Author
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
Typical Xiaomi. the Chinese company that stuck its tongue out at the dominant players in the mobile market and pole-vaulted to the third place, has brought its little 7.9-inch MiPad tablet to India. Audaciously as usual, the tablet has overtones of Apple-ness to it and is quite a match for Samsung’s tablets, which in turn are facing competition from iBall and others in the Indian market.The MiPad, unlike other “cheap” tablets, gives an immediate impression of being value for money. It’s actually heavy for its size. While that makes it feel nice and substantial, it’s ever so slightly tiring to hold it for a long time, say, while you read, and its slippery back makes it a prime candidate for a slip to the floor. Using it, I noticed that my grip would slide, slide, slide until in a few minutes, I’d have to readjust. But well, that sort of thing may not bother many who will find the benefits outweigh the ergonomics. You see, the MiPad has a really nice screen. If you’ve been watching screen resolutions over multiple reviews here you’ll know that 2048 x 1536 is nice and high. Pixel density is good at 324 ppi. More than that, the screen looks good. It’s a bit warm looking, like a Samsung screen, but just right for a tablet. And Xiaomi has put a few live widgets right on top, making sure you immediately get an eyeful of that screen. Only problem is that every app and game may not scale to fit the screen quite that well, but I didn’t have a problem with it.Neither did I notice any lag. The MiPad, in fact, has a 2.2GHz Nvidia Tegra K1 processor powering it, not the typical Qualcomm, Mediatek and Intel. Nvidia makes chips that are popular with gamers. The tablet has 2GB of RAM to play with, and onboard storage of 16GB with an SD card slot. Its 6700mAh battery keeps it going for the day, with fast charging support if you’re a heavy user of the device.The MiPad’s cameras are 8 and 5MP, on the better side for tablets right now. The camera application is very barebones but does have a handful of average looking filters to use. There’s not much by way of controls but the assumption is that tablets are unlikely to be the preferred device for shooting much, only a second device. Sound on the MiPad is very nice. Not as nice as say, the HTC phones, but better than many tablets I’ve seen.You get Android 4.4 on the MiPad, with Xiaomi’s much talked about MiUi interface, well known for doing away with the app drawer and giving you a bunch of themes and other goodies for customisation. Overrated, in my opinion.All of this costs just Rs 12,999 which isn’t much for a device that looks good and performs well. The catch? There’s no calling ability, 2G, 3G or any G. It’s a Wi-Fi only tablet. If it’s an at-home device, that’s just fine, but tablets were supposed to be mobile and we don’t have free Wi-Fi everywhere. Or even anywhere for that matter, so this upsets the applecart for many. (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 20-04-2015)
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For the past couple of days I’ve been “Periscoping” with Twitter’s new video streaming app. Not streaming my own activities – I don’t have the courage for that yet – but being a bit of a voyeur and checking out other peoples’ broadcasts. Periscope and Meerkat are two new apps and open to you if you have an iPhone, though they’ll turn up for Android devices soon enough. A bunch of techies I spoke to asked me what the big deal was and pointed out that video streaming had always been available. “What about UStream?” they demanded. What about Ustream is that no one knows how what or where to use UStream. With video streaming having been made as easy as pressing a button on your phone, everyone is, quite abruptly, a broadcaster. At the moment users are only just discovering and trying out Periscope and Meerkat. They’re comparing features, making wishlists of features, and bumbling about with video streams. You could easily get turned off as you try out these apps right now. For some reason, showing you the inside of a fridge has become a tradition already. You can see someone’s messy room, go along for the car ride to office or the walk back home, go weak at the knees at everyone’s cute puppies and purring cats, or listen to someone taking requests for karaoke. But already, the future possibilities are beginning to show up. As you get into the app and look at the feed of streams, you’ll also find you can all but attend presentations – as they happen – feel the buzz in a newsroom, look at how busy they are (or not) at an ad agency, and most incredibly, go along, from your place far away, with a reporter as he or she covers a happening. Sure, someone can just turn on Skype or something and show you what’s happening elsewhere, but not with this smoothness, not with this ease, and not out on Twitter for anyone to join in. In fact, when a stream is in progress, you can just use the comment box to ask questions or otherwise say something. I just amused myself with a stream in which a lady, for some reason, decided to show us her chicken coup. I spent a few minutes asking her things and reassuring myself she wasn’t going to eat them up and went on to the next thing – a view of the San Francisco bay from another lady’s house. It was beautiful and she laughed when I said she could just dream all day. What I’m getting at here is that participation is possible from across the world. The experience is somehow intimate, making it all