My DigiCam needs a boarding pass to heaven

What!! You just bought one of those 14.1 megapixel cammies down there..  
Really?? 
That's incredibly absolutely not bad, atleast  thats what the digi-cam or any other cam OEM's think. Well you'll not find a 'Thank you for buying' card coming your way, so better not expect it. De facto is that camera sales have declined, ever since the mobile phone was born, perhaps reborn as an all in one device.(ofcourse with a camera)

I certainly donot buy that thought, and that's because camera phones suck and still suck big time. Chiefly because none of them have Optical zoom. That's true for all the Berries, Iphones et al and all the other smartest of all devices as well.

But where it certainly scores is at being a swish set optical device that is online all the time, with a conglomerate of apps to PHOBAR your pics, to the extent that every pixel of the image screams out PHOTOSHOPPED. And then the very next instance you upload it to Facebook, share it on twitter or send it off as an email. Now that's convenience, in the real sense of the word. And it's certainly the need of the hour for the present generation with our umbillical chords tied to the internet. 

Devour the fact that your new 14 point something shiny toy can't do it. Yes, I know there are some other wifi-enabled cammies as well. But setting them up is super clunky. Believe me while doing it, you'll feel like whooping your ass, if you've bought it or the executive's  if you are out for a demo.

What the digital camera manufacturers need is to give the Digi Cam or whatever cam a new Avatar and make a device that's online all the time and makes the editing and uploading task an automated process, rather than it being an ordeal. I am talking of a utilitarian chic device that does it all with a press of a button. A device that marries them both together, a CAMOB may be.This needs to happen no later than RIGHT NOW..   

This lands me into obfuscation about what is better a 12MP Camera phone or a 14 or 18 MP stand-alone camera. Stalemate.

   

My DigiCam needs a boarding pass to heaven

Tech Clunkers of the year gone-by part 2

CARRYING ON from where I left yesterday, on the same clunky journey of dud devices and techs that didn't take up. So, here I am sticking to my guns and out with the second post of the year on the very second day...

* 3D:- The entire exhilaration that the concept created of driving the viewer to the new 3D wonderland died almost as soon as it came out. Or maybe the floodgates of expectations doomed all the euphoria. Nineteen 3D movies came out(You: How the hell did you pull up those numbers?   Me: Click Here) and they kind of evolved and brought us acoss a 2010ish cinema or Cinema 2.0, as many call it. If you ask me, many of them were simply amazing, a piece of art I would say. But 3D at home is till date a No-No.. I am simply not being a luddite with this, but setting up and maintaining 3D is a pain. Wearing 3D glasses every time is an even bigger. THEY SUCK BIG TIME!! Then there are also warnings that 3D TV manufacturers themselves give about the exposure to certain radiations and stuff..          
The only thing that's great about it is, you get a home TV thats aeons ahead of it's time.

* Digital photo frames are still struggling to survive. This time on a heavy dose of steroids.Till the last year it was only the touch- enabled mobile devices  and media players that were head on with it but now they also have a superstar Tablet. This is kinda competition that is too hard to swallow for a wacko & disgusting device that it is. The tablet simply scores on portability when pitted against it. Truth be told, I feel the device will scythe its way through at least in the commercial sphere of it's utility but only for an year or two. And that I say considering the economics of reality, for a Tablet is dang expensive today.

* Skype Phones: Skype, found by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and Dane Janus Frii  in 2003 has been very successful. It's success is evident from the fact that 'Call me' has become 'Skype me'. And that's pretty much a global phenomenon, atleast for International Long Distance Calls. Skype in a way did exactly what google did to search. 
What I think is a turkey in the entire Skype saga is the Skype Phone. After years of being there in the market place, the phone couldn't undertake the journey from the board room to the living room. And that's certainly disappointing if you take into account the fact that an epic proportion of Urban Indian households are well connected to the internet.
That isn't a hard nut to crack if you tie the knot between a cordless phone and a skype phone and most importantly make it available in India. Who wouldn't love free calls from a cordless device..
For all the Naysayer to that thought of mine, here I come. I accept the fact that a Skype app is available for the Iphone, Android and Symbian devices (except for the unlucky Blackberry boys, the league I am in) and it does even allow you to make calls.The defacto is that in the past couple of years(predominantly the post Iphone era), the mobile phone emerged as the mighty Device but only with a battery that failed to play it's divine part..
And this certainly reasserts the need for standalone devices as well.

* Ebooks: This is one reason that makes Ebook readers a toy only fit for fat-old bastards with a lot of extra moolah to spend. Well not exactly the ebook but ebook prices. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google, Kobo etc are the convicts here. These snobby avantgarde blokes are not allowing a flamboyant reading experince to take off. You guys suck for so bullish pricing of yours. I crown you with the title of the most opulent and full of grandeur advocates of super duper crap. 
That's because if you compare the  pricing of books vs. their digital renditions on the Amazon store, you'll see some e-books are more expensive than regular books and vice-versa in other cases. Next, if you compare the prices between the Kindle e-book store (where you're paying in US dollars) and Indian stores like the Wink Store or Infibeam, you'll find that most of the copies on the Kindle store are actually cheaper than the Indian stores. To make matters worse, the Wink Store doesn't have most of the books and the Infibeam store's pricing for some e-books is  just outrageous despite them having a good collection.  

