Category Archives: Reviews

Disability limits marriage choices: Online survey

http://www.ifsw.org/cm_data/Disability.jpgChoices are limited for the physically disabled wanting to get married. A recent survey shows that 59% women and 48% men refuse to marry anyone with a physical disability. About 34% women and 37% men said it depended on the situation and extent of the disability. Only 7% women and 15% men and said that they would marry someone with
physical disability.

An online matrimonial site had conducted the survey over four months starting November 2010. It had more than 1.5 lakh respondents in the age group ranging between 18 to 45 years. These also include NRIs from the US, UK, Canada, Middle East, S E Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

via Times of India

Yet another snag in Airtel service

I had flown over to Hyderabad first time for the last weekend, Hyderabad is nice city just like my home town Lucknow and the last thing that I want to be without in an unknown city with a phone with data connection.

Being a big fan of GPS and how it has helped me find/locate places in the past, it becomes very difficult for me to keep calling people and asking how to reach where. At times the way told by people you meet en route are different. And that is where GPS comes in handy.

The moment I landed, I was surprised to see my cell phone without GPRS icon. I tried everything I could to get back on data.

Later in the day I called up 121 (Airtel customer care) just to be told, yet another time, that my connection is outside Hyderabad Connection so I should call up Mumbai. I did call up Mumbai and they tell me that I am in Hyderabad and my data is having issues so I should call 12118. I called up yet another time being optimistic but to my dismay they just hung up the call after understanding what I wanted to say. I was being told that the agent will call up the required support team and conference my call to that team which never happened.

Airtel better learn from some good service providers like Vodafone.

I know loosing a customer here and there will not hamper Airtel in any sense but O’ mightly Airtel thou might never know when the tipping point comes.

Samasung Galaxy 3 User experience

smiley galaxy 3Bought me a Samsung Galaxy 3 as a Valentine ’s Day present, had waited too long to get hands on an android and Angry Birds made this inevitable.

It took me just 5 minutes to buy the phone and I was online, no settings needed and all contacts sync on the phone while I was happily chatting my way through on the talk application.

A call landed on my phone and wow it showed the name of the caller along with photo. I didn’t do anything,  Google sync is surprisingly wonderful.

I launched maps and was happy to see the quick response of GPS assisted with data.

However by the time I reached home, a couple thousand contacts from Google and face book had been synced, yup I did download the Facebook app on my way home.

I tried calling my parents and it revealed the dark side of Galaxy 3. The phone application sucks big time. It took me almost 30 seconds for the contacts to show up. No matter what I did it remained slow.  I finally fixed it today after 3 days and night of extensive research and hit and trail based tweaking.

The music player is great, it says 5.1 on the top right corner but till now I have not been able to play music in that mode, I always get the error that 5.1 mode is only supported when effects are off, and till date I have not been able to find the way to turn the effects off, ma be I would read the manual when I don’t have anything to do or get fed up playing around with my droid.

Coming soon – how I made my galaxy 3 Shine.

Reliance Broadband+ vs Tata Photon+

I recently bought Reliance Broadband+ connection for wireless internet as there were a lot of issue with the wired one due to the construction going around and the digging of roads involved. I enquired about both Tata and Reliance and had to buy Reliance as Tata was some how not feeling right.

Reliance has a lot many flexible plans and that tempted me to go for reliance.

Photon+ available in 73 cities (works all over the country with limited speeds)

Broadband+ available in 56 cities (works all over the country with limited speeds)

http://www.bloggerspoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Tata-Photon-Relaince-netconnect-Broadband+.JPGimage    Vs     http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_SlRfLvjk-wk/S5jZ13_xAiI/AAAAAAAAAbs/JPUSF5v74gY/s400/Tata_Photon_Plus.jpg

Cost comparison chart

Data Bandwidth Reliance Broadband+ Tata Photon+
Modem 2299 2499
0.5 GB 499 500
1 GB 650 650
2 GB 750 750
3 GB 850 850
5 GB 899 950
10 Gb *1050 1100
15 GB *1550 1500
10 GB night 499 Not Applicable
1 GB day/ 10 GB night 849
2 GB day/ 10 GB night 949 Not Applicable
3 GB day/ 10 GB night *849 Not Applicable
5 GB day/ 10 GB night *1098 Not Applicable
10 GB day/ 10 GB Night *1249 Not Applicable
10 GB city# *899 Not Applicable
10 GB day/ 10 GB Night city# *1098 Not Applicable
* =200 discount for a year from the date of purchase of connection. All costs in INR #city plans do not allow roaming

My Plan is the 3GB day/10GB night one.

Speed that I get are upto 350 KBPS at times but most of the time the connection is at 1.6 mbps ie arounf 150 to 200 KBPS which is decent enough.

While idle there is bare minimum usage of a couple of KB per second and it also goes to 0.00 KBPS when all connections are idle.

netconnect window

At times the device is not identified but just reinstalling the application once more does the trick and barely takes a minute. May be this is just with me.

One doubtful thing over here is that Reliance has no way of tracking the sessions as in they wont be able to show you how much data was downloaded/uploaded in day and night slots separately.

