Archive for November, 2010

The most awaited gadget in this holiday season, Kinect for Xbox 360 has been released to the retail market today and the blogosphere is abuzz with views and reviews of Kinect. Though we are not able to review it ourselves (Indian launch is on Nov 19th), we have done a round up of all the popular and reliable reviews available on the web!

kinect-review

As expected, Engadget was amongst the first to review Kinect. They have a detailed video review, which really helps users understand what the v1.0 of Kinect has on offer. They also evaluate the initial set of Kinect games - Kinect Adventures, Dance Central, Your Shape - Fitness evolved, Kinectimals, Kinect Sports and Kinect Joy Ride in brief. Their summary in brief -
It's always hard to review version 1.0 of a platform -- it's tempting to give concept and potential nearly as much weight as execution. The Kinect as hardware is great, but there's plenty of room for software engineers and UI designers to improve.
And here is their video review of Kinect: 1 Comment Read More
notion-ink-adam-launch A great news for all you gadget freaks who are looking to buy a tablet this holiday season. Notion Ink's Adam tablet may land on or before Christmas. According to the company CEO, Rohan Shravan, they are hoping for FCC approval very soon and if it all go with the plans, we might get our hands on this Android beauty right before the Christmas. Worst case? It might get delayed till CES or New Year. Now that's not at all bad for a gadget which was constantly held back due to various issues.

Notion Ink Adam Pre Orders start early December

The pre-booking for Adam tablet will start in early December. There is no clarity on the price yet. But what's clear is that the tablet currently runs Android 2.2 Froyo "but expect upgrades as soon as its out there"! Another good news is that Notion ink Adam will be available in most of the countries through online booking. This is by far the most complete tablet (going by the specs) and the most anticipated Android gadget for this holiday season. Stay tuned for some detailed posts coming up regarding Notion Ink...
No! Facebook has not introduced the Unlike button for status updates. Rather, they have added an "Unlike Page" button for news feed, which allows users to opt-out of receiving unwanted messages from pages they had previously said they "liked". Clicking on the small "X" button next to any update from a Facebook Page will list the regular options, "Hide this post," "Hide all by [page]," "Hide all by [app]" and "Mark as spam," but also a new "Unlike Page" option.

unlike-page-button

As a matter of fact this is a pretty small update, hence Facebook rolled it out silently, but on the hindsight, it implies the acceptance of dislike or unlike an update (in this case a news feed) by the folks at Facebook. It's a welcome addition really. It puts pressure on Pages to not send spammy, irrelevant, or too many updates, as it has become really easy for the user to unlike the page and stop being a fan. When an user clicks on "Unlike Page" option, a pop-up box appears asking if you really want to remove your connection to the page entirely. The user has to click "Remove Post and Unlike" in order to opt...
tektrak-logo For everyone buying a new & costly gadget like an iPhone or an iPad, the major worry is to how they can safeguard their device and what to do in case they lose it or if it gets stolen. We had addressed this issue in our previous post on 6 ways to track and recover lost iPhone. Amongst those 6 ways, Find your iPhone app from Apple is the most popular, but it comes with a MobileMe subscription which in turn comes at a huge price of $99/year. Well, now you can do the same thing with TekTrak for just $5!

How TekTrak works?

The concept is pretty simple. TekTrak runs in the background, using your phone's GPS location data to track your location based on user-configured intervals. If you ever misplace your iPhone or if it gets stolen, just log onto TekTrak's website and you can check out the map of where your phone was last time it checked in. You can even try calling your phone, in case you have misplaced it somewhere in the house itself (like Mobile phone finder) or set the site to locate your phone, which will...
windows-calculator-bug Microsoft has been selling their Windows operating systems ever since 1993. That's a good lord 17 long years. They have had more than eight different versions of Windows OS in those 17 years, and all of them were aimed to do simple & complex computing. One such tool aimed to help us carry out simple computing is the Windows calculator. As with the OS itself, Windows calculator app has also undergone changes over the years and in the latest Windows 7, it is prettier than ever before. But there are few things which are left unchanged - Windows Calculator bugs!

Windows calculator bug -> 2-2 != 0

Trust me, if you haven't come across this bug before, you will surely have a hearty laugh. Open the Windows calculator and find out the square root of 4. It gives the right answer (which is 2). Now subtract that with 2. Lo and behold! The answer is not 0 but -1.068281969439142e-19. You don't trust me? Check it out yourself! Or check out the video below! The funny thing is, in Windows...
Skyfire is launching an iPhone (& iPad) browser that supports videos in Adobe's Flash format. Apple has finally approved this app which was submitted to the app store almost a couple of months back. Skyfire is the first of its kind app to be approved by Apple and will be available for download from Thursday.

skyfire-iphone

Apple and Adobe have always been on loggerheads with respect to Flash, as Apple had made it clear about their displeasure of memory issues with Flash content. SkyFire goes around these restrictions to allow Flash content to be downloaded to their servers, then “translates” and renders the video into HTML5, which is supported by all iOS devices. SkyFire won’t work with every site though. For example, it will not be able to convert Hulu videos, or Flash games. Everything else should be a go. Below is a video interview of the Skyfire CEO, where he talks about Skyfire for iPhone app. The app will be available for download on Thursday morning for $2.99. Is...
Though we have seen many innovative ways to access blocked websites, none of them are better than using a fast and reliable VPN service. Not that the Free VPN services aren't reliable, but they normally don't come with all those additional features which are provided by the paid VPN clients. One such reliable VPN service is SwitchVPN. switchvpn SwitchVPN provides Personal VPN Service with servers located in USA, UK , Netherlands & Germany. Recently they have also included a Canada based server. Using SwitchVPN, users can browse the web anonymously and securely. Also, as I mentioned in the beginning, with SwitchVPN, users can bypass internet censorship by accessing all those blocked websites or country specific websites like Hulu & Pandora from any part of the world. With SwitchVPN, all the programs installed on your computer are automatically redirected to the VPN so that a highest level of security and anonymity is provided. You can even unblock VOIP based applications like Skype with VPN. They have servers located in USA and other countries with PPTP / OpenVPN so you can connect on multiple platforms like iPhone / PlayStation / PSP / VOIP Phones on single VPN account. SwitchVPN...
Remember Cuil? A hugely funded Google killer which met a slow painful death. Well, cuil wasn't the only startup in the search engine infrastructure space to have failed miserably. Many more have had the same fate and now we have a new kid on the block - Blekko which might as well fighting an already lost battle.

blekko-google

How Blekko works?

Blekko is designed to eliminate spam search results, allowing users to search just a subset of the web through its proprietary slashtag technology. Slashtags are a way that anyone can make a “vertical” search engine around any topic. I will not go into the details on how Blekko works. You can check out the website yourself, since it is in open beta right now, or else check out one of these articles, which explain the service in greater detail. However, what I do is put forth my views on why I think Blekko will (also) fail.

Why Blekko has a Bleak Future?

1. Zero userbase - Unfortunately for all search based startups, they start from zero, while the biggies, specially Google & Bing are way too big...
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