January 20, 2008 at 11:38 am
· Filed under GizmoNoise
After several days of procrastination, here we go with Tata’s Nano. Was keeping tabs with the recent AutoExpo for 2 reasons, one was obviously for the people’s car, Nano.
At 1st glimpse, the Nano reminded me of a smart car that Russell Crowe rides in A Good Year. Here is the shot:
With this, he zips through France’s country side to take a look at his vineyard.
When Ratan Tata unveiled the Nano, I felt he was submissive & made it sound very ordinary. There was no dramatization nor boastful talks like Steve Jobs did for iPod Nano. We should be really grateful for Ratan Tata for keeping the promise. Now more people can be on the move with 4 wheels. Long time dreams of several Indians would come true. Nice.
One significant impact that Nano would bring in is the safety of pedestrians. When we have more cars per stretch of road, there’ll be new stricter road traffic rules to reduce congestion & commotion. A hefty capital punishment along with a few weeks of imprisonment would be levied for skipping a signal, for rash driving, for changing lanes in a haphazard way & so on. Our infrastructure cannot scale to the growth of vehicular traffic, so the birth of such rules is inevitable. But it wouldn’t be very natural, there’ll be several incidents & accidents that would pay way for such rules. This would bring in orderly behaviour of drivers & also the pedestrains would be using their footpaths as there’ll be no space on the roads for them to walk. Vehicular traffic will in no way abuse pedestrians.
Other changes would be in related businesses, more & more Drive-in food outlets would open, converting Nanos into Hybrids, making it to run on alternate fuels such as ethanol or making it into a complete electric vehicle. As many people would gonna own a Nano, there’ll be immense pressure for differentiation, businesses in stickering & adding extra accessories would flourish. Private car parking areas would be ubiquitous in cities. Fuel filling stations & motels would sprang throughout the country.
For Tata Motors, Nano is a case of Corporate Social Responsibility where a slew of objectives, direct as well as indirect, will be met. Kudos.
October 31, 2007 at 12:35 pm
· Filed under GizmoNoise
I’m truly excited on seeing Eye-Fi. Its a SD card with an in-built WiFi. Which means it can automatically upload pictures from your digial camera to your computer, as soon as you bring it into your home network. It can even push those pictures to your favorite photo-sharing/printing/blogging/social-networking site. May be even to a private backup site. No need of cables & no waits. Just a 5 minute long one-time-initial-system setup, is needed.
This is a wonderful extension, as this enables to WiFi any device you hold. Gone are the days where WiFi is just for networking your laptop.
I would like to see such a card for Phones which support expandable memory. This might be a little tricky, as in general, the slot sizes are for Micro SD cards. For older phones, how about adding WiFi into SIM cards? Will take a while for their WiFi circuits to scale down. May be, I can accept with some extension chords that can stick on to the casing of the device to WiFi it. Folks at ThinFone to ponder upon. :)
“When we looked at 3G, the chipsets are not quite mature, in the sense that they’re not low-enough power for what we were looking for. They were not integrated enough, so they took up too much physical space. We cared a lot about battery life and we cared a lot about physical size. Down the road, I’m sure some of those tradeoffs will become more favorable towards 3G but as of now we think we made a pretty good doggone decision.” more.
Titbits:
Jobs has concerns about the connection speeds with GSM networks & feels that can be better. Ripping off the iPhone, one can see the Radio circuitry is being implemented on a separate daughter card. This makes easy for the iPhone’s evolution interms of mobile networks.
Unlike to my belief, the storage comes as a Flash & not as a magnetic disk.
Apple’s business is Samsung’s business. Atleast 2 chips from Samsung Semiconductor has gone into the phone; the app processor & the storage media. Could be more.
This guy has 128MB of SDRAM & a 650 MHz CPU.
Although there isn’t any mention about 3D graphics hardware, there is something sneaking inside.
The total cost of build material is about 250 USD for a 8GB model. However its sold at 599 USD.
Disclaimer: All info in this post has influences from various iPhone resources, I have some across.
Viola! A projector on your phone!! Yep! TIdemonstrates its latest DLP tech for Mobile phones at the recent CTIA Wireless convention. That was a technology demonstration & would soon reach our hands.
If you wanna experience this DLP tech from TI, go watch a show at Sathyam Theatres, Chennai. Heard that their projectors employ DLP.
A few thoughts:
Mobile television is catching up & with this tech breakthrough, you can possibly enjoy mobile broadcasts on bigger screens. Ofcourse, you need to bank near a wall for that. Beware, this mobile is gonna make you immobile.
Ambilight is an “intelligent” light glow (halo) behind the TV/Monitor that changes in color with the content that is shown. The Royal Philips Electronics invented this.
But even before Philips, my mom had found it. She