Category Archives: Technology

Gadgets, Mobile

Airtel vs Aircel for iPhone 4

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Airtel and Aircel, both have launched the much awaited iPhone 4 in India after 11 months of its launch in the US.

The phone is priced at 34500 INR for 16 GB and 40900 INR for 32 GB model by both the service providers.

What matters here is the rentals and the other charges that would come along with your iPhone 4 for a period of two year contract.

Both the service providers are trying to lure the customer by giving the rental discounts and showing up savings of upto INR 41040 in the 2 year contract period.

Here are snapshots for two very close plans from Airtel and Aircel, just for comparision. ( There are other plans too )

In the INR 1200 plan Airtel gives a discount of 600 and 800 MB of data at 3G along with 1050 local minutes and 1250 sms. This will be good for a caller whose major calls are local. The STD user will definitely suffer as the local minutes will be of no use. 800 MB of 3G data is good but the user will never know when the 800 MB got over and would be charged heavily for more data that point onwards.

 

Aircel has almost the same plan at INR 1119, with a monthly discount of INR 720 with 1250 free local minutes and 500 sms plus 350 MB of 3G data.

The data is less compared to Airtel and also the sms that the user gets per month is less then half of what Airtel is offering.

At this point Airtel definitely looks like a better deal, but the table turner can be the *conditions apply which will be different for both service providers.

Details about all other plans can be found here :- Airtel , Aircel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google, Internet

Gmail’s People Widget

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http://cdn3.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/people_03_individual.pngGoogle has just announced that it’s rolling out a new feature over the next week called the People Widget — a small sidebar to the right of email messages that features contextual information about the people you’re interacting with in Gmail. I don’t have the feature active yet so I’m going by the screenshots provided, but it looks like the widget includes each person’s job title, recent email exchanges you’ve had with them, photo, calendar availability, and shared Google Docs. It also includes Buzz updates (hopefully Twitter integration is coming as well).

If you only exchange a handful of messages a day then this probably isn’t a game changer for you, but if you’re constantly having to deal with a flurry of projects and hundreds of contacts, then it could be a godsend.

Technology

Phone’s future lies in cloud

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http://tftscdn.nexus404.com/Blog/wp-content/thumbs/alt/INQ-cloud-touch-w480TFTSThumb174135RC.jpgCloud computing is the news buzz in the market and everyone wants to join the bandwagon in some way or the other. Soon we will witness that feature phones will work on cloud and this can be a revolutionary change in feature phones.

Telecom giants are eager to use this boom in communication to its fullest. Verizon, an American communication firm has recently acquired Terremark, a company that specializes in web hosting and cloud computing. So it could be obvious that Verizon will use the technology of Terremark to rest its phones on cloud. Samsung and Motorola are the front runners in this initiative of displaying cloud based mobile phones. Samsung is looking to use either Chromium or even WebOS from HP to make sure it has a great user interface in place. The recent news of Motorola acquiring Zecter, a company that provides music and photo streaming services to mobile phones also indicates their intention to make extensive use of Cloud.

Users will benefit big time from Cloud, as it will provide a very low cost of phones as one need not store its apps on their phone and will be able to access apps from a cloud server. The data accessed by smartphones resides on the phone itself hence this raises the bar of the cost in them. Cloud phones, on the other hand, are cheaper phones running on software stored in a remote server or cloud and one does not need to carry data with them. All one needs to do is just pluck data from the cloud and make use of your apps, data, and whatever you like.

This means that feature phones will now have the same amount of data available to them as that of smartphone and there is no worries for data storage since it will be taken care by the Cloud. However in order to store data beyond the free limit one has to pay a certain amount.

The most significant part of this boom is that phone users can go for a new handset without worrying about their personal data since Cloud will keep it safe in it. More interestingly, other apps like the music player, mobile desktop, printer app, and multimedia player can be based in the cloud.

Technology

Carriers no match for Credit card companies for Mobile payments

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Samsung’s Nexus S includes NFC capability, which means you’ll be able to use it to make mobile payments (someday). Photo Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Isis, the collaborative mobile payments venture initiated by three major U.S. telecom carriers, is scaling back its efforts to compete with the credit card industry.

Created in a joint effort by T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T, Isis first aimed to allow customers to pay for purchases at retailers by using their smartphones, with a network of payments independent of credit card companies. Purchases and account information would have been handled by the carriers.

