Nokia Needs To Do More, Much More

Finally the N8 is out in the wild. After months of delay, numerous false announcements, Nokia's latest flagship device is available to customers (to be frank there is some doubt if this is actually a release date. Especially since the preordered phones are the ones being despatched).

A lot is riding on the N8. In short, Nokia future will be defined by this device. If it turns out to be an epic failure like the N97, then lets say, its all over for the Finnish giant. If however this turns out to be a success, it will give Nokia another opportunity to prove to the world that they are capable of producing quality phons even now.

Although individual bloggers had already come up with pretty good positive reviews of the N8 (thanks to Nokia's "trial a phone" for free sweetness), Techradar's (a much more reliable source for reviews than individual blogs, and more recently even CNET's) detailed review of the phone has bared it all. From what I understood from the review here are the conclusions regarding the N8 -

Pros: good camera, good build quality, good battery life.

Cons: oh well, the same old ones to be honest. Okay you start checking if I miss anything. Symbian^3 is primitive, not nearly as good as android or ios interfaces, severe shortage of apps, sloppy internet experience, okayish touchscreen and physically "heavy". Apparently its much heavier than the likes of iPhone 4.

And from the look of things, the reviews arent going to get any better for Nokia. As someone said on a personal blog, had this phone been released a couple of years back, it would have blown everything else, but in 2010, there are simply way too many better phones out there for the N8 to even remotely create an impact.

Is it time to take a step backwards?

Image via Wikipedia

Perhaps in this rat race of features and more features and powerful processors, the importance of good battery life for a mobile phone has been lost. Battery life used to be a serious buying criteria back in the 90s and the first half of this decade. But today, its no longer a leading criteria, perhaps lost in the jungle of featues and apps and processors and GPUs.

However the neglect and perhaps the lack of innovation in this regard is quite astonishing. Nokia's once flagship device, the N95 had a fierce reputation of having the worst battery life among mobile phones of the age. The same reputation is being carried forward by the new generation touchscreen devices of the company. The N97 Mini has a hilariously short battery life for a smartphone. Its not just Nokia which is facing problems. Even the hallowed iPhone 4 has battery issues, as in the battery life isnt as impressive as the 3GS. The same problem can be found with the Samsung Galaxy S. Reason? Well for starters, its the super heavy duty processor and battery life-unfriendly OSes. Now tell me somerhing, whats a smartphone which cannot be used for extended hours? Whats the use of a device which requires you to carry chargers or cables as daughter packages wherever you go?

Now would you go back to a simple good old blackberry, or a N70? These truly had awesome battery lives. I guess most would say no. Hence whats required is a better battery management system where every single app will be able to utilise the battery power only as per the minimum requirement. I am hoping that the manufacturers already have this in mind and are working towards a solution. This also goes with the 'green' theme everyone's suddenly obsessed about, hence makes good marketing sense. Else we consumers would be forced to used dated devices with poor functionality.

Nothing much

I havent posted on this blog of mine in a long time. If you consider a week to be a long enough interval between blog posts that is. I am spending aimless days at home watching unreal reality shows on TV, sleeping for days on end,
and gulping gallons of booze
and enjoying the occasional adrenaline rush everytime I hear my mobile phone shout (sing rather, or lets say play) 'Its too late to apologize' (yes, I'm still not over that song. Heck, it was the most downloaded song of 2008!).

Anyway, I was wondering what to do with my ample spare time. Its really a shame that when one is neck deep in shit (aka work/studies), one craves for free time and when one finally gets it, its difficult to figure out what to do in that spare time. (Life is so fraking complicated!)

In the absence of any constructive thought cropping up in my brain, I did some pretty old school stuff. Browsed the internet. (Remember those days when the phrase 'browsing the internet' was in vogue? Back then, browsing the internet was a perfectly feasible feat. One could actually browse most of the sites on the web. Fast forward to 2010 and the internet is as endless as the universe we live in. How endless is the universe? How do I know? Ask that guy in the wheelchair)

So, I signed up for sites/forums/web pages I'd never even dream of opening. Of course, only to be frustrated and pissed off at my terrible decision. For example, I signed up for a 'geek' site (lol okay dont start laughing already) only to find out that I was among thousands of Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift fans (who by the way, called themselves 'geeks') and who had absolutely no idea what they were doing in those forums and who somehow considered themselves geeks coz they used Windows (???). Yeah yeah I know what you're thinking.
I was pretty drunk, evidently.


What else did I do? Erm...I signed up for Google Buzz which turned out to be pretty crap (read the post exactly before the current one), expectedly. And...oh yes! I have been discovering! No, not paleolithic artifacts. But, music! Bands, rather. From Europe. I have found that my true genre of choice to be symphonic metal (yes that is a genre and its not pop, so stop thinking in those lines!) thanks to Last.fm which has kindly allowed me to listen to 30 tracks (yeah, thats what you get for a FREE account after which the website dedicates itself to endlessly reminding you of its excellent paid services every time you want to do something useful or interesting). There are quite a few bands from Europe, like Sirenia, Nightwish, Therion, etc., quite unheard of in the international rock arena, coz their records dont become platinum or diamond or ruby or uranium or whatever! But trust me these bands rock, they are awesome!

I also happened to discover YouTube's new service at www.youtube.com/disco where they let you listen to tunes from some new artists/bands. Still in experimental stage (as with everything Google, hell Google is an experiment!), but very useful...theoretically.

And I also found out that I cant be half as funny as Richard Hammond, even when I write. (Okay I stretched it too far, but you dont have to rub it in!) And so, with a heavy heart (not just because I cant be funny, which I cant, but also because I'm really tensed about things outside the cyberscape), I end this stupid post of mine. If you have read this till the end without wanting to destroy your monitor, honestly, you deserve a Nobel Peace Prize more than the current US President.

Peace... (okay now I'm desperate to make this post funny, so this is how they spell forceful laugh ... llooll)

Mobile number portability at last!

Image by NiklasNikon via FlickrTRAI has finally done something really useful! It has managed to introduce mobile number portability, which basically means that you dont need to change your mobile no. everytime you get a new SIM.

This will definitely come as a relief to all mobile users out there. India after all is acknowledged as the fastest growing mobile phone/wireless market, and perhaps its only appropriate that we had some of the cutting edge facilities users in many other countries enjoy. Quite surprisingly however our next door neighbour, Pakistan, seems to have caught the portability train earlier than us (way back in 2007)! [Source - Wikipedia]

As per the new rules, you need to pay upto Rs.19 (dont expect it to be anything less than that!) for the transfer (which is quite reasonable I think). Also you need to hold on to your service provider for 90 days (again, pretty reasonable I believe). What this will do is increase the competition among operators who will have to dish out some pretty customer friendly offers to hold on to their customer base. For instance, since Vodafone has discontinued its 'unlimited GPRS' aka Vodafone Live net-on-phone pack, I'm planning to take full advantage of this offer and switch to Aircel, which apparently has an unlimited GPRS plan for just 98 bucks!

At last we are free from the clutches of crappy offers! w00t!