Image and Comparison courtesy:www.techtree.com

Will the ebooks succeed? Surely it will. Let the frugality set-in..


Very gracious of you to have come this far. Thanks for being so generous with your time.

Tech Clunkers of the year gone-by part 2

Tech Clunkers of the year gone-by

First to quash any rumors of me having died in a night of drunken revelry on the last day of the decade. I’m very much alive, thanks for your concern.
I’ve done a so-so job of keeping this blog up to date in 2010, so without making a new year’s resolution I do commit to my regular Pool of readers that I'll reverse the trend and finally Nail it just the way I promised at the outset.. Come what may I'll blog regularly.


The tech vendors and enthusiasts have witnessed both pride and infamy in the departing year. Having bid adieu to the year 2010 let’s have a look on major tech disappointments that I feel weren't supposed to be. These are those terrible gadgets that came and never conquered, they made hypes that were never fulfilled. Devices, technologies and ideas that didn't have it all in sync with the geeks or with the end consumer either. Then its also about companies that announced their products or services too premature and made a bad situation hilariously worse..


1) 3G tops the list. It's ironic how the introduction of 3G has been delayed in India even as the world is talking of 4G. Earlier 3G was stuck in spectrum allocation And now 3G is derailed for the umpteenth time because of security concerns over video calling! 
But the last couple of months were however very promising. Atleast by the next decade India will have a top notch, cutting-edge, smooth as silk, spectacularly advanced telecom system. Thankfully this(will be) due to a refreshing lack of A Raja in the telecom ministry. God alone knows who's gonna be the next Monk without a Ferrari who'll finally ensure a 30 min. or free 3G experience even on our now 30 month old data starved phones..

Source: www.watblog.com

2) Number portability :Oct 31 Nov 25, and Dec 31- these were the dates on which Number portability was supposed to take off in India. After much talk, now only Haryana has this service and that too with a few telecom operators. The rest of the country will have to wait till April, 2011 to switch service providers without losing their current nos.. Although I don't really think that it's gonna help all consumers (well it may, in some cases) but I really think it'll not give our Service providers the chance to fuck the pockets of the so-called 'very valuable customers', coz of the large clutter of those 11 odd(i guess) in business. Who knows if this one technology brings a new Renaissance in our mobile experience.
Well for the time being we just have one thing to look at 


3)  McAfee:  McAfee’s software solutions are installed to protect your PC or laptops from virtual threats. But ironically, the most famous Anti-Virus caused hundreds of thousands of computers to crash. After installing the update, users found their PCs in ongoing reboot cycles with no end in sight. 
This makes McAfee a dis-fucking-gusting thing to buy for a 1200 bucks.


4)Tablets that didn't seamlessly blend creativity with efficiency:

www.notionink.com

First on the list is the Notion Ink's Adam. An Indian venture which actually defined the 'real tablet' around  the world. The device had everything you could ever imagine- a transflective display, a swivel camera, an HDMI out port, wifi, Bluetooth, 3G, sd, usb and mini-usb connectivity options and above all adobe flash support. There isn't a single thing that was missing.........except the DEVICE ITSELF.
Coz it never came out. Announced in early 2010, they started pre-booking in end- December and have already sold out(in 2010 itself).


Next is the Made in India, for India and by India(ns) tablet to revolutionize education, as announced by Kapil Sibal. But it was too shy to make a public appearence!! Well I just hope the tablet is in the hands of school going children atleast by the time his term as an Education minister ends.


Now the only good piece of tablet available in the Indian market and yet a DUD- The Samsung Galaxy Tab. It was very exciting and everything about the device felt good(including the advertisement with a man in boxers working in the office..oops taking a call on the galaxy tab) but hands on experience of the device at a Croma outlet really spoilt it all, atleast for me. Did it suck? Damn straight it did.

The Tab has a huge screen and yet not a single app has been made specifically for it. And almost all the apps are pixelated and don't fit the screen. Watching videos is a pain in the ass. Very little content on the device actually matches the resolution of the screen. Even the wallpapers were from Samsung's other android mobile devices. Everything was fussy. 


Well the device is good in terms of the hardware and the fact that you get a chance to use a tsunami of apps available in the Android Market place, but it will eventually be lost in the sea of mediocre devices out there in the market. 


Next up the Ipad
Psst.. Apple fanboys and Steve Jobs worshipers don't flame me for this being on my list. The Ipad is truly and incredibly the best tablet. It certainly did rock and is the best device in the segment it created.
It's on my list coz even after months passing-by and promises galore they still haven't launched it in India. This is when the world is actually preparing for the next Camera toting Ipad 2.
We still have to depend on our Uncles or Aunts in the States or the UK to get one or pay a moolah for it in the grey market.


To be Contd...
       

Tech Clunkers of the year gone-by