1. Gorgeous damned design. Finally a tablet that looks like more than just a big screen cousin of a phone. You have to love the wedge at the side. Allows for easy holding, feels solid and makes it a tad more easier to type when you rest it on a desk. And oh, there are these tiny dots on the back which make holding it a joy. Latecomers to the market can be forgiven when the design is this sexy.
   
2. Modifications done to the Honeycomb flavour of Android are minimal and functional. Someone sure kept a leash on those kid-in-a-candy-store programmers when told that its got a Tegra 2 inside. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 can just stick it. This is the best Android tablet you can lay your hands upon. Of course, Android being flawed to no end is another story for another day, but good job Sony.
3. The screen is 9.4 inches and not 10.1 inches. Sony understands that this is not about bigger-better-faster. This one feels good when you hold it and you don’t really miss the missing three quarters of an inch anyway. Sony’s raided its parts bin and added the Bravia engine to this thing. Makes colours shine through and look really bright.
4. The piece de resistance in this tablet is the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. That, coupled with the 1 gigabyte of RAM, the trusty GeForce ULP and the Tablet S (what a retarded name, you gaiz) is ready for anything you throw at it. I’d go far as to say that it irons out the flaws of the Honeycomb flavour and the Android platform in general. Nevertheless, best Android tablet experience ever. Touchwiz can stick it.
   
5. To its credit, people across the range found the tablet really intuitive, not just nutcase geeks like me. I replaced my technophobe Dad’s daily dead wood newspaper, the Economic Times with the tablet app and he found it a breeze to use. ‘I don’t have to depend on the vagaries of the paperwallah’ said he. I even gave the tablet to a 3 yr old kindergartner and she had a blast with the sketching app. A for Apple was made without much fuss. Red apple with green leaf, mind.  Thanks, Steve. The tablet truly is a more intimate experience.
   

   Yours Truly doing some posing.

6. I’m not really a tablet person but this one is a smashing reading device. I was reading Sir Richard Branson’s Business Stripped Bare via the physical book. Given the microscopic font, my pace was far from good. I got the tablet, promptly downloaded an ebook and finished reading the book in no time at all. In the Mumbai locals. General compartment.
   Apart from books, magazines are fun to read on this as well. Zinio got me a free copy of the latest Harvard Business Review and it made the stoic, boring language on it a joy to read as well. Google Currents too, is amazing on this one. So is Feedly. Ekdum jhakaas. Me gusta.
7. I do not have comprehensive tests to give you, but like every smartphone, you have to turn the screen brightness down a few notches to make sure it lasts throughout the day. And oh yeah, turn off the radio when not in a WiFi zone. Given the bulk and wedge design, Sony could have packed a better battery. Or maybe its the inefficiency of Android. Lets hope future software versions improve it.
   
8. This one does have a decent 5MP shooter (without flash, mind) but, to me, cameras on tablets are about as useful as a vestigial organ. Who wants to click with such huge devices? Oh, document scanning, AR and all? Ok. Everyone, please copy the swiveling camera unit from the Notion Ink Adam. Or just call that damned factory in Shenzhen which does it…
9. Sony’s packed an Infrared blaster into the tablet and it doubles as a pretty good remote control for all your devices. It silenced the universal-remote-control-skeptic in me and did its job admirably. I am still zonked it worked.
10. DLNA worked like a charm as well, no problems at all. And the best part is, you don’t need Sony products for it. They work with everything. Don’t you just love it when these wireless technologies just work? I have a customary tribal dance to go along whenever such things happen.
    

    Propreitary charging port. This. Is. NOWNSAINS.

11. If there’s one thing that got my goat, it had to be the godawful proprietary charging/docking port. In trying to improve upon the iPad, they even copied this feature for ‘structural stability’ purposes when attached to the dock or some such similar horse manure. But wait! I’m not done. There’s a little flap to the left, which when flicked open reveals a mini USB port. NOT a microUSB. They sell an adapter to hook you up with USB devices. Ah, see?