the more powerful and really letting you see the world from someone else’s eyes. If a person chooses to stay quiet, it isn’t as much fun, of course. But if the person wants to interact, you have a powerful interaction going. A young man was driving home in Calcutta. On the way, he proudly pointed out new hotels, flyovers and other parts of the city. I remarked that he sounded very proud of his city and he said yes indeed, he was. He felt it was a place where there was more “bonding” than in other places in India. He considered himself very lucky to be living there and even luckier to be heading towards his new flat, close to the airport, in a nice green area. A few moments of this interaction made me feel happy for someone else. Broadcasting video has so far been something only professionals and tech savvy people could do. Not any more. Periscope and Meerkat are designed to keep all the technology away from the user and just leave him with a button to press. Then, position your phone, and you’re on the air. In the first flush of how much investment these apps have got, which one of them will survive and which not, and other nitty gritty, I don’t hear too much about how the use of video anywhere anytime is going to pan out. If people can use something, they can misuse it, and that’s where the fun begins. If someone had an iPhone, one of these apps, and a healthy internet connection, he could have streamed everything that happened inside that AAP meeting and we’d have known who beat up who. What happens when there’s a nice bribe in progress, and someone streams it all live, then and there? What happens if you’re in a movie hall and you just stream the whole movie out? A psychiatrist friend of mine is worrying about what the implications would be if one of his patients decided to video stream something at the clinic – perhaps involving other people. Could everyone’s privacy be in peril this way, just as it was with Google Glass? Will we constantly have to be on guard and be TV ready, doing only what we think is ok to stream live to the world? As you can imagine, there’s immediately no end of filming of women, dancing, parties, and intensely personal material. That’s side by side with all the fantastic boat rides, hike into the hills, interviews, access to people you’d never get a chance to talk to otherwise. As someone who’s always been intensely interested in new technology, I think the democratisation of video with one-button broadcasting is exciting. But as usual, one has to consider the serious flip side, specially as you can’t keep mobile phones out of everywhere and nor will video streaming apps go away easily, back where they came from, leaving the world as it was a few days ago.
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It’s difficult to say whether smartphones are perpetuating the addiction for selfies or whether sheer narcissism is forcing cellphone manufacturers to come up with selfie-oriented devices. Either way, taking pictures of yourself on an everyday basis, if not several times a day, has become the new normal. And Micromax has decided to milk the phenomenon for all it’s worth with a phone, the Canvas Selfie, that has a 13 megapixel shooter on both front and rear.Of course, raw megapixels don’t necessarily mean you’ll get a good image, so Micromax has played with things enough to make sure the cameras really boost light and reduce noise. Inevitably, there’s some softness in images shot in low light, but the artificial boosting of brightness will make selfie addicts more than happy. I rather doubt that the targeted audience will be overly fussy about top notch photography or want to bother with settings. So, the camera application is simple and entirely selfie-oriented. There are buttons for making the eyes wider, face slimmer, skin smoother, complexion whiter, and even the teeth get a makeover. Basically, it’s truth, lies and selfies.The Canvas Selfie has a dedicated camera button on one side, but it doesn’t launch the camera from a phone that’s asleep or even on the lock screen. You have to be on one of the homescreens or one of the apps. There’s a self-timer so the user can quickly get into a pouting pose or stick close to whoever’s close and look inseparable.The Canvas Selfie has a strange design. Not the usual rectangle but pronounced curves top and bottom. You could either find it stylish or strange, depending on your taste. There’s a faux leather back – it really looks like plastic leather, if there’s such a thing. It’s a light phone and quite slim and easy to hold. The screen is just 4.7 inches, so it doesn’t get into the awkwardly big category at all.The specs on this phone are mid-range. The screen is a 720x1280 with 312 pixel density. It’s a good looking screen and comfortable to use. There’s a 1.7GHz octa-core Mediatek processor with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage. You do have a micro SD slot and two SIMS. The phone is running on Android 4.4.2, a bit behind the current common version. The battery is a 2300mAh and adequate for this device. It isn’t built for heavy gaming and although it performs well enough, it isn’t noticeably smooth and gets a shade heated up.The Canvas Selfie costs Rs.15,499 and anyone considering it must take a look at a number of other options from HTC, Xiaomi, Asus and indeed from Micromax itself. But the Selfie phone is the one to pick if one is looking for a budget phone with a camera good enough to work indoors and entirely meant for fun with one’s own photos.
