Asus p320
After months together of looking for a replacement for my c168, I finally got the Asus p320. Here’s a review of this windows mobile based phone for all you wanna-buys.
The phone comes with a (240 x 320 pixels, 2.6 inches) TFT resistive touchscreen – not as finger friendly as the iphone which comes with a capacitive screen, but with a couple of tweaks you won’t need to take out the stylus either.
The Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) works seamlessly with my protected home network, and is very useful for a quick email. The GPS module is a Sirf Star – III chipset, and takes ~5 minutes to track satellites the first time you start GPS, but that reduces to 2 seconds the next time you start it, at least for a few hours. Updating the satellite data using GPSCatcher does reduce the initial 5 minute delay. Mapking/Satguide/Google Navigator run on this phone without changing any options. (P.S.>For the non-geeks: GPS is free, and wont work under a roof. Go out and get some fresh air!)
It comes with just 64 MB RAM in which the basic firmware uses about 43 MB to leave you with 21 MB for other applications. Typically an application takes 4-5 mb of ram so you wont be able to run more than 4-5 applications simultaneously. The 128 MB ROM is sufficient, since you always have the choice of installing software onto the microSD card. It runs on a TI OMAP 850 200 MHz processor – one of the slower processors, but then even the HTC touch uses the same processor so I don’t have anything against it.
USB is v1.1, not v2.0 as stated in some websites, so keep an SD card reader handy. The 2MP camera’s not something great to talk about. With dimensions of 99 x 55 x 13 mm the Asus P320 is as small as a mini-pda can get.
Must-have software for this phone (or windows phones in general):
There are millions of software for windows mobile – try this site. I consider these as must-have software for the phone.
SPB mobile shell 3 – Once you install this you can get rid of the stylus. Oh yes, you need the Paco X softtouch tweak as well to make the resistive screen almost as responsive as a capacitive. Heres a peek at SPB shell2, its predecesssor.
Resco File Explorer - use your thumb to explore the contents of your SD card.
CorePlayer – The Best audio/video player for this phone.
Skyfire – Its a browser which simulates browsing on a desktop. It can be slow at times, but nothing beats a browser which is stable and executes javascript/flash/ajax and plays streaming video/audio.
PIGEON – a messenger client. Because Fring is resource hungry and too slow on this phone.
Tracky – Download maps from google/yahoo and use them offline on your GPS enabled mobile phone. Works pretty well without any lag on the asus p320. It overcomes the need to stay connected over GPRS to get map data for places you are anticipating to go to.
GPS Cycle computer – Track your movements on a graph based on GPS. What interests me the most about this app is that it calculates average travel speed discarding the time wasted at traffic signals. It records speed in real time.
cleanRAM – Not been very useful to me thus far, but this is the only software for cleaning up your ram when your mobile slows down.
Did I forget something? Oh yeah.. its a PHONE! In my opinion the phone is as good as any other phone in terms of signal and voice claity. If you don’t use the rest of the features, and use this gadget just as a phone, it will easily last you 3 days on a single charge, with about 1 hr talktime per day. If you leave the wifi on and browse nonstop, the battery might last for around 5 hours, but hey, I bet even your laptop can’t do that!
It doesn’t crash as often as people claim – I must have seen it crash about twice in the last 3 months, both times because there were too many applications running in the background. Wish Asus could add another 64 MB RAM.
Lots of stuff
.. I’ve been up to since my last post, I don’t seem to have had the time to update this blog.
- Bro & sis in law had the cutest baby boy ~ Sumukh.
Ain't he cute!
- Weekend trip to wayanad with friends from office – got roasted in the heat.
Santu, do you see us?
- Won a Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme 1Tb drive as part of a contest by IBNMS, Yay!! Will post an in depth review of this drive once it reaches home!
- Started an open source project with a couple of friends on an idea which I’ll put up in a future post.
- Ripped apart my iRiver H10 20Gb PMP (pic below, since not many ppl are insane enough to do such a thing with their mp3 players). It lived through several months of rockbox mods, until the hard disk spindle got misaligned from an accidental fall. Never imagined it would involve removing 20 screws. 
Bees screw baad..
Seagate FreeAgent + Xbox + Zune = VOD!
Do you own a xbox and a zune? Get yourself a zune pass and a high speed external hard disk, and you’ll have HD video on demand, right here in India! The new xbox experience fall update has brought in zune integratrion, with a single marketplace for both. What this means is that if you have a zune pass (15$/m), you can use the same to download unlimited audio/video content (HD TV shows from NBC, Fox, MTV, Bravo, Comedy Central, etc and movies too!) from the marketplace, onto your zune and/or xbox. Better yet, you can keep the downloaded content as long as you’re subscribed!
