Prakash Advani's Blog

I went for a wikipedia meetup in Mumbai and learned a new way to create your own books. You can pick various articles on Wikipedia and create your own book. Very impressive I must say.

On Wikipedia:Bookshelf you will find all the books thats created.  Go to Wikibooks to create your own book, just like I created my first book

A cool looking phone from Google. Bbuilt by Samsung, hence the similarity to Samsung Galsxy S.

Here is what I like:

• Android 2.3 (first and currently the only phone to have this)
• 16GB Internal Memory
• 4″ Display
• 1 GHZ Processor

Here is what I don’t like:

No expandable memory slot, Whith 16 GB built in, you may not need it..but why not have it?

Only HSDPA 7.2Mbps, No HSDPA+ which offers 14.4 Mbps

The HTML 5 standard is looking promising. Currently Crome and Opera  has very good support, Firefox has some support for HTML5, Firefox 4 will have complete support. Most of the browsers will be fully supporting it in the next 6-12 months.

HTML 5 will offer many features which today requires additional plugins like Flash.

Here are some of the key features:

• Direct support for video. HTML 5 has tags for running videos within the browser without the need for Flash. this will improve video integration and performance.  This requires your browser to support various codecs as well such as H.264  You can test if your browser already supports this: http://www.youtube.com/html5
• 2D drawings, so you can ask your brower to draw an image, and it will do it. Its vector graphics instead of raster graphics which is gif,jpegs, pngs, etc. Hence the files are smaller in size.
• Offline web-application support, so you can run web applications even if you are offline.
• Drag and drop support. you can drag files from your computer and attach to your gmail. You can try this if you have crome installed.

Aviary has launched an HTML 5 based photo editor, have a look.

If you are more interested, check the video on Introduction to HTML 5

Motorola has managed to come up with a very good concept. Its essentially a very powerful phone, which can be converted into a PC or a netbook. This will provide a serious competition to the iPhone4 and also provide a single device which can double up as a PC or a netbook.

It has two docks which are optional accessories

• The Motorola HD Multimedia Dock has three USB ports and an HDMI port enabling connections to a keyboard, mouse, speakers and HDMI-compatible monitor for working at your desk/office, or connecting to an HDMI-compatible television and home theater audio system for interacting with content and enjoying video, music, games and more in your living room.



• The Motorola Laptop Dock has an incredibly thin design with an 11.6-inch screen, full keyboard, stereo speakers, 36Wh three-cell battery that delivers up to eight hours of battery life and weighs just 2.4 pounds. Users simply dock their Motorola ATRIX 4G into the back of the Laptop Dock to turn it into an active, connected machine to experience true mobility at work, home and playing on-the-go in a form factor that’s lighter and smaller than most laptops on the market.

Comparison between Motorola Atrix 4G and Apple iPhone 4

Image curtesy: Motorola.com

ARM which is already leading in Smart phones, is now gaining popular on Tablets.

With Microsoft also announcing today at CES that Windows will run on ARM chips and with Google’s Android Linux, Apple’s iOS, and Canonical’s Ubuntu already on the low-powered processors, that’s a big portion of modern computing.

Throw in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its clones from CentOS and Oracle, and you can pretty much call it a day in terms of OS coverage for ARM. Alas, today was not Intel’s lucky day, no matter how much revenues and profits it stands it get in the near-term from its new “Sandy Bridge” Core PC chips and future Xeon variants for workstations and servers. With Nvidia and Microsoft jumping into the ARM race, the future for Intel is going to get a whole lot tougher.

Read the complete article.

More than 40% of U.S. customers who purchased smartphones over the last six months have chosen Android-based phones.

Apple is still leading with 28.6 percent, followed by RIM (Blackberry) at 26.1 percent and Andorid at 25. percent. With the current growth, it won’t be long before Andorid becomes number 1. Read the complete report.

Thanks to the efforts of the European Commission: Apple, Motorola, Nokia, Blackberry and Samsung will release phones with standard microUSB chargers.

This will make it easy for customers as one charger can charge all their phones, will reduce the e-waste and bring standardisation.

If you are in the market for a new phone, ensure that its using microUSB.

Read the complete article, if you are interested.

Now its time for notebooks and netbooks to standardise on a common charger. It should be 12 volts so that car batteries can be used in places where power is a problem.

AirJaldi is an organisation which has pioneered the art of creating mesh WiFi networks. They have managed to reach Internet to the hills in Dharamshala, where connectivity is a challenge.

Here is a full writeup about them. Some interesting quotes

The open-source community has also dabbled extensively in it, creating a suite of free software. Most of AirJaldi’s work, Ginguld says, was made possible by “standing on the shoulders of these open-source giants”.

“I hope we’ll be remembered for adding some beauty to this place, not as someone who bought the silicon valleys of Pamela Anderson to innocent Dharamshala,” Ginguld says. For him, the Internet is a basic freedom—as important as security, water or electricity.