Prakash Advani’s Blog

Lenovo Which has mgood Linux compatibility and good reliable product has released the Lenovo X200 with 12.1″ display.

This is similar to the popular Lenovo X61 except that it has the new Intel centrino 2 processor which improves battery life significantly. (you can get upto 9 hours! of battery life).

It also has the faster DDR 3 memory.

Now the X61 is available for steal! of $1000, if you may.

Saw this interesting product at Computex 2008: PhotoTrack

This is a GPS device that stores location information. You just carry it with when you travel and then use the software which add the location information to your photos. It does this based on time syncronisation.

It works with Flickr and works with all digital cameras.

It also has a mapping software that maps out your trip.

Excellent product, too bad the software is Windows only.

At some point of time, camera manufacturers will add a GPS device within the camera, until then use PhotoTrack

More information: www.wonderproud.com

What happens when a relatively small company launches a low cost notebook? A device that doesn’t do everything but does all the basic computing: email,browsing and wordprocessing and is available at half the cost!

From this article:
Sony: “If (the Eee PC from) Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble.”

You better be . Its high time customers stop paying a thousand dollars for typing emails, which be done as well on a $100 PC running Linux.

Eeepc Website

HP Photosmart C4388 - Multifunction Device - Printer/Scanner/Copier

Configuring this with wireless printing and scanning Ubuntu Linux 7.10

Whats good about this printer:

Wireless Printing: So your printer/scanner need not to be physically connected to the PC/Laptop and can be anywhere on the Network.

Memory Card Reader: Remove your memory card from your digital camera, insert into the printer and print your photos directly.

LCD Display: It has a nice LCD display which displays the status.

Photo quality: The printer is designed to print photo quality prints, I haven’t compared the quality, but its a nice feature to have

Flat bed scanner: So you can scan documents and books.

Copier: You can take photocopies without using a computer. Directly like a photocopy machine.

What I don’t like:

Single colour cartridge: No separate cartridge for each colour so you need to replace the whole cartridge even if you run out of one colour. What a waste!

Also be careful when you run the printer for the first time. It takes a test print and asks you to scan the page. If you don’t wait for the ink to dry up, your scanner will have ink smudged all over! Wonder why don’t ask you to wait.

Now the meat:

Note: Please read the section on HPLIP below, before you start.

Configuring the printer on Ubuntu is a breeze. Just plug in the USB cable and the printer gets detected and configured. It uses the C4200 drivers which work fine.

To configure wireless, you need to run the setup utility the first time on Windows. This will activate the wireless printing.

Once that is done, from Linux, change the print port from USB to jetdirect and give the IP address. The printer IP address can be found through the router. Once you know the IP, just ping to check if its accessible.

If you can’t figure out the IP, you can force your router to assign a specific IP address to the MAC address and then use that IP address.

If I look into /etc/cups/printers.conf this is what I see:

DeviceURI hp:/net/Photosmart_C4380_series?ip=192.168.0.11

Where 192.168.0.11 is the Printer IP address.

HPLIP

To get the scanner working. I had to install the HP utility from HPLIP Site. This was a bit tricky to install. When it was trying to install the necessary packages, it gave me some strange errors.

Package install command failed with error: 100

To fix that I had to manually install the required packages and then it worked fine.

This utility also doesn’t work with the drivers bundled with Ubuntu and those drivers needs to be uninstalled.

Once this was installed, I was able to print and scan wirelessly!

To scan use xsane or xscanimage

Also refer to this article for more information.

When was the last time you dated a woman who was nice and sexy and at the same time intelligent too? Welcome to the iPhone. Steve Jobs magic is working.

The iPhone is not only a sexy phone but extremely intelligent. Once you use it, you would find other phones are so dumb!

I tried a Windows mobile phone. While talking it would blank out the screen. Which is a good way to save power but…. during a call if I had to wake up the screen, I had to tap the screen. While doing that, some other button would get accidently activated and the call would get disconnected or go on hold.

Similarly on many touch screen phones, you would find that while talking, when the ear touches the screen, it activates some button that you didn’t wanted it to.

How does iPhone manage this? It has a proximity sensor. The proximity sensor switches off the touch screen when you take the phone close to your ear, and turns it back on when you take it off. Simple technology but extremely practical.

The iPhone interface is also the best I have seen. Very easy to use and intuitive. It hides all the complexity that a normal user wouldn’t use.

