Techno rants

Nokia Lumia 800 Recently I had said that I bought the Motorola Razr, because it was a incredibly powerful phone in a tiny but rugged body. But a couple of weeks ago, while using the phone to navigate. It slipped out of my hands and fell on the hard paved ground. Initially it looked like it survived its ordeal by landing on its Kevlar lined back. Some scuffs were on the phone but were mainly negligible, but the real damage showed itself the the next day when I went to charge it. The phones internals were badly damaged, it would no longer take a charge. Seeing that I had a ruined phone, and one which probably would not be covered by warranty, I went looking for a cheap replacement smartphone. What I came across was the best mobile phone which I had ever used. That is the Nokia lumia 800, it truly is amazing device, with its design coming from the gorgeous N9 and the operating system from Microsoft (aka windows phone 7.5 mango), it has the best of both worlds ...

--> New Apple Maps Logo Old Google Maps logo Google maps was brutally axed from the iOS platform during the latest iteration of the operating system, as usual there is huge resistance from iOS users, since google maps was a better option to what is currently being provided by Apple maps. While Apple maps are generally fine, with mapping data provided by tomtom and open street map, they lack street view, public transport locations and accurate POI data. To compensate for this short fall Apple has provided turn-by-turn navigation and unique 3d feature called flyover. while the turn-by-turn navigation is a critical feature which was missing from Apple's mobile platform, I'd much rather have street view than the terrible flyover feature which makes roads and bridges looks like roller-coasters and buildings look like sausages emerging from the earth. Another massive error on Apple's part is the launch of incorrect maps where entire cities are either...

Sennheiser HD201 The Sennheiser HD201 are an entry level headphones aimed at users who want to upgrade from the cheapo on-ear headsets without spending a ton of cash. These headphones are far from high-end, but they do provide decent sound quality for an average online list price of $30.  foam and leather on the headband and the ear-cups The HD201 are an over the ear design, with minimum noise leakage and maximum noise isolation. Their foam padded ear-cups and headband make them very comfortable to wear, though do become uncomfortable after extended periods of use because of the leather becoming hot. The light weight construction is surprisingly tough, mainly due to its hard plastic exterior, these headphones can take quite a beating and have survived quite a few drops. One of the main weak-points of these headphones is the cable, it is a traditional dual sided non detachable 3m long cable, due to its thinness and length it is prone to tangling and not ideal for use while...

Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo co, Ltd. Today Nintendo reported its first operating loss in 30 years, a loss of $530 million. Nintendo sold 13.51 million 3DS units, 9.84 million Wii's and 5.1 million DS family units (nintendo DS, DSI & DSI XL). Nintendo predicts that the next financial year, they will be back in the black with a net profit of $245 million, this is due the 3DS will no longer be sold below cost and the upcoming launch of the Wii U. We see from these earnings, the impact of smartphones and tablets. The economy is also a compunding factor where gamers, especially casual gamers (Nintendo's target market) don't want to spend $30-$50 on games. When games on their smartphone or tablet provides a similar of in some cases a better experience than the hand held gaming system at a fraction of the price ($0.99 for angry birds, $14.99 for infinity blade, etc). Though Nintendo is predicting and profit of $245 million, next financial year. I am less enthu...

The battle for the "cloud" just heated up again with today google launching or rather renaming their google docs to google drive. Out of the gate google offers unparalleled search and file type support, does this makes the google drive a force to be reckoned with? NO a free account offers 5 GB of storage and then there are tiers which people can buy for example 25 GB costs $2.50/month Microsoft's ubiquitous Skydrive (personally I find this name to be the coolest names for all the cloud storage options) currently offers 25 GB of storage for those who lock it in now or in the future will be 7 GB of storage. The tiered plans for Skydrive are also very competitive. Box offers or recently offered 50 GB of free storage to all android users. Thus the list goes on, and the google drive is not the revolution which was gmail with gigabytes worth of storage. Insted google is comming late to the game and offering minimal storage when compared to its competitors. does t...

Ditching the expected nomenclature, Apple has launched its new tablet device today, "The new iPad". What was the point in bringing out iPad 2 then going back to the old days of how iPods are named, the blasted generation title. So whats on everybody's mind is, should I upgrade or not? For me its a no, but that's me. Apple has bumped up the hardware in the "new iPad", while keeping the design the same. Frankly that is a pretty good idea as the iPad 2 still has a fresh design. So what's changed, first and foremost is the screen. It has been given the retina title, with a resolution of 2048 * 1536, that is a mind blowing number of pixels, when a full 1080p HD screen is olny 1920 * 1080 pixles. Everything is much more crisp on "the new iPad", you no longer see a grid but a seem less image. Next is the backward facing camera, which apple renamed the isight camera. Its now 5MP and takes decent images. I found myself scratching my head at thi...

