January 2008

We know this was coming. Finally, the DRM daemon has been conquered. Leading from the front is the Amazon’s mp3 downloads store, which now offers DRM free music from all major labels.

Gone are the days when there was only one mp3 player per house. Today everyone has atleast 10 devices which are mp3 enabled. When I purchase an mp3 song, I expect to play it in all my devices, not just on my iPod and PC. The real pain of using DRMed music is when your change computers or your hard drive crashes. Many music stores allow you to download your purchased music only a limited number of times. DRM free music does not have any of these hassles.

It is now natural that the iTunes store, the largest online music store in the world, will now be forced to go completely DRM free. Expect an announcement at Macworld this year.

YouTube is a great source of hard to find music videos. What if you need a mp3 version of your favorite video song? I used to go through a long procedure of downloading the flv first, then ripping the mp3 using VLC command line. This step, while giving you greater flexibility like setting the mp3 bitrate etc., is still a time consuming job.

With the advent of online video conversion tools, this step is greatly simplified. Use an online tool like Zamzar and select the conversion format as mp3 (or ogg if you are an open format junkie). You will receive an email link from where you can download your music file!

As you may have noticed, NewsGator has made all their previously paid products free! This includes the mobile version of the NewsGator, NetNewsWire and FeedDemon. If you are looking for an RSS reader for your mobile, you can get NewsGator Go, which is available for Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Java enabled mobile phones.

A nice feature of NewsGator products is their ability to sync with the server. Because of this, any feed you read will be marked so in all other NewsGator products you use. This was one reason I always used a web based feed reader. Native feed readers are much faster and responsive on mobile devices.

You can download NewsGator clients for mobile devices from here.

Because of its highly themable nature, it is pretty easy to make Windows XP look like other operating systems. The most popular XP transformation pack is flyakite, which makes your poor old XP installation look like Mac OS X. With the following themes, it is easy to make windows look like Ubuntu, Amiga, OS 9 etc., Here are some of my favorites:

Clearlooks for XP

Imitates the clearlooks default theme of Gnome very well on your XP box! Makes your XP look like Ubuntu. Requires a patched

Amiga OS 4

Nice skin which emulates the look of Amiga OS 4 on Windows XP.

Vista

Yep. If you haven’t upgraded to Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system, you can get a nearly identical theme with this transformation pack. Replaces almost every element of the desktop. Don’t miss this one!

TATA unveiled the one lakh car today and it met many people’s, including yours truly’s expectations. Instead of a toy car, TATA showed a very practical vehicle which will help many Indian families to upgrade from two wheelers. The reaction to this car has been mixed. As I wrote earlier, many people were worried about the consequences of introducing this car on Indian roads: Further congestions on the already jammed Indian streets, the questionable safety aspects of the car and the resultant increase in fuel prices. Tata has answered many of these questions convincingly.

I am writing this post mainly for the friends from western countries who question the need for such a car. Most questions are directed towards the safety aspects of it. What one should understand is that this car is for a family like the one below, who cannot afford to buy a four wheeler. As far as they are concerned, the TATA Nano is much much safer than driving on their two wheeler. The Nano is priced at Rs. One Lakh (US$ 2500), which is a very affordable price point for most Indian middle class families.

The traffic on Indian cities move at a pretty slow 25 mph most of the time, because of which fatal accidents are very low in number. The Nano has passed several crash tests, which should address the safety aspects very well.

Once again, kudos to TATA for achieving something which was dismissed as impossible by competitors.

Scooter Photo from http://nh80.eximie.net.

Here is the promised comparison of the three internet tablets that are currently available in the market. Note that the Sony Mylo featured here is the second generation model, officially announced at the CES.

* - Will update once this information is available.