What Apple is missing in the iPhone that they are not trying to make it a replacement for a computer. It still requires the computer and iTunes to sync music, pod casts, etc. You also can’t sync your address book with Yahoo or Gmail directly, this again requires iTunes.

What more I like about the iPhone:

• Good battery life, goes on for 2 days on moderate use.
• Good sound quality through speakers and the headphone. The sound volume is good for music. However the volume is low for the phone and the speaker phone even after when the volume is on full. Didn’t figure out that one!
• Excellent screen resolution and good video playback.
• Conferencing facility works well.
• Email works well, I tried IMAP and Gmail.
• EDGE works well and it switches to WiFi whenever available.
• No crash. It has never crashed on me. It does get slow at times, when you load up too many applications but never had a crash. This is amazing considering how many times a Windows Mobile phone crashes.
• Also the operating system response is fast.
• WiFi works well and the Safari browser works well.
• Very attractively prices at US$ 399 in US. Hope they can maintain the same price in the rest of the world.

Now what I don’t like about the phone:

• Very very proprietary. Everything is proprietary and it feels like your locked into Apple for life.
• You can’t use it to connect your computer to the internet using the iPhones EDGE/GPRS service. Apparently this is again locked by Apple. There are sites that explain you how to do that in a round about way. But that’s a little complex for an average Joe user.
• You can’t edit emails once they are in the outbox but not yet sent.
• No option to send electronic business cards like Palm, Nokia and other cellphones.
• Once you sync your music/video from one computer, you can’t sync with another computer. If you do that you will lose all your music and videos. This may have been done to prevent people from sharing music but its a big pain for the average use. I feel every more sorry for Windows uses, who need to re-format their computer every couple of months. They better have backups of their iTunes.
• The phone does get a bit hot when used. Its still doesn’t get as hot as a Nokia but still its irritating.
• No expandable memory, which means you cant add more memory. With 8GB and now 16GB phones, they may not be required by most uses, but why live with a limitation?
• Camera is good but only 2 megapixel. No flash or zoom or any other camera features such as scene modes.
• No camera in the front which is required for video conferencing.
• Regular head phones jack doesn’t work. You need only an iPhone jack. Proprietary!!!
• It has excellent maps but no GPS.
• If you face a problem with the battery, replacing battery is a rocket science! Its not as easy as the other phones where you can just change the battery.
• No video recording so you can’t make some fancy home videos
• No timer for Silent mode. I like this feature in my Nokia phone, when I go for a meeting for say 2 hours, I can put the silent profile which expires in 2 hours. So after 2 hours the phone switches off the silent profile. In iPhone, you will have to manually switch it back.
• Big problem with recognising Numbers. If I have a number saved as 55555 without the country code and the caller ID send the number with +15555 (country code), it won’t understand. Nokia does this very well and that’s a limitation of the iPhone.
• Couldn’t find a way to synchronise your calendar with any other web service. Would have liked if it could sync with Google Calendar.
• No PDF reader, Adobe Acrobat! Apparently Adobe asked $2 per device as license fees and Steve Jobs said FO! So we get F$%#.
• No TV out cable included. So if you want the watch the videos on TV you can’t right do it out of the box. You need to buy a cable from Apple which cost $49.

The iPhone’s SMS is very poor, perhaps because SMS is not big in the US but it surely is in India and other countries. Hope Apple fixes it before they want to sell it to Europe and Asia.

• No MMS.
• No SMS forwarding. Not a big deal, there are third party applications that allow you to do that but it would be nice if Apple included that by default.
• SMS with special characters. These are alerts are sent by Banks/Airlines. They show as garbled on the iPhone.
• No option for sending group SMS.

Conclusion:

For me the iPhone is the smartest device I have ever used. And if you don’t mind some of the limitations mentioned about, its definitely worthy the try.

PS: If Steve Jobs is reading this, good work! But keep it open

Read Earlier post:

Why wait to buy the iPhone

Want an Pen Drive, SD Card, Mini SD, Micro SD? All in one. Ideal for people wanting to switch memory between cameras/cellphones and other devices that adheres to the SD standard.

Buy at Amazon.

Whats lacking in the $600 iPhone, which even a $50 phone has?

1. MMS.
2. Video recording.
3. Custom ringtones.
4. Mass storage.
5. Fully functioning Bluetooth with stereo audio streaming.
6. Voice dialing when you’re using a car kit.
7. Sending contact info to other people.
8. Instant messaging.
9. Sending an SMS to more than one recipient at a time.

