When I decided that I would get myself an Android, my friends suggested that I should either go for the Nexus One, the Evo 4G, or wait a while for Google’s new Gingerbread device (the then-rumored Nexus 2). I’d put in a lot of thought into this, and finally decided on the Droid. The Droid was Motorola’s flagship Android device which was a huge success in the US and pretty much saved the company from extinction. It wasn’t the latest model available at that time, but it definitely was a big hit and managed to stick around longer than expected (for almost a year). I followed the device eagerly for around 6-8 months, after which I set my eyes on its non-US counterpart, the Milestone. The Milestone was one of those gadgets that absolutely had to retail everywhere else in the world owing to its sibling’s success.

Motorola has always been a company known for its excellent but stubborn values. They rarely try out disruptive trends in innovation (as far as I know) and have always followed a path driven by the market. I remember this from the time the RAZR took the mobile world by storm. Flagship devices that ruled the industry has been the manufacturer’s stronghold for over a decade. The mobile unit of Motorola almost withered away few years ago. They chose the Android platform after, hoping that it would save the company from collapsing; which later became one of the best decisions they’d ever made. One might question the relevance of this introduction, for which I’ll jot down my two cents in the coming lines.

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Installed the CyanogenMod Android 2.2.1 (Froyo) build on the HTC Touch Diamond running Windows Mobile 6.1.
Andy Rubin, you’re a genius.

1. >format F: /u
2. Partition F: into FAT32 “Android”, EXT2 “System”, FAT32 “Linux” [no fdisk, no system partitioning routine]
3. >cd Android
4. >Android/install.exe
5. One reboot down >haret.exe to boot into Linux
6. Robot says hello

Buying digital cameras has always been quite a task. Reading reviews, asking friends, learning about photography.. the list is endless. And just when you think you’re done with this cycle and zero down on one, a new one pops up out of nowhere. Most of my friends have had similar experiences when it came to purchasing digicams.

I happened to bump in to a site called Snapsort one day; and the very same evening, I was admiring my new DSLR. It was that simple. The site had a clean, simple and focused approach to help users decide pretty much anything digicam. Whether it was to learn about cameras, learn about their performance, prices.. I didn’t have to look elsewhere. The task based UI offered a neat user experience due to it’s simple language and intuitive icons.

Comparing two cameras was never easier – it is well laid out in a “face-off” manner of sorts that helps the user make an informed buying decision. Scores, what they mean and the parameters that make the camera stand apart are well illustrated.

The details that govern the differences in comparison have also been made friendly.

I really liked the “Just tell me!” feature. I think it works well for last minute purchases. It would help if more currency types are supported as people don’t usually want to go about converting USD to their local currency (keeping in mind the feature’s single-step task).

If you’re interested in photography, and looking for easy ways to learn the art, check out the “Learn” feature. It’s quite cool as well.

Overall, I’d give the service a 4.5/5 rating

She was just 2 weeks old. One of the new generation cyborgs, an upgrade, I could say. With so much energy, so much aspiration and the will to soar the silver skies, she walked up to me and opened her lips just to whisper “Stereo Love – Edward Maya”. Voice Over, she called it. I knew she was a cyborg even though she didn’t admit it. You know, just so that she could always keep her emotions in check, unlike me. The “firm” that made her has been trying to take over the world for over a decade now. Things get a little nasty at times, but at the end of the day people do look up to this firm for “inspiration”. I’m not sure if people should stop doing that, because this firm, in the name of design, embraces color, form, type and aesthetics… all at once; and it’s hard to find that these days.

It all ended inside a godforsaken Samsung washing machine. I tried to save her as soon as I knew what had happened… an uncanny resemblance to The Fountain‘s story. Things went a little too fast in the end. They even rigged her up with a tiny water sensing device as if she was an expat. If they wanted to know if she’d been swimming, why didn’t they make her intelligent enough so that she could protect herself when there was a flood? The only useful thing that I can do now is initiate a relentless quest to understand everything I possibly can about this firm and find out their world domination plans which is probably entangled in some misplaced sense of ethics. And try and change things.

The addiction seems unstoppable. Oh, and say it like Elmer Fudd.

I can comfortably say that Cocoa is one of the best UI platforms there is, owing to its standardized, beautiful and intuitive interface. Most Mac apps are built using this framework which makes them consistent. A clean and simple looking menu bar, for example, throughout all software is an almost welcome offering. I guess Windows sort of got it right till 98, after which a series of mishaps and unaccounted justifications led them to a not-so-friendly place in the world of User Experience. I’ve been a fan of Windows for 8 years, and it took me less than a week with OS X to wipe the past out.

Just to get even on all my Windows bashing in the last two years, I actually thought over instances where some of my favorite Mac apps don’t fare too well. Here’s a list, and I sincerely hope all you guys at Apple, Google, Ate Bits, Mozilla… hear these out and do something about it. After all, there’s always room for improvement!

