Is Galaxy S2 worth buying?

A friend asked me "How is samsung galaxy S2? Worth buying?"

In one word I can say Yes, but I being me would go on and on and on.....

SII got a 1.2 GHz dual core processor and 1 gb ram, iPhone 4 has 1 GHz single core processor. I found SII is much faster than the SI and iPhone 4. But watch out for iPhone 5.

Samsung got a 4.3 inch screen bigger than 3.5 inch apple screen. But iPhone has super high resolution retina display compared to Read somewhere that iPhone screen is less power intensive and reproduces colors better but that does not mean a lot as of now.

The Body is plasticky, SII back cover is flimsy, made of slim plastic, seems will break down at any moment. iPhone 4 has a industrial design, it is the sturdiest you can get ever.

The OS in Android 2.3 (ginger bread) is far more stable compared to 2.2 and 2.1, but iOS is most stable any day. Personally like using a Android OS compared to iOS, because of the Home screen and Apps screen separately. Expect iOS 5 to add more features to the stable and then I might have to change my opinion.

Overall i feel iOS gets better apps than Android. Don't like the Android App market experience, most of them look lot less polished than the iOS apps. Most of the apps I use however are available on both platforms so it does not matter.

I like the integration to Gmail/Google Apps/Social Networking in Android. iOS will have integration with twitter in iOS 5, but it is far less integrated.

Battery... I used to run out of the iPhone 3GS in half of the working day with SI somehow get to the end of the day (because I play with SI far less compared to iPhone), with a Blackberry Bold I would use 2 whole days. Displays consume most battery apart from the calls, bigger and touch screens even more.

If mail is the primary use of the phone Blackberry is better (Bold Series (avoid Torch) but look out for the new ones coming. For high apps and games use I would recommend iPhone. SII gives a more balanced user experiences.

Finally; when I bough the SI I though to myself that it is a poor mans iPhone. I still stick to it. SII gives far more value for money spent than iPhone.

Reliance Broadcom Wimax: A Review

In the last week of March I asked the Reliance Broadband to change the plan from 150Kbps to 300Kbps as the difference in the price is just 250 bucks while the speed is double. The rate plan change took nearly 15 days.

I first tested the speed with the Mumbai server which gave me 295 Kbps download speed and 867 Kbps upload speed, which does not seep right.


Then I tested with the Singapore server. The test with the Singapore server my opinion gives a more accurate speed.

Now a days I download nearly 3 movies a day, a 700 mb file in every 6-7 hrs, which is causing an overkill of the number of movies as I am not able to watch most of them.

Reliance Broadcom Wimax: My First Impressions

Today the guys from the RCom came and installed the system.

I have subscribed speed of 150 Kbps, and I am getting better speed than that at 2 speed tests on speedtest.net clocking 176 Kbps and 205 Kbps, but the upload speeds are pathetic with around 6 Kbps both the times and in a current test 1 KBps. On the torrent uploading it is not crossing 3 KBps. I also ran uTorrent and got nearly 16 KBps (it's the big B) on average download speeds, with the Gmail IMAP folders updating in the background. I guess I have to file a complaint for the upload speeds because I am not been able to update the mandatory My Profile page, and change the password as that page is not getting updated at all.

Following is the 3rd test:

Another problem is the PoE needs UPS backup, every time it switches off it takes nearly 5-20 min to get back to normal and start working. And I was told that the PoE (Power over Ethernet) is very sensitive to voltage fluctuations. That means you really don't get instant internet as in the case of bsnl where it used to take much less time.

They installed a reception antenna facing towards the reliance mobile towers and a PoE thingy. The engineer said the installed instruments cost 15K but I think he was bluffing. Line of sight to the reliance towers is a must it seems else the connection speed reduce drastically. Fortunately I got one.

One small irritant is the "User Workspace" window that needs always needs to be open else the connection drops.

Review of Sony Ericsson K790i

Idea for the upgrade:

I was a satisfied owner of a SEK750i – very pleased with the performance of my instrument. It had a good 2 mega pixel Auto Focus camera that did AF with optics, rather than purely on a digital level. It had pretty decent talk and standby time. The music capabilities were fair enough for a casual listener like me, and had thrown in some de-facto PIM capabilities like the Calendar, Alarm, Notes. On the connectivity front as well it faired decently. It had the Bluetooth, IR, USB connections apart from support for GPRS.

Well basically it had everything that I wanted. But then I had to change. I have this compulsive urge of trading my phone for a new one every once in a while. This time therefore I went for an upgrade rather than a new model altogether. The choice was obviously the (not so) New SE K790i since it succeeded the K750i from SE.