Getting out if the clasps of apple, i have moved to google's android platform in particular the motorola DROID RAZR. Hardware wise the phone is great, it has awesome battery life, great screen quality, its light but feels sturdy and with its kevlar, steel and gorilla glass build it is definitely a premium device. So whats wrong, well its android itself. Though i absolutely hate apples business practices, such you can't offer anything cheaper at another outlet if your in apple's development ecosystem. Which frankly i think is anti-competitive, due to the giant market share apple possesses, it pretty much shift market prices towards apples favor. The best example of this is the ebook market. Prior to ibooks l, ebooks were at low prices such as $3-5, ibooks launched, apple and publishers wanted higher prices and due to these broad market altering agreements prices of ebooks are now at $12. Getting back on track, i want apple to have an ecosystem competitor, so they c...

After the death of Steve jobs there has been rampant speculation that apple will launch their own TV set so a real Apple TV instead of a set top box. Apple will not get in this business as we have seen in the 2011 Christmas sale season, even at rock bottom prices people are just not interested in television sets. If apple was to produce a TV set, it would at odds at apples previous successful business entrances. The iPod and iPhone were introduced when phones and personal music players were popular, and further more if apple were to produce a groundbreaking TV, it would need to have great streaming content. Apple is yet to offer any true streaming content and witnessing the attempt's of NetFlix and HULU, the content providers/creators are unwilling to change to a new business model. These are some of the many reasons apple will not launch a television set, but if they were theses might be some of features we might expect; apps high resolution display unibody/aluminum ca...

this september Microsoft announced their new operating system, windows 8. It is supposed to be the answer to the tablet phenomena currently ripping across the tech landscape and the king is apple with their iPad. Set to launch late 2012, meaning sometime in Q3 Q4. This really worries me as Apple and Android would have then at least 3 generation in this category to refine their respective operating systems, getting a general mindshare in the populace and not to mention the huge lead in market share android and iOS would have over windows 8 at that point. I'm starting to get the vibes that Microsoft might have become a dinosaur, i will justify my analogy with the fact that Microsoft still has 90% marketshare in the desktop and laptop business, thus they are big but as we have seen thought out last year and this year, all the growth thus the money is in mobile devices such as tablets and phones. which Microsoft missed with windows phone 7 only started to get attention this year...

HP the other day shattered everyones dreams of WebOS. In a surprising announcement, HP is discontinuing its Personal Systems group, basically they will stop making all electronics that we consumers buy such as desktops, laptops, WebOS, etc. but they will keep making printers as they make money for the ridiculous price of their ink cartridges. The dying gasps of WebOS came today as, in Australia the touchpad which only on sale for 4 days was pulled then sold again for 98 bucks. As you would imagine, it sold out in 60 minutes around the country. But what does this mean? Tablets need to be an impulse item? Or was the touchpad just priced incorrectly at $499? Most people I asked said that they went to buy it because it was $98 and it was a average tablet, this i feel what HP should have done from the start. Lose money in the short term with touchpad though it was pretty crappy hardware with its plasticy finish and slow hardware so i dont how ...

Apple have been pushing this new thunderbolt port from intel, it combines PCIe and display port technology, thus we are seeing a ranger of connectors from apple to go from thunderbolt to HDMI, DVI etc. also we have seen the introduction of the new apple cinema display which as apple are have named the thunderbolt display since it connects through thunderbolt I/O technology with 10 Gbits/sec speed why only apple pushing this port? well there is usb 3.0 though not as fast it is more widely used as most laptops are coming with at least one usb 3.0 port and many peripheral 's are making the switch as well as the fact that its backward compatible, thunderbolt we should not count it out yet, thunderbolt or light peak as it was called has the ability to add extra hardware components such as graphics cards. the best example of this sort of implementation is with 2011 vaio z, it has a core i7 processor and is made to compete with the macbook air though is no where near the same price,...

If any of you out there would want and video screen capture on your mac, it is quite easy and apple has already provided the tools for the job. Though it is not sophisticated as many third party applications it works fine and is more stable than many of them which I have used. Quciktime 10 has the ability to make video screen capture and export them as .mov First open Quciktime 10 Then under File open New screen recording or alt + command + N Finally this should be self explanatory press the record button and click the screen

the battey life on my new macbook pro 13" has been a mixed result, while I have tested it running at half brightness settings and the keyboard backlight off I was able to run the machine from 100 - 0% for approximately 5 hours, during this time I was actively using the computer using the web browser (chrome since its the best). An interesting thing which I found out was that the running of multiple desktops and the number of widgets running on the dashboard affects battery life. after adding an extra desktop that is a change in 36 minutes of battery life, so if you don't have access to a power outlet keep your desktops to a minimum