This might confuse the customers and the there will be billing issues. I was told by the contact centre executive that they are working on it so lets see how soon they can do it considering that its not that big a task. BSNL has been doing such session based tracking since the beginning.

One more thing that pushed me towards Reliance was  low modem cost and the discount of INR 200 on the plans that are above  INR 1000.

I have been using Reliance in various cities and the past experience had been good so I again went with the tried and tested one instead of experimenting.

If any one has any experience with Photon+ please share with us.

Why India is so hot this year

The month of March 2010 was characterized by above normal temperatures over Delhi. The month started on a warm note with both maximum and minimum temperatures 5-6 Degrees C above their normal values. It was only during the second week when they were near normal.

image002[1]

The graph shows a lot of deviation in the temperature of Delhi. This is the same with all the cities across the country. The temperatures are at all time high. After 2005 this year has broken all the past records.

Patna experienced the hottest April in last 10 years and a new analysis of global surface temperatures released by NASA showed that the past decade was the warmest ever on Earth.

For India the major reason is a large anti-cyclonic follow over northwest and central India that caused downward motion of warm air.

“The subsidence warming, when combined with lack of moisture and a practically cloudless sky, re-sulted in more insulation and persistently high temperatures”. as said by the IMD sources.

BSNL’s* customer service rocks

There were days in the past when any one tried to call BSNL customer care the phones were not at all picked up and even if they were the customer was bounced like a throw ball across various lines. That was so frustrating roaming around various departments of the telco just to get a minor issue resolved.

http://web.mit.edu/ryangray/Public/Gnus/thumbs_up.jpghttp://mh-31.com/nagpur/images/stories/mh/bsnl-logo.jpg

Now there has been a turn around. Called BSNL’s 9400024365 to convert from 2G to 3G and I was instantly with an executive. No waiting at all that too on a Thursday. The executive gave detailed information about everything and told what all was needed to be done. I was so happy with the change in the way BSNL looked at its customer service. Currently I would rate it among the best in lines with Vodafone and Airtel. Reliance still sucks big time. They never can pull up any customers info and site the problem that they don’t have access. Why do they make such call centres where they cant even give information to the customers.

BSNL rock for now! Share your experiences with BSNL with us.

* with respect to BSNL UP EAST circle.

Real INDIA

Stumbled upon an episode of Thousand Places to See before You Die. And this episode has India. The guide shows to the tourists Albin and Melanie Ulle the uncontrolled traffic, the crowded streets, the child hawkers, the garbage dumps along the sides of the roads and people n children in and around the garbage along with the pig and the cows as if they are our national animals. The guide keeps insisting that this is the real India.

Is this what we wanted to be the image of India? To foreigners India is all about poor and dirty people. Long gone is the image of India as a land snake charmers but still we are looked upon as such despite being the second fastest developing nation of the world.

We would like to have your comments on this.

Harishchandrachi Factory – A tribute to the father of Indian Cinema

Had it not been for the man with the revolutionary vision to create an industry of motion pictures in India, the country would not have had the largest film industry of the world producing more than 900 motion pictures in a year and employing more than 3 million people. Harsihchandrachi Factory is not only a movie but also a tribute the the revolutionary man who we know as Dadasaheb Phalke.

http://aniket.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/harishchandrachi-factory-06072009_182500.png?w=400&h=264

The movie shows how the first motion picture of India was made. It is a mesmerizing and spell binding movie and depicts what all Dadasaheb went through to make this movie in a very exciting and entertaining manner. Had it not been for this man the existence of film industry in our country would have been a question.

Movie Details

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_r8GjWqN6cvM/SrZZCJfAJ4I/AAAAAAAAG2g/P4V31P5zmew/s320/harishchandrachi-factory-300x200.jpg

Arkayne’s plugin for bloggers

http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/398388812/ArkayneFavicon_bigger.jpgArkayne delivers relevant links at the bottom of your content. Whether that content is a blog post, news article or any other form of textual information, Arkayne examines every viewable word on the page and then searches your site, sites within your network, and the web for the most contextually relevant matches.

Arkayne does what other related content plugins don’t:

  • Allow your friends to recommend your relevant blog posts.
  • Show more of your posts in your RSS feeds.
  • Introduce you to other bloggers in the same space.
  • Deliver high CTR rates that increase your audience.

This vdo from their website shows how it works.

We installed this plugin yesterday and registered with their network. The concept of recommending the blogs on the newtork is great. We are still lookin out how it can benefit our websites and would be posting more about Arkayne in near future.

Adam – The Indian iPad killer

Apple’s iPad was, it’s fair to say, awaited with the kind of breathless anticipation usually reserved by nubile nymphets for rakish rockers.
But even as consumers rave about it, the technoscenti are already looking ahead ─ to a product that could make the iPad seem outdated, and, what’s more, is completely Made in India.

India is, of course, regarded as a software superpower but hasn’t really made waves in IT hardware so far. That could soon change, thanks to the Adam tablet PC of Hyderabad-based Notion Ink. Adam has generated enormous buzz on tech websites and gadget blogs ever since an early prototype was first demonstrated at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show), the world’s largest consumer tech trade show in January this year… Continue reading on  Time of India