    Dear Sony, you are not going to wipe that big red blot in your balance sheet by selling adapters and proprietary accessories. And snap out of it, you’re no Apple. These aren’t the 1980′s and you’re no longer the leader of the pack. Conform to the norm and join the party like a happy bunny or be left out. Or just start innovating like crazy again. I still treasure my decade old Sony Walkman for keeps. Revolution mangta humko, evolution nahi.

    

    SD card slot and miniUSB port. NOT microUSB.

12. The Tablet S is one of the few devices that are Play Station certified and can play select PSOne titles with consummate ease. The experience leaves a lot to be desired since the games weren’t designed to be played on a touchscreen in the first place, but it could bring back to life some age old classics. Hope we get a few simple gems out of this exercise.
13. Transferring files from your computer to the tablet is quite a pain. Since the boffins didn’t provide a USB cable, I recommend using something like SwiFTP or AirDroid.
14. The Tablet S is blessed with stereo speakers, but I have to admit, they sound tinny. Which is where software gimmickry comes in. Sony’s got 2 signal enhancement tech coined XLoud and ClearPhase which do well to improve the output, but are limited to the music app. I wish they were implemented across the board. Much joy would happen.
    Sony also gives you a free 6 month trial to their Music Unlimited service. Not available in India. Chuck. Moving on.
    
15. I must warn you that there is this really bright LED at the side and you should turn it off at night. Or go to the app settings of your mail and social client, turn it off for good. The pulsating effect can wreak havoc if you are a light sleeper. If someone tells me that I shouldn’t be keeping the tablet by my bedside, I’ll ask them to promptly buzz off. A tablet is meant to be more personal than a netbook/laptop.
    

    The front camera.

16. There are absolutely no hardware/soft touch buttons on the front panel. Which is a smart design move but may the heavens save you if an app crashes or the screen freezes. Dude, this is Android. Bound to happen. You said something? No, I didn’t hear that.
17. Just a friendly reminder that this doesn’t really have 3G. In India, this renders the device useless the moment you step out of home/office. If any smarty pants geek is going to suggest turning a smartphone into a 3G hotspot, I’d be then left with 2 useless devices without any radio capabilities.
18. The tablet is not nearly as good at covering your face from the sun when hauled up against the Samsung 10.1′s screen. It’s 0.7 inches better than this one. Yeah, I just had to say this. To put things in perspective…
    

    Kids let loose with SketchXpress

19. The Tablet S is priced at friggin INR 29,900. Rubbish. NOWNSAINS pricing. All you get in the box is the tablet and its charger. Not even a cover. Wouldn’t I just rather buy an iPad2, then? Read point no. 11 if anyone wants to justify the stratospheric price. Accessories are very pricey as well. This just makes Sony look real cheap wanting to make a quick buck.
    Simple suggestion for Sony India All Stars MBA Mktg team. 25k as is and 30k with all the accessories. No, don’t argue with me. I know its available for $399 in Yankeeland.
    The 3G version (whenever that comes out) can retail for no more than 33k, all accessories included. May I point you to this Economist article on Kodak vs. Fujifilm. Do not try to use the legacy of the brand, lean on the ad agencies and take the easy way out. Price responsibly and deliver convenience in a manner never seen before. The consumer has many more options to choose from, otherwise.
    

    Even a corrupt, uneducated politician knows... (Thank you for this awesome pronunciation, Singham)

20. There is no taking away the fact that the Sony Tablet S is the best Android tablet out there. Be a nice person and get it from Flipkart. I don’t drink anymore. So your money will go to a good street food shop. I assure you.

Pictures by Rutavi Mehta/Photokatha A few by me as well. Edits by Kukku Thampi.
Thanks to Perfect Relations for loaning me the device.

Every year, I look forward to two events. CES and MWC. The Consumer Electronics Show, at Las Vegas is a showcase of the evolution of mankind, although this doesn’t make a good case for the “evolution of mankind” part.  Let’s see the “WOW” of CES 2012.

1)  LG launched its first full OLED TV, the 55 inch LG 55EM9600. Being a completely OLED display( unlike the  LED backlit LCD’s available in the market), it shows deeper blacks, richer colors and consumes lesser power.  Full specs for this 4mm thin beauty can be found here.

2)  It’s finally here. Intel joins the smartphone chipset bandwagon and ties up with Lenovo to produce its first Intel Medfield running phone. The Lenovo Racer-A  has a 4.5 inch 720p HD display with a 1.6GHz dual core Intel Medfield SoC. Other specs include 8MP camera, HD recording and the standard connectivity package. Here’s  a look at the phone.

On the windows phone side, we had two new announcements. Nokia Lumia 900 and the HTC titanII. Both of them are fit to be the titans of the windows phone game. Lumia 900 has a beefed up 4.3” display and LTE but retains most of the Lumia 800 internals. Whilst the Titan II is a behemoth of a phone at 4.7” and a 16MP (yes, 16 MegaPixels) camera.  With the fluid WP7.5, operating these phones will sure be a breeze.

4) Coming to tablets, we had a lot of tablets announed and launched by various companies. As far as the specs go, Asus  transformer prime  TF700 and Acer Iconia  tab 2012 are Full HD screen monsters with an equally jawdropping quad core processor. However, the best tablet of CES 2012 goes to Asus MeMO 370T. At $249, you get a 7-inch HD screen, quad core processor, 8MP snapper with HD recording and other bells and whistles. I can already see Kindle Fire’s and the Nook Tablets running for cover.

But the real star for me would be the philanthropic OLPC XO-3 tablet. (Hit this link to know more about the One Laptop Per Child project)Its a rugged tablet running a Fedora core. It can be charged with a hand crank or the solar panel which doubles up as a cover for the tablet. Lets hope this takes learning well beyond our reverend universities and into the hands of the poor. Learning just received a shot in the arm. We wish them well.

OLPC XO-3 Gallery by TheVerge.com

These are the “wow” worthy moments of CES 2012. Faster-better-cheaper ultrabooks were present dime a dozen at CES 2012, so were the DSLR’s (I liked the Nikon D4 but it should be priced aggresively.) and there were almost no netbooks this year. This year’s CES had very little to show for innovation. Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX crammed a 3300 mAH battery in an eight mm body, but that was about it.

CES showed an incremental trend in technology. Apple pulled out and so did many others. Technology firms probably want their own space to control everything that they can to put up a big show. Just like Vegas, maybe, CES is too noisy for them. Come on CES, get them back. Give us more consumer, less electronics.

Nikon just released this awesome video showing off their newest full frame baby, the D4. Camera porn if you’re an imaging nut. The illuminated buttons are a nice touch. And so are the LAN port and Wi-Fi capability. Check out the video after the break.

My favourite tech website has even got it for a hands-on preview!

A list of 10 things you should know before you go out and buy Nokia’s latest effort on a brand spanking new platform, Windows Phone 7.

1. The poly carbonate body and the convex AMOLED display are gorgeous. Feels real solid in your hands.

2. Windows Phone 7.5 ‘Mango’ is truly delicious and is tightly integrated with Nokia services, making it a good experience overall. If an understated, clean OS is what you crave, Windows Phone is your answer.

3. The camera, music and the GPS are almost the same as the Nokia N9, but Windows Phone is a better ecosystem for the longer run. Camera is strictly ok, nothing to write home about. Decent 720p video. Carl Zeiss has clearly sold his soul to the devil. iPhone camera still remains the best.

4. The battery survived a whole day, which is excellent by current smartphone standards.

5. The phone is virtually lag free. Microsoft is to be praised here rather than Nokia but still, it is good to see a single core 1.4GHz processor outclass a Tegra2 of the Optimus 2X.

6. No front camera (bye-bye skype), LED notification light (its a nifty thing) or an NFC chip. Huge let downs on all fronts.

7. Occasional battery issues can be expected. Nokia and Microsoft are working  hard on this.

8. Interesting apps on board, the OCR translator especially with which you can scan a bunch of languages and translate that to text/speech from any other language. Nokia Drive and Nokia Music have already been ported to other Windows devices. Exclusivity lost. Ouch.