Instead, Isis now has its sights set somewhat lower.  Isis is now working to produce a sort of “mobile wallet.” Customers will still use their smartphones to pay for purchases, but instead of an independent payment network ran by the carriers, the phones will use your existing credit card information.

Isis had already enlisted the help of Discover Financial Services to start the venture’s payment system. But Discover is no Visa or MasterCard, and merchants weren’t keen on the idea of cutting out the two giants.

And why should they? There’s really no need to reinvent the wheel, just to create an enabling technology which leverages the parts that already work, and make it better. The point is to replace a wallet full of cards, not create new cards.

Internet

Grouponomics of the deal

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18 months ago, Groupon didn’t exist. Today, it has over 70 million users in 500-odd markets, is making more than a billion dollars a year, has dozens if not hundreds of copycat rivals, and is said to be worth as much as $25 billion. What’s going on here?

There’s obviously something clever and innovative behind Groupon — but what is it? Given that customers with Groupons are saving lots of money on goods and services, how can this possibly be good for merchants? Is there a catch somewhere?

There are significant network effects at play here: The more people Groupon signs up, the more targeted its deals can be. And there’s another social aspect to Groupon’s success I’ll come to in a minute.

But first it’s worth looking at the innovation in the name of the company: the idea that coupons only become activated once a certain minimum number of people have signed up for them. This is essentially a guarantee for the merchant that the needle will be moved, that their effort won’t be wasted. With traditional advertising or even with old-fashioned coupons, a merchant never has any guarantee that they will be noticed or make any difference.

But with a Groupon, you know that hundreds of people will be so enticed by your offer that they’re willing to pay real money to access it. That kind of guaranteed engagement is hugely valuable, and more or less unprecedented in the world of marketing and advertising.

Then there’s the twist in the “coupon” part of the name. No longer do merchants pay money for the privilege of giving coupons away for free in local newspapers. Instead, they receive money — half of the total paid up front. There’s something extremely gratifying about being paid to offer discounts to new customers.

Technology

Google, Sprint join the mobile payments race

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Google will announce a new mobile payments system, adding even more urgency to the all-out arms-race taking place in the point-of-sale digital money space. The announcement will include news of a partnership with mobile service provider Sprint to roll out a mobile-payments system based on Near Field Communication, or NFC, technology.

NFC-fans believe the technology will become the standard format for mobile payments. Google’s plan to begin testing its own mobile-payments system was reported months ago, and will install thousands of NFC units made by VeriFone Systems at merchant locations in New York and San Francisco.

Technology

NFC to change lifestyle

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Near field communication (NFC) is emerging as the hottest keyword in the telecommunications industry. Both mobile carriers and handset manufacturers are eyeing the technology as the one to accelerate toward a truly smart life.

What is NFC?

To use a transport card, one only has to have it close to the card reader. They don’t need a communication network. Such wireless communication using tiny computer chips and a radio frequency is called radio-frequency identification (RFID). NFC is a kind of RFID using the 13.56 MHz frequency.

The most notable feature of NFC is that it enables bidirectional communication. Instead of only storing and sending the information to the reader, NFC makes it possible to read and write information on other devices.

NFC works only within a radius of 10 centimeters. Kim Jong-dae, a researcher at the LG Economic Research Institute, says such distance limitation is a strength, rather than weakness, of NFC.

“That could be a fatal defect if NFC is used alone for communication, but it turns into a merit when coupled with other high-speed communication methods such as 3G and Wi-Fi,” he said.

He cites the use of a smartphone with NFC as an example. The user chooses the device he wants to use and puts his smartphone close to it. Hacking and the leak of private information have become a serious problem in the current smart era, but NFC is safe from such threats. Hacking isn’t possible as communication won’t work from a distance of 10 centimeters. As the user doesn’t have to enter a username or password to use the service, there is less chance of hacking.

Chip sets make NFC widely available

NFC is not a new technology. It was first developed by Sony and semiconductor company NXP in 2002, but it didn’t receive much attention due to lack of infrastructure and expensive chipsets. The condition has become more favorable. It took an additional 100,000 won to buy a smartphone with an NFC chipset, but the price of the chipset has gone down to 2,000 to 3,000 won recently. NFC smartphones have become widely available.