I started using this service sometime back, using a 5 year old Seagate 40gb external drive for storing downloaded content. The drive has usb connectivity, and connects to both the xbox and my PC. I take backups of cds/dvds onto the same disk so that I can choose to watch any movie without looking for it in my dvd collection. Works great, but I’m running short of space already. So last week I decided to start looking for a replacement for my external drive, with the following specs:
- Large capacity (1+ Tb)
- Fast connectivity to PC for transferring HD content (Internal hard disk transfers normally happen in a jiffy compared to over usb – know why? You probably have sata1 [1.5 gbps] or sata2 [3 gbps])
- Portable/Sleek
- Preferably Seagate (My 40gb drive still rocks even after 5 years and umpteen shocks)
Heres the list of external drives I came across, and the pros and cons of each. All of these are environment friendly, support encryption (useful in case you intend to store personal data), and come with a 5 year warranty.
Pros: Great on portability, really sleek and light weight (12.5mm x 80mm x 130mm, 0.18 kg)
Cons: Largest capacity of 500 Gb. Only one connectivity option – usb 2.0 (480 mbps).
CNET Rating: 
Pros: Upto 1.5 Tb!
Cons: Only one connectivity option - usb 2.0. Weight of 1Kg.
CNET Rating:
Pros: Upto 1.5Tb; Firewire, Usb 2.0, eSata (3Gbps), connectivity; 7400 rpm (mentioned as it makes sense with eSata)
Cons: 1.39 Kg
With the Xtreme, you could download HD xbox/zune/multimedia content directly to your drive from the PC over eSata @ 3Gbps, and watch the same on your xbox/cd player when its connected over usb! 
I only wish the XTreme were a 1Tb SSD.. that would make it consume less power and more shock resistant.
So here’s my conclusion: If you’re looking to store images/backup data to carry while you’re on the move, the Seagate Desk and Go are great options (Go is better for the purpose, considering its dimensions and weight). If you’re planning to store huge (multimedia) files like HD video, and want connectivity options to support future devices, the Seagate Xtreme is a winner – unlike conventional external drives, it provides eSata which offers extremely fast transfers – which matters when you’re dealing with huge files (Benchmark results - 1, 2).
When I bought the Seagate 40gb external drive 5 years back, I thought it would provide more than enough storage space for all my needs. I had a PC with a 8 gig hard disk back then. I currently have a PC with 160 gig hard disk, besides the external drive, and even after taking a million backups on DVDs I find myself running out of storage space.
Forget the zune and xbox, digital storage which was earlier being used only inside computers to store essential data, is now being associated with CD/DVD players, PMPs, cameras and even mobile phones. The focus has shifted to portability and connectivity of a storage solution. And with HD video and other multimedia standards, and easy availability of content, we now have to deal with storing huge files which occupy a lot of space, and take ages to transfer over conventional usb. So what’re you waiting for, go get yourself a Seagate FreeAgent drive!
Or try this option instead.
Whats common to..
… and me.
Darshan do ghanshyam..
Hackday is a 24 hour hacking competition organized by Yahoo!, the last one was in 2007, which I missed as I wasn’t in town. When I got the confirmation for the event and 5 other friends of mine didn’t, I began wondering what kind of junta to expect. What got me even more confused was a chat conversation with someone who responded to one of my ideas on the hackday wiki – this chap began explaining how he was a security expert and how hackday was a big opportunity for him to learn the other side of security – “hacking”. I couldn’t help myself from bursting into laughter, but the next guy who responded to my wiki entry repeated the same mistake! If you’re still wondering what hacking means, go lookup a dictionary! (or here)
@9:00 a.m. Hackday began with some interesting talks on Blueprint, FireEagle, Yahoo Social and YMDP. I couldn’t attend the talks on BOSS/YUI/YApp but these apis seem relatively easy to understand. (I’m new to all of this, though) What impressed me most was Blueprint, which is a SDK for developing mobile applications. Coming from an embedded background, I’ve tried my hands on developing J2ME apps for nokia phones and apple sdk apps for the iphone, these are totally different development environments, and put in symbian, linux and RIM/blackberry rapid sdk and you have a situation where you need to develop your app in some 10 different languages for supporting all mobile phones. Blueprint acts as a wrapper around all of these sdks, and all you need to do is return blueprint xml from your application server – and the sdk on the mobile phone will decode this into the mobile app. Neat!
@1:00 p.m. The hacking began at 1:00 p.m. in the trinity hall, taj residency, there were beanbags strewn around for us to relax (which we got to take back home at the end of the event!!). Kurt Cobain, Deja Vu and I started discussing our ideas, it looked like we couldn’t decide upon one. 2:30 p.m. and it was time to grab some taj grub.