The First Look
The first five things I noticed when I took the phone in my hands were:

• It seemed slightly lighter than the K750i, though in size it was larger than the K750i, may be because I was so exited.
• It had a matt finish on the back of the phone body, and it too had a camera sliding cover which, on sliding would activate the camera.
• It had a slightly changed key layout with an instant internet key thrown in.
• It had a larger screen and the Menu seemed similar to K750i.
• The words cyber-shot were mentioned prominently on the phone at the back camera sliding cover and under the screen.

Now let us go into the details
Price

The K790i set me back by Rs. 16,500 from the grey marker without bill. The going rate for a new K750i is around Rs. 9,800. I had to go to the grey market as I had to barter the old phone for part of the price. My old phone went for Rs. 6,300 (it had a 1GB memory, I bought for Rs.1,200 which now costs Rs. 600). I bought a 1GB M2 memory for the new phone for Rs. 1,300. SE K790i uses a new M2 format memory that is similar to miniSD in size.

Body

The K790i (105 x 47 x 22 mm) is a larger phone compared to the K750i (100 x 46 x 20.5 mm). K790i (115gm) is also slightly heavier than the K750i (99gm) however if one would look at the ratio of size to weight K790i would seem lighter as I though initially.

K790i seemed a slightly less sturdy than the K750i. It had matt-finish plastic on the back that looked delicate than that of K750i which has a sturdy plastic cover. If you tap on the plastics of the phone you can listen to the hollowness inside, the K750i was on the other hand was a solid brick.

Looks

In this part of the world most of the phones do get greasy a bit due to the moisture in the atmosphere. The back has a matt-finish that would not let any grease apparently visible. It has a slide-down camera sporting black color and a Xenon Flash over it. There is a Speaker Phone at the back as well. On the left you will find a music button and a M2

K790i has a curvy line on the back of the phone with Aluminum finish; it is the median between the front and the back. Front of the phone has a brushed steel finish, but the large screen overshadows everything else. There are two buttons for use with the camera on both sides of the ear phone on the front. The screen is surrounded by mirror finish border. The number keys look very tiny; anyone with large fingers would find it very difficult to SMS. There is an extra instant internet button creating a balanced grid of menu buttons.

Menu

Enough talk on the looks, lets talk about the menu structure of the phone. At first look I thought the menu is exactly same as that of SE K750i, however later found out some differences in both. SE K790i has a set dark looking themes preinstalled in it that compliments the overall black hue of the phone. The main menu is same as SE K750i however underneath it you will start discovering new things. Let me list them here:

• The key left to the earphone starts picture view and the left one will being the grid view of the pictures.
• Internet Section starts with the Google Search box. It seems Google is to be found everywhere.
• Entertainment section sports a new Video Player it supersedes the Music Player that used to do the job. The phone comes preinstalled with some mute videos – the purpose of which I could not understand.
• 2 new games other than the Tennis Game from Sega. The other 2 games are on golf and photography.
• A new RSS reader in the Messaging section – I have not tried it yet so will not be able to comment on it.
• Music Player has been revamped. Main window starts with 4 options - Now Playing, Artists, Tracks and Playlists. Artists and Tracks section get automatically updated with the ID3 tags from the mp3 files.
• File Manager is also got revamped. Now you find 3 tabs one each for the memory stick and internal memory and one overall.
• Thoughtfully the Camera album – the place where all the camera pictures and videos are stored has been made as separate folder – earlier it was buried inside the Pictures and Videos folders respectively.
• Videos folder gives a Live Thumbnail view of the videos that start playing the preview when the file is selected.
• The light in the organizer is missing now. The Xenon Flash does not allow it to be used for long duration as a torch light as earlier flash used to.
• There are 5 configurable Alarms in the new phone, which is a boon for people like me who oversleep every day.

Camera

SE K790i is all about the camera. It was the first phone from the Sony Ericsson to sport the Cyber-shot branding of Sony. It has a 3 mega pixel Auto Focus camera, and a true Flash to compliment it. The phone has 8 in all buttons dedicated to the camera – including a couple of new tiny buttons near the speaker.

The camera has a dedicated button on the right side panel. Apart from that the volume buttons can be used for zoom/pan in the camera mode. The Zoom can be used Numeric 3 and 6 buttons on the keypad.

The camera sports 8 custom modes

• Auto
• Twilight Landscape
• Twilight Portrait
• Landscape
• Portrait
• Beach/Snow
• Sport
• & Document

All these can be easily accessed from the right side button near the speaker when camera is on. Further the there are 4 Shoot modes as well. Apart from Normal and Video the camera/phone also sports a BestPic and Panorama. BestPic is the mode in which the camera takes a series of shots and one has to choose the best one of them. The shoot modes can easily be accessed from the Left Button near the speaker.

