Use Smartphone, Internet Wisely and Productivity Jumps.

                       Many are using internet and smartphones today. But here in India, many use internet for Facebook and Smartphones with out an internet connectivity to it. Internet has may things to help in our daily lives. As a Student or a Professional, not using internet productively is a wrong thing to do because Internet has many uses.

                   

                  

                            Any thing of your interest can be found on the internet today. Then why waste time asking others? If you are interested in technology then there are a lot of sites waiting for you like Engadget, Gizmodo, etc... If you are an automobile lover then there are driveinside, autoexpo, etc... Likewise you can find hundreds of sites on whichever field you are interested on. And many don't know the potential of google today. Whichever information you want, google keeps in front of you in a matter of seconds. And you cant believe, google searches an answer for every question that exists. Thanks to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Also use Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha well for any sort of information and mathematics. Wikipedia has the largest collection of articles to read on whichever topic or whatever person you want and wolfram alpha solves every mathematical equation(at least the ones Aryabhatta, Euclid or Newton can!) 

              

                            Having said that, Smart phones without internet connectivity is the biggest dumb thing to do. You've invested some money, got a smartphone and will you use it just for listening to music and playing games? Thats just insane! Smartphones with internet connectivity opens up a whole new world for you because all the above things mentioned can be done anywhere you are if you feed your smartphone with a internet plan. Its a great thing to have because all your doubts can be clarified then and there on the go and so you don't have any half-thoughts on any topic. This is great because many of us find ourselves forgetting lots of things. Moreover you can have the information up to date on all the happenings around the world on the go! 

                            

                                

                              So, go start browsing, feed your brain with such content and have the feeling of missing all these before. In few days there will be lot of websites sitting on you which you follow and they constantly scorch you to read them and you'll have scarcity for time while doing productive work! So students, never join a college that doesn't offer speed, reliable Wi-Fi. check this particular thing twice before you join a college. :-)

P.S: I don't mean fb is a waste of time. Fb too is productive if you start commenting and having debates which build your character.

Apple TV - What I think its going to be like!

                  It all started with the statement of late Steve Jobs claiming that he had 'cracked the TV problem' in the biography of walter Isaacson. Lets get into insight of what I think its going to be like.

Present day TV experience: 

       Some people are content with what TV has to offer today. But lately with the invasion of world wide web, many internet things are creeping in to television sets and many are now slightly dissatisfied with the interface and connecting procedures of TV and Internet. TVs today offer Wi-Fi connectivity and a little browser is attached to them but on the whole the experience sucks. So what's available today is not enough for a seamless way of having browsing experience for the user and more importantly the interaction device remote has lot of space to improve. 

Apple TV:

                  Then came a little hobby thing Apple TV. Though they called this as hobby thing, it proved to be productive for lot of people. Apple TV is now being used in offices and class rooms for Air-Playing iPad screens for teaching and presentations. Air-Play is a very little hyped technology today but it would prove to be a key technology for future Apple products. Apple TV streams all your content present in the computer to a TV and it even shows videos in YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo, etc... Apple is making profits from these but not as much as main stream products like iPhone or iPad. 

Apple iTV speculations:

             After the statement of Steve Jobs, speculations started to take rounds that Apple is building the whole TV not just streaming box like Apple TV. When asked about this to Tim Cook by Walt Mossberg at D conference, Cook didn't say a definitive no. So there may be some works going on as there is a saying 'There will be no smoke if there is no fire.' 

      Naming pattern in Apple:

                   Apple Computers Inc. is the name before Apple entered to iPod and iTunes business. But after they invaded this market, they have changed the name to Apple Inc.. iPhone had iPhone OS in it at first. But after invasion of iPad, they have changed the name of its iPhone OS to just iOS. And now they have changed Mac OS X to just OS X. Is it an indication of adopting OS X to Apple TV? I don't t think so but this naming would be a long time merging plan of OS X and iOS. 

iTV:

                  So I think Apple TV will be built around Airplay technology. That means many apps will be built that use TV as a display and iPad or iPhone as remote. Problem in front of Apple is that they are a hardware driven company and they make most money on their hardware products sold. And problem with Apple TV is that people don't change their TVs more often as much as they do with phone or a tablet. 

