Prakash Advani's Blog

HTC Android phones: Wildfire, Legend and Desire http://bit.ly/do43VC

What happens when a Taiwan ODM (Original Device Manufacturer) starts making their own phone? Result is you get good value for money, it start selling well and as a result they also get sued!

For those who came in late, ODMs are the actual manufactures of the device sold by the likes of Apple. ODMs actually make the devices and these are branded and sold by the big MNC brands.

HTC is  an ODM for many big brands. For example they manufactured the Google Nexus One for Google which is similar to HTC Desire. They have now been releasing their own phones.

They are so successful, that Apple sued them for patent infringement cause they enabled multi-touch on their phone and actually did a better job than Apple did on its iPhone.

HTC the number 1 brand as per GSMArena,  has launched some nice  phones to give customers a choice:

• HTC Wildfire
• HTCL Legend
• HTC Desire

Here is whats common between them:

• 5 Megapixel Camera
• LED Flash
• 3G with HSDPA for upto 7.2Mbps download speeds (network dependent)
• Wi-Fi
• Stereo Bluetooth
• GPS receiver
• FM Radio
• Touch screen with Multi-touch support
• Proximity sensor
• Accelerometer
• Optical Trackpad
• Flash Player
• 3.5mm standard audio jack
• Unlimited phonebook (limited by memory)
• MicroUSB
• Limitations: No front video camera for video conferencing. No Qwerty keyboard.

• All of them Run the latest Linux based Android 2.1 and are expected to be upgradable to 2.2 this quarter.

Android 2.2 will add:

• HTML 5
• Flash 10.1 support
• Faster speeds due to JIT compiler

Now here is the main difference between the three:

Features	HTC Wildfire	HTC Legend	HTC Desire
Display Type	TFT	AMOLED	AMOLED
Display Resolution	240×320	320 x 480	480 x 800
Display Size	3.2 Inches	3.2 Inches	3.7 Inches
Internal Memory	384 MB RAM	384 MB RAM	576 MB RAM
CPU	528 MHz Qualcomm	600 MHz Qualcomm	1GHz Qualcomm
Weight	118g	126g	135g
Price	$379/Rs. 15,000	$495/Rs. 21,000	$659/Rs. 26,000

The main difference between these phones are processor speeds, display quality and the price. The Legend and the Desire sports an AMOLED display which is the latest LED display, which is razor sharp.  The Desire also sports a slight larger display of 3.7 inches with the highest resolution. It also bundles a 4 GB MicroSD Memory Card. The processor speed is not so important if the OS works well and you don’t need to run too many apps simultaneously.

Here is my suggestion:

If you want an Android phone but not willing to shell out a bomb, the Wildfire is your best bet. Since the Wildfire is the latest amongst these, it also has some newer features.

If you don’t have budget constrains and wants to show off to your iPhone friends, then go in for the Desire. Its will also do justice in video playback capabilities. The Legend is ofcourse for people who want the best of both worlds: Lower cost than desire but with better display than the Wildfire.

Android has overtaken Apple OS (iPhone,itouch,iPad) to be number 2. Blackberry RIM is still Number one,  however they are quickly loosing marketshare to Android.

• RIM’s BlackBerry OS at 36 percent;
• Android at 28 percent;
• Apple iPhone OS at 21 percent.

Read more.

WordPress is scaling new heights! For those who came in late, WordPress is the best blogging platform and it open source.

You can either use their free blog service at wordpress.com or download WordPress and setup your blog on your own domain.

WordPress Vital Stats:

WordPress 2.9: 10.3 Million Downloads

WordPress 3.0: The recently released version has already reached 3 Million downloads.

Number of WordPress Plugins: 10,000

WordPress Plugins downloaded: 100 Million

Google Search results: 202 Million results

Now those are huge numbers for a software which is primarily hosted and is not a client application.

BtrFS is the newest filesystem for Linux. Its is likely to replace ext4 at some point of time. Ubuntu 10.10 will include this in October this year.

Here is what is interesting about it.

• Compression on the fly. If you remember Stacker days when you could double your disk space without buying a new disk, you would know what I am talking about. BtrFS now brings on the fly compression to Linux file system.
• Easy resizing: Today if you want to resize your partition, you have to take a backup, shutdown, use gparted and cross your fingers/prey everything works well. With BtrFS, you will be able to resize any time even when you are using the file system.
• Snapshot backups, you can take snapshots of an existing file system when can be restored any time to go back to the same state.
• Checksum support for protection against crashes.
• Better performance, specially on SSD drives.

Phoronix has done a stress test by comparing Btrfs with ext4 with on this and published the results. Btrfs with compression gave best results in most tests.

Our plain old hard drive is getting increasingly replaced by SSD, now Seagate is soon going to announce Hybrid drives (Momentus XT) which take advantage of both these technologies to give you the best of both world. Here is a summary.

Hard Drives (spinning Disk drives)

Advantages:

• Lowest cost per GB
• Easy availability
• Fairly reliable

Disadvantages:

• Not drop proof
• Generates Heat
• Slower than SSD
• Consumes more power than SSD

Solid State Drive (SSD)

Advantages:

• Fastest speeds today
• Drop proof, as there is no moving parts, hence rugged enough to be used in extreme environements
• Low power consumption, so increases your battery life
• Light weight so reduces weight of your portable device

Disadvantages:

• Most Expensive

Hybrid drives:

Advantages:

• Uses both SSD and spinning disk drive
• Gives cost advantages of spinning disk drive
• Provides performance of SSD
• Dynamically moves more often accessed file from spinning section to SSD

Disadvantages:

• Still not drop proof like the SSD
• Power consumption will be higher than SSD

Read full review and speed tests.

Seagate Momentus XT 320 GB 2.5 Inch Solid State Hybrid Drive for Laptops available for $125

Best Buy is firing its employee who made this funny video comparing iPhone 4 with HTC Evo. Perhaps Apple didn’t find the video funny and is pressurising Best Buy to take action.

Here is the scoop. The video has already had 2.3 Million views and growing rapidly. Its funny

If you want to build a Media Center PC to play your movies, music and photos on a high definition TV. Here is a simple way to build so.

Step 1

First get the tiny Zotac Media Center PC.

Step 2

Install Ubuntu, which is very easy just download from Ubuntu.com and follow the simple instructions. You can install via CD or bootable USB pen drive which is faster.

Step 3

After you install Ubuntu, install XBMC. XBMC (XBox Media Center)  is the coolest media center on Ubuntu.

Following  these steps:

Go to Accessories – Terminal.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc

It will ask for your password, once that is done, close the Window.

Then go to system-administration-synpatic

Search for “xbmc” (without quotes).

Check this package, select mark for installation and then click Apply. It will now install this package.

After that go to Applications-Sound and Video-XBMC.

If you want to try XBMC on a regular Ubuntu system follow step 3.

If you are a bit more adventurous, these are things you can try.

1. Buy a Zotac board and build your own box, here you can add blueray disk or a 3.5″ 2 TB hard drive. The Zotac PC supports only a 2.5″disk, so you are limited to lower capacities.

2. Add a remote control.

3. Made XBMC your default window manager.

Nice you tube video.

Zotac with Ubuntu