My Nokia E63

Its been a long time since i blogged and 3 long years with my phone, a Z550i from Sony Ericsson. i finally made a move to a business phone and bought a Nokia E63. It was a no-brainer decision for me as this was the cheapest business phone available. 10-11K was the budget i had in my mind and this fitted the bracket perfectly. Im very impressed with its capabilities so far. I have configured Gmail, OviMail, Facebook, Twitter, Nimbuzz IM and found the going easy so far. The QWERT keyboard is quite convenient to use. The hitch so far has been that i havent been able to get the mail for exchange configured with my coprporate exhange servers.

I got the Airtel Weekly Unlimited GPRS connection enabled for Rs 140 (Weekly) and the speeds have been quite good. Yes it going to be costly but im waiting for Nokia to announce their paid messaging service with Airtel (Similar to Blackberry's). I hope it similar to what Airtel-Blackberry offer at Rs 299/- cause a couple of my friends picked up Blackberry phones and avoided a nokia precisely for the lack of push email. Sometimes i wonder what the fuss is..about push and pull. For me a pull client is good enough no?

Chrome OS

Now thats a missile directed at Windows 7 and MS, When everyone has been touting android on netbooks or even notebooks, Google surprises everyone with a chrome OS. It will be fast, lighweight, new and based on the linux kernel. This is good. It will be opened up to public similar to Android.

I expect this to be up and running in under 5 seconds. Ubuntu has plans for a 10 second boot. Google chrome Os should be a lean linux kernel, with a new lightweight windowing system and of course chrome running.

This will truly tie all the ends for google. Google OS, Google Browser, Google Apps (like Office) and Google clouds. Why will anyone want MS then?

Microsofts is getting tested for sure.

Hyperspace Fast Boot

Phoenix Technologies is offering a 21 day trial pack of their fast boot product called Hyperspace. I dowloaded it but then it requires XP + SP3 which i dont have on my laptop. So till i get to SP3..id have to wait to evaluate the fastboot. 

Picasa Photo Viewer

Image via Wikipedia
The Picasa 3 has a nifty new feature called the Photo Viewer. Click on any image and this is what it will look like.


Its got a very cool effect to it and looks rather snazzy. I feel its got a very 'mac' look to it.

You can zoom in and out of the picture by using your mouse or the up and down cursor keys.

Chrome Bugs and the opera connection

That Chrome incorporates a lot from Opera is not very good news. So google themselves did a Microsoft dint they? (for MS having taken a lot of Apple Mac features). Well the bad news certainly stems from the fact that are we running out of ideas and features for browsers? Even if they had launched 6 months later but with features that were really unique and enhancing user experience, it would have well been the effort. Well the fact also is not many use Opera and hence using chrome would definitely provide a enhanced and newer experience for the user.

Well news is also that there are bugs in chrome (of course) and they are coming out fast. People are going to tear chrome apart especially for the fact that its a BIG product launch from google.

Google Chrome Vs Firefox

Image via Wikipedia Googles official announcement about the impending launch of Chrome, their own scratch up browser. Well what does this do to Firefox? The second ranked browser in terms of market share has never had it going so good. A recent record number of downloads for Firefox 3 and the new features have only added to Firefox'es popularity. Well now with chrome coming out, what does this do with google's association with FireFox? Google being inherently more popular than the Firefox brand, a download chrome link on their main page may get a whole lot of users trying out their new browser. This will of course impact Firefox and even IE, but then users will really decide that. 5 years down the line, will Firefox and chrome compete? will they merge into one? will Firefox fade like how Netscape did? or will users simply reject chrome? Not every Google product is successful and well that might simply be the answer.

OTOH, if chrome is a really good design and can fit into embedded devices as much as it can into PC's them well it may well still be a really successful browser.