If you could step into the future of television, what would you find? That’s the question Samsung is posing to us, and their answer is the new ES8000 Smart TV. It certainly is the most techno-packed TV I have ever seen, but are all the bells and whistles worth the ‘Smart TV’ tag and the premium pricing? Let’s find out! For a 55-inch TV, the ES8000 is one good looker, with an extremely sleek profile and a thin aluminum bezel. The massive panel is glossy in finish, which gives you great blacks and punchy images, but also saddles you with annoying reflections. Connectivity options are comprehensive – there are three USB ports, an optical digital out, a SCART in (via the included adapter), audio in and a combined composite/component in. Yet, surprisingly, it has only 3 HDMI inputs, and I quickly ran out of high-def input options once I’d plugged in the HD media player, the PS3 and the DVD player. The iPad will have to wait its turn, I guess. On the bright side, Wi-Fi is built-in, as is the integrated wired Internet LAN port. Using the TV straight out of the box, picture quality is very bright and high on contrast, though some of you might want to try out the various picture modes to find one more suited to your tastes. The TV’s image processing engine handles tasks such as upscaling and 2D-to-3D really well, and while I’m not a big fan of 3D, this TV checks off the boxes on that front as well. It’s really the ‘Smart’ TV features then, and how they perform, that will decide the fate of this TV. With the ES8000, you get the Smart Hub, a central access point for all of the TV features as well as Internet services (Skype, web browser etc.) and downloadable Samsung apps. The latter include tons of the regular Facebook and Twitter apps, along with some exclusive apps that let you share content within the family or track your fitness. Samsung likes to highlight its new "Family Story" app that lets friends and family exchange messages and photos. With all these smart features came a challenge – how do you use them via a traditional remote? You could use the built-in voice commands, a library of recognised words, to do things like change the channel, volume or the source, or even control a few Samsung apps. While the feature works fine from a technical standpoint, it’s really not that practical to use and I often found the remote to be a faster alternative. The TV takes its time to process the voice command, which quickly gets old. The same holds for the gesture control, which is far too dependent on the ambient light and how quickly your patience runs out. Once you've extended your hand towards the TV, it takes a few second before the TV recognises this and displays the cursor. Controlling the cursor works fine most of the time, although it depends on the distance to the TV and the ambient light. With too much backlight gesture control becomes almost useless. Besides, if your TV is wall or table mounted at a height, you’ll have to get up to be in the line of sight of the camera? Fat chance! Once the novelty wears off, I’m willing to bet that you'll rarely use the voice and gesture controls. Maybe when you have guests over…to show off? A window into the future they may well be, but there’s a lot of refinement needed before I’ll be ditching that remote control. Speaking of which, the smart touch control, which Samsung includes alongside the regular remote, is the real find of the day. It works well in conjunction with the Smart Hub and lets you navigate through the apps in a really intuitive fashion – it really looks as if it was designed with a smart TV in mind. That, and the promised Smart Evolution kit – the potential to upgrade your TV internals and prevent obsolescence by the time next year’s models come out - are the real reasons I’d want to bet on this TV. Smart Evolution in particular is an interesting development, but I’m eager to see what type of upgrade Samsung will introduce next year. Clearly, adding new features will be limited to upgrades that don’t require new sensors, and some of the existing hardware that’s in place, such as the camera, cant be upgraded via this route. What you can expect is faster processors, more memory and other hardware improvements that would otherwise happen under the hood. I just hope it isn’t an excuse to add features that can otherwise be dealt with via a software update. The Samsung ES8000 is clearly ahead of its time, and you’re paying a premium for that. While there's still room for in the motion and voice control systems, it's the first TV out there to integrate this kind of function. While there may be other less expensive HDTVs that arguably deliver better value-for-money when it comes to 2D picture performance in a darker viewing environment, the Samsung UE55ES8000 remains one of the best LED LCD TVs I’ve seen lately. And the Smart Evolution feature may just provide you with an argument in this TV’s favour if you’re trying to sell this purchase to a spouse! Rating: 8/10Price: Rs 2,73,000 for the 55-inch variantURL: http://bit.ly/NFy4rf Sounds SlickCall me jaded, but Bluetooth headsets rarely excite me, what with most following a safe one-ear design. Which is why I took notice of the Plantronics BackBeat Go – it’s a sleek, black Bluetooth headset that sports two in-ear plugs that neatly disguise a microUSB charging point, along with volume keys and answer/hang-up controls all integrated into a flat, tangle-free cord that rests nicely on the back of your neck. It can play stereo music and streams phone calls to your ears via Bluetooth profiles and offers a battery life between 2.5 and 4 hours. What I liked about this was the slick design and the rather inventive charging point, and the fact that they fit really well in the ears and block off a lot of outside noise while they’re at it. Sadly, the sound output is tinny and flat, which suits voice conversations really well, but lets you down while listening to music.Rating: 7/10Price: Rs 4,990URL: http://bit.ly/MDpn6q technocool at kanwar dot nettwitter@2shar
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Slide to Select SlideWriter solves one part of the overall nuisance of typing naturally on a glass keyboard with its accompanying problems of selecting text and navigating the cursor around for editing. It has a regular keyboard except for one nice difference: a subtle shaded bar appears on top of the length of the keyboard when you touch that area. When you slide your finger along the bar, your cursor moves on the page. It only moves sideways, not up and down. Using two fingers will move the cursor faster. Also, when you double tap, the nearest word gets selected and handles appear on the bar to match the ones on the selected word. You can slide them to increase or decrease your selected content. You can share text on Twitter or via email. Its own interface is clean with big text, which is easy on the eye.Instant Gratification An absolute must-have app is the much-loved TuneIn Radio. It's available for most mobile platforms in both free and paid versions. TuneIn had over 50,000 stations and recently added 500 more. With such a huge number, you obviously get good and bad, talk and music, clear and fuzzy and every category under the sun. You may come across stations that won't play in India, but for the most part, they do. When you like a station, you can preset it for quick access later. It shows information, related stations, and sometimes a schedule. But by far the best feature is how you can find something to suit your mood in barely a minute. With the paid version, you can record a session of music. You can't share or move the recordings from the TuneIn app because of copyright issues, but you can delete them. You also can't sync across devices or pre-schedule a recording, but these are minor hardships considering the world of music you get for instant gratification. Stay Linked With so much happening in apps for other social networks, LinkedIn needed some love too. And Hookflash gives it just that. This Canadian company has created an iPad app (free) that lets a LinkedIn user connect with people in his or her network with a single touch. You can choose to message, but, more important, you can video call your contact — in HD. If your contact isn't a Hookflash user, you can send an invite; if the person isn't online, you can send a notification and can talk later. It's like Skype and other VOIP calling solutions, but from within the LinkedIn environment. In a way, Hookflash competes with LinkedIn's own app that has more features, but not calling. Hookflash is a great tool for active LinkedIn users. In time, it will be available on other platforms as well.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 23-07-2012)
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There are many thin smartphones around. But the HTC One S manages to combine its mere 7.8 mm thickness with solidity. There's no compromise on its premium feel when you hold it, especially as your fingers caress the smooth, scratch-resistant metal back. It's designed to be understated, its 4.3-inch screen lightly bordered by a quiet grey casing. The HTC One S looks like just the phone for someone who doesn't want to flash gadgets about. The One S comes from HTC's newest series of smartphones, all of which have similar software specs: Ice Cream Sandwich, HTC's own interface, Sense, in its latest version, Bluetooth 4.0 and more in the way settings and widgets are handled. The phones are quite different in hardware and design, and make a good mid-range option. Unfortunately, there's nothing understated or mid-range about its price though: it costs Rs 33,590, placing it in the premium range. The One S has a nice easy-on-the-eye screen (though Pentile) and