No longer the Apple of my eye

http://business.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?265709

I have so far never purchased an Apple product. And it will be a long time before I will. Not unless they stop their bullying tactics. I hate bullies you see, and I like my freedom.

Yes, I do own 3 iPods. The first one, a 30 Gb video ipod, was given to my father by his company as part of some Sales conference gift. The second, 4 Gb, iPod Nano, slim and slender, was a gift from some friend or relative, I don't remember which or who. The third iPod, another Nano, but part of the rounded square series, was won by me at an inter-Bschool quiz held by Infosys. And I cannot describe the sheer joy owning these 3 has given me. The sheer beauty and design of the these products, at that time, was unmatched.

Apple products are usually the best looking and best designed. Using them is sheer joy. Simple, elegant, classy. Genius.

So why am I saying that I won't buy Apple products for some time to come ? And why am I blasting Apple ?

For a long long time I used to really admire all Apple products. And I still do for their design. And I love their software as well. But some where down the line, I started disagreeing with their philosophy. 'Think Different' is their motto - how can I when they control all the apps and service providers and software on all their products ?

Lets start with the Macs. I used to always admire their design, those pure white pristine beauties. But, they were always too costly. Now I don't mind paying more for the cost... but then I don't see the point in buying a Mac and running Windows OS on it. And Mac OS, despite being good, is not compatible with so many softwares. But until this point, I had no problems with Apple. In fact, I used to admire them 100%.

I took serious exception to their behaviour with the launch of the iPods. I would have preferred a simple folder system, where I plug the iPod in, copy my songs onto the iPod HD, and voila ! If I want some classification, let it be folder based. Now I understand iTunes offers multiple viewpoints, so you can classify and view songs, by different meta-data labels associated with each song. And maybe it was difficult to implement this system with the PnP, Copy & Paste system. (Though I don't even think they tried.)

But they could have at least allowed me the option of having a Folder system as opposed to the iTunes system. Like Sony. Like Cowon. Like everybody else. But no.. they want to maintain their 'control' and yes, they wanted to make money via iTunes. Fine.

Things got out of hand with the launch of the iPhone. I was gushing over Apple's design technology then. But then, when it was launched, they pulled off a cheap trick. Your phone was 'locked' to one carrier - in the US, AT&T. What the hell ? Why the f*** should have to stick to AT&T ? This is monopolostic behaviour, this is bullying. And whatever reasons they might give, I can't palate them.

So now, for the iPod, I have to buy music, movies and ebooks only from the iTunes store. For the iPhone, and now for the iPad, I can transact and navigate myself only through Apple approved Apps. Go to hell - I ain't buying your products.

Right now also, I am looking to buy a Phone. A smartphone. Either way I wasn't going to buy the iPhone. Firstly, it is way too highly priced in India. Secondly, the idea of being locked to Airtel or Vodafone, makes my blood boil. Thirdly, I am very excited with the Android mOS - and the implications of an open source OS where millions of people can easily contribute awesome apps.

And to my great great delight, I realised I didn't enjoy using the iPhone so much. One app at a time ? No multi-tasking in the iPhone ? Ha ha. Try again. I enjoyed the Sony Ericsson Experia X10 and the Motorola Milestone much much more. I am yet to try the HTC Legend (out of stock) and the HTC Desire (not yet launched in India), but I have seen enough videos and read enough reviews to know how good they are. I haven't yet bought the phone - but it isn't the going to be the Apple iPhone for sure.

Portable Hard Disks – mmmmwwwaahh !

Just thought of giving all you people who intend to buy large portable hard disks some advice.

You have two options.

Buy a regular SATA/ATA hard disk, and enclose it in a casing that protects it from dust and basic damage, and also attaches an IDE-to-USB convertor to the hard disk, thus adding that crucial ‘ease-of-data-transfer’ feature. This option is cheaper, and you can buy HDs of humongous capacity, and carry them around. The disadvantage is that since this HD is really a normal HD enclosed in a casing, it is not really ‘portable’. Yes, you can carry it around. But you will need an extra power source, and the chances of the HD getting corrupted over time, especially if subjected to jerks while on power, are really high. For example, at the beginning of this year, I purchased a 232 GB (standard 250 GB) Seagate SATA HD for Rs. 3900. I also purchased a Transcend casing for 1600 bucks. (This is among the higher end ones – you can get a cheaper Chinese equivalent for around 600 bucks.) Thus I got a pseudo-portable 232 GB HD for Rs. 5500. In mid-2005, I had purchased another such HD + casing, for 2900 + 700 = 3600 bucks. Such HDs are very useful for people who have access to lot of data (movies, sitcoms, music, e-books, software, etc.).

