Technology Blog

Labels: BlackBerry 8800, cellphones, Communicator, mobile, Mobile phones

Posted by Aadi at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments

Labels: mobile, Mobile phones, mobile tracker, samsung

Posted by Aadi at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments

Nokia E50
Today, we have with us our second E-series phone from Nokia; the E50. The first E-Series phone we covered was the Nokia E61. Now, the E61 was a complete enterprise solution with a QWERTY keypad and a whole range of connectivity.
The E50 on the other hand is much called for to fit the budget and at the same time offer decent business convergence. Like mentioned in the Mobile Buying Guide that the E50 is an economic businessman s phone. When I said that I didn't mean the banya kind of business man, but was referring to a person with minimalist business use of a phone. To get a better idea of what I'm trying to convey, read on.

Bundle
The Nokia E50 bundle is not the multimedia package, but it is more-or-less good enough for a businessman. But that doesn t rule out the fact that a businessman wouldn t want to have a stereo headset, which seems like the worst part of the bundle. Anyways here s the list.

Nokia E50

Mono Headset

Charger

Charger Adaptor

USB Data Cable

CD Manual

Design and Build
The Nokia E50 is a sleek, bar form factor phone. The phone s dimensions are 113 x 43.5 x 15.5 mm and it weighs just over the 100 grams mark, at 104 grams. The phone has a longer screen and hence the phone is long. The screen is a 256K TFT color and has a dimension of 31 x 42 mm.

It has a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. Above the screen is an earpiece of the phone with a lot of free space, which unnecessarily increases the phone length. Below the screen is the joystick and the entire keypad. The keys on either side of the joystick are a bit cramped and it's a tad troublesome accessing all of them. The numerical as well as alphabetic keys are quite comfortable as compared to the rest.
On the left side of the phone are the volume controls. On the right side, there are 2 keys; the first is a hotkey to contacts and when kept pressed works for voice tags.The second key is the clipboard key. This key works differently when being used under different applications. Like while writing an SMS, it gives you options of predictive text ON/OFF; Insert word and number mode while being used, while surfing it does copy, paste etc.

System and Interface
The Nokia E50 runs on a Symbian OS v.9.1 Series 60 3rd Edition. This is the most stable release of the Symbian operating systems. The phone is smooth and there isn't much time-lag while running through apps with a few opened in the background as well. The phone has 70 MB of internal memory. This high in-phone capacity always proves good because around 5 MB is utilized by the phone OS, while the remaining is utilized by the programs running in the background.

The phone interface is like any other Symbian OS v9.1 with a line of 6 shortcuts and the schedule listed on the main screen. The shortcuts can be customized to your choice of application, mostly the ones that you'd use frequently.
The phone has a notification feature, which notifies you if you have received a message or missed a call. The backlight of the phone's keypad blinks green. You can customize as to how long you wish to have the notification light blink or even turn it OFF. The phone's keypad backlight is blue by default.

The E50 has a mono-headset; yet, the reception is good. The phone has speaker-phone option, which also works well.

Software
The Nokia E50 comes bundled with a lot of software applications. The software can be classified as Office and Media.

Under Office applications there is Quickoffice, Zip, Adobe PDF, Avaya, Teams, and the basic bundle (Calculator, Converter, Notes, and Msg. Reader.)

Under Media Applications it's Music Player, Real Player, Flash Player, and Recorder (Audio.) There are other apps that come installed like Gmail (to access your Gmail account), Internet Radio, and SymTorrent. There is more software under the Tools folder; you have Navigator, File Manager, Apps Manager, Position, Voice Aid, Voice Commands, Speed Dial, Speech, Voice Mail, etc. All these apps save your time consuming task of searching and installing the apps.

Connectivity
The Nokia E50, unlike the other E-Series phones, doesn t have a WLAN module. The all other connectivity options are available. The list includes GPRS (Class 10), HSCSD, EDGE (Class 10), Bluetooth v2.0, Infrared, and USB (Pop-port). Most business phones would have 3G as well. But considering that the phone is a basic business phone, it s quite acceptable. The USB connection requires the Nokia PC Suite to be installed and only then sync is possible. The USB transfers are fast and you get two transfer modes; PC Suite and Mass Storage.
The PC Suite accesses the phone memory while the Mass Storage option accesses the memory card once you have inserted one. The phone even supports PTT (Push to Talk) so if at all you have the service activated from your service provider, it will work.