an 8 megapixel camera with an easy interface. Low-light pictures are grim. The One S has a dual core processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB onboard storage (not all of that is available to the user) and a 1,650 mAh battery which lasts about a day. There's no option for a micro SD card and you can't get at that battery inside the phone's unibody — an unfair trend considering Android phones drink battery juice by the second.A Dash Of Android HipIn a world where Android phones look like replicas of each other, the Sony Xperia U has its own style. The blackness of the 3.5 inch screen when it's asleep is offset by a bright plastic cap that fits at its bottom. There are many colours and you can replace them. When you wake up the screen, which is nice enough, you can set a theme to go with the plastic cap. Not only that, there's a translucent strip atop the cap that lights up to match the theme. The Xperia U is the smallest (so far) in the NXT line from Sony but it runs on a dual-core 1GHz processor. It's fast and responsive. Yet, instead of the Ice Cream Sandwich it should have been having for lunch, the U comes with the older version of Android, Gingerbread. That, of course, is the fate of most Android phones at the moment. An update could turn up soon as the Xperia S has just received one. Don't buy this phone for its camera. Unlike the Xperia S, the U has a 5 megapixel camera that is passable in daylight but poor in low light. But it does have a secondary camera, unlike the HTC One V with which it's often compared. Shockingly though, the Xperia U doesn't have a micro SD card, which you do need as there's only 4GB of user-allowed space on the device. Meanwhile, the software and interface on the phone is neat, but with rather small text, a point that doesn't bother those who are young and not squinting through bifocals. In most other ways, it's a standard Android phone and a good one to consider at Rs 17,399, if one can't afford the hyper-expensive premium superphones.3D On The GoThe LG Optimus 3D Max is a slab of a phone. Unrelentingly rectangular, it looks the epitome of Androidness. It has the same "undersigned" look as the Galaxy SII, which continues to sell, design or no design. But the 3D Max has raised edges that take away from the comfort of its being held. It has a 4.3-inch screen with 480 x 800 resolution. It runs on a 1.2GHz OMAP4430 dual core processor with 1GB of RAM, 8 GB internal storage and a micro-SD slot. It has two 5MP cameras on the back, and has a 1,520mAh user-accessible battery. The 3D Max is, quite obviously, centered on 3D which you can shoot and view. In fact, you can also convert high quality 2D graphics to 3D with an application. You don't need glasses to see stuff in 3D. Pick a 3D video (there are some on the phone to begin with) and you can see the depth quite readily, though perhaps not altogether flawlessly. It runs the Gingerbread, but it plays video without any hiccups. It's priced at Rs 30,500.Seven Inches Of 3GAnother 7-inch "low-cost" tab just joined the crowded space of budget Android tablets. Whether the Nexus 7 from Google will come and blow these away, we shall have to see. But it's possible that rural and small-town customers will go for whatever they find nearest at hand. That's what Zync Global is hoping will happen to its newly launched Z-999 Rs 11,990 tablet. The slim tablet's unique selling points, says Zync director Ashish Garg, is that it runs Android 4.0 (a feat that only one in 10 phones have managed so far), has 3G connectivity — in addition to Wi Fi — via a Sim card, and a 4200 mAh battery that can last through five hours of video or 10 hours of regular use. There is a 2 megapixel camera and a secondary 0.3 megapixel one. It runs on a 1.5 GHz single-core ARM Cortex A8 processor but on first impression didn't seem to be quick. Thankfully, it does have capacitive touch screen with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. It has an onboard storage of 8 GB and runs on 512 MB RAM. There is an expandable card option.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 23-07-2012)
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It's easy to be enticed by faster, shinier, newer. How many times have you asked a friend which phone is the best to buy? Or indeed, answered that question? Inevitably, we'll recommend whatever we're ardent fans of, or whatever is the hype of the month. Or we remember that some phone was smartphone of the year, month, week...If you peel off the layer of hype and get down to using a phone, you'll find there's some feature or characteristic you're just not comfortable with. Sometimes that may be because a phone is designed so, and sometimes it will be because you are designed so.The famous QWERTY keyboard of BlackBerry phones is a case in point. A phone may be brilliantly designed, fast, spec-filled, etc, but