It is very obvious that Nokia N810 is the undisputed leader in terms of features. As of today, N810 is my recommended device for anyone who wants internet on the go. The distinguished feature on the N810 is the cellular data connectivity using bluetooth. That means, you don’t need to search for a Wi-Fi access point when you need internet connectivity. You will be able to use the device anywhere you get a cellular signal. Another winner on the N810 is the support for Adobe flash 9, the same version that is used in the desktop. Mylo comes with Flashlite 3, which is good enough to render flash videos directly.

Related: Nokia N810 vs iPod Touch vs ASUS EeePC

In a few hours from now, Tata Motors - the prospective owner of Jaguar and Land Rover, will unveil the world’s cheapest car. With this small car, TATA is trying to achieve something which has eluded many car manufacturers in the past. The previous efforts tuned out to be damp squibs with either poor passenger comfort or questionable durability or both. When TATA set out to build a sub $2500 car, which is fondly called the one lakh car in India, their goals were pretty clear: a car which is bigger, safer and more fuel economical than the Maruti 800, the cheapest car in Indian market. Note that the Maruti 800, once the largest selling car in Indian market, costs $5000 upwards. That means TATA had a real challenge at hand.

If rumors are to be believed, TATA has achieved what no other auto manufacturer has done in the past. Not only they are successful in creating the car, they are going into mass production in just months from now.

There are people who believe that this could create major problems in the Indian roads as more people will now be able to afford cars. This is a very negative way of seeing things as traffic congestion is a problem that the local government needs to solve, not TATA motors. Needless to say, with this car, the small car unit of TATA will be surviving on a wafer thin margin and won’t be making a lot of cash, which makes it clear that profitability is not the motivation behind building it.

There will be other interesting outcomes one this car goes into production. While the word on the street is that this car will give other manufacturers like Maruti a run for their money, I beg to differ. It is Bajaj, makers of the ubiquitous 3 wheeled auto rickshaws on the Indian roads, who will be the most affected. It is very likely that the TATA’s small car will turn out to be an interesting alternative for the auto rickshaws as the price difference is negligible, just like the way the Indica replaced the venerable Ambassador as the preferred Taxi vehicle. Another possibility is that the number of houses which own two cars will increase manifold. I already hear from a lot of my friends and colleagues who say they they will buy this as a second car for their wife or children.

TATA will unveil this car at the Indian Auto Expo which is just hours away from the opening ceremony. The whole nation is waiting for the unveiling of the car, which has sidelined the other important launches like Skoda’s Fabia hatch and TATA’s own Fiat Linea launch. Personally, I am eagerly looking for the Linea’s launch as it could turn out to be my next car.

Sony’s original Mylo was an uninteresting and a pretty useless product. Though it had an internet browser, media player and a Skype client, it never became popular because of its poor QWERTY keyboard and a paltry QVGA resolution.

This time around, Sony has upped the ante with a 3.5″ 800×480 touch screen, 1 GB internal storage, wide variety of codec support including WMA and AAC, Flash (yes!), Skype and RSS reader. Eventhough the specs are interesting, the device merely is the same as the last generation Nokia N800 with an added keyboard. Lack of GPS and third party applications support means that Nokia N810 is still the winner. Only one area where it outshines the N800/N810 family is the looks. As usual, Sony has a far better looking produt than its competitors.

Now, that leaves us with three internet tablets fighting for the winner spot: The Nokia N810, Apple iPod Touch and Sony Mylo. I am leaving out ASUS EeePC because technically, it is not a tablet. I will write a detailed specification-wise comparison of these 3 products later today.

That was quicker than I thought. The migration to WordPress from Drupal has been complete. For my blogging needs, Drupal was becoming an overkill. No doubt it is one of the best CMS out there, but it was getting difficult for me to maintain the blog with a complex system like Drupal. The migration was an interesting experience, which I will document in a later post.

For now, there is load of stuff coming from CES and you can expect a series of posts in this regard- not to mention the leaked screenshots of a pretty interesting looking Windows Mobile 7 OS.

PS: Your RSS feeds should be taken care automatically. If you are seeing a refresh of the previous posts, don’t worry, it will happen only once.