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The Huawei WatchYou wouldn’t associate this Chinese company with smartwatches but they have showcased one that men truly like the look of. It has a classic look and it’s easy to forget its really a smartwatch. Huawei also released a smartwatch-fitness tracker—Bluetooth headset hybrid.Samsung Galaxy S6 And S6 EdgeSamsung hasn’t been having a particularly good time lately, but that didn’t stop it from confidently refreshing its Galaxy S line with not one but two phones. Both have the familiar Galaxy contours but plastic has been finally shed, this time for Gorilla Glass 4 on both sides. The more interesting of the two S6’s is the Edge which has screen spilling over both sides, giving it a more beautiful look but also adding new functionality. You can colour-code your favourite contacts and see the edges glow in that assigned colour when you get a call. The two phones are about the most powerful in the world right now and have fantastic cameras with f1.9 lenses on both sides, live HDR, optical image stabilisation, and quick-trigger from the home button. Now to see if the Galaxy S6 does for Samsung what the Galaxy S5 did not.LG G Flex 2We’ve seen LG’s curved phone last year, but here it is again in a refreshed version. While not many people actually bought the device, it still caused a lot of interest, and that continues through to this year. When LG presented the all new G Flex 2, the focus was all on how beautiful it is, which might make you wonder if there’s anything else to the curve. Well, it makes the device fit the face better, actually makes looking at the screen more immersive, and gives the phone more durability and toughness. In fact, you can press it down and it will bounce back up to the original. It’s now smaller and nicer to hold and some specs have been bumped up, especially the screen. The phone is also less expensive this time, though whether that will hold true for India or not remains to be seen.Pebble Time SteelThe Pebble watch has had its cult following since its initial campaign on Kickstarter. The Pebble Time has been the most funded Kickstarter project. Much of its appeal is in its looks. But this time it will have smart straps and sensors and a battery that lasts 10 days.Blackberry LeapBlackBerry wasn’t to be left behind at the Mobile World Congress and so it launched a touchscreen phone called the Leap. There’s no additional physical keyboard and without it, it’s reasonable to wonder who exactly this mid-range phone will appeal to because long-time BlackBerry users really want the keyboard. But interestingly, there was just a sneak given to audiences at MWC of a curved phone with a slider.LG UrbaneThe big round smartwatch from LG has a few unique things about it. It can support LTE, for one. It also runs on WebOS an operating system LG bought from HP, and not on Android Wear. There’s a non-LTE version and both look extremely fashionable — for men.HTC One M9The design on HTC’s One series has been much loved by those who don’t want plastic and need an alternative to the sea of similar smartphones that flood the market. The M9 makes no big departure from the earlier design but makes it more satiny and pretty with its duo-tone finish. The M9 has the top Snapdragon 810 processor. The camera is a 20MP primary and the 4 Ultrapixel on the rear.The RunscibleA very attractive round pocket-watch style wearable — or pocketable — the Runscible is unusual in many ways. It can take calls; you can assign 12 contacts to it, it gives you specific social network activity alerts, and it has GPS which it uses to take you to interesting places.HTC Vive headsetsVirtual Reality headsets were really evident at MWC this year, clearly showing that this is the next big trend in tech. HTC unveiled a headset which transports you to another 3D world. It has to connect to a PC though. There’s a bunch of controllers to navigate.Samsung's Gear VR headsetsSamsung’s Gear VR headset is particularly interesting because it can work with smartphones: at least the Galaxy S6s. You can be practically in the movie when you put it on and watch, according to Samsung. Of course, you still have to strap the thing to your face.(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 06-04-2015)
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Acer Aspire E-5571GRs 62,499In these days when laptops are becoming smaller and smaller until people give them up for tablets and give up those for large smartphones, the Acer Aspire E-5 571G seems a colossus. It’s designed for portability but not mobility. A sort of desktop-laptop. The size of the screen only means that this hunk of tech is meant for those who need to sit down and dive into their work, concentrate, and shut the world out. Smaller notebooks are for those who have a more physically active work day, typically rushing from one meeting to another with their devices in tow, and of course for those who travel a lot. This giant laptop is in either grey-black or a garnet red and it has a plastic casing, though it doesn’t look it. Its texture is smooth and easily wipeable, so I don’t see it gathering too much dirt or fingerprints.But what it looks like is besides the point. The machine is power-packed, at a great price for what it gives. Rs 62,499 gets you an Intel Core i7 4510U with 8GB RAM and 2GB VRAM NVIDIA GeForce. You have 1TB of storage. The machine is running 64-bit Windows 8.1 on a 15.6-inch screen. The screen is adequately bright and has good viewing angles — thankfully it doesn’t wash out if you just happen to move your