@3:00 p.m. We decided we should stick to the RemindMeTo App. It took me some 3 hours after this to get the basic blueprint app to run, (1) this api was released just last week and is still buggy, and (2) chrome sucks with uploading to websites, we couldn’t understand why yahoo returned “error – invalid error” until we tried a different browser.
@7:30 p.m. Chris heilman tells me he’s already completed three hacks! (Pic – Filo and chris)
@8:00 p.m. Kurt went home while Deja and I decided to stay on overnight. Time for some..
The Yahoo crew organized a valentine’s day event, with some great dance performances by ShadowOne.
@5:00 a.m. I didn’t think we could stay awake all night, I got an hours sleep around 5 in the morning. Kudos to Deja for staying awake all night!
@9:00 a.m. Kurt and Deja busy discussing whether social app should return the list of users to eagle or vice versa. To make matters worse I send them a 6th web server configuration, we had a real tough time looking for free servers which can support our app.
@12:00 a.m. I submit the app to the hackr.tickr, even as Deja suggests it isn’t complete and we can’t demo an incomplete app.
@1:00 p.m. Timeout!! Time for lunch, i suddenly realize i’m so hunngggrrry
@2:30 p.m. Time for Demos, Deja and Kurt are busy pulling my leg, they don’t wanna go on stage!?
@3:00 p.m. We backout of demos.
@3:05 p.m. Kurt and I realize the demos being presented suck bigtime, wish we had registered our team for demos.
@3:10 p.m. I’ve had enough, I go speak to Amit Patel to include our demo, we’re #56 in any case. Amit agrees, even though it means more setup time for my laptop.
@4:00 p.m. Demo goes well, but I have a doubt whether we fall under any of the categories for awards.
@6:00 p.m. Awards announced; beers on the house.
After 40 hours of staring at my laptop screen, I could barely keep my eyes open, but I could still see people blogging from hackday as the awards were given out. God only knows what drives these geeks. As for me I had to take a day off work, not wanting to even look at a computer monitor.
Darshan do ghanshyam.
RemindMeTo
Reminder services on mobile phones are usually based on time, but I find that for most of the reminders I want to set, this isn’t always the case – for example if I need to set a reminder to buy a particular DVD the next time I’m near Planet M or to check my car batteries the next time I go to the service station, these are location specific reminders for which I would probably have to maintain a To-do list. Another case is where I need to return something I borrowed from a friend the next time I am near him (assuming he is on my contact list).
Lets take this idea a step further – instead of specifying just my current location using GPS, if we set the route along which we are planning to travel, the mobile software should be able to recommend reminders that lie along that route – wouldn’t that be great?
Kurt Cobain (aka Anirvan Majumdar), Deja vu (aka Sneha Jha) & I submitted this mobile software hack – RemindMeTo – for Hackday India 2009, it took us the entire 24 hours from saturday 1:00 pm, to (almost) complete this hack which involved BluePrint (an sdk which works on all mobiles, yay!), FireEagle (To find locations and landmarks in the vicinity) and YSocial (to find contacts – and in turn find their proximity).
You can try the mobile widget on your mobile phone, or check out a (html) demo here.
More on the HackDay Event in another post.
P.S.> The MySQL Server we’re currently using is dead slow, so you might need to refresh that page several times 
Yahoo! Hackday!!
I seem to have lost count of the number of hacking contests I’ve attended for the last 2-3 months, (last two being #1, #2) but yet another Hackday brings out the enthusiasm in me.. for those of you who aren’t familiar with Y! Hackday this event lasts for 24 hours (thats right, it goes on overnight!) in which each team has to try to come up with an innovative hack involving Yahoo API. I’m hoping this will be more exciting than the (web app) hacking contests we had in college days, where Paresh and I termed what we won as “our booty” even before we won it – we had a record run winning across some 6-7 colleges before we realized we were depriving our friends of pocket money!
I asked a couple of friends to app for Hackday but it seems like I was the only one who got through – hope to make some new friends over @ Y! Will definitely try to keep my status updated on my twitter feed, not sure if I’ll have time to post entries on this blog during the event.
Numero Uno
For all these years I have resisted blogging, mostly because I have always found it easier to express my feelings and share my experiences when I am prompted by a question that stimulates that response. (I can almost hear you go buhahahaaa!!!)
Okay, chuck the fake excuses, late start, but the reason I haven’t maintained a personal blog all this while is that I never seemed to find the time for a personal blog, so now, i’m planning to wrap up the tech blog at lockergnome and move everything to one host. In short, this blog is for sharing what I’m up to.
Hello world!
3 comments