                   

                   Solution is that Apple TV would be a smaller device like iPad which streams the content from TV. That means you would have one Apple TV per room and they stream content from Cable network. Any one can watch any channel on their choice. Personalisation would be possible with this kind of approach. But  they have a harder task in their hands pleasing people with small screens with this kind of approach. The best thing to do is build the displays with utmost care as they did with the iPhone 4 because Colour saturation is on the spot and there is lesser glare which are the main things that please the user. And sure Siri would be a part of whole experience.

                   Knowing Apple that its concentration is on end user experience and integration of hardware and software and knowing that everybody hates present day TVs, they would not leave this TV space to others. All this is just imaginative thinking of me and I would be completely wrong if Apple makes a full sized TV but not small screens as I've claimed. Lets see what Apple has in its product pipeline!

NFC Tags - For an automated life.

                     NFC is the latest short-range radio communications standard taking the mobile world by storm. NFC stands for Near Field Communication and its a standard that allow devices to establish radio connection whenever brought within close proximity of one another.

                      Majority of users use NFC to "beam" contact info, use them for payment services like Google Wallet and to transfer media in high-speeds. But we can now use NFC tags for automating the mobile.

                    With a simple touch of your device with this NFC tag, you can launch apps; set alarms; switch Bluetooth, WiFi, Navigation; and much more. With this small tag you can automate your tasks by just tapping your NFC-enabled Phone with it and have time saved and yes you can configure your tag. In the sense, you can configure your tag - which task to perform when tapped with a Phone.

                   NFC tags have a plethora of use case scenarios and that’s where the app NFC Task Launcher comes in. This application which is present in Google's Play Store supports NFC Forum Type 1, Type 2, Type 3 and Type 4 Tags as well as third party NFC Enabled tags like the MIFARE Classic, DESFire, Ultralight and Ultralight C and allows any NFC enabled device to create and perform tasks such as:

Create:

• Task Tags
• Switch Tasks – use 1 NFC tag to toggle between two Task tags
• vCard Tags
• Smart URL Tags
• Text Tags
• URI Tags (Tel, SMS, Mailto)

Task Tags currently support the configure or execute the following tasks:

• Turn Wifi on or off
• Turn Bluetooth on or off
• Make Bluetooth Discoverable
• Turn Air-plane mode on or off
• Launch any installed Application
• Configure a new Wifi connection and connect
• Configure and enable Portable Hotspot
• Turn Auto-sync on or off
• Turn Auto-rotation on or off
• Turn Notificaiton light on or off
• Set Display brightness and auto-brightness
• Launch any Tasker Task (for users of Tasker)
• Chang Ringtone
• Change Notification Tone
• Changing Ringer Mode (Normal/Silent/Vibrate)
• Changing Ringer Volume
• Changing Media Volume
• Changing Alarm Volume
• Changing Notification Volume
• Set vibration
• Set Alarm (both a fixed time and as a timer)
• Check in with Google Latitude, Foursquare, Facebook and Google Places
• Send a tweet on Twitter directly from the tag
• Start / Stop media playback
• Turn GPS on or off (root Required)
• Turn Mobile Data on or off (root required)
• Changing Display Timeout
• Changing Auto-Rotation
• Changing Notification Light  

                      And this list goes on. But for all this to perform, you should have a NFC-Powered Mobile and if you have, start automation and save time.

Example 1:

            We can create a simple Silent/Vibrate mode to a NFC tag and add it to a key chain. So whenever we see a board "Switch of your Mobile phones" in places like Movie theatres, Hospitals or at College, we can simply tap our mobile to this tag present in our pocket to keep the mobile in Silent/Vibrate mode.

