Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
Review : The iPhone 4… August 24th, 2010
I finally got it!!! After being in a confused state for a month over which smart-phone to buy, I decided to opt for the Apple’s newest and finest cellular telephone…
I must admit I was a little wary, first because of the antennagate fiasco, then after hearing complains about iPhone 4′s flaky proximity sensor… I considered picking up an Android handset, but on getting reviews and playing with the emulator it left me unimpressed. I also thought about picking up the Palm Pre, but that device seemed a little too last-generation… Besides, that 720p video camera on the iPhone 4 was awfully tempting…
So, i asked a friend of mine to buy the “sim-free” version in UK for me, as he was going to come to India in a weeks time… which costs approximately 43,000 Indian Rupees… Yaa i know that’s hell expensive but all Apple gadgets are expensive, its a fact that we have to live with…
I’ve now had the iPhone 4 almost 6 days… How do I feel about my purchase???
Well its almost what u call “magical”… The two ultra smooth glass panels, united with a classic brushed steel band… Then the near-invisibility of the pixels, and the smoothness and responsiveness of iOS 4… It all just comes together in a way that almost makes me forget that couple of months back I was criticizing Apple’s iPhone and opted for a Blackberry… It feels like its an artistic master piece rather than just a smart-phone…
The Looks
The first thing that you would notice is its sleek redesign… The iPhone 4 is much slimmer (9.3mm), flatter, and feels like a much sturdier smartphone than the iPhone 3GS thanks to stainless steel along the edges and reinforced glass on both sides (said to be 30 times harder than plastic)… It also feels a tad heavier, by just 2 grams (now 137g). The volume up and down buttons are now metal and separated… The iPhone 4 is available only in black at this time, but a white version will be coming later this year… Maybe Apple would solve the antenna problem in it…
The Screen
Apple has been boasting about its new “Retina” display, with its incredibly high-resolution of 326 pixels per inch (ppi), four times sharper than past iPhones… This is quite evident when you’re reading text on websites and emails on the 3.5-inch screen… Even more noticeable, however, is how much better the contrast is on the new iPhone 4, with much deeper blacks and richer colours compared to the iPhone 3GS—with a screen that looked washed out when viewed side by side with the iPhone 4…
The Camera
Compared to other smart-phones, iPhones always lacked in the camera department… The new iPhone 4 takes much better pictures with its 5-megapixel camera, LED flash and a larger sensor that delivers better low-light performance… The iPhone 4 can also shoot HD video (720p quality at 30 frames per second) and despite not having good zoom, the clarity, colour and handling of motion was very impressive – especially for a smart-phone…
One of my favorite new features of the iPhone 4 is FaceTime, which can best be described as a Skype-like webcam chat between two people over a Wi-Fi connection – but both chatters need an iPhone 4 (Apple says they’ll “open up” the software in the near future so that it’ll work on multiple devices, and over 3G networks, too)…
Conclusion
Without question, the iPhone 4 is the most impressive smartphone in the market right now… Not to mention it works well with the roughly 250,000 apps already available at the iTunes App Store… The iPhone 4 stops just short of perfection, in other words, but it comes awfully close…
Something I know you would be dying to find out… YES, I can make the bars drop by gripping the device a certain way, and NO, I haven’t run into any issue with the proximity sensor… The display goes black and ignores input when I hold the phone up to my face, as it should… Frankly, I think that whole antennagate thing has been overblown… I’ll take the free bumper, though, thanks… 
Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone 4
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The Problem with Nokia… July 18th, 2010
Nokia may be still dominating cell phone markets all around the world, but the steady decline in its smartphone market share could threaten the company’s long-term standing… The problem is that Nokia can’t bring innovative high-end products to market in a timely fashion…
Much of Nokia’s strong growth came in an era during which hardware innovation on its own could secure high margins, and more importantly, when hardware and software were considered independent… The premium-handheld-device business now is about which device can run software applications most smoothly — a matter of hardware-software integration… Nokia has not been able to make the transition….
While Nokia continues to say that N-97 has been a success, it has seen very low sales compared with the millions of devices that Apple and RIM are selling… Even Nokia E-series devices are not getting the volume of sales that the iPhone and BlackBerry phones are getting…
Nokia appears to still dominate the low end of the cell phone market… Its strength over the past several years has been in selling high volumes of low-cost devices to developing markets… While volumes are still high, there are indications that trouble is on the horizon…
Nokia needs to stop trying to spend itself into something it’s not… It’s time to push the high-end software and applications innovation work into partners’ hands… That does not mean giving up on innovation altogether: it means focusing its engineering and design expertise on getting partners’ consumer innovations into a device that gets to market quickly, efficiently, at cost and at scale…
Natural partners are large and small software firms that want their best apps on lots of mobile phones as fast as possible — from gaming companies like Activision to enterprise software companies like SAP…
If Nokia could become the partner of choice for mobile software innovators, its high-end business could become a profitable way to deploy the capacities that make Nokia undisputed leader in the mass market…
Posted from BlackBerry.