if you're likely to spend much of your time two-thumb texting, you'll find a touch phone a bit of a shock because typing on glass isn't the same thing. On the other hand, if you find the little keys on a phone annoying and often hit neighbouring keys instead of the ones intended, you might find you're comfortable with a virtual keyboard.Input methods are one of the most important aspects of a smartphone. There's the old style keys, newer softer keys, virtual keypads, handwriting, voice input, super-predictive typing, and unusual methods like the Swype you find on Android phones. Cameras, in addition, bring in a new form of input. Think of what you really can't do without and what you have no use for. A frantically busy person accustomed to dictating to-do lists to his secretary would do well with a phone that easily lets him use apps to send off recordings or instant voice messages. Someone who networks a lot might need a phone with a good camera so business cards can be scanned quickly. Or, a user may need a good camera to support the heavy use of an app like Evernote, where photos are frequently pulled in and used for different purposes.There's a recent buzz around quad core phones which are impressive with their speed. But very often, it's only advanced users who are able to push the limits of performance on such phones. Gaming or other processor-intensive activities may call for a massive amount of speed as will high-end video and movies — but many users are relatively undemanding in the quality they want for such activities. They just aren't involved enough and are casual users, not caring whether they can see the droplets of water on a car's hood or not. Spend on a fast phone — read expensive — if you want to genuinely boost your experience and are willing to pay for it. To buy a high-end phone and only use it to make phone calls and play an occasional round of Angry Birds is a waste. Also look at the other devices you own. If you have a tablet, specially a smaller one like the Galaxy Note or one of the 7 inch tabs around, rethink the size of the phone you plan to buy. A 4.8 inch smartphone and a 5.3 inch tablet make for a bizarre pair, unless you really separate their use in some way.Phones have also tended to get larger to accommodate screens to make for an impressive experience with gaming, visual apps and consuming media, including better reading. But everyone hasn't got used to holding large screens. Some think nothing of it and adapt happily while others can't seem to figure out just how to hold them. Consider this before you pick up a device that becomes your daily companion. If you've been using another phone, also see how much trouble you might have using buttons and other access methods on a new device. It takes very little time to learn new placements, but for some people it's a put-off to even try.A relatively new trend is for phones to have irreplaceable batteries, sealing the phone's body up into one single unit. The beautiful HTC One X is like that. And so is the iPhone, of course. Some from Sony's Xperia range are unibody devices. With Android phones in particular, battery drains out quickly and you may be the type of user who'd like to just carry another battery and exchange it — though this can be avoided if you're willing to carry portable chargers.Each of us is willing to make certain compromises or adjust to new ways of using a device, but only up to a point. Each of us would rather a gadget fit into our own style rather than the other way around, keeping in mind of course that there are also people who like to experiment and are bored with an "old" way of doing something within minutes. Rather than let someone else tell you what's the best for you and go by specs alone, it's best to touch and feel and try a device if you can. After everyone's finished admiring it, you're the one who has to become comfortable with it.mala(at)pobox(dot)com, (at)malabhargava on Twitter (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 04-06-2012)
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Paper Everybody's talking about a free app called Paper. It gives you, well... paper! But it's slick and smooth and uses a touch of pinch and zoom to open and close your files, which here are called whatever you want to call them, but they're about 10 pages each. You get, with this paper, a set of six tools. But here's the catch: these are not free. Except one rather lovely thick-and-thin drawing pen and an eraser. Oh, and a handful of colours. The remaining tools, all pen-like, are for sketching finely, drawing thick and quick diagrams, colouring in nice cloudy splotches, and making outlines. Each of these tools costs $1.99, which is not only expensive but unfair. Surely it would be better to be an upfront paid app, and not get users to pay for each separate tool. But, that said, you can get