Tweetie:
Tweetie is such an awesome app for managing my Twitter account. It even supports multiple accounts, conversations, image posting, URL shortening… just so many important features in a beautiful and crisp UI. Although there’s a very important function missing – Delete tweet. I don’t think I need to state why it’s necessary! Hope Tweetie 2 brings out this feature, and possibly a lot more.

Firefox:
What a fantastic browser – easily the best of them all (I should tell you that Safari is my one and only “Tumbler”/Chevy V8 Rig).. but it takes up too much memory. It’s insane. Guys at Mozilla seriously need to sort this out. Google’s Chrome is super fast with their process driven tabs, what’s happening here? The experience of browsing the web is lost with such a memory hog. Most of my RAM is consumed by Firefox when I have more than 5 tabs open. That just sucks.

Google:
Where on earth is Google Talk for Mac? Any plans, ever?!

Mac Finder:
Why isn’t there an option where I can save the window size/position? I know there are third party apps available (such as Afloat), but these are basics that shouldn’t be overlooked. And of course, ‘forgiveness forever’ control? Undo accidental copy/move? Mapping this intuitively?

iPhoto and iTunes:
Some serious work on the storage databases may help. They just eat up disk space like crazy. How about learning a thing or two from Picasa? Tagging in iTunes? Tune detection (like Face detection)?

Transmission:
A neat little client for torrents, although the process of verifying and building files after/during a download sucks, and even fails sometimes. I’ve lost GB’s of data during this process. How about a ‘state’ saving feature? It will kick ass!

There are more, but I guess I can live with them. I’m sure many of you feel that an app can do better when you’re actually using it. I encourage you to contribute to this list! If you have any app suggestions, ping me and I’ll feature in it in the next version of this post.

Well, I got lucky this time. I won a free pass to attend TEDx Chennai (an independently organized event bringing people together from primarily the walks of Technology, Entertainment & Design), and it turned out to be quite an eventful Sunday. Joseph (an organizer of the event) called me on Saturday evening to inform me that I had won a ticket to attend TEDx at the IIT Madras auditorium. Nothing like an otherwise ‘plan-less’ Sunday! I got up very early, which hasn’t happened for the past year or so, all ready to drive down and expect a totally inspiring set of talks.

Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil Gurucharan performed what I can call one of the best fusion pieces I’ve ever heard till date. Earlier this year, Anil performed at ‘Across the Universe’, a concert in Madras alongside Unnikrishnan and B S Purushotham, which was another fantastic performance – one which truly teleported (yes, music might be the only answer to my teleportation fetish at least in my life time!) people across dimensions. This was by far the best start I can think of for a TED event!

Romulus “the snake man” Whitaker, the founder of the Madras Snake Park, kick started the set of talks with his witty, funny and surprisingly-snake-loving instances of his life. Now I guess I’m not as scared of snakes as I was before – nothing like empathy toward anything and everything… probably something that can save the world!
Sharadha’s talk on Indian culture through films was inspiring, and made me question myself on whether it was worth watching my next Bollywood movie. As ‘politically incorrect’ as it was and as she had put it, we do need a set of fired up vigilantes to change things around here. The closest to Batman I could say!
Madhavan showed us what it took to stand out from the status quo; not by doing something entirely different, but doing something amazing with what he had already learnt. The impact of Agriculture in our nation was put through to people, some of whom didn’t know much about. A swarm of people surrounded him during the coffee break, and continued to rush out to catch him even as he was leaving after the event!
Vittal’s talk was hilarious and yet powerful. He showed us what corruption had grown into, inflicting politics, businesses and people. I felt his approach to tackle corruption by addressing the ‘money-problem’ or the flow of money in politics, a probable solution worth pondering and trying out even. Apparently ‘corruption’ is a hot topic today, especially in interviews. Getting a grassroot fix for this would be marvelous.
Krupa’s presentation on helping the underprivileged was touching, and Kavita’s life experiences and music evoked emotion.
It was at this point when I realized the TED India series of talks were slightly different from the rest. Most Indian entrepreneurs had a story to tell, which had the ability to evoke human emotion in a peculiar way. Something which captures the heart with not just awe of science or awe of technology, but with the awe of life. For me, the awe of life was very well articulated as the awe of Design! It did make a whole lot of sense. (Yet, we still have a long way to go to match TED standards – a lot more to learn.)
Reddy and Santhosh had good initiatives running on serving/helping people to build a better future. I could correlate a lot of it to creating sustainable lifestyles after understanding Sustainability at the WUD2009 event in Bangalore earlier this month. Jeeva and Bawa engaged the audience with their post lunch activity-packed talks – made me feel more human than anything else
The last talk was a bouncer. Something unexpected, yet fantastic. To be frank, it wasn’t a talk at all! It was the life of Satyabrata Dam, an ex-Indian Navy submariner with multiple roles and whacky ambitions. His perception of life is something breathtaking, and I could say I got most of today’s inspiration just by watching his slideshow: a series of jaw-dropping photos of mountains, caves, skies and beauty of mother nature. As he put it, “Mountains have all the answers, no matter what your question is”. The Himalayas has just taken the highest priority in my to-do list, after Amsterdam and places where celestial marvels happen by the minute.
Kiruba and his team put up a good show, and not to mention good food and good people. More at http://tedxchennai.com and #TEDxChennai (on Twitter).
Yet another productive TED India experience! (The earlier one was a few gigabytes of streaming video over the Indiatimes Live telecast of TED at Mysore). Looking forward to 10.10.10 – the next TEDx Chennai event.