Example 2:

          We can create a NFC tag to just open Google maps app and stick this tag to a mobile stand in the car. So whenever we sit in the car and place the phone in the stand, it automatically opens maps App and its a little time saver.

                  So there will be no end to the imagination if you start thinking. All you need is a NFC-Powered Mobile, a few NFC badges and a little geeky coolness!

                 

                      

Android - A Fragmented Market

Android is mobile OS designed by google corporation that sees 12 activations per second. It is the most adopted OS in the world ( Though some of it's users don't know what an app is and what an app market is.) Android has an advantage of adoptability- It is open and can be adopted by any manufacturer. But the result is many apps undergo crashes and many apps needs updates like once every 2 weeks (mostly). This drives user crazy. For example, I have 100 apps in my phone and I want them to be up to date. So I update all my apps and in just a week, I get 15+ updates. So as they are not divided into crash-updates or feature-updates,I have to go to every app and should read the description to find out whether that app is worth upgrade or not.

          Actually we see this many updates because devices are more,screen resolution is different and skin used varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. This becomes hard for a developer to write apps bug-free. Because one app would work perfectly well on a device and the same app would crash on the start on an another device though they both run the same version of Android. If they run different versions,thats an another story.

          Talking about software-updates, here is where Android is broken. You get a phone with some version out of the box and chances are more that you might end-up with the same software for years till you purchase a new phone. This is because liberty of Android to make manufacturers and carriers to run their custom skins. My strong view is that many phones today can run the next version of pure vanilla Android. But adding a skin to would slow down the phone and so manufacturers are not willing to update their phones. The reason for my belief is- a 600 MHz processor powered X10 Mini can run ics if rooted and ported with custom rom but why not an unrooted Xperia Play which is powered with more than a GHz processor?

           And if you are lucky enough to get a software update, you will be using the latest version for a maximum of 3-5 months. Because, after Android releases a software update, manufacturers play with that version add new skins, test that for at-least 6 months and then start the roll out. This rollout would take at-least 2 months to reach the users according to their carriers and SI numbers and all. Then 2-3 months after the update of your phone Android releases the next version of their OS making the last version obsolete. ( In Google I/O this year, in the demonstration of 'Project Butter', they made ICS obsolete by showing how fast their latest version is and how laggy the ICS is captured in a high speed camera though. The reason for me mentioning this is Xperia Mini has received the update just the day before I/O event and users are content that they are using the latest version for just a day )

             Team Android had promised a partnership with OEMs to provide software support for at-least 18 months after the user has purchased a phone in last I/O conference. No discussion on that has taken place in this year's I/O.  

              Keeping users' aspects aside, developer community is the one that is affected the most. Because, though Android has great APIs to offer for developers in the newer iterations of versions, they can't make use of them because they can't write Apps for a significantly smaller portion of that pie. Today, according to stats released by google according to traffic in play store in 2 weeks, 64 % of users use GingerBread, 10% users use ICS and the others use still previous versions. A developer can't opt to write apps for just 10% of users. Instead he opts for 74% (Gingerbread and ICS) and so he cant use new APIs which ICS has to offer. So quality of Apps is significantly reduced. But in iOS which is hated by most tinkerers who doesn't like control of manufacturers, more than 80% use the latest version iOS 5. 3 year old iPhone 3GS runs the latest version and there's a planned upgrade to iOS 6 though some features are eliminated. So developer feels very happy because the Apps he writes making use of the latest APIs can run on more than 80% of devices. And as there's just a single store in iOS, developers need not fear for App piracy.

           
Finally, as it is better late than never, Android should concentrate on fewer models and fewer resolutions as Microsoft did with Windows phone 8. Android has defeated iOS on market share but there is not a single Android phone that competes directly with iPhone. And more over phones running the latest software of iOS are more than the phones that are running the latest software of Android. So Android, address the issue of fragmentation!  

Cloud Technologies- The real future where the world is heading to..