away with the free tool and, say, one more and do very well.In Paper, you can create very quick sketches and line drawings that look very good and you can jot down ideas to share with others via email, Facebook, Twitter, or post to your Tumblr. This means each page will go out as a single image — not as a collection of pages or a file. You can make charts in a casual freehand way and use the image in your presentations. Paper is one of those apps that has to be used for its appeal to be understood. It's best thought of as being really tablety and slick. But it could have had more choices for what it costs after you buy all the tools. Should you be interested, this app is for the iPad and is not to be confused with another app by the same name but not by the same developer, 53. The other Paper is just a whiteboard. SnapguideThere's another social network in the making. And this one is useful. For now, it's a free app for the iPhone, though it looks just fine on the iPad. Think of Snapguide as the Instagram of how-tos. The app is a nice and easy platform to create guides on anything at all, on the go. You can take pictures or videos, write out simple steps and you can have a guide ready to go up on the network within minutes. Just as with Instagram, you can follow people. And everything else that people can think of, from origami to five ways to tie a scarf. It's very new on the block and so there aren't a huge number of guides yet. It'll be interesting to see if this idea gains traction with businesses or becomes as addictive as Pinterest and Instagram. Anti-Spam SMS ProAn Android phone app blocks all those annoying unsolicited messages trying to sell you real estate on Sunday afternoons, and all other afternoons for that matter, flouting Trai rules and getting past your provider's DND filters. It doesn't stop calls, but allows you to put numbers in a blacklist to block them. There are also some bulk actions you can take such as blocking messages from all numbers not in your contact list. Too bad if a spammer uses multiple numbers. You can select numbers from among your contacts and call logs to blacklist. Also, you can enter a bunch of keywords to block. ‘Apartments' could take care of a lot of your nuisance messages. One tap can turn the app's functioning off in case you do want to receive all SMSs.mala(at)pobox(dot)com, (at)malabhargava on Twitter (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 11-06-2012)
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Take a close look at the image above these words. What if I told you it was taken by a slim point-and-shoot camera running the Symbian operating system, one that packed in phone functionality and wireless data connectivity as well? You see, that's the dilemma the Nokia 808 PureView has to contend with — the beast of 41-megaixel shooter that is packed into this phone overshadows pretty much every other feature.Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, to be honest. This is hardly the lightest/slimmest phone around the block— it weighs 169 grams and is 18mm at its thickest, obviously to make place for the large camera assembly. It feels solid in the hand, no surprise given Nokia's strong tradition to make stuff durable and built to last. And it runs the latest Symbian Belle mobile platform, which works pretty smoothly on the 1.3GHz processor and graphics processor combo. If you consider the fact that the camera technology on this phone has been in the works for the past 5 years, Symbian seems to have been the only choice for Nokia. Yet, having Symbian on a premium priced phone is …anachronistic. It just doesn't match up to the user experience on competing platforms.So let's face it, the only real reason this phone caught our eye is its humongous 41-megapixel CMOS sensor. It measures 1/1.2 inches, larger than the iPhone 4 and the N8's and that of most advanced compact cameras. Dizzying as the numbers may sound, you don't have to shoot all your images at full resolution – 38 or 34 megapixels, depending on the aspect ratio. There are loads of size options, allowing you to snap at a more levelheaded 5 or 8 megapixels. Shooting at this resolution does have benefits, as it allows you to use a nifty trick called oversampling, which combines upto seven pixels into one "pure" pixel – eliminating a lot of noise found on mobile phone cameras while at the same time allowing you to zoom in upto 3X without losing details.Shooting with the 808 is a revelation of sorts — the outstanding amount of detail you can capture has to be seen to be experienced. The results blow most point and shoots, and most certainly all smartphones I've seen, clean out of the water. Low-light performance, a common weakness of phones, is impressive on the 808, and the only place where the 808 doesn't hold up well is shooting macros at short focusing distances. Oh, and the