Peace to all

Twestival will hit Chennai soon, sometime in September 2009.

Check http://chennai.twestival.com for updates!

For more information on Twestival, visit the official website at http://twestival.com or join the Facebook group!

A long awaited review, I’ve been holding back this long just so that I could literally put this phone through everything and see how well it turns out. For all you impatient readers, the phone is an absolute marvel to sum it all up; go ahead and buy one (even though it’s a late verdict, I still have friends coming up to me and asking for an opinion).

Let me get the basics sorted out first. This review is primarily intended for the average Indian “geek”. Irrespective of whether you keep changing phones often, or intend to buy that long-awaited new model, I’m hoping you’d find this review useful and end up happy when you get one.

The first thing that sets this phone apart from its other contenders is the complete QWERTY keypad. Most phones with the whole keypad are pretty expensive when compared to this one. The keys are rock solid and have a neat tactile feel for small and long fingers (I learnt that it’s pretty good with fat fingers too!). If you feel that you’ve been using the normal keypad for over a gazillion years and fear the change, worry not as you should get used to it in a jiffy.

The body of the phone is robust with a metallic finish and a great paint job. The black one looks like it’s right out of KITT (that’s Knight Rider’s car for those of you who are wondering). I personally feel the phone’s a bit heavy, but considering it packs a lot of punch it’s absolutely worth the weight.

On the usage scene, it comes with Symbian OS Series-60 (3rd edition) software which is a mobile operating system. Unlike the earlier Symbian versions, this one is stable and doesn’t hang much (which means you’d get far less frustrated in waiting for your task to start as compared to, say, a Nokia 6600). I still cannot be too sure about the specific sub-version or model available as they vary in different locations around the world. Nevertheless, a software update should fix things if it still happens to act up.

The battery life is impressive and on an average lasts for about one and a half days (couple of hours of calls, a bunch of texts, half an hour of bluetooth transfers, an hour of music and few camera pictures using the flash).

The most important feature of the phone according to me is the Wi-Fi connectivity. Surfing the net is really fast using Opera Mini (a mobile web browser, can be downloaded for free). The inbuilt browser is good too, but you may find couple of websites messed up through that. GPS is an absolute jaw dropper, and Google Maps totally deserves a platinum. The app is fabulous, and a real life saver. If you often find yourself looking for places, streets or even directions, this one is a must have. Google Maps through Wi-Fi is a stunner, although you’d have to get used to using it through GPRS when you’re on the move (contact your service provider for the GPRS/Data facility). I found the app really helpful and it saved me a lot of money which I would’ve lost through long & conned auto rides in Bangalore!

Applications for the phone are available in abundance too. The basic functions such as Alarm, Notes, Organizer, Calendar and Radio ship with the phone, and more can be downloaded off the web. Gravity is an awesome Twitter application if you’re into micro-blogging, Fring and eBuddy for chatting through various services such as GTalk, Yahoo! and MSN and Google Apps with Gmail, Google Calendar, Picasa, Maps and YouTube for all your Google needs. Push email works great too, but doesn’t work with certain encrypted wireless networks. This could go on and on, but the most important apps for your basic social/travel needs are taken care of by Google!

The camera quality could do better, but a small trick could get you through that. Whenever you’re ready to click a picture, press the ‘T’ key to focus on the subject/object. This makes sure your pictures are always clear. Tweaking few photo settings such as white balance and exposure could even unearth that budding photographer in you!

Overall, it’s an amazing phone. Go ahead and get one! It’s worth the extra money. For more details, you can check out the GSM Arena website for specifications and user submitted reviews. If you have any other questions, drop a mail and I’ll be glad to help.

It’s been little over a month now since I joined HP Labs, and I’m finding work interesting. It involves listening to a lot of music! Understanding music from an emotional perspective is very fascinating, coming across all those amazing apsects of a song I’ve never even bothered thinking about. I hope to learn as much as I can here, and gain some perspective on what I would like to do after say, a year.

During the first month, there was a workshop in collaboration with universities in UK and Europe, titled “Winter School on Interactive Technologies”. As an interaction design and HCI workshop, it focussed on trends and upcoming technologies from a design perspective, showcasing interesting projects going on in UK and Europe. It was a good opportunity to meet people there and learn about work abroad. The lectures were interesting and fun! (5 years back, I never knew I’d actually say anything even remotely close to this ) It was a two day workshop, the second half of the day consisting of bootcamps (hands-on sessions) on realizing concepts and prototyping. I worked with Prof. Alan Dix (Lancaster University) on a rather empowering topic, and we came up with some interesting insights (read more about it here). Alan has jotted down his experience in India too in his blog.

It was a great source of inspiration and it was well timed (beginning of my project)! Hope to attend more workshops in the future!