Read more on why wait to buy the iPhone.

iPhone Review

10. Nokia 8800

9. Helio Ocean

8. Sony Ericsson W880i

7. Motorola MOTOROKR Z6

6. KDDI au Media Skin

5. Helio Kickflip

4. LG Shine

3. KDDI Penck

2. LG Prada

And number one.. is .. no prizes for guessing this one!

1. Apple iPhone

Read More at Fosfor.

OpenMoko is an Linux based phone which is like iPhone but half the cost. This is expected to be launched in October and is going to be fully open. In fact its also going to come with a screw driver!

Read More.

After using Nokia 6230i for a while now, I was wondering if I should switch to a new phone. After some investigating, can’t really find something that fits into my needs.

I am looking for something that has the following:

• 3G support or atleast EDGE.
• WiFi
• Smart Phone capabilities.
• Candy Bar, I don’t like flip phones as flip phones are not very easy to operate with one hand.
• Support for MP3 and stereo bluetooth.
• Decent Camera atleast 3 MP, not that I use my mobile camera much but having a camera which can be used when you need to take a quick picture and don’t have your digital camera, helps.
• Expandable Memory
• Uses standard SD/Mini-SD memory.
• Reliable OS, preferably Linux.

After searching on GSMArena.com I found that very few phones actually meet my requirements.

- Some Nokia do, but their OS Symbian really slows down things.

- Sony Ericsson meets some of the needs but uses a proprietary memory card (Memory Stick).

- Many Windows Mobile phones have all these, but Windows is very unreliable and can’t imagine a phone OS crashing.

- Palm Treos are decent and meets most of my needs but looks like they are going to launch Linux ones by year end. They don’t have Wi-Fi though.

Palm chief executive, Ed Colligan said the introduction of Linux would “improve the reliability and performance and stability” of Palm products.

Thats good news, as Palm really understand how to make good pda+ mobile phones. They also have the largest number of applications, which they are planning to create a kind of Palm OS emulation on Linux so you can run them.

So time to wait?

This this is free if you are in the US and can work with rebates.

From:
iLikeCheapStuff

Buy.com is carrying this Kingston 1GB Secure Digital Card

Kingston 1GB Secure Digital Card $30 Exclusive Mail-In Rebate on it until 12/23/2006

Buy.com is offering Free Shipping on this item

Your Final Price: $50 - $20 - $30 = FREE + Free Shipping

Compaq:

Turion processor
60GB drive
512MB RAM

Read More

These are refurbished old models but what the heck! nice to have a good looking computer in the house that can be used for basic browsing/chat/email.

Check them out

A friend was looking at buying a 24″ LCD. After some reserch, I suggested to him to go for 22″LCD since that was half the price and just 2″ less. Here are some good deals

You can get an Acer for US$ 300 while a Viewsonic sells for US$350.

Specs are similar:

• Screen Size: 22″ WSXGA
• Resolution: 1680 x 1050
• Response time: 5ms

Someone recommended thats its worth spending the extra $50 and getting the viewsonic!

Read More

* AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology ml-34 processor (1.8GHz)
* Genuine Windows XP Media Center
* 512MB DDR SDRAM
* 80GB hard drive
* Double-layer DVD?R/RW Super Multi drive with LightScribe
* 17″ WXGA+ high-definition widescreen display (BrightView)
* ATI Radeon Xpress 200M graphics
* 54g 802.11b/g wireless LAN
* 6-in-1 digital media card reader
* Remote, headphones
* ExpressCard/54 slot
* QuickPlay buttons
* Windows Vista Capable
* One-year limited warranty

Go get it!

Buy.com is offering Iomega Limited Edition 320GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive for only US$109. This is a good deal.

Shipping is free.

You can also search for Buy.com coupons through google and save additional US$5.

Deal ends September 29, 2006.

Note: I had difficulty in getting buy.com to accept my international visa credit card and deliver to a US address.

Cons: This doesn’t have eSATA.

The new external drives have eSATA (external SATA) port which is 3 times faster than USB 2.0 provided your PC has a eSATA port, which is a simple connector with cable that connects to the SATA port on the motherboard.

My friend Harsh suggested that since I track lots of gadgets and their prices, I should put them up. So here I start this section.