Xenon flash is a tad heavy-handed.Can this be the only camera in your arsenal, and should camera makers quiver in fear? While image quality is exceptional for a phone, it lacks not only the versatility of interchangeable optics but also the true optical zoom on similarly priced (or cheaper) super-zoom cameras. So while it may certainly be the most groundbreaking handset yet in the mobile camera space, it's just worth buying this pony for its one single trick.Rating: 7/10Price: Rs 33,899URL: http://bit.ly/NpmXH2 Touch Of Perfection It's "surfaced" finally, after having done the rumor rounds for years now, and the Microsoft Surface tablet looks to be a truly enticing proposition. Though launch is quite some months away, I think this baby has a few tricks up its sleeve that should have Android tablet makers quake in their boots. For instance, the Surface ships with a iPad-esque magnetic Touch Cover, only this one has a fully functional set of pressure-sensitive flat keys that let you hammer away at documents on the tablet. Both versions of the tablet will run variants of Windows 8, with one of them being powered by a capable Intel i5 processor. Factor in the USB ports which are standard on the Surface tablets, and you essentially have a fully functioning Windows 8 PC in a form factor that would be the envy of current ultrabook makers. If Microsoft price this right, this could be the PC-tablet combo to own in 2013.URL: http://bit.ly/MaH3FKPrice: to be announced technocool at kanwar dot nettwitter@2shar
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This is no ordinary phone. That much is clear if you have caught any of the recent buzz about how a smartphone is coming loaded with a 41 megapixel camera inside it. The immediate reaction, back at the Consumer Electronics Show this February, where Nokia showcased the PureView 808, was to dismiss it as a marketing gimmick. After all, who even needed 41 megapixels in a phone? They say you learn the most about a person within the first few moments of meeting. I'm beginning to think this is true of phones as well. The moment you hold the 808 in your hand, you know what it's all about — the camera. In case you had any doubts, the big bulge, staring at you Cyclops-like from the back of the phone, will dispel them. This is the 1/1.2 inch Carl Zeiss sensor and you immediately forgive it for being that big, making the device top-heavy, because a bigger sensor means more light and information for better quality pictures. (Bloomberg) On the front, it looks like most phones do, just with more pronounced curves. It's a 4-inch Amoled capacitive with a 640 x 360 pixel touchscreen. I spent a whole minute ranting about why the phone wasn't in the brilliant red in which it's also supposed to be available. In fact, it hit me that the red of anything is just never available. Why? Then I forgot the red, settled for the matte white, and got in to quickly find the camera. Actually, there's a dedicated two-stage camera button on the side of the phone, but I'd quite forgotten that. My first picture with the 808 was, from about four feet away, of a newspaper on the table. I just clicked without planning or fiddling with settings, flash, or the lighting in the room. I don't really read newspapers in print these days as they don't get along with my eyesight. I tapped on the picture to zoom and to my amazement, I could read every word on the visible part of the page. Well, that's one way to do it! In the same way, pictures of a rug go right into the weave; photos of a cushion show the separate threads, and a shot in someone's office let me happily read all the papers on his desk, a fact I hope he'll only notice when it's too late. And all this is with indoor (read low light) conditions. The photo of a running fan turns out still and sharp, frozen instantly by the Xenon flash.Outdoor shots were equally interesting, showing good depth of field. Focusing on one object nearby sharpens it while blurring out what's in the distance. And vice versa. One can get motion shots, bokeh, night pictures, spotlight shots, and more. There's no HDR (High Dynamic Range) mode but you can use the bracketing capture mode to let you take multiple shots and use software to process them — rather hard work and not very necessary. The aperture is F2.4. Shutter speed is fast. There's a bit of basic editing on the camera itself, such as effects, cropping and rotate. One annoyance is that the photos have to be manually rotated to fit the screen orientation. But overall, shooting with the 808 is quick and easy, the on-screen button being a bit nicer than the dedicated button which could shake your hand. Just as often as I'd get surprising detail in a picture, I'd also get terrible pictures. A random shot, even with everything set to automatic, would result in a washed out image or not-real tints. I quickly realised it's