           Cloud Technology- The word frequently listened in modern days of technology. Cloud technology is anything you get to work through internet. Cloud stores the data in the data servers or the real machine you can work on. Cloud technology is very helpful in storing your data in data servers which aren't owned by you. At first gmail called itself a cloud technology giving a free storage of 6 GB 10 GB for every user. Cloud services help users to access the data anywhere, anytime, on an any machine with internet access. The only thing an user need to do is to trust a server, store his data and just forget about it.

           We can call photo sharing web-sites like Picassa, Flickr; mail offering sites like gmail, Yahoo!; file hosting sites like mediafire, rapidshare, etc.. as cloud services. The advantage with cloud services is that you need not fear that your data might be lost due to technical snags in your machine in the future. Cloud services acts as backup to your important documents that can be retrieved anytime.

              These are just starting days for cloud services. With post-PC products rushing in to the market, cloud services moved to the next level. With cloud services on the go, you need not have great hardware support to your devices. For example, if your media on whole is lot compared to memory size of the device you carry, cloud services will be the savior for you. All you need is a reasonable speed for internet.

             And its not just limited to memory size, but also for the processor. If your device doesn't do the needful to you, computers in the cloud do the work. For example, in an iPad, if you cant run flash , the flash animations can be shown to you with the help of a computer that is present in the cloud. There is an App for that (iSwifter) We can also run Microsoft Office using App like On Live Desktop. So without having all these soft-wares installed on your device, you can do the total work with the help of devices that are on the cloud.

               Apple Inc, has takes these cloud services further by providing many services to users as a freebie naming the service as  iCloud. Key features of iCloud are:

• You can download any song on any device and just leave. The other iOS devices automatically download the song for no extra charge. All you need to do is sign in with the same account on all the devices.
• You can take a pic on your iPhone and it automatically appears on your iPad and your Mac without you doing anything. It automatically and wirelessly pushes all your content to all the device straight away. We can forget syncing these devices again and again.
• We can work on a presentation or read a book on an iPad, keep it in office and can continue the work on an iPhone from where we have left.

                 Cloud technologies just evolved from hard-disk in the cloud to the " Center for all the Media". And it would be wrong if I hadn't named Dropbox here. DropBox is a software available for multiple platforms like Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, etc.. where you have to install it and signin with the same id. And if you place a file on just one device, it automatically appears on all of your devices. Steve Jobs reportedly offered an undisclosed 8-digit sum to the founders of DropBox to strengthen his cloud Services which was rejected.

                    On the down side, security is a problem with cloud services. If the security gateway of just one data server is manipulated, much of the confidential information you have already stored in that server will be in wrong hands. Authentication should be strengthened in cloud services.

                    With cloud services, a cheap smartphone or a tablet can do all the work a computer does. All you need is a blazing speed for the internet so that we can greatly rely on these cloud services for day-to-day needs. In a word a Cloud technology enables a tablet user to work on a computer, he doesn't know where it is but gets his work done.

Windows 8 - Did Microsoft get it right??

                        With every edition of windows operating system, Windows has got some problems that need to be fixed by throwing out some constant updates. But this time they didn't want to screw users with bugs. So, they have decided to put up a developer preview to fix bugs before release. The best part is that its free and available in Microsoft's website to download so that you can get hands on experience well before the final release so that users can decide whether the new edition is worth an upgradation or not.

                        And so I am here to write up my thoughts on Windows 8 developer preview. Coming to installation, previous editions of windows were not that easy to perform. You should have a bootable DVD that contains the Operating System that meets your system requirements, and a lot of patience and still its a ton of headaches. But that ends here. Installation itself was just awesome. It went on just like an installation of a software( ignoring some reboots though). It was just flawless and worked with no problems. Unpacking the iso image that I got from Microsoft's Website, installing it and the pop up of the welcome screen hardly took 20 minutes. It asks for your hotmail account on the start-up (which you can skip though) and yes you are right in.

