time. This kind of usage found the phone performing well for about 8 hours. I mean I wasn't on a call or browsing the web ALL that time, but I used it frequently enough as one would during the course of a day.
11. The Track ID feature is nice and useful too. For the uninitiated, this feature allows you to record a sampling of a song that may be playing around you so that you can identify the artist and the song - for later piracy... I mean purchase from iTunes. I expected that it would simply be a feature included on the phone to make the phone sound very capable. But it's actually pretty good. Especially for english songs. I never tried it with Hindi or Kannada songs as yet, but I have a feeling that Gracenote (the service the phone uses to identify the songs) is not filled with information about songs in other languages. But to get back to the point, I tried it out using the in-built Radio, where it worked very well, but also in a noisy coffee shop, where it successfully identified the song in a second attempt.
12. The calendar, contacts, tasks and notes perform in a pretty standard manner. Nothing much to say about there, but a surprisingly cool feature is in the alarms settings. Some phones are an all or nothing alarm settings i. e. it will wake you up the same time everyday whether it's a Sunday or not. And if you forgot to turn off the alarm on the previous night, you will be woken up bright and early even though you intended to stay in bed that day.
My Windows Mobile phone that I had before had gone one step further and allowed me to set an alarm for weekdays only - all fine until you realise that weekdays in American terms doesn't include Saturdays, which for most people in India and many other parts of the world, is a working day. So you may sleep in on Saturday while your boss is fuming at the office. But the K810i is amazing. You can set up to five alarms and not only that, you can *choose* the days you want that alarm to operate on. How's that for customisability. And moreover, seems like the engineers at Sony have actually asked people what they want rather than assuming what they want.
13. This phone has a stopwatch AND a timer. Very useful while playing certain board games.
14. There's also something called the Code Memo, which seems to be a feature where you can store encrypted messages such as credit card numbers and passwords of your plethora of accounts for the oh-so-many online services.
15. Oh, and most importantly, for me, this phone syncs with a Mac! So my address book, calendars and tasks are always synchronised. And yes, it doesn't mention it on the Apple iSync Website, but you can download a plug-in from the SonyEricsson support site by clicking here. Life is wonderful again! And no, it doesn't synchronise your contact photos to or from the Mac. And no, it doesn't synchronise the photos you took on the phone either.
16. In case you need to use the internet connection from the phone, probably provided by Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL or who else have you, you can easily set up a Mac to do so. In case of Windows, this statement remains true, but I would just remove one word from it, which is "easily". However, if you have the Desktop Suite software installed, this job becomes easy. :)
And the cool thing is, if you initiate the connection from the Mac, the phone's screen changes to the one where you can just select "Turn on connection"! Nice huh.
17. You can transfer photos and files to/from the Mac using the "Browse device" option in the bluetooth menu item. It's fairly easy, but slow if you are dealing with a lot of photos. But hey, it's possible.
18. I got the phone configured to my Gmail account. But the cool thing is that in Bangalore, India, Gmail offers push email service. And since this phone is capable of it, I've got the push email service! This means that I don't have to keep hitting the Send/Receive button every time I want to check my email, (which is an exaggeration because there is a preset that I can check which allows me to check every X minutes, but hey let's complain about it because there is a better alternative already built in). I didn't even know this before buying the phone, now I am pleasantly thrilled.
19. This feature may be commonplace, but when I dial someone and that person is busy, the phone offers to keep trying until it goes through. This feature is just so nice and convenient that I had to mention it.
20. The voice dialing, voice answer and voice hang-up features are all pretty cool. When you're driving, this is a boon as you don't even have to look at the phone to find the contact!
NOW COME THE BAD STUFF:
1. To top any such list, it's got to be the interface. You can easily spend a lot of time clicking several buttons in order to achieve something. For instance, if I want to read the email that just arrived, here are the clicks - Menu > Messages > Email > Inbox. However, there is a handy shortcut button on the right of the centre navigation joystick in which you can define a shortcut to the Inbox. But the fact that they needed such a shortcut feature in itself speaks of the poor interface planning. But this has been the case since the SonyEricsson T300 which I used to own.
2. The interface still uses comic styled icons. This doesn't go very well with the external styling of the phone which is far more serious.
3. The faceplate of the phone has a shiny plastic. Apart from being a finger-print magnet, I am always scared that I am going to scratch the phone. If I were to put this thing into my jeans pockets, they would undoubtedly come out scratched. Even though I completely hate putting scratches on anything I own, and sometimes go to great lengths to keep it that way, I have already, in a matter of five days, put a dink into the screen. Not one to ever buy a case (because it's lame), this therefore is a design flaw in my opinion. Anyone wanna trade?! Anyone????
4. The buttons don't look too good nor do they feel too good. The clicking is a little stiff in my opinion and sometimes feels like I am literally 'punching' numbers into the phone. The gap between the buttons and the plastic faceplate is a trap for dust. Once dust settles there, I know it's never coming out. So eventually, I am going to be discarding this phone because it "looks" old rather than because it IS old.
5. There is no way to share the broadband internet on your computer with the phone over bluetooth. You are forced therefore, to use the internet service which is Rs. 100/week in Bangalore (pre-paid plans), for what is known as Mobile Office on Airtel. I am still looking for a hack around this. I will update this post when that happens. But the good thing is, now my laptop has internet access anywhere I go - like now.
6. The photos have a blue outline around the edges of objects when viewed in a highly enlarged mode. But then again, this isn't meant to be a professional grade camera and for the purpose it was designed for - general purpose everyday use, it does a fantastic job.
7. The Radio only works if the wired headset is connected because it acts as the antenna. So if you've already got a bluetooth headset, you may still need to carry around the wired headset just to get the radio working. Stupid design in my opinion.
8. Also, what's with the proprietary headset connection to the phone. Why not just use a standard 2.5/3.5 mm jack.
9. Oh, and the SonyEricsson's 'My Phone' feature is mostly pointless. If you're not into photo blogging, don't bother signing up.
Some Caveats:
1. Since we don't as yet have 3G service in Bangalore, India (as of this writing, BSNL has announced that it will be launching 3G soon, which means that the other service providers will soon follow and I'll get to try it out), I haven't had a chance to try out the video calling feature which it's built to handle.
So as you can see, there is a lot to like about the phone. And at Rs. 10,300 (from Sun Times, Jayanagar), this phone is packed with the right amount of useful features and the ones that I would like on my phone. The reason I didn't go for the K850i is that the difference seems marginal and there are some problems with the camera on that phone. And being 5000 bucks more expensive, I didn't want to be experimenting.
Got a K810i? Want to get a K810i? Love it? Hate it? Got it cheaper some place else? Got questions? Post your comments, I'd love to know what you think.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
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