“Only around 3 percent of cell phones had NFC, but it is expected to grow explosively from this year,” Kim said. Google started supporting NFC from the Gingerbread version of its smartphone operating system Android, and manufacturers like LG and Samsung announced they will upload NFC to most of their smartphones. Nokia and RIM are also planning to include NFC, and so is Apple on its iPhone 5. The government is also leading the standardization of the technology.

NFC to change lifestyle

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in February, Samsung Electronics presented devices with NFC. Local telecommunication giant KT showed its payment system based on NFC.

Smartphones have brought about many changes in daily lives though it’s been only a couple of years since they became widely available. NFC is bringing in even more changes, as seen in the introduction of smartphones equipped with NFC. The mobile card service, which turned smartphones into credit cards installed in small chips, is popular here for its convenience.

“Some use NFC for mobile card payments. However, this is only one of the numerous services based on NFC,” Kim at LG Economic Research Institute said.

“While watching home shopping channels on smart TV with NFC one may just touch the smart TV with the NFC smartphone to buy the product instead of entering usernames and passwords,” he said.

Such smartphones are opening new doors to the mobile service by enabling communication with diverse services that have only been offered offline. By tagging NFC onto smartphones, one can buy tickets, receive information on tourist sites, verify the user on a computer or start a car engine. “Instead of exchanging business cards, people may just hold their smartphones close together to transfer the information. The technology will make all this possible,” Kim said.

Gadgets

iPhone 4 to arrive in India by May 27

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After various announcements, the last of which was more than a month and a half ago, operators Airtel and Aircel are finally making good on their claims of bringing the iPhone 4 to India. The duo will be launching it by May 27, or Friday, almost a year after it was launched in the United States, last June. So far, only Aircel has revealed pricing, and as expected, it has a slight premium attached.

The 16GB Apple iPhone 4 will retail for Rs. 34,500, and, the 32GB version will retail for Rs. 40,900. A requisite bumper, to avoid the ‘death grip’, will be charged for separately. This news fortunately is not too confusing for potential customers, as at that price, there are plenty of other phones with better specs, including the just-launched Samsung Galaxy S II, available for around Rs. 33,000.

Customers opting for a new connection will get a micro SIM for the device, and we expect some provision from the operators to help cut SIM cards for existing customers. We were hoping the iPhone 4 would launch with some sort of contract, enabling customers to buy it at a lower price. Aircel has come up with some plans, but we aren’t too sure they will entice customers.

Aircel postpaid customers will be able to get the phone for “free” in the Premium Money Back plan, by paying up front, and then availing voice and data plans that are equal to the phone’s value, valid for 24 months. The Advantage Money Back plan is the same thing, at half the phone’s value and for one year validity. Let us hope Airtel comes up with better plans.

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Gadgets

Apple’s next iPhone Rumours

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http://gadgetmedia.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/iphone5.jpgApple might be planning to adopt curved glass on the next iPhone, according to a report.

Taiwanese publication DigiTimes claims that Apple has purchased about 300 glass-cutting machines in preparation for producing curved cover glass for the iPhone 5.

It’s unclear what role curved glass would play on an iPhone, though it’s worth noting that the previous-generation iPod Nano used curved glass for its display. Also, MacRumors chief Arnold Kim points out that Samsung’s Nexus S uses a convex curved screen, to improve comfort and perceived usability.

In addition to today’s report about a curved display, publications have claimed the following about the iPhone 5:

  • The handset will debut in September, perhaps during Apple’s annual iPod event.
  • The iPhone 5 will have a flat metal back, instead of the glass on the current iPhone.
  • There’s been some debate about near-field communications technology debuting in the next iPhone, to enable wireless payments with the device at stores. However, we’re skeptical because it would first require merchants to be on board with NFC readers.
  • Likely “under-the-hood” changes include the faster A5 processor currently powering the iPad 2, as well as an 8-megapixel camera sensor designed by Sony.
  • The iPhone 5 will become available on T-Mobile and Sprint, according to some analysts.

Apple does not comment on rumors or speculation.

Multiple publications claim the iPhone 5 will not be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, where the company has traditionally introduced new iPhones.

Internet

Netflix beats Bit Torrent

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Netflix streaming movies now fill more of the United States’ internet tubes than any other service, including peer-to-peer file sharing, which long held the top spot — to the consternation of Hollywood.

That means for perhaps the first time in the internet’s history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is content that is paid for.

The change is reported in the spring 2011 internet traffic report (.pdf) from Sandvine, a company that sells network management and measurement software to large ISPs.