The second option, obviously, is to go for an actually portable HD (let me call it pHD), which is of the same type of the HDs used in laptops. These pHDs do not require any extra power as they source their power from the USB port. You can carry these pHDs in you pockets, thus taking all your data with you, without worrying too much about the pHD getting corrupted. Until recently, these didn’t come cheap – what with an 80 GB Toshiba pHD costing Rs. 4000+. However, just last month, a friend of mine managed to buy such a pHD of size of 120 GB at a meager (by pHD standards) Rs. 3000. How cool is that ! Ofcourse, this was in Singapore, but if you do know someone who is going there, this is what you should be telling that person to buy. This implies that two 120 Gb pHDs (= 240 Gb) will cost just Rs. 6000, a wee Rs. 500 more than Rs. 5500 I paid 4 months back for a HD of the same size which wasn’t really portable, which was as heavy as big book and which required external power.

My next HD purchase, which won’t be until atleast 2-3 years later, is definitely going to be a large capacity pHD. I have a feeling that I might just be able to afford it then !

Posted @ 11.05 pm, July 05, 2007

More kudos Google's way

Yesterday I used Google Notebook (http://www.google.com/notebook) for the first time - and I'm very happy with it. It is an excellent piece of software, and very useful too, especially for a person like me who reads a majority of his articles online and likes to store the better ones. There are some bugs that need to be sorted out with, in the word editing section. However, they are very trivial bugs, so they did not pose much of a problem in the end as I found out a way around them. (And tell me about a word processor that does not give problems when you directly copy a highlighted amalgam of text, script and pictures from a webpage.. MS Word surely does !)

I've already made separate notebooks for all the distinct verticals I could think of - I thought that would be better idea as compared to make similar sections under one notebook. If you don't get what I'm saying, just give Google Notebook a try, it is definitely worth it. While scanning through some info on Notebook just now at Wikipedia, I found out that Micrsoft has had a somewhat similar product in its stable for quite some years now called Microsoft OneNote or some such thing. I think it is time they started offering some stuff free and online, otherwise they are going to lose many a valuable customer.

While on this topic of Microsoft, Google, open-source, piracy etc, I would like to make a mention of an article written by a friend of mine, which I thought was very good. Take a look at it. I too have some stuff to contribute on this topic, but I think I shall write it in another post.

Wireless

I love things that are wireless. By wireless, I mean absolutely without wires, not just wi-fi. I believe in the literal meaning of wi-fi - wireless fidelity - loyalty to that which is without wires. And fidelity towards wireless need not be restricted to snazzy electronic gadgets - it can be applied to almost any gadget or machine.

The arrival of mobile phones, satellite communication techniques, technologies like GPRS, CDMA, 3G etc. are slowly but surely negating the need for having wired telephone and internet access. Sure, wired communication is still safer, cheaper, faster and more reliable for the general public. Sure, all internet traffic travels through gargantuan and serpentine layers of undersea cabling and a worldwide network of telephone cables. Sure, Relcom purchased Flag Telecom and recently finished laying cables across the length and breadth of India. In my opinion, however, wireless is the proverbial 'lambi race ka ghoda', the technology of the future which will render wires obsolete within the next few decades.

I dream of a world in which all voice and data communication takes place only through the wireless medium.

Today, an ever increasing number of people own personal computers. Organisations invest heavily in a lot of computer hardware - PCs, network routers, storage and backup media, etc. All these are connected with wires. The standard desktop PC is a huge mess of interweaving wires - the daily jhaad-poos-waali-bai's worst nightmare. Monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, printer, scanner, webcam - all have to be connected to the CPU. There are inter-speaker wires for those 5.1's and 7.1's. The iPod has to be connected with a wire as also the mobile phone. Add to that all the power cables and internet cables. It's a mad, mad world. But nowadays, wireless mice and keyboards are becoming cheaper, and hence, more popular. The other components still use wires only, but this is set to change with bluetooth and other such short-distance high-datarate technologies being invented, perfected and mass distributed. Laptops are also being used by many more people, and a laptop is one of the strongest proponents of the wireless world.

I dream of a world in which laptops and slim wifi-communicating-component-based desktops become commonplace, and all communication with PnP devices is wireless.