9. No Adobe Flash or Silverlight. But you probably know that if you are jumping on the Windows bandwagon.

10. Price. Nokia missed a trick here by pricing Lumia 800 too high. At Rs.28000, Lumia 800 gives you almost the same experience as the Samsung Omnia W at Rs.16000. They think they can sell anything in India at any price. Mr. Stephen Elop was trying to douse the burning platform with gasoline.

Nokia Lumia is a great WinPho7 device. If only it had been priced little more aggresively, it could have emerged a serious threat to the market leader Samsung Galaxy SII.

If you have any gadget queries and want to add to the confusion, ask the guy who wrote this article. He’ll help. Gladly.

The Motorola Xoom 2 is here. Lighter, faster, brighter. Better. Watch and enjoy.

We’re in the age of information. There, I put that straight up. We are not in the dark ages where our only source for information was the public library. It is just a Google query away. Or if Siri is the next big technology, its just a matter of picking your phone up and asking it.

We are free to learn whatever catches our fancy, from the most fascinating to the most bizarre. The web also makes learning a two-way street, enabling you to learn at your pace and adding a certain amount of intuitiveness while at it.

But for education to be meaningful, it must have a certain amount of structure and it is best delivered in the form of a ‘course’. The web sites listed below help you do just that. (I promise to update this list as I find new avenues to learn online. Please do post in the comments if you know such a website. It could help someone learn something they enjoy. )

On Udemy, you can find courses here from dance to making coffee to the obvious realm of coding and design lessons. Being a Silicon Valley firm, they also routinely put up lessons about startups and the like. I signed up for a course of the basics of Photoshop CS5 and its been a good experience.

You can also design your own course with slideshows or videos or both.

The Khan Academy started from a simple idea when an doting uncle made small, simple videos for his nephews. He decided to make this videos open to everyone and people wanted to see more of this. That’s how the Khan Academy grew and now counts The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation amongst its board. The site features an astounding range of videos on many subjects. From simple math to complex accounting lessons. They have also started adding practise exercises to make the process that much more intuitive.

This is how code should be taught. Start off with some really simple exams that even the old hag grandma next door can do and slowly walk them through as the difficulty increases. It’s just so simple that it works! I would, however, love to see a voice guide. Some people (read yours truly) respond better to audio aid.

Here’s another awesome platform to learn coding online. Website’s designed to mimic the feel of a school. Tonnes of videos, interactive tutorials and the use of ‘gamification’ to improve grasping. Of knowledge, that is.

When the big daddy of the web starts offering tutorials, you better sit up and take note. With courses divided into 8 sections, we have quite a comprehensive list of coding goodies. My only gripe is that they don’t have video content from their insanely talented engineers.

The learning phase in education is all about consuming media. Be it a blackboard, a paper book, videos or anything else for that matter. Stepping away from the class of online video/interactive learning, we have Kno.com who provide textbooks for the iPad.

Kno fully utilizes the iPad for what it is, a great consumption device. It is a joy to read a Kno textbook on an iPad with all the interactive features the books have on offer. Another huge advantage I see is that kids wont have to lug heavy textbooks to class, incur the huge costs of the textbooks and actually learn better while at it.

Kno.com can be accessed via Facebook and the Web apart from the iPad. While I wouldn’t really recommend the Facebook app, given all the social distractions, the Web reader gets a thumbs up from me.

(stay tuned, I am in the process of fiddling with a couple more websites. Yes, all the MIT-OCW’s, their clones from universities across the globe and some more fantastic websites.)