Tags: Apple, BlackBerry, iPhone, nokia, RIM
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Features Needed on Android… July 15th, 2010
Andriod is a great smartphone operating system no doubt… I’m sure that it is the only competitor to the iPhone and in couple of years time would definitely overtake the IPhone OS… Google hasn’t yet announced anything about Andriod 3.0 aka Gingerbread and I don’t think they are going to say anything about it as Froyo is still too fresh to be updated… Still here are some of my views that should be added to Android 3.0 for sure…
- 1. Android Marketplace: Google must add a couple of sections like Top Apps, Staff Picked Apps, What’s New and also enhance the update processes to make it compete with the App Store…
- 2. Touch: There is noway that you can compare an Android phone touchscreen to that of an iPhone… Touch must be improved for sure or at least Google must address the issue if it’s a software or hardware problem…
- 3. Multitasking: Android multitasking is confusing, that’s because Android keep processes running in the background giving them a short time before killing them based on “You may need this” idea… I think that every Android app must add “Exit” button to the app menu to let users decide either to kill or to keep a particular process running in the background…
- 4. Networks: One of the annoying issues I was facing with Android is the need to setup the GPRS connection manually because Android do not get the network info automatically… what makes the problem even harder is when I visited the company and they told me that they do not know or support Android yet… The story becomes even worst when you travel, you don’t know how to configure a connection or even the number to call customer support… iPhone handles all GPRS, 3G and cellular data networks automatically…
Android is great, promising and absolutely powerful if and only if they keep enhancing and updating it. Android is good but still need a lot of work and enhancements to go through the same track of iPhone, not to copy it but to provide us better features than the iPhone.
Posted from BlackBerry.
Tags: Android, Apple, Google, iPhone
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Dell’s Streak to take on Apple’s iPad… May 27th, 2010
Alright i’m very excited.. I have been waiting for it since the time it was first showed at CES 2010…
Dell Streak is basically a device that exists between a smartphone and other larger tablets or netbooks that you might be using right now… Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Apple, Dell, iPad, Streak, tablet
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Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates!!! May 18th, 2010
Came across the really hilarious comic strip on Sad And Useless… You just have to have a look…
Bill – I went to a bank yesterday to talk about a loan…
Steve – What do you need a loan for???
Bill – i don’t, the bank does…
Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, Microsoft, Steve Jobs
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Steve Jobs Thoughts on Flash!!! April 30th, 2010
Steve Jobs today posted an open letter explaining Apple’s position on Flash, going back to his company’s long history with Adobe and expounding upon six main points of why he thinks Flash is wrong for mobile devices…
In summary, Jobs pointed out that Flash is proprietary, insecure and unreliable, a drain on battery life and not optimized for touch screens… He said Adobe’s claims of providing the “full Web” with Flash are increasingly irrelevant as more sites come up with alternatives, and that banning iPhone app development in Flash will result in better apps because Apple retains control over new features and innovations…
Outlining these points Jobs closed by saying :
We know from painful experience that letting a third-party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in substandard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.
Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third-party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.
Looks like the war of words won’t stop just like that… It’s as if both sides are implying that “It’s our device and we can do with it what we please.” But the meaning of that statement is completely different depending on who says it…
Lets see what’s in store over the next week.. Cheers. 
Tags: Adobe, Apple, Flash, iPad, iPhone
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What is it about Apple??? April 12th, 2010
One questions has been bugging me for a long time… “What is it about Apple, that it generates such a massive following???”
I know numerous people who just have to buy the latest thing Apple has to offer… One of these Apple nerds bought the latest iTouch even though he had got the newest iPhone just a month back… Couple of them have to buy ever iPod that comes out, just to through the last one on eBay or Amazon… This sort of fanatical behaviour is an obsession with people…
Oscar Wilde once said “I have the simplest of tastes, I am always satisfied with the best”
But still why waste so much money on it??? Now we have people waiting in line all night buying multiple iPads… So why are people so mad about what Apple cooks ???
Tags: Apple, appletablet, iPad, iPhone, Ipod
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Coming Soon: Adobe Flash and AIR on Android!!! February 15th, 2010
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Adobe has unveiled AIR and Flash 10.1 for Android, both of which should arrive in the first half of 2010…
Have a look at its press release and blog article….
Looks like its Adobe’s reply to Steve Job’s comment that “They are lazy”… This move is like a knockout punch for Apple as there tablet(iPad) has no support for flash…
Tags: Adobe, AIR, Android, Apple, Flash, iPad
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Symbian goes FOSS!!! February 4th, 2010
Symbian 3 (the successor of previous Symbian versions, S60, S40 and others), the new version of Symbian OS, will mark the change of Symbian from being a closed OS platform to become an Open Source platform where anyone can download and modify it for free… The source code is published under the Eclipse Public License (EPL)…
We’re a community, not a company, owned by members not any one entity. — Symbian
I think the move comes seeing the increase in the popularity of likes of Android OS from Google and the iPhone OS from Apple who had slowly started stealing the limelight from Symbian…
But I seriously think Symbian is way late to gain back its popularity here… Should have released its code long time ago..
Tags: Android, Apple, Google, iPhone, nokia, Symbian
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Steve Jobs on Google and Adobe!!! February 1st, 2010
Steve Jobs daring comments on Google and Adobe during Apple’s company wide “Town Hall” meeting at corporate headquarters, is surely gonna be criticized over this week…
Taken from WIRED :
On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.
About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
Looks like Jobs not happy with businesses not being Apple-friendly now days….
Tags: Adobe, Apple, Google, Steve Jobs
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