Camera can shoot in VGA, 1 MP, 2 MP and 3MP and these can be changed conveniently with the Numeric 1 on the keypad. The Focus length can be Macro, Infinity or Auto focus. These settings can be controlled from the Numeric 4 on the keypad. There is a digital image stabilization that can be activated from the Numeric 7 on the keypad. The flash got Auto Flash mode, the Red Eye Reduction and No Flash modes. As per my experience the Red-worked fairly well but then it is just a phone. They can be accessed from the Numeric * key on the keypad.

My Journey into Word Press

I was confused as to how my blog should look like and how do I have the various topics covered on the Blog. In last few days I had experimented with Google Pages and Blogger working in tandem. I had 5 different blogs on the web for different purposes and they were linked to a Home Page on the Google Pages.

Different Styles on Google Pages and Blogger made everything look very odd. I was clueless how to go about it. Google Pages won’t let you import any new styles (CSS) and have limited number of uninspiring styles. It would be better to have similar looking styles on the Google Pages and Blogger and a way to integrate the both. I don’t understand the Google’s way of having every thing in duplicates. They have the Google Video and the YouTube and now the Google Pages and the Blogger.

While all this confusion persisted I was told by someone – (that some one is arun_k_d) about trying WordPress. As I was eager to have some kind of uniformity of shorts I didn’t think twice before logging in to WordPress.com.

That is how my Journey to the WordPress begins and here's a look at what it was like.

Dashboard:

• The interface of WordPress was easy for a novice and I was at ease with it instantly. Initially though I fiddled with the WordPress Dashboard and saw the recent happenings about my blog aptly called “Your Stuff”. In the Blogger Dashboard’s got a lot of useless clutter.
• I was impressed with the Blog Stats and the Feed Stats, in Blogger I had to go to Google Analytics to know how miserable my blogs are performing. Tag Surfer is a cool way to know what others are talking about. This is there nothing similar to Tag Bowser in Blogger that I have come across.
  

Posts and Comments

• In the Write Tab I saw some common tools in the right-hand side of the page, and better still you can configure it as well. What I liked was WordPress has to option to selectively allows Discussion and Pings for each post. You also can have private messages- I am not sure what can be done with private posts. Track Back, Post Password, Post Slug is yet to be checked by me. I liked the Blogger Interface for posting to blog it is neater and less options to worry about.
• For Managing or Moderating comments in WordPress you can edit them. I am yet to use it on Blogger. On WordPress You know from where the person is posting (his IP address is given). Comments can be classified as Spam – it is an easy way to delete all the Spam messages from a person.

Managing Posts

• Manage Tab is what made me to switch to the WordPress. The management of Posts is not very different from the Blogger, only it is based on Ajax or Flash or something like that which makes the posts disappear as soon as you click delete (I know absolutely nothing about any programming so don't know how it is done). In the Blogger it takes more time and confirmations to delete a post.
• Word Press lets you have separate web pages and you can have one of the Static pages as the Front Page from the Options Menu. This solved my problem of having to use 2 different domains on the Google Pages and Blogger and also got the uniformity of the look and feel of the entire web site.
• The Categories in WordPress are known as Labels in Blogger. Label sound good to hear. But there is no Label management in the Blogger. WordPress is a lot better. You can edit the Categories, if you feel like changing the names in one go. Blogger allows to delete or add labels with out going into the post, from Label action drop down menu in Edit Post Tab. I had not seen it earlier. But does not let you edit the Label though.
• The best thing that I saw was the Import facility form LiveJournal, Blogger among others. So I instantly pressed the button to import from the Blogger and import all the 5 blogs I have there. Changed the labels and – I am done. I plan to update this piece on the Blogger first and import to Word Press.

One mystery surrounds me till now. WordPress automatically logged in to the Blogger and imported the posts from all my blogs. But I could not understand how WordPress knew about my Blogger ID and Password? I had given only my Yahoo Email id at the time of registration. Only guess I could have is since I was logged into the Blogger at that time on my computer so WordPress could have picked up from the cookies.

• By the way WordPress lets you export as well if you may like to combine 2 or more blogs into one. Blogger doesn’t have this so I had to delete the smaller blogs and post all the posts to the new Blog.

Miscellaneous

• Blogger allows custom domains so as WordPress. On WordPress the main blog resided on the WordPress and the traffic from the Custom Domain is transferred to WordPress Domain. But on the Blogger it is opposite for a good reason.
• No Google Adsense in here. Adsense is an easy way to have some revenues. (I have got $1.08 in last 8 months by clicking ads on my posts by mistake and they promise that as soon as it becomes $100 they will send me a check :) ).
• You have Blogroll on the WordPress, to add outside links and that’s about it. In the Blogger you have Layout Editor where you can add element and do it. You can have List, Link List, Picture, Text, and Code. Adsense, among others on left or the bottom of the blog Home page. I prefer the Blogger to WordPress in this department. It gives a lot more flexibility to edit all portions of your blog.
• WordPress has 52 themes to install compared to 38 on the Blogger. WordPress gives more flexibility with regard to the themes. The theme are better on the Blogger and I like more themes on it then WordPress. You can have sidebar widgets on the WordPress so as you can have some Widgets on the Blogger as well. I tried neither.
• Both Blogger and WordPress allow other members to post and edit the blog. Since I have no one else to do it except for me I don’t know much.
• The WordPress options seemed sanely more relevant compared to Blogger. However Blogger options are much more exhaustive in comparison. As I said earlier in Blogger you can change the name of the blog site, e.g. I change the blog address from GomzyPix to Gomzy Online on Blogger but I could not have done that on the WordPress, there I would have to create a different blog first, export the current blog and then import to the new blog.
  