Camera
The Nokia E50 has a 1.3 MP camera. It s not the most vital part of this phone. The camera is average and is there just to complete the package. It can capture images with resolutions up to 1280 x 960 pixels. The camera just has a couple of adjustment options and a couple of modes as well. The adjustment options are White Balance and Color Tone. Under modes it has Night Mode and Sequence Mode. The Night Mode of the camera is quite bad and there is nothing to make it better. The Sequence Mode, on the other hand, takes six shots with just one click.

Under the video section, the camera manages just QCIF recordings. The resolution of the video is 176 x 144 pixels and is saved in .3GPP format. You can choose to record with and without audio. The Night Mode and the other adjustments available in the still camera mode are present here as well. There is no limit on the video length and you can record till you run out of memory.
Battery Life
The Nokia E50 gets its juices from a Li-Ion 970 mAh (BL-5C) battery. A completely discharged battery takes about 90 minutes to fully charge. A fully charged battery provided me 3 days of use. These 3 days included around 5-6 hours of talktime and even using the other features of the phone.

The battery life of the phone is sufficient but if at all you feel that your talktime requirements are high, you can always choose to buy the 1150 mAh (BL-6C) battery. That would increase your talktime by a couple more hours.

Conclusion
The Nokia E50 sells for a street price of Rs. 10,700. It is an absolute VFM (Value For Money) phone. The phone is the cheapest Symbian v9.1 phone. The interface is smooth and the rest that the phone has to offer is quite decent. The only thing that I found bad was the mono-headset, which should have been stereo and no memory card provided. It's still worth the buy for the market that it's aimed at. More over this phone has already gained quite an acceptance and the introduction of a full black finish will see more sales of the Nokia E50.

Labels: camera, cellphones, E50, mobile, Nokia

Posted by Aadi at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

To find out that the Apple iPhone would roll out locked to Cingular on a multi-year exclusivity agreement was difficult enough for some folks to swallow. Imagine, then, the pain and suffering that'll be experienced by those in areas that Cingular has forsaken. Case in point: the Burlington Free Press has noted that Cingular offers not a sliver of coverage in the quaint state of Vermont, leaving well over half a million good citizens (Ben and Jerry included, we reckon) without their fix. While our initial instinct might be to buy the phone elsewhere and just roam 'til the cows come home (literally -- this is Vermont, after all), Cingular policy states that a customer's address must lie in a directly covered area -- and even for the few that manage to skate by that one, the carrier's known for canceling accounts that roam excessively. Of course, Cingular points out that eager buyers are more than welcome to buy it contract-free without activating an account, but there's not a lot of fun in that; meanwhile, Apple's staying mum on the subject, perhaps for fear of further agitating hundreds of thousands of irate Vermonters. And the problem is by no means limited to Vermont: residents of large parts of Maine, Virginia, West Virginia, New Mexico, the Dakotas, Arizona, Montana, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Colorado (among other states) might find that Apple has passed them over come June, unless Cingular goes into turbo mode lighting up new service areas. Anyone out there willing to move for a cellphone?

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Labels: apple, apple iPhone, cellphones, mobile

Posted by Aadi at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments

Although Immersion's VibeTonz technology has been integrated into various Samsung handsets in the past, the shakin' technology was previously limited to ring tone and gaming enhancements. Today, however, Samsung is launching the keypad-less SCH-W559, which is the self-proclaimed "world's first" handset to utilize the VibeTonz system as a means of tactile feedback. The unit's QVGA touchscreen is meant to be a hands-on experience, and whether you use a stylus or the tips of your finger, the phone will provide a vibrating cue, which can be adjusted and customized within the phone's software, whenever you touch a virtual button. Immersion claims that its technology allows the on-screen buttons to feel more like "mechanical keys" rather than just a sheet of plastic. The device will be launching solely on China Unicom initially, will support both CDMA / GSM networks, and will feature a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, handwriting recognition capability, and audio / video playback functions to boot. Of course, users will be able to pimp out their ringtones with integrated buzzing, and while we're not sure how much Samsung plans on charging for the rumbler, we can't wait for it to start shaking things up here on American soil.

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Labels: cellphones, mobile, samsung, touchscreen, vibeTonz

Posted by Aadi at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments