Sunday, April 18, 2010

FAQs about my Nexus One

January 5th, Google announced Google Nexus One based on its Android Mobile platform. After reading reviews after reviews of the phone, I decided to take the plunge and buy the latest and greatest Android based smart phone in the market, The Google Nexus One. Since I was about to return to India soon, I bought the phone without a contract, which created a huge dent in my wallet. In return for burning a hole in the pocket, the Nexus One, I would get the rights to brag about it, or so I thought.

Upon returning to India when I went and met my friends, they asked me to show the phone with eagerness in their tones. With a big smile I took out the phone and handed it to them, but with a second that smile vanished when my friend asked, "Is this better than the iPhone?". After playing for a while with it I got a deluge of questions followed. I shrugged this as and one of occurrence. Went and showed it to my colleagues at office, in a striking coincidence all of them asked the same set of questions and pretty much in the same order. This prompted me to compile a list of Frequently asked questions and there answers.

FAQs about my Google Nexus one and the answers.

Q. Is this the iPhone?

A. Nope, this is Google's Nexus One.


Q. When did Google launch this?

A. Jan, 5th 2010


Q. Is it touch screen?

A. Yes.


Q. Is is better than the iPhone?

A. IMO, yes, its better than the iPhone.


Q. The UI looks the same as the iPhone, how is this better?

A. Its hardware specs are better than the iPhone. Supports multitasking! It has multitouch contrary to the popular belief. Its not controlled by an evil empire called the Apple. (While answering this I wish I had the controversial Section 3.3.1 of the Apple SDK couple of months back, but instead I had to stick to "I hate Apple" argument instead.)


Q. No! I heard/read about the 3G/Network connectivity problems, how can it be better?

Google came up with a patch for that, seems to have fixed the problem for many. But I didn't get a chance to use it with 3G yet.


Q. What are the problems you have faced so far?

A. So far none.


Q. What is the camera resolution?

5 Megapixel


Q. What special features does this have?

A. Has a built in GPS receiver as well as AGPS and a digital compass, which compled Linus Torvalds to not hate a phone and actually love it!.


Q. Hmmm. What is the use of a GPS in India anyway?

Well you have to update yourself my friend! (Big broad smile) Google maps now knows how to navigate like a local.


Q. How much did you pay?

A. 529 USD, with tax it comes around 572 USD.



By this time most of my friends just wanted to end this and they just give a smile or just nod and hand back the phone to me. This made me realize that am not good at selling idea/things to others. Although I have sold a used car, I still struggle to sell a new car! May be I should try selling Snake Oil once...

Friday, April 09, 2010

Firefox Lorentz

Mozilla today announced the first beta release of Firefox Lorentz. With this update Firefox will run all the plug-ins like Flash, Quicktime and Silverlight in a separate process outseide of the browser, resulting in better handling of crashed and hung plug-ins. There will be a page load performance improvement as the main browser thread can work on rendering the page as the plug-in takes its own time to load and initialize. So Happy You Tubeing!

Download Firefox Lorentz from here. Lorentz is built on top of Firefox 3.6.3, so will not effect the installed plug-ins and extensions.