I-PHONE : Unwarranted Hype.

Who hasn't heard of the iPhone? Ask around and you'll see that the hype around this little gizmo is phenomenal to the level of becoming downright scary.

At the launch of the iPhone, consumers were promised that it was a 'revolutionary and magical product that is 5 years ahead of any mobile phone'. But this is far from reality. The much awaited Apple iPhone has its share of quirks.

Here are some of them:

1. Availability: The i-phone will be available in India through Vodafone or Airtel i.e they'll be SIM locked to these carriers. So for owning an i-phone you might have to change your number as well. If you want to use it with any other carrier like BSNL, Spice, idea etc, then it would work only as a Glorified i-pod. As per the Scene now, you have to order it. You just can't walk in any showroom to buy one.

2. Price :The price of i-phone in India is Rs 31,000 that too on a 2-year contract with vodafone. You won't be able to use it with any other Service Provider (Spice, BSNL, Idea etc). If you get it unlocked it will void its warranty.

3. iTunes and Fairplay: You still have to use iTunes to transfer music to the phone. This is unlike most phones, which allow direct drag-and-drop. Also, there's no Wi-Fi sync available with iTunes to transfer music. The songs bought from iTunes can only be played on the iPhone or on iPods due to the Fairplay digital rights management software created by Apple.

4. Useless 3G: In India 3G services are still not available and will not be available anytime soon. Even if they are introduced they'll be beyond the reach of majority of people.

5. Camera: The iPhone is equipped with a 2 MP camera. Sadly, camera is non auto-focus and does not have flash of any kind. Moreover, it flatly refuses to record video, even in any sort of reduced resolution and frame rate.

6. Battery: The battery life of a phone depends on its usage which differs from person to person. Since the iPhone is touted as a video iPod, phone and an Internet device (all in one), its usage will be much greater than just a simple phone. Add to this the battery usage of powering a huge touch screen and Wi–Fi; this means that the claimed five hours talk time may be far from accurate and the phone may have to be charged multiple times in a day. Also, the iPhone features a non-removable battery. So if a user faces any battery issues, the phone would have to be sent back to Apple for repair or replacement (not clear where and how, or how long it'll take).

7. No physical keypad or stylus: The iPhone doesn't have a traditional keypad that most people are used to type on. Instead, it has everything onscreen, including a QWERTY keyboard on which you type with your fingers! No stylus! But in case you are a heavy SMS/email user, would you really like to type out messages on the screen? Even if your answer to this question is yes, think of the mess the screen would be with fingerprints all over it. As the screen of the iPhone reacts only to human skin touch, don't even consider using a make-shift styllus or fingernails.

8. No Voice Dial/Voice Memos: For a phone without a traditional dial pad, the absence of voice dialing certainly seems to be a big let down. The phone does not support voice memos either, so they would have to be typed in using the onscreen keyboard every time.

9. Lack of some Basic Features : It doesn't include A2DP stereo streaming over Bluetooth. The recessed 3.5 mm port doesn't work with many commercially available earphone jacks. You can't set your own ringtones (you may be able to store 1000 songs on the iPhone, but the damn thing won't allow you to use one of those songs as your ringtone).You can't send an SMS to multiple recipients. The built-in 4, 8 or 16 GB memory can’t be used as mass storage.

10. Charging problem: The iPhone doesn't use a standard universal wall charger that usually comes with phones. Instead, it comes with a docking station similar to the ones available for iPods. It gets charged while it is docked. And seeing and you may need to charge it several times a day, according to your usage, carrying around a huge docking station would definitely be cumbersome. The good news is that the 3G version being sold in USA comes with a small wall charger. But same can't be said for the phone in India.

11. No add-on software support : the iPhone is a closed system. No one except Apple is allowed to write applications for the device. Apple has even blocked out the huge user community that develops applications for MAC OSX. If I was one of them, this reason alone would be enough for me to boycott the iPhone. In comparison, any phone that uses Symbian Series 60, Symbian UIQ, Windows or Linux is open to new functionality with freely available add-on software.

