Digital Rover

Gnome 2.20 has been released. This will be picked up by Mandriva and Ubuntu in their upcoming releases. While browsing through the release notes, I found that Evolution has a small but very significant addition: Warning if you forgot to attach something to the mail. This happens to everyone and I had so many instances when I had to send an embarrasing follow-up mail with the attachment! Here comes the savior for many people. Evolution now detects if you have missed any attachments through keywords and provides a nice warning. But careful, never check that box below the message!!

A Tip: One way to ensure that you dont miss the attachment is to start typing the mail only after you have attached the document. If you make this a habit, you will eventually have less no of follow up mails sent.

Rumors say that Sony Ericsson could be launching some new Windows Mobile devices in the coming months. Once again, HTC seems to be the beneficiary as they are touted to be the ODM who will be manufacturing these devices. On the one hand, it is hard to believe that SE will take such a step considering they are the owners of UIQ, a Symbian based touch screen enabled operating system. On the other hand, it seems to be a logical step for SE considering that the business based phone offerings from SE are almost zero, barring the new P1i. In contrast, Nokia has been very successful with the e-series phones. A couple of Windows Mobile based offerings will help SE to quickly grab some share in the enterprise business market space.

This is also good news for Windows Mobile users, as they will see better quality cameras and music players in the SE based offerings. Sound multimedia capabilities is one thing that Windows Mobile devices have been lacking in. In any case, it is a win-win situation for everyone. Nokia, are you listening?

[via the::unwired]

The czar of mobile phone reviews, Eldar Murtazin, is now reviewing the iPhone in a series of articles. While no fan of Apple, Eldar brings in an unbiased look at the much hyped device of the century. Here are the links to the first two articles in the series:

1. SMS Features of iPhone
2. Phone in the iPhone.

HTC entered india with a bang a couple of months back. Hitherto available only through resellers like O2 and i-mate, HTC devices are now available as branded HTC itself. The company priced the launchtime handsets, the Touch and S710 very aggressively - in fact cheaper than the european market - which led to some remarkable sales numbers during the first few weeks. I heard that Touch is in great demand and dealers are running short of supply! Indeed it is a sleek device. Probably the best looking Windows Mobile device ever.

As a result of HTC's pricing, O2 and i-mate also reduced the prices, which means you can get a brand new WM device starting from about INR 12K. That is an amazing price point considering that you had to shell out atleast 25K a couple of months back to get a good WinMobile phone.

After the iPhone has been successfully unlocked by the community, the Indian black market is suddenly flooded with iPhones. I think the black market merchants were just waiting for the opportunity. What is disturbing is that these phones are sold at an astronomical price which may give a heart attack to even his Steveness.

The front page of rediff Shopping (a great source of illegally imported electronic goods) shows an iPhone for INR 59,999 which, according to todays' conversion rate is a whopping US $1450. Only a FOOL (a fool in capital letters) will offer to buy the iPhone at this price.

While the iPod Touch is predominantly portrayed as a multimedia device which can also browse the internet, the utility value is much more than that portrayed by Apple - It actually appears as a real threat to the N series ‘internet tablets’ from Nokia. The N800 tablet is primarily a web browsing device which also supports making VoIP calls using third party clients like Skype and Gizmo. If you compare both the devices, they are very similar in form factor, the Touch in fact much thinner and smaller than the N800. Both are Wi-Fi enabled devices with excellent browsers (Opera with flash on the N800 and Safari without flash on the Touch) and great multimedia capabilities. Though the N800 lacks flashy features like cover flow, it compensates for many of its short comings with an Open SDK and features like UPnP. Again, I am opening the classic debate of if only the iPod had an SDK…

The N800 has a much higher resolution screen (800×600, WVGA) and an onboard mic and camera for making VoIP video calls. This is where the iPod lacks clearly. With no confirmation of having a mic or Bluetooth (apart from some screenshots which purportedly show a BT icon) it is very difficult to get VoIP running on this device. It will be a shame if it cannot do this, because the iPod Touch seems to have the processing power capable of doing all that the N800 can do.

While it may appear that the iPod Touch has an upper hand in terms of storage capacity, don’t forget that the N800 has two memory card slots for adding additional memory.

For people who only want web browsing on the go, the Touch is a very good device. If it has BT and someone can hack it to support DUN, you virtually have full internet experience wherever you go. The touch is also a full $100 cheaper than the N800. But if you want to make VoIP calls and need third party application support, stay with the N800.

Related: The new Nokia N810 vs the iPod Touch vs the Acer eeePC. 

Palm, probably did the right thing by killing the Foleo line even before it saw the light of the day. It might have been disastrous had Palm released it, in its 'current configuration'. During its launch, apart from a few enthusiast Linux users, no one else would have bought the Foleo. It could have ended as another Sharp Zaurus.

Now that Palm does not have the head ache of marketing a very difficult product, they can instead focus on marketing their new Palm device which will run Linux. How about an 800×600 device with Wi-Fi, 3.5G, 16 GB internal memory and a 620 MHz processor?

Related: Foleo, are you going to buy one?