Some years back, these people we knew, had purchased a flat in the outskirts of Pune. Since the area was in the purlieu of city, the municipal corporation wasn't supplying water to that area. The society had to make do with a couple of borewells dug up near. However, this water contained salts and other minerals, which made it non-potable. Hence, they had to purchase those 20 liter plastic cartons of water. Later, however, they came across this machine in an ad, which converted the water vapour in the air into drinking water. The manufacturers guaranteed atleast 20 liters of water a day. I do not know whether they actually purchased the 'aquator', but it lent high-octane fuel to my imagination - it created the possibility of elimination of water pipes from our lives. In the same way, a device could be created that would 'vaporize' all the used and unclean water, or better still purify it immediately for reuse.

I dream of a world in which there are no ugly waterpipes disfiguring our homes and bathrooms, and where the atmosphere itself is a conduit for all the water that we need.

Quite a few people must have read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In that, the leading hero, John Galt, invents a motor that is able to generate electricity / power from air. It is certainly a very fantastic claim. But, having seen the great leaps taken in technology over the past decade and a half, one cannot discount outright the possibility of such an invention taking place some years down the line. And if the invention is exactly the way it is described in the book, producing energy from thin air and yet not polluting it a bit, then it would solve 90% of the world's problems - think fuel shortage, oil and gas wars, related inflation, environmental problems and global warming. But, my focus is not on that. I look at the beauty of it - no horrendous transmission lines dotting the horizon. No ugly tangled masses of wires near your house. Clean standalone devices. No wires to trip over.

I dream of a world in which there are no messy wires spoiling the beauty of compact devices.

Some things that I wish for, especially those in the previous paragraph are way too far-fetched. However, the other things that are mentioned are very much feasible - and have already been implemented somewhere or the other. I really can envisage something like this happening in my house. Imagine your music system, your laptop / cool wireless compact lcd-screen desktop, your portable music player and your mobile seamlessly connected through wireless medium, offering an unimagineable fluidity as far as your data is concerned.

I dream on . . .


Disclaimer : This post has been written on the spur of the moment and without any research. So, some claims might be very far-fetched and some closer to reality than can be imagined.

Gadgets I'd like to own

I am an out-and-out gadget freak. Just seeing a new gadget can make my day. Owning a new device keeps me happy for months. If someone even touches any gadget I own, I become restless. I hate lending my gadgets - though ofcourse, nowadays I have consciously decided to become generous, because I don't like to borrow something and then not lend in return. Still, I am very particular as to who I lend my gadgets to.

As a student, who has not yet settled down on his own, I feel these are the gadgets I would like to own to feel complete from a luxury point of view - a laptop, a mobile, a flash memory mp3 player, a portable media player, a satellite radio set, a digital camera, a handycam, a good set of portable speakers and good set of headphones. Ofcourse, this is all fantasy - I don't quite have the money to own any of these gadgets !

Laptop - A Sony Viao or an Apple iMac would the most preferred. The high-end Dell or HP laptops would be good to, but I have a great attraction towards products from the stables of Sony and Apple. Since I'm in India, buying an iMac would be like buying a car that works perfectly, but only on 5% of the roads. So, Viao it is. I would love to buy that model which supports Blu-ray disc-writing - and I would like my laptop to be a powerhouse of sorts - high RAM, a humongous hard-disk and a fast dual-core processor.

Mobile - Again, the iPhone is ruled out as of now. So, I would either opt for a Nokia N series mobile in the 90+ series or the Moto Razr 2.

Mp3 player - I would like to own two mp3 players. The iPod nano and the Sony exercise walkman player, both with flash memories of 4 or 8 GB.

PMP - Without doubt, the COWON A2. A friend of mine has it, and using it is a delightful experience.

Satellite Radio - There's not much choice in India, so Worldspace it is.

Camera - The most expensive Cybershot offered by Sony.

Handycam - A digital hard-disk based handycam from Sony again.

Speaker Set - Any speakers from either Creative, Bang & Olufson or Bose.

Headphones - Since Bose has been advertising their headphones so much, Bose it is.


Aaah ! Just thinking about these gadgets has released a flood of endorphins and other happiness and exhilaration inducing chemicals in my body . . .

The Future of Gadgets and Interfaces

Somewhere in the middle of last semester, a video titled "The Future of Computing" popped up on our hostel LAN. Obviously some one had downloaded it from YouTube - and on searching I did find it there. The stuff shown is mind-blowing and even a gadget-centric person like me had never imagined something as wonderful as this. Incidentally, this is my first video-blog-post . . . symbolic, don't you think ?



One of the earliest applicants of this technology is Apple, in their maiden mobile phone effort - the Apple iPhone. If you haven't already seen the amazing features in the iPhone, take a look at this clip :



Makes you go "Ooooh!", doesn't it ?