head a bit. Resolution is 1366x768. But here’s the thing — it’s not a touch screen. By now I think one has begun to associate a touch screen with Windows because that’s how its tiled interface works best. I constantly found myself reaching out to swipe away an application only to remember this wasn’t going to happen. But, should that matter little to you, you’ll get used to working the old way, without touch screens, fast enough.The keyboard is, I often think, one of the most critical parts of a laptop; one that can make or break your entire work speed and style. They keys are well spaced out and allow you to type quite fast. The keys could have done with a little more travel to them, but do work fine without that as well. There’s a large touchpad and the full number pad on the right.The battery gives you seven hours, plus there’s a battery pack. Overall, it’s a good get-down-to-it machine.Lenovo A6000Rs 7,000Lenovo has been busy. It’s been launching phones finely aimed at specific consumer segments. The most recent to hit India is for those who are hankering after 4G LTE and don’t see themselves paying enormous sums of money for it. Quite rightly too.A little 5-inch phone called the A6000 brings 4G capability in just Rs 7,000. Its first sale on Flipkart lasted a mere four seconds for some 20,000 units. What you get is a totally modest phone in all other respects, but the connectivity. It’s got a soft smooth back with removable battery, dual-SIM, and an SD card slot with the capability of moving apps to this external storage. That’s good because there’s precious little storage on board — 8GB of which about 4 is available. The screen looks good despite not being very high resolution at 720p. Sound too is pretty nice, with two front speakers and Dolby sound.Other specs are modest including a 2,300mAh battery, a 1.2GHz Qualcomm 410 processor — except it’s a 64 bit — just 1GB of RAM, and an 8 and 2MP set of cameras. Despite these specs, it performs adequately and runs Android 4.4.4 with the promise of an upgrade to Lollipop soon.I didn’t have a great experience with the camera which I found slow and resulting in noisy images. In low light, you may as well not use it. It’s not much of a looker either, but definitely doesn’t veer towards the cheap and budget look that some phones have. It’s also light while being built well. It’s a good size and very comfortable to hold.The A6000 comes into a market crowded with all sorts of inexpensive wares, including from Xiaomi, Asus, Motorola and others. It has its work cut out for it.Xiaomi mi4Rs 19,999The mi4 is really about a year old, but not much about this smartphone from the House of Xiaomi is dated. It looks a whole lot like an iPhone, but then so many companies copy Apple — including sometimes Apple.And so to move on from that issue, the Mi4 is a really solidly built gadget, skirted by steely metal all around and carrying a bit of heft in its 5-inch form. Well, that is, the screen is 5 inches. It's a nice screen too, with good strong bright colours. It is, however, a bit warmer in tone than it should be.The back is glossy plastic and though it doesn't look bad at all, the world is in a state of plastic fatigue. The Mi4 is all topped up with hardware specs. Notably the Snapdragon 801, 3GB of RAM, and an 8MP front camera. The rear camera is 13MP and these do a pretty good job of low-light photos. There's the most recent pre-Lollipop Android running on it.This one isn't as cheap as the other Xiaomi phones, but it's still great build and high-end specs for Rs 19,999. What makes it — and other Xiaomi devices — stand out, is the proprietary interface sitting on top of Android. It's a little Apple-like on the face of it, but once you explore settings and downloads from the Mi account you, there's a lot of customisation you can do. It isn't for those who don't want to tinker with their phones, though even they have at least a good solid phone, it's better in the hands of those who want to arrange how the device looks, use theme packs and enable features. For instance, you can project the screen on a PC. You can record calls. In fact, the MiUI is so popular it's available to download and use on other phones. The MiUI is in version 6 and is regularly getting updates to fix bugs or bring in features.You have to turn to the Redmi Note for 4G, but if you're not in a 4G zone, look at the Mi4 — though you'll have to watch for the flash sales on Flipkart with your finger on the buzzer.(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 06-04-2015)
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If you were to believe the hype swirling around the Apple Watch, to be launched in a few hours at the Spring Forward event, you would think the world will never be the same again. The watch was shown off last September and everyone got to see it – on stage – but it’s taken all this while for it to come to fruition. Whether it’s going to be an expensive fashion accessory or something that will take charge of our very health and well-being, we will only know when the gadget is on thousands of wrists. Meanwhile, there are some reasons why so many are waiting with baited breath.REASON NUMBER 1Apple Watch: Source Apple.comThe fashion and luxury industry wants only a Johnny Ives designed Apple watch with which to craft expensive variants. The rumoured price for the basic watch is $349, but plush variants could be anything from $5,000 to $20,000. Apple’s recent splash in Vogue are one big indication of how wrists are going to glitter. REASON MUMBER 2 A man displays the Huawei Watch