VC’s Techie CockTail

Today my cousin came with a Philips Go Gear 2GB MP3 player (SA2325), which he had got as a present. So here are some of my thoughts on it,

• Its almost like a thumb drive with a USB port protected by the Cap on the top. Finished in a black glossy coating looks nice, but after a few minutes of playing with it my finger smudges were all over the player. Size wise its quite ok.

• Switching it on i was greeted with a monochrome (black & white) screen with bright green backlight and the text and icons were clearly visible. Song info was displayed in the 2nd line whereas 1st line had battery status indicators and other indicators.
• Transferring the songs (supports mp3, wma) was just plug & play using the USB (USB 2.0)adapter cable.Folder navigation was possible (no ID3 tagging) so putting albums in different folders will make navigation easier.Transferring 306 MB of songs took me 3:25 seconds
• Then I tried playing the songs using the given earphones, sound quality was quite good and there were 4 preset equalizers too. As every other review site would say better get a good quality earphone to enjoy your beats
• FM radio was there ,but I wasn’t able to try it because of poor FM reception in my town. Voice recording was also present.
• The GoGear was powered by a single AAA battery which makes it very easy to replace when we run out of power.

People looking for a no non-sense mp3 player at a budget of 50$ can really consider this player.

Official link

Photo courtesy of Sony Ericsson K550

written by Vignesh

A lot of you might have heard or seen chinese made mobile phone clones. Personally, I have seen lots of them on the Net but this week I came across a phone very much similar to the much coveted Nokia N95. This phone however is called as NOKLA 95(model no. i am not so sure about). From a distance it resembles very closely to its much touted counterpart. Here are some of my observations on it,

• Build quality is OK to put it mildly. It doesnt feel solid like its counterpart.
• Screen quality is good. But I wasnt able to find the actual resolution of the screen. It should atleast be 240 x 320 pixels.
• It has two SIM card slots. I was not able to test whether it can use 2 active sims at the same time, but still a cool feature if you ask me.
• The audio was blaring out through the 4 speakers ( yes you heard me right, this gizmo has 4 speakers). But when I reduced the volume it was good.
• I could test the video playback capabilities as the phone had no memory card (it has a slot for T-Flash memory card) and the in built phone memory was only around 1 MB.
• The UI was one which resembled like a Nokia N95 in the main menu but other than that it was a proprietary UI. It was easy to find my way through but sometimes it was confusing and the navigation was tad slow too.
• I was able to pair the device with my K550i through Bluetooth and it had GPRS too. Other connectivity options I wasn’t able to checkout.
• The camera was inscribed as 2 Megapixel at the back but according to my friend who took some snaps it was only a VGA camera.

Going at a retail price of Rs. 6,500/-(160 $) in my town Sivakasi (see the map) ,people who are adventurous and looking to experiment can go for this NOKLA 95.

Photos courtesy of my Sony Ericsson K550i

written by Vignesh

Hello Techies……

If you have read my previous posts on Open Source softwares and free softwares, here is a update on that topic. I would strongly recommend these utilities for your PC ,

CCleaner : On my “Spring Clean ur PC” , I’ve mentioned as a excellent software to clean out the junk left by your various softwares in your PC. Their latest version 2.0 has been completely revamped with further enhancements to their excellent feature set.

Free Download Manager : A very good download manager with now support for BitTorrent, embedded video download from sites like youtube, metacafe etc.

JZip : Based on the 7-Zip open source platform this compression utility can handle zip, rar, ace, iso files.

Note: All trademarks and logo are properties of the corresponding companies.

written by Vignesh