Getting best online price by Indian deal sites

Below are some sites which has information about deals in real shopping sites. These are just collectors only.

http://cheapestinindia.com
http://www.91mobiles.com

http://www.desidime.com 

Samsung Galaxy Y S5360 Review

At last after months of research, I too became owner of a smart phone. May be for couple of months as it is for my Mom .She feels it too complex to operate Nokia 1100 which she is using now. So not sure how many months she will take to accept the Samsung Galaxy Y S5360.

Anyway I started exploring the features such as Compass ,GPS ,Accelerometer etc...Its worth for the money that spent for it as it has everything needed for the smart phone.I purchased it through eBay.in @ INR 6950.It took 1 week to get the phone into my hands.Ordered on 13th and reached by 20th Feb 2012. I feel its much cheaper than any other shops here at Kochi. If the things are going in this way, I am sure that India will soon turn into online shopping at-least in case of electronics.

Below are my observations till now. May be I will add some more later.

Pros

1. Android Applications
   Huge list of applications and we can find a free app for its paid equivalent. It includes regional language apps such as Malayalam bible which my mom is going to like a lot.
2. 2 GB card
   No need to spent for memory card as it comes with 2GB card which is enough for an entry level smart phone user.
3. Swype keypad
   You can type by drawing a line on the keyboard connecting the characters.
4. There are other features such as GPS,WiFi,Sensors which almost all the smart phones have. Above are the items, I feel as pros.

Cons

1. Battery backup
   Sad to say that if we use GPRS normally the charge will not last more than 1 day. I don't know why we need to buy this if we don't want to explore the smart features which requires internet. For calling and smsing we should have gone for Nokia 1100.
2. Less sound
   Compared to my Nokia 5300.It is obvious.Nokia 5300 is music edition. Now I need to close the car door glasses to hear to the phone music which was not the case with 5300.
3. Button Light
   There are 2 touch buttons which are at the bottom of the phone placed left and right to the physical button. They are easy to operate in light but at night if you are about to sleep with lights off and you want to send something to your secret lover, you will find it hard time to locate those buttons. The higher models of Galaxy have light on those buttons.
4. No secondary camera
   If the phone has the secondary camera too,it would be the perfect phone. I thing manufacture made it knowingly as they don't want to break the "Nothing is perfect" law. Also the primary cam is of 2MP which is not useful as a camera. I think whatever camera you got in mobile that will not come as your normal camera which has optical zoom. So don't look at the cell phone camera.
5. No feeling of security
   Your activities can be tracked as you are registering the phone using gmail id for getting updates. If you are not a criminal and not interested to watch or download sex related stories ,images or videos through phone go with this happily.
6. Keypad
   Little difficult to use by males who have bigger fingers,if the phone is in vertical position.I mean if you hold the phone with the top SAMSUNG label readable you cannot type, otherwise if you can type properly you cannot read the SAMSUNG label. Try the Swype feature before you conclude on the keyboard matter.

Some good apps I have found in the store

• Google sky map : Interesting app which shows you the position of the stars in the sky. Start the app and hold your phone in the direction of star. It uses the sensors and show you the stars towards that direction.
• Micro spirit level + compass : App which shows the compass & the spirit level for leveling needs.
• Laser level : This shows horizontal and vertical lines in the background of your camera capture.So can easily check or fix the position of materials in front of you.
• Go launcher - Enhances the UI for better usability.
• Google apps such as Reader,Blogger etc which people will install without any list.
• Regional apps - Kerala / Malayalam
• POC Bible
• Shabda sagarm : English <-> Malayalam dictionary

Samsung Galaxy Y Tips & Tricks
These are some tips which I spent some time to figure out. Just sharing as you may also want these

• To know the phone information more than what in the settings->about : Dial *#*#INFO#*#* . INFO means the corresponding numeric keys ie 4636
• Put into silent mode : Long press power button and select the silent mode or reduce the volume to lowest possible.
• Changing keyboard to or from Swype mode : Long press on the setting button  in normal keyboard  or anywhere in the typing area to get the input method selection window and select either Swype or normal.
• Setting mp3 as  ring tone. : Just create a folder called "ringtones" in your SD card and copy the mp3 files.Then they start showing in the ring tone selection dialog box.It seems hard coded to the folder :-)

Finding similar sites

When I wrote about eh DIY sites some of my friends asked me how we can find similar sites if we discovered one useful site.ie how I could find so many sites like http://www.instructables.com/

The answer is simple .There are sites for finding similar sites. Can't believe? Just look at the below sites.
http://www.moreofit.com/
http://www.similarsitesearch.com/

Find out similar sites above using those sites itself :-)

Happy browsing.

Creative How to Do It Yourself (DIY) sites

Normally after the lunch hours in office people will be in a sleepy mode. Productive things are difficult to come at that time. Last week when we were sitting like that, suddenly a conversation started on a toy car which was seen in my colleagues cabin. It was presented to him as X'Mas gift. It was a car which can go forward if we apply a backward force.

The conversation soon went through so many toys which were used by surrounding people in different ages and finally settled on the pop pop boat and what is the science behind that boat which runs using a candle by producing a top top sound. Then the google started and find a link on how to build a pop pop boat

The building of pop-pop boat was simple. After that the site http://www.instructables.com/ got my attention.It contains so many hobby projects and interesting things. But there was not enough time as it was office hours. So just googled similar sites like that and got so many .Some are listed below. Hope you will also like these sites.

These sites are commonly known as DIY sites. ie Do It Yourself sites. These sites contains instructions to do things yourself as a hobby project or weekend project.

List of DIY sites

http://www.instructables.com/
http://makeprojects.com/
http://www.sciencetoymaker.org/
http://www.howstuffworks.com/
http://www.wonderhowto.com/
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.pcworld.com/howto.html
http://www.videojug.com/
http://www.5min.com
http://www.sutree.com/
http://www.ehow.com/
http://video.about.com/
http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page
http://www.uniqueprojects.com/projects/projects.htm
http://www.stylelist.com/home/
http://www.cutoutandkeep.net
http://www.diynetwork.com
http://hacknmod.com
http://www.doityourself.com

Downloading .jar & .jad files from getjar.com into computer

Last week I was into a conversation about advanced mobiles ie smart phones and usage of applications made for those devices such as iPhone apps, Andriod market and Windows Phone 7. Different people had different phones and when we started downloading apps, we could see equivalent apps for all the phones. The main attractive applications ideas were the metal detector, leveling ball to check whether the surface is in level and the protractor to measure angle. All of them works based on the sensors inside the phones such as digital compass, accelerometer, gyroscope etc...Some people using smart phones for years came to know that their phone has these many capabilities after that conversation. At the end people were making fun by saying about replacement of traditional devices with smart phone.

But I was not able to install anything in my phone as I have an old Nokia 5300 which I am using for calling and smsing rarely browsing like the other smart phone owners do.Anyway that conversation made me to search for some apps which can be installed in my phone. Very soon the google ended up in getjar.com. I think you all knows about www.getjar.com for the availability of mobile applications. It is a good site actually but the issue which I faced was the absence of download application button into the PC. It was ok to download to mobile if we browse m.getjar.com from mobile browser. But due to some issues in the mobile net connection, I had no option other than to download to PC and copy to phone via USB.

The research didn't reached anywhere .(May be I am weak in searching for mobile apps) .Then I started exploring the net in other way and could see a good mobile browser emulator runs in Java. Its nothing but the opera mini. I navigated to that simulator and put the m.getjar.com there and was able to download the .jad file. Still I am missing the .jar file. After inspecting the download url I decided to try out replacing the .jad extension with .jar and it worked!!! .Yes we can download the .jad & .jar files form getjar.com into our desktop / laptop.

Follow the steps below.Its easy

How to get the mobile apps from getjar.com to our computer.
 - Open the opera mini browser simulator http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/mini/
 - Navigate to m.getjar.com it will not recognize the mobile device. Set the device properly
 - Navigate to your app & click on the download button.
 - The .jad file downloads .Then find out the URL of the .jad file downloaded.
 - Change the .jad file ext to .jar and paste the url in browser and download the .jar too.

Enjoy...

iPhone & iPad from windows user perspective

Today I happened to play extensively with apple's 'i' products such as iPad & iPhone.It is related to one of our project where I am responsible for it's server side architecture using WCF and Azure.I am from windows background with experience in almost all the versions from Win95 to Win7.

End User perspective

• UI - Superb.
• It's great idea controlling everything using one button.
• Great touch interface.
• There are Mute and Volume buttons but no next/previous buttons.
• Not able to see any file manager.
• Performance & Stability - Very good.
• Not able to hang iPhone with normal operations.
• But hung when a downloaded third party came into play. But could see that it changes to safe mode and restarts very quickly.
• Really fast even if there are 15-20 apps open
• Only one app runs at a time. Minimized apps are in dead state .Hence its fast.Don't know how background processing apps are going to work.
• Hardware
• Rock solid and wonder how they pack all the things inside a small box.
• Can't find any screws. How this is going to be repaired in case of any trouble? Is Apple that much confident on their product or want the device to be repaired by their own people?
• Applications
• Plenty of apps.Even free apps.
• Can only install from Apple store
• Only registered users can download.I was using iPad which my company owns.It took sometime for me to get credential to download a new app.
• If I have access to Indian Apple store I cannot get the apps which are available in US store.
• We should be vigilant in each and every click to protect our money. But no fraud.
• Connectivity
• i device can connect with only another i device through bluetooth. Better they should remove the Bluetooth feature from it
• Need iTunes to copy music to the i device - Unwanted bound between a software and device.
• Able to connect through Wi-Fi .Good that there is no i wi-fi router.Otherwise we would have to purchase that too
• Security
• Its like a black box.Nobody knows what is happening inside the machine. So difficult to hack.
• When we type password anybody can stand behind or near us and can get our password.Really sad to say that the typed letter is converting into dot(.) very slowly.

Developer perspective

• Language
• Need to learn Objective-C to write anything.
• API
• Apple provides good APIs.
• Cannot find an API to host background process where Apple does for its apps
• Development & Testing
• Need to have account to test the App
• Hosting
• Need to have account to distribute the app.
• Validation took time.
• Account is categorized to regions

Overall it looks like a closed place where we have no control on what how things are going on inside except trusting Apple as a company where once Steve Job's himself was out.

Setting password for bsnl modem WA3002G4

I was not considered about my wireless network security at home till yesterday because my house is situated in a village and no nearby houses in which the wireless network reaches.But yesterday I could see one of my neighbor boy having a mobile with WiFi connectivity and he asked my permission to connect through my wireless network. It was a shocking moment for me that there are so many with these types of mobiles in our area.But on the other hand I am proud that my village is also growing with the technology world.

So decided to put the security in my bsnl wireless modem model WA3002G4.It was tough first time.There is no direct password mechanism. At last after a fine google I got the below link from bsnl which explains each steps with screen shots.Thanks to bsnl…

http://www.chennai.bsnl.co.in/BBS/WA3002G4.htm

NB: I had to restart my WiFi router as well as computer to get into the security enabled WiFi network.