VC’s Techie CockTail

For many years now I’ve been a subscriber of Cable TV provided by a local cable service provider where the quality of service and the channels you get are dictated by his own whims and fancies. Even though Direct to Home services has been in my town for more than 2 years now, I was hesitant to go for it mean mainly because of its cost of ownership and service reliability. But some 3 months back, curiosity got the better of me and took the plunge.

I was considering Sun Direct because of its plethora of tamil channels & smaller top-up packages and also for its mp4 quality, even though I am a Airtel mobile postpaid user for more than 4 years now. But the shop keeper’s briefing of the various service providers proved that almost all the service providers cost of ownership was more or less same,so I decided to go for AirTel Digital TV mainly because of it quality of hardware and also the broadcast but also because I could club my mobile and tv services online to pay and recharge.

The installation was quick and the broadcast quality was excellent, but a few days after the quality started to suffer due to poor signal reception but the service guy was helpful and re-fitted the dish to a different location and this solved the problem. The user interface is good and easy to use and the all-in-one remote is user friendly. It has a feature to mimic the tv remote but I haven’t used that feature yet. Switching through channels is tad slower than the local cable tv but i think this is only a minor downer.

I got it a special offer of Rs. 1750/ with 3 months packages but once it was over i recharged it online via my airtel account and switched the package (lots of packages / top-ups & discounts to choose from) through calling a Toll free number from my Airtel mobile. This process was also glitch free. Then last night my cable tv’s espn got cut off the wrong moment leaving me fuming, thinking i would miss ManU vs Arsenal match. I got online to my airtel digital tv account which had some balance left and selected the ESPN sports channel package and viola !! in some few minutes I was able to watch espn…to top the day off, Manchester United romped to victory….

On the whole AirTel Digital TV seems to be a good bet, but TataSKY seems to be also a excellent bet because of their excellent service….

written by Vignesh \\ tags: airtel digital tv, airtel dth, airtel tv

written by Vignesh

Wishing all my Readers / Techies a Happy & Proseprous Diwali !!!!

Site News:

• Added a Gadget Sale Page

• Re-ordered page list

written by Vignesh

In this post, for the first time in my blog I will put some trivial happenings in my Gizmo world. Last week I was on a trip to Chennai and while on a short shopping stop in Spencers Plaza I decked in & out of some gadget shops.

First & foremost on my mind was to get a Memory Stick Pro or a Memory Stick Pro Duo with a Pro adapter for my Sony Cybershot DSC-P73 (quite a old digicam and recently I lost my 256MB Sandisk Memory Stick Pro). After a exhaustive search, one thing became pretty clear that nowadays Sandisk Memory Stick Pro isn’t available and Memory Stick Pro Duo doesn’t come with a Pro adapter, but Sony does. Finally at Landmark, I got a good deal for Sony 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo with Pro adapter for Rs. 750/-(17$). Unfortunately this was not end of this episode, first the memory stick was tough enough to push it inside the adapter and it was even tougher to get it inside the cybershot. After a small struggle I got it in, then the camera first flashed the message there is no memory stick media, then after small adjustments it worked. But the problem now is I am pretty damn sure I won’t be able to get the memory stick out of the camera (it’s stuck ) but i won’t be able to lose the memory stick again

While on this shopping hunt, I came across a Sony Ericsson Service center at Spencers, I thought I would go and ask for a solution for my ciphering problem .They said it could be resolved and within ten minutes I got my phone back with the irritating ciphering error solved but my wallet got lighter by 250 bucks since my phone is more than a year old and warranty is over.

written by Vignesh \\ tags: Sony Ericsson