• There is one more Upgrade facility in the WordPress where you can buy credits to have Custom CSS – Blogger you can upload your own theme or more space on the WordPress – I think it is pretty much unlimited on the Blogger.

So that’s how both stand up head to head and I think WordPress wins the battle on most of the grounds.

Review of Canon S3 IS

Ok, this might seem funny.

Wait!! it is funny. Could not take any serious pictures yet, except for these 2 that I took for the blog. and a just a few others.

Review:

Build:

1. at 410g it is heavier than my previous Sony DSC 5W, but feels handy, not to large or small and also feels quite solid.
2. Every time i switch on the camera lens cap falls down. I always forget to remove before switching on.
3. The buttons seemed to be pretty well lay out; the Manual Focus and Macro button are on the left side of lens.
4. It got a plastic tripod mount !!
5. It got a rotating LCD display which addictive.
6. It has stereo microphone and speaker.
7. It takes 4 batteries so on a single charge maximum number of pictures can be taken compared to any other roughly @ 500 pix.

Oparation

1. The camera supports the following modes:
   a. Auto
   b. Portraitc. Landscape
   d. Night Scene
   e. Sports
   f. Special Scene: it further includes the following

i. Fire Works
ii. Color Accent - only one color can be seen rest b/w
iii. Color Swap- changes one color for another
iv. Night Snap Shot
v. Indoor
vi. Foliage
vii. Snow
viii.Beach
g. Stitch Assist
h.Movie
i. Program AE
j. Shutter Speed Priority AE - It is similar to Program AE - however you the camera takes 2 more picture 1 above the shutter speed specified by you and one below. (this does not work on the best quality, largest size mode)
k. Aperture-priority AE - same as above here the aperture changed. These 2 modes are very good for amatures as it lets them know what are the effect of light and timing on the picute one takes.
l. Manual

2. Most of the variable can be adjusted through the Function button on the back, except for in Auto mode - ofcourse why else it would be Auto Mode. There is also custom White balance if you wantand 11 color modes incl vivid, natural, sepia, b/w et al.
3. The file size in the Superfine Mode at the Largest Resolution the file size is approx 2.7MB and up (the above broken glass 1st pix 2.8 and 2nd 3.1 in the native resolution)
4. The camera supports themes but they are only to hear. the startup screen is hardly visible as it starts up pretty quick.
5. no red-eye, as you can see.

   

6. It allows upto 48X Zoom when used the Digital Zoom. And there is a Super Macro that lets you take a picture from 0″.
7. Fast continuous shoot at 2.3 shots/second - does not work in the Sports mode - only 1.5 shot/second
8. There is a custom button on the back which can be used for setting the following functions” a. Shooting mode
   b. Record Menu settings
   c.zoom location and
   d. Manual focus location
9. It has Auto rotate function which changes the oriantation of the camera, so that you don’t have to rotate the picute on your computer, However the Function Menu does not change. It would have been useful if the “Function” menu could also get rotated.
10. There are 4 view modes 2 on LCD and 2 on View finder - 1 each showing only picture and 1 each showing full details. The view can be configured.
11. It has 3 View Modes in the Playback mode - 1. Only Picture, 2. with basic details like date, number, resolution and size 3. Complete details including the Histogram.
12. You can zoom upto 10x on the LCD and 9 picture can be seen at most on the LCD for review in the index playback mode. The Zoom button is used to magnify pictures.

Software

The following software are given with the camera:

1. ArcSoft PhotoStudio - junior photoshop that too trimed down.
2. Zoom Browser - for downloading images from a camera, and then viewing, editing, and printing them. Movie Edit for editing movies, PhotoStitch for creating panaroma. It also has remote capture - when connected to the computer you can take a picture from PC. Quality not so good as it looks a bit grainy. Or may be i could not take a good one see here:

Conclusion: No conclusion because I am just an armature - who would blindly say I love my camera - just because I own it. Having said that I must say that the photo quality is very good, it starts up super quick and has a better continuous mode; I liked the color reproduction as well, see the previous post.

Ya! by the way it is my first review ever.

Read More on Review of PowerShot S3 Digital Camera Resource Page