                        After Windows 8 booted up for the final time, I was amazed at how my desktop looked. This is the major revamp of the look by far. No previous edition has differed this much with its predecessor. Windows 8 is rich with evenly sized tiles which acts as widgets that update time to time, and the look and user interface were just ground-breaking. The colour scheme of the widgets looked great. This time, Windows started to compete with mac aggressively in looks. No word on performance though as there is long time to go to Windows 8 to be released.

                           But unfortunately Windows 8 still has registry as its code. Called it as unfortunate because major hacks and tweaks done today are due to accessible registry. But when asked about this registry issue to Windows boss Steve Ballmer, he answered that all the softwares are written in registry and so pulling out that registry means Windows starting a fresh life. Its like pressing the reset button which they cant do.

                        Coming back to performance, with full screen apps, Windows app store and widgets, you can clearly make out that windows had a tablet plan to meet Apple's iconic iPad which is dominating the tablet industry. I don't want to call it a catch up game because they didn't just want to fragment the market. They are trying hard to compete with iPad. With Windows 8 its clearly evident that they are really competing with iOS. Windows to wipe their image as copycats, sweated so much not to copy Apple this time.

                         And if we look back at CES 2011, Windows 8 looked well in Tablets too. So now Windows don't need the precision of a cursor but a cruder finger will suffice. Stylus, bye bye. 

                             Key features of Windows 8 are Picture Password (Where you need to tap three points on a picture in order to unlock), a very small booting time. It copied Mac here I have to say. The technology where the kernel session loads the data in the RAM of the previous session was first used by Mac in Tiger itself. Very happy that Windows too adopted it because it greatly reduces the booting time. Full screen Apps in Windows 8 are great. Internet explorer, Paint brush and all other Apps that come preloaded in Windows will run in full screen from now on. The browser was a bit slow when compared to Google's chrome which has set a benchmark in loading java scripts and flash animations in a jiffy but the Internet explorer looked great in full screen.

                               Windows 8 was been to developers to fix bugs and constant updates are being pushed to the users. But on the downside, many viruses are being discovered well before the final release of Windows 8. Developer previews works well with Mac as its a closed Eco-system. But an open platform like this is too vulnerable.

                                 To sum up Windows 8 was great, many features are yet to be added and it looks cool as its the only Operating System that supports two form factors- the PCs and the Tablets. The release of Windows 8 consumer preview is scheduled on 29th February and I am looking forward for the release.

                   

For those who are eager to get hands-on experience with Windows and want to dual boot it with previous versions, here are my tips:

System Requirements:

CPU: 1GHz minimum
Hard Disc: 16GB Minimum (32-bit) or 20 GB Minimum (64-bit)
Ram: 1 GB Min with 32-bit or 2GB min with 64-bit
Graphics: DirectX 9 Graphics with WDDM 1.0 or higher

And if you want to dual boot it with your previous versions, you need an empty disc with minimum memory of 20 GB other than the disc with your present operating system.

Steps:

• Keep the windows 8 installer file on a disc other than the disc you have chosen to install OS on. For example if you have chosen D: as the sector for installation of windows 8, place the installer file on C: or D: or if any.
• Do not boot from a pendrive or through any flash memories (No stable method was found yet)
• Then start the installation. Ignore the multiple Shut-downs and reboots of the system.
• In the installation process you have to specify the drive for installation of windows 8. Do that step carefully. Otherwise you may loose the previous edition of Windows.
• After you have successfully installed Windows 8 on your PC, open the explorer by clicking on the folder icon on the task bar.
• Right click on "Computer" and select Properties.
• Find "Advanced System Settings" on left of the window and click it open.
• Then under "Default Operating System" , select "Earlier version of Windows."
• That's it. You are right in business. When you reboot your system, you can watch a screen asking you which Operating System to open.

And the download links are:

Windows 8 Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64)

Windows 8 Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86)


Update: Consumer preview is released as expected at a few new features are present in the new release like Windows store and other interface changes. And the link is:


Windows 8 Consumer preview