Lion hit the shelves, pardon me it hit the online store. apple are not offering disks for this version of the operating system neither are they providing the cool usb's holding the software well not yet anyway. sorry for sounding a bit stuck up, but by offering a new operating system only through their application store, it pushes all of you who are on the fence whether the idea of digital distribution. when i bought my new macbook pro the day after lion launched, I had to go to the mac app store app put in a code then download lion and install, apple a company who prides themselves in being usable right out of the box is not exactly scoring pretty high here. but after everything was installed and the setup completed lion feels like a new os and is very nice using it as well.  Some people may be put off by the weird scrolling an almage to iOS but once you get accustomed to it, the saying goes "a piece of cake". There are multiple gesture to get used to as well, where as ...

There is no longer any point to stop the inevitable, tablets/slates are the future, Netbooks you have been dumped. At the consumer electronic show you could be forgiven to think that the this year its just a tablet show. Every major manufacturer and some minor ones all have declared tablets and slates, all different sizes with or without keyboards and as usual most of them are running the android os while other are running windows 7. Now if your wondering "android on a tablet, that doesn't sound so good" or " hey isn't that OS mad e for smart phones, on a larger screen it'll look terrible and feel clunky " well Google has announced Android 3.0 honeycomb (got to the Android names) a version of the OS optimised for tablets and most if not all the Android tablets are running a dual core processor. well lets get stated the tablets announced and some of their specifications are listed below: Motorola Xoom The xoom the most coolest device to roll up this y...

What can we expect from the iPad 2, rumors are running rampant of retina displays and camera's, what can we really expect from apple? Leaked case designs have confirmed that the new iPad would probably be thinner than the current generation, we can also expect at the bear minimum a forward facing camera to enable FaceTime, since Steve Jobs promised over 3 million FaceTime capable devices within a year of last July. The inclusion retina display is a bit of a stretch though since the the aspect ratio doesn't allow for the same pixel density of the ipod or iphone. Though we should expect a higher resolution display. What about the processor? well the apple A4 processor is fast and is being used in the ipad, ipod touch and the iphone albeit on different clock speeds, the A4 is a good processor but it seems very 2010ish not 2011. At CES this year we saw the arrival of android tablets Motorola "xoom", Toshiba Tablet, Vizio Tablet, Lg Tablet etc. etc. etc. All these tablets...

At CES 2011 we are seeing that the ipad has left a mark on manufacturers, toshiba, samsung, motorola, & vizio are all now trying to get a slice of the evil cake. Motorola has announced there "xoom" tablet and no its not a typo it is actually spelled with a "x". Even with the dyslexic spelling on paper the "xoom" looks like a solid ipad competitor with dual core processing, 1GB RAM, HD display, HDMI out, 4G compatibility with a software update and Google Android 3.0 honeycomb optimused for tablets this looks like an interesting product. Interestingly Vizo maker of TV's and other things have made a similar tablet, though it has a they have placed a their custom UI and the demo version is like the playbook (just a screen running video's) we can expect that 2011 will be the year of the tablet halle lujah! On the other hand we have seen the announcement of the Samsung sliding PC 7. This is essentially a tablet which slides to expose a keyboard then...

The iPad is apples new tablet device, I can't help but call it a giant iPod touch since it's runs the same operating system software and is aesthetics are a dead give away. But this is defiantly a new device, with apps taking full advantage of all the new screen real-estate making this a totally new experience. Though some apps are just bigger versions of the original iPod/iPhone apps and the use of the pixel doubler showcased by Steve jobs is terrible, as iPod/iPhone apps are pixelated and in some cases writing is unreadable. The LCD IPS display just pops and photo's movies and everything else looks awesome. The lack of a key features such as a camera, HDMI output, USB port and a SD card slot reduces the functionality of the iPad greatly when compared with other net books, which is the market that the iPad is competing for, though there is a camera connection kit for about another $50 but it still is an extra. when comparing the iPad to other e-readers such as the amazon k...

The reason I bought a Mac was OS 10, in future if apple phases out the OS 10 and shifts its focus to iOS personally I would see no reason to buy a mac anymore, HP offers laptop and desktops which have comparable aesthetics better hardware with at lower price. The iOS should stay in the mobile/portable world while OS 10 should be placed in more powerful computers. But it looks like that apple will probably shift all their products into an iOS/restricted type of environment, we are seeing this today as we see apps like iMovie, Keynote, Pages & Numbers move to the iOS environment, apple are probably doing this since a lot people have iphones, ipods and ipads. they are used to the iOS environment so if it were to translate into desktop environment, more people would buy apple laptops and desktops. genius market strategy for apple and they would make a lot of money but I still don't like it.