My Two Cents

It takes everyone by surprise on how meticulously Apple plans the features on their products. The photo iPod has a TV out which can optimize photos for 4;3 or 16:9 resolutions. You can create photo presentations with complete music from iPod.

Ok. Can you think of the obvious future of the iPod? From a simple photo player, I see it graduating to a complete video player with hours of video storage. Or expect soon an iPod with a camera (5 mega pixel and optical zoom?). All this could happen in the next one year.

Incidentally, this also makes me postpone my iPod purchase till next year. J

Apple iPod Photo

This new variant of iPod doesn’t excite me too much, because now it asks me to buy it. Sometime back, I told myself that I will buy an iPod when the display goes color. Not only it has gone color, it shows all your photos too. That is typical Apple style.

In my current financial position, all I can do is download the new iTunes 4.7 and listen to some music on the tinny speakers on my laptop.

Ever since they started talking about this secret gadget, I was always looking for the information on whether it will be EDGE enabled. There were contradictory information on the net about the EDGE capability. Now that the Treo 650 specifications are officially out, it is time to rejoice. It is indeed EDGE enabled. Biggest disappointment is that it has only a VGA quality camera whereas many new smartphones boast of a megapixel camera.

But then, the other phone specifications  and the keyboard are spectacular. So if you want to arm yourself with a multifunctional cute little computer, then go for this !

This is an excerpt from a mail from my colleague Ajit:

guess its an old stuff..got it to read it now..i liked the way the stuff is coined – ‘Bangalored’. a google search gives some interesting stuff..

it seems they have it in some T-shirts in the US – A separate website of American info-tech professionals sells an even pricier T-shirt ($ 19.99) that reads "My Job Went To India And All I Got Was A Stupid T-Shirt."..you also have T-shirts that say – "Don’t get Bangalored".

…On the flip side, there are many US fast food, pizza and burger joints springing up in India even while desi eateries are closing shop. Maybe workers of affected Udupi eateries could consider wearing T-shirts saying "My job got Burgered". 

Do iPods face threat from smartphones ?

The future is with smartphones. Today a smartphone comes with at least:

-          A PIM

-          A Camera

-          A Media Player

-          High speed internet access

-          Java

-          Connectivity options including Bluetooth, IrDA, WiFi etc.,

-          And of course, the phone.

A little while ago you carried at least 3 devices to get all these functionalities. Considering how ubiquitous the iPods are, one wonders why he needs to carry an additional burden now. At least one model of phone now has a built in hard disk. That means the iPod is in the danger of getting obsolete by smartphones. Doesn’t sound good for a company which came out of shambles just a few quarters ago. They cannot bank on the iPod for long. Statistics say that iPods have a market share of over 92 %. I would say at least 50 % of these people will migrate to a smartphone with music capabilities if it came within a sleek package and an intuitive interface as the iPod.

There are reports saying that Apple shelved plans of coming out with a handheld. That might be an indication they are thinking ahead in this arena. Don’t be surprised if apple comes out with a smartphone for the 2005 holiday season.

Sharp kills Zaurus

The zaurus is now officially killed by Sharp. Some 15 months back I had bought a SL-5500 which is now accumulating dust in spite of some really thrilling software on it. This is the only main stream PDA with a true sense of open source in it. Enthusiasts ported all sorts of GPLed software including the gcc, perl, kismet etc., to this little dream machine. The SL-6000 is going to be the last PDA in the series.

Sharp though, continues to sell the Zaurus line in Japan (The clamshell design is really impressing).

Zaurus now joins the Newton and will be remembered for a long time by early adopters like me.

How to use Google Desktop search for your research

Let us say that you have been doing a research on what camera/car to buy. You would have been sending a lot of mails, chatting with your friends and surfing through lot of review sites. Now if you want to consolidate all your results, just open Google desktop search and type in ‘digital camera’. Voila, all your research is now summarized in a neat web page.

Enjoy your google desktop.

Google: Now at a desktop near you

Google does it again ! This amazing little utility from google indexes your entire hard drive and helps in searching for virtually anything and everything using its familiar web interface.

I always felt that the search capabilities of outlook are very limited. If you want to do an advanced search you almost end up writing SQL queries with their advanced finder J. Google comes for your rescue with its search which is extended to your MS Office documents and all your outlook mails.

Though it is a beta, it is highly usable. The cute little punch is when you search for something on google, you also get a small bar where search results from your desktop are also shown. Sure, privacy advocates will come-in with all their long lectures, but at the end, it is a nifty little tool.