during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona March 3, 2015. (Reuters)Other wearable makers are hoping Apple will open up the category, taking smartwatches and bands mainstream. But it could as well end up owning the category, as it did music players with the iPod, and for a while, tablets with the iPad.REASON NUMBER 3Source: Apple.comApp developers have always loved making apps for the Apple store, where they manage to make more revenue. The Apple Watch will truly “Spring Forward” the app industry as it modifies apps to work with the Apple Watch and comes up with entirely new uses. The gaming industry is particularly interested.REASON NUMBER 4 Smartwatches and bands have been all about fitness and health, that being the logical and easy thing to execute on these devices. All set to go beyond measuring heart beats, steps and sleep, the healthcare industry wants to push many services to the watch and Apple’s ecosystem.REASON NUMBER 5The Apple logo inside an Apple store (Reuters)Apple being the most valued company in history, based on market capitalisation with a market-cap of over $620 billion, there are enough people who want the future of the company to be assured. There are high expectations from Apple which must be seen to be constantly innovating – the Apple Watch is just that next big thing.
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The 3,500 mAh battery sits, unremoveable, but visible under the back panel of this 5-inch smartphone. The battery to phone-size ratio is in the E700’s favour. The charger will give it a quick charge. That said, there’s no special battery saving mode. It’s all a matter of pure battery heft. But if you’re one of those especially concerned with battery life, the E700 is worth a look. The battery’s performance is pretty good.
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There's someone on this planet for whom this hunk of a phone is intended. That someone is definitely not me. If I had a Lamborghini, it would be parked out front or busy gliding me across to some rendezvous — it wouldn’t be the heavyweight gold and leather smartphone I hold in my hands right now. For a start, it’s really meant for men and to me looks entirely Mafioso. Like it could be made of a chunk of car, for that matter. It arrived in a box bigger than that of a laptop — a box inside a box inside a box, and then finally five inches of Lamborghini 88 Tauri encased in satin.
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Connected With Linkedin These days social networks are getting too big to handle. So they’ve figured it works to break things up into specific-use-case apps and keep their users engaged in activities they find useful. LinkedIn already has a couple of apps, but now its contacts app, Connected, comes to Android to go more mainstream. On both the Play Store and the App Store, it’s a free little utility that calls for minimal fiddling.
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At the technology show Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a familiar figure takes the stage to make a presentation. It's Stephen Elop, once head of Nokia, famous for telling Nokians they were standing on a burning platform and they had two choice – burn or dive into the unknown. But today, Elop is back with Microsoft, from where he came to Nokia in the first place. As vice president of Microsoft Devices and Services, he is still presenting some new Lumia smartphones. It almost seems like old times, except that now it is hardly about the devices. It’s really about the services. "We should stop obsessing over the mobility of devices," said Elop. "We should focus on the mobility of experiences." That was the starting point to what may have been the introduction of two budget devices, the Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 SL, but was really about the upcoming Windows 10 and how Microsoft would make the shift to being present on many platforms besides its own – and then push services from there to customers. "Windows is our home but we are extending our presence to different platforms. Our products will deliver experiences across different platforms but bring them back to Windows", said Elop. Microsoft is promising a "One Microsoft" with an experience that has strong commonalities throughout. What you do on one system, goes up to the cloud and is available to the other, no matter whether you’re using a PC, an iPad or a Lumia phone or any other phone. With this in mind, Microsoft has actually been releasing apps for its competitors' products, such as a far more workable Office for iOS and Outlook for iOS and Android that some feel beats the native email experience. On demo was a selection of features from Mi rosoft Office that show how much easier it is going to be to use its several thousand features. More context awareness and semantic understanding will help quickly get to what you ask to do – in natural language. Cortana, Microsoft’s answer to Siri and Google’s voice search, is ever-present and will also respond to conversational commands and queries, a re-designed Skype will make it more easy to use. They even showcased a foldable keyboard that would work with any device, including phones, of course. Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has begun to take steps in a post-PC era that are different from the company's moves a year ago. Of course, mobility is a space every big company is trying to dominate and the jury is out on who the biggest players will be in the next couple of years.
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