all about the settings. This is a capable camera, but you need to explore and understand the settings to take advantage of its capabilities. Getting used to it can take a couple of days but once you know what the camera's sensitive settings like, you can use it to best advantage. Cameras on other phones don't match up to some of the 808's possibilities — but only as long as you know or can learn to adjust settings for different conditions. You can't just whip it out, take a shot, and be certain that it'll be brilliant and better than what any other phone can take every time. SMART CAMERA The 808 has a 41MP camera with aCarl Zeiss lens Someone rightly said that the 808 is like two cameras. The PureView, and the Full Resolution. You have three modes of settings, actually. One of these is Automatic, which is self-explanatory. The other is Scenes, or presets. The third is Creative, which is where you need to tinker with settings, trying out how to get the best images. The Creative mode lets you shoot full resolution resulting in 38 with 4:3 ratio or 34 megapixel with 16:9 radio photos. These are Raw files and you can take them off the device to edit and even print out in large size. Connecting the phone to a computer, incidentally, leads to a quick and easy transfer of photos. You take pictures in 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios, each requiring its own optimum settings and resulting in different image quality. You can also change other settings such as jpeg quality, colour tone, saturation, contrast and sharpness. Also in the Creative mode are the PureView oversampling options, which is where Nokia's secret sauce comes in. You have the same choices, but here the resulting pictures will be 3, 5 or 8 megapixel strength, with 5 megapixels being the recommended. This is the mode where high quality is squeezed into fewer pixels. There's a Facebook button on the camera's interface. But all said and done, this isn't really the kind of device you need if you want to take quick shots to post to Instagram, if you're addicted to that. Some of the apps you see on Android and iOS won't be visible here, in fact, and if you want a great deal more than the camera, you should consider other options. The 808 also takes excellent video: full HD 1080p with 4x lossless zoom. There are two microphones to capture a range of frequencies in stereo sound. This brings videos alive. Nokia has also teamed up with Dolby Laboratories for amazing sound. One tends to forget that because of the camera, but the truth is you could also use it as a music player. And as an on-the-go movie player. The Dolby Digital Plus software delivers 5.1 surround sound. I also heard it on a home theatre system where it sounded brilliant. As a smartphone, the 808 doesn't match up to the premium Galaxy S3, HTC One X or the iPhone in smart responsiveness but it surpasses all of them in the camera department. People are fond of saying that it's really a camera with a calling function, but the 808 does have apps, widgets and all the basics of a smartphone today such as browsing, e-mail, and games. It just doesn't feel as snappy and fluid, but at the same time, it isn't like you can do nothing else but take pictures. It has an awful, seriously cramped keyboard. The 808 runs on a 1.3GHz single core processor, has great battery life, and is NFC enabled. At around Rs 33,000, the 808 sits in the same segment as other coveted smartphones, however. While Nokia is justified in placing the 808 at a premium when no other phone can quite do what it does, the truth is that it's a specialist phone, excelling at one thing, even if it does others. Well, three, if you count video and sound (read excellent music) separately. More than other smartphones, the 808 competes with point-and-shoots, actually "blowing away" most of them. It doesn't replace low-end DSLRs, but because of its handiness, is a serious contender for amateurs or in some situations in which one doesn't want to carry a larger camera. But with today's smartphones, photography has, in a way, gone down in quality from the purists' point of view and most people are quite happy to shoot with whatever's quickest and most handy as long as they can set it to interesting filters and effects and whiz it off to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other networks. They don't necessarily want pictures of high quality, showing every spot on every face, every blemish on every surface. The PureView may not be for them. It's all about detail, which is why it's for those who don't want an ordinary phone.Mala(at)pobox(dot)com, (at)malabhargava on Twitter(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 09-07-2012)