Sony Ericsson Adopts New Nomenclature System

If you've been wondering about the unusual model numbers of some of Sony Ericsson's latest products it is because, as announced today, they are using a new nomenclature system that will implement several major changes.

For starters, the "i" -symbol will no longer be used as a suffix on any devices. In fact, the full Sony Ericsson portfolio already has eight different handsets without the "i" tag. The "a" and "c" suffixes will remain to designate model versions for the American and Chinese markets respectively.

Model names will begin with a capital letter that denoting the type of phone. "C" denotes the popular Cyber-shot series that consists of camera-centric phones. "S", which formerly denoted slider/swivel phones will now mean "Snapshot", phones that are less well equipped than the C-series. No new models have been designated S so far. "G" stands for "Generation Web" and will denote the lower end of the smart phone line while the XPERIA series will denote the upper echelon. "W" will denote the Walkman line while "R" will denote the lesser Radio series.

The number following the initial letter denotes the status of the phone as high end, mid-range or low end, with 9 being the highest. The next number is the version number, followed by a number that describes the phone's style, 0-2 is a candy bar, 3-5 slider, 6-8 clamshell, 9 other.

There is no word as to what will happen to the K, T, M, Z and P series yet but there is supposed to be a P5 announcement this summer.

VAIO ZOOM - Holographic Laptop Concept

Yanko Design has published the images of the Vaio Zoom laptop concept. The notebook is supposed to use holographic technology.

“The Vaio Zoom notebook concept takes everything we know about holographic technology and squeezes it inside a thin glass form factor. When off, the screen is completely transparent and the keyboard goes opaque. Turn it on and the touchscreen holographic festivities begin. Even the mouse buttons are holographic,” the post says.

Since the Vaio Zoom is just a futuristic concept, there is no information on its technical details.

Samsung's 64 Gigabit NAND Flash Memory

As the memory capacity of devices gets doubled and tripled with every passing day, the smile across space hogger's faces broadens. This one's got just about the memory to ensure that you stop whining. memory, but style too. It isn't everyday that we come up talking about something as cool as a 64 GB NAND Flash Memory. Can you imagine the wonder of your device you iPhone will be once it will have this Flash in it. We can dream about having phones with massive storage capacities in the form of flash memory itself. It's all for the taking!

3G won't come to INDIA

Sometimes, it just happens that staying behind the technology of the times allows one to skip intermediate technologies and move on to newer ones—at least, that seems to be the case with India. On the cellular com­munication front, India has not yet moved to 3G from its current 2.5G, and will probably skip it altogether to embrace the emerging 4G. This is seen to be more feasible and 1.5 times more cost-effective, according to Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior. Though no plans have been announced thus far, we can expect this to happen within the next four years.

The Wireless World Research Forum defines 4G as an Internet technology that com­bines technologies such as Wi-Fi and WiMAX to enable the lowest-cost wireless network pos­sible. This fourth generation mobile commu­nication protocol aims at delivering wireless broadband access, Multimedia Messaging Ser­vice, video chat, mobile TV, high-definition TV content, and DVB (the Digital Video Broadcast standard), in addition to the usual voice serv­ices on mobile phones.

Meanwhile, 3G doesn't seem to be as dead as it's been made out to be. Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a 3G technology that combines 3G and Wi-Fi: it is a high-bandwidth technology that enables CDV mobile users to experience application such as videoconferencing, live TV, and Internet connectivity at theoretical speeds of upto 14Mbps. Practical speeds are found to be upto 3.6 Mbps on compatible handsets, though. Our government is evaluating the process of spectrum allocation for this service, and commercial launch is expected in 2009. This will usher in the era of video phones—read: video chat over your phone Interesting enough?

4G will use a technology called Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB), which will use larger band­width (greater than that offered by 3G) to deliver a host of Internet and high-bandwidth applications in addition to delivering higher-quality voice services. UMB will help eliminate the disadvantages of CDMA: it will support dif­ferent and mixed cell sizes (thus allowing more flexibility to operators, who will now be able to create cells according to the number of mobile subscribers) and variable bandwidth sizes that will eliminate the limits of the total band­width available to handsets.