VC’s Techie CockTail

As time goes on many people want to converge their mp3 player and their cellphone so that it gives them one less gizmo to carry around, and as price - features ratio in mobilephones is dropping to astounding levels now this convergence can be achieved with a budget of 73 $ (2900 Rs/-). In India,Motorola has started the Yuva tradition by targetting cheap mobiles with FM first and now a MP3 player. Enter W230, when I first saw its not a head turner but at the same time it wont burn a hole in your pocket.

Looks : With a dimension of 110 x 45 x 14.7 mm its pretty long but light at 80g. The silver version is smart.

Phone : Its a dual band phone with GPRS. Signal reception was good with nice sound quality using Motorola’s Crystal Talk function. SMS/MMS was pretty standard affair with 500 message storage capacity. And phonebook was quite good for a budget phone with 500 entries.

Music : The music player was pretty bare but the sound quality was good and loud. MicroSD cards upto 2 GB are supported, but how far the phone would slow down is anybody’s guess. FM radio is also available.

Customization : The display of 128 x 128 pixels is OK. The User Interface is little confusing (this is my first hands on experience with a non-smartphone motorola). But there are options to customize the menu with grid /list view and ability to change color scheme and wallpapers and ofcourse ringers.

Extras : Since GPRS is present you will be able to browse internet, but in this phone its much more of a gimmick. Tetris and Sudoku were preinstalled to while away your time. There were also calendar, alarm for productivity.

To put it in a nutshell, at the price range of 3000 Rs. there is almost no such phone to compete with it. Lets say with a 1 GB memory card your ownership cost is almost 3300/- rs and I would say its a pretty good deal for a Music Phone.

written by Vignesh

From my previous post, all of you would have learned that I’ve been using Windows Vista Home Basic. After almost 2-3 years of good experiences with Windows XP Home SP2, I found the first few days of Vista nerve wracking at times. Other than its eye candy it seemed everything was somewhat a step farther than XP. And least bit of all, the 1 GB of RAM was almost 80% full when Vista booted up.

So first of all, I removed the unnecessary items  on my start-up list.I was able to disable items from the list using Windows Defender or delete it using CCleaner. Even though the Sidebar was useful, with my 1 GB RAM it was a no-no, so disabled it from start-up too. Then I decided to use the ReadyBoost feature available with Vista by plugging in my 512 MB Sandisk pendrive. The funny thing I wasnt able to make my Kingston 4 GB pen drive to use this feature. Anyway now I am satisfied with Vista, till the time when I upgrade my RAM.

I usually use ccleaner to clean out my temporary files, but it misses some temp files. So type out “%temp%” in search and open the temp folder and delete all the files. For more tips and tweaks check out this link.

written by Vignesh

After almost a 3 year stint with my Acer TravelMate 4152 was cut short with a broken hinge, I was on the lookout for a laptop with a solid construction , good build quality and hardware reliability. With a budget of 40,000/- I knew I couldnt go for a full fledged business laptop like the THINKPAD so after having considered Acer Aspire 4720, Dell 1525 I zeroed in on Lenovo. After reading some positive reviews on the solidity of Lenovo 3000 Y410 I went ahead, bargained a lot and got Y410 775757Q for 43,000 Rs (1075 US$). Here is a brief glance of its specs,

Intel Core 2 Duo T5250, 1.5 GHz
1 GB DDR2 RAM @ 667 Mhz (Single Slot)
Intel 965 GM Shared Graphics
160GB Hard Disk
DVD-RW Drive (Slot-In)
4xUSB2.0 ports, 5 in 1 Card Reader, BlueTooth,Firewire,S-Video
Windows Vista Home Basic

For a detailed list of specifications check it out here.

First of all, about its external appearance is covered in a plain silver with the Lenovo engraved at the top.Its little on the fatty side unlike its competitors BUT its very well built with a solid construction. The hinge has external multimedia buttons to operate the laptop as a CD player without powering on the operating system. One thing which stands out in this laptop’s favor is that i have seen many laptops inlcuding my Acer when kept under a fan the screen used to shake at the hinges but this laptop doesnt budge a inch.

The internal area along with the keypad is finished in a dark gun metal grey with a lenovo Shuttle center key at the right hand side top in orange color. The screen at 14.1″ WXGA TFT @ 1280 x 800 is bright and the color reproduction is very good and accurate. At the top of the screen is a 1.3 MPx camera and with the preloaded Veri-Face system you can make your face your password.

The speakers are dolby certified and are at the front with a sub-woofer at the bottom.I havent yet tested its full audio capabilities, but as far as I’ve used its audio clarity is good but not that loud (anyway I am not a fan of hearing loud music anyway). The edge of the laptop has different colored LED’s for various indicators like Power, Battery,Wi-Fi/BT. The slot-in DVD burner is different but it works well. The back of the laptop has no ports.

The laptop came with the usual AC adaptor, a Targus laptop bag and 4 CDs (Vista, Drivers,Hindi Language Pack and a Lenovo Software pack). Even though the system was preloaded with Vista Basic it wasnt over loaded with bloatware. Anyway I uninstalled them all. A Power management softwares called Lenovo Energy Cut is useful in managing the power . In the power saver mode I get around 3 hrs 10 mins and in the balanced mode almost 2 hrs 25 min.

The only gripe about this laptop is the processor, its the basic Core 2 Duo processor available out there a much better processor like T5500 would have made it a much more value buy but you cant expect everything without paying for it. People who can stretch their budget can go for a Santa Rosa based processor like T7100-7500. And one more thing which i have found out in this two weeks of using Vista is that with 1 GB you cant live with Vista so my next step is to upgrade my RAM. If you have any queries, comments you are always welcome to post it here.

written by Vignesh \\ tags: Laptop