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With our mobile devices in hand, we're always, always online. And that pretty much means reading material flies at us from all directions. If we were to stop and read everything we wanted to, we'd get nothing else done. And that's why we have reading apps.Reading apps do three things: They let you save things to read whenever, including offline; they let you read in comfort by parsing content to get rid of other clutter on a web page and making other changes to the way text looks; and they let you email or share content with the world.As with everything, there is more than one application that handles your reading. But three of them are really battling it out for your attention right now: Instapaper, Pocket (ex Read It Later) and Readability. There are others, like Spool and Longform, but they're still to become real alternatives to the big three. READABILITY Zaps clutter and saves web articles for an easy read For a while there, Instapaper for iOS and on the web through your PC, was the clear winner among the three apps. In some ways, it still is, because it's the one that is most supported by other apps. Look at the sharing options on any other content-related app and you'll find there's an inevitable option to send to Instapaper. Getting your reading material into Instapaper is in fact one of the easiest things about it. If you're on the PC or laptop, just log in to your Instapaper account and put the bookmarklet on the browser. Then, click to send anything to the app for reading later. In fact, if you copy a URL to the clipboard on your iPhone, iPod or iPad and then open the app, you will be given the option of adding that URL to your list.Instapaper is a much-loved app with many loyal users who also support the equally-liked creator, Marco Arment, by paying $4.99. A recent update to the app has brought better formatting, more fonts and animated page flipping among others. There are some options for additional features such as text search. This month, Instapaper arrived in Android, licensed but not created by the same developer. POCKET Manage a reading list of articles from the Internet Pocket does much of what Instapaper does. Both — or rather, all three —will let you set brightness from within the app, change fonts, modify text alignment, change from dark to light or use sepia for better reading comfort, and most importantly, change text size for easier reading. But Pocket is more charismatic, and has a more gesture-based and much prettier home screen. And yes, these things do matter. Pocket organises articles in tiles so that they feel magazine-like and you tap to get into full reading mode. People have always felt Pocket looks better. The app also lets you tag articles and search for them. What Instapaper has over Pocket is much wider support from other apps so that there's never any doubt you can save something to Instapaper. Pocket, on the other hand, also saves other content forms such as videos and so is quite a good bookmarking option. On top of that, Pocket is free and is available on multiple platforms. Readability, also free, is the other app that has been around for a long time and was seen on computers before mobile devices became so popular. INSTAPAPER Save long web pages for later offline reading Many think of it as a network rather than a standalone app, syncing across devices. Readability had one of the first few mainstream uses of the Bookmarklet — a little button you can drag and drop on to your browser and use for instant access to a site or feature. Readability would, with a click, reformat your web page for a customised reading experience, including turning the background a soothing grey-black and the text white for reading without much glare from the screen. Sending to Readability isn't as commonly found in other apps as are the first two apps, but on the other hand, Readability has tie-ups with many apps and is automatically available with them. If you're a user of Tweetbot on the iPad or iPhone, you can set the Twitter app to go to Readability for all links that you click. This makes for quicker reading via Twitter, which can otherwise be a time-consuming activity because of the poor signal to noise ratio there. Also, try the amazing browser, Maven, on iOS, and see how a little Reader button converts the webpage to Readability format for easier reading. Both Pocket and Readability are beginning to catch up with Instapaper in popularity and support from other apps. Ultimately, which one you prefer depends on what's most important in your reading experience. For some, it may be the way a page is parsed, for others, a particular font or how the app syncs with other devices or how quickly it works. Many people who consume vast quantities of reading material have more than one of these apps, choosing whichever they feel like on whichever device they happen to be using for reading whenever.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 09-07-2012)
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