[The very awesome Ankita Gaba belts out a quick list of likes and dislikes of her newly acquired Reliance 3G Tab. I asked her opinion simply because she is an iPhone4 user. ]

Negatives:

• It is slow. But again, I use an iPhone 4.
• Doesn’t have flash player. Major #fail
• Very little space. External data card can be used but a lot of apps have to be saved in the tab memory only.
• 3G plans are costly
• Qwerty keypad is far from perfect.
• Keypad doesn’t have auto correct. [Unlike iphone does]

There are conventions and then are those eye-openers like the IBM Software Universe India 2011. This was, in all probability, India’s largest software convention with IBM’s work taking centre stage

John Dunderdale, VP-Software Group, Growth Markets and Pradeep Nair, Director for the Software Group for India/South Asia gave an overview of some of the fantastic work being done in the emerging world tailored for their needs. IBM’s global footprint painted the picture of a new world, where power centers were shifting from developed markets to emerging economies.

It was heartening to see the list of offices IBM had in the Indian subcontinent region rise from the Delhi-Mumbai-Bangalore to a list of 20 odd hubs, spread all over India. You could see the commitment IBM had to genuinely make the world a better place with their ‘Smarter Planet’ suite and many others.

The highlight of the whole convention was the ‘Smarter Cities’ solution which worked with municipalities to deliver a dashboard style overview of the entire city for those in command. Rio De Janeiro was one of the earlier cities to get it and Pradeep Nair said talks are on with municipalities across different cities to implement it.

“The ‘Smarter Cities’ suite is for cities with a population of around 1-2million. But interestingly, we are seeing more demand coming from tier 2 cities.”, he added. On being asked about software for our villages and panchayats he added that “For the level of complexity the software handles, it needs a critical mass of around 1-2 million residents.”

All the functions expected out of a municipal organization like health, sanitation, public works and many others can be co-ordinated via the ‘Intelligent Operations Center’ using analytics and real time information to target and deliver services in a better fashion. With UID on the way, it would most certainly help the cause of better city management.

That said, in the cities of the future where everything is interconnected, security must be taken care of. Solutions must be built to a fault where the end user is in complete control of their lives and the data is in safe hands. The consequences and cost of insecure systems, we don’t even want to imagine.

We’ve all been hearing about Google Wallet for a while now. We probably even have an idea of how it runs. Hold the phone in front of a terminal and the monies are transferred. But its always interesting to see how an app works in the real world. And the joy of a consumer who discovers a new technology that will make life easier.

Watch the video for exactly that as Google engineers demonstrate by paying people’s bills, much to everybody’s amazement. And that lady going, ‘O-M-G. Thank you Google Wallet!’.

So what, if the husband and the wife have arguments that go like “put my phone down, this instant! I am not going to pay for that!”

Lenovo unleashead a bunch of tablets this week at various price points and a super funny picture of their India team. Let’s go through the tablets one by one and, of course, the Lenovo management.

Ideapad K1

• Android 3.1 OS
• 2MP front and 5MP rear camera
• mini HDMI and SD port

If someone were to put a gun to my head and forced me to buy a Lenovo tablet, this would be my pick. Lovely curved design, interesting interface. Will sell like hot cakes if the price were around 20k.

Price INR 29,500/-(32GB, WiFi); INR 33,990/- (32GB, 3G)

Ideapad A1

• 7” display tipping the scales at 1.7 lbps
• Dual app store (Lenovo App Shop and the Android Market)
Why do all these cheap tablets look alike? Oh yeah, right. I mean, of course. They are sourced from the same damn sweat shop in China. Somewhere in downtown Shenzen or Guangzhong or Crawford Market.

Priced at INR 14,990/- (16GB, WiFi)

Thinkpad

• Comes with some pressure sensitive pen which provides ease of jotting down notes and doodling effectively in boring meetings.
• Looks rather corporate-y and should be the work tablet the BlackBerry Playbook never was. Of course, I don’t really know if you actually need 2 tablets.

Starting from INR 29,500/- (16GB,WiFi)); INR 41,900/- (32GB, 3G); INR 46,900/- (64GB, 3G)

And finally, as promised.

Press Release said they'll be aggressive.

#fakingnews – Last heard, they had approached Ogily and Mather for creating a “We’re the BlackBerry Boys” style ad, a.k.a. Vodafone. They were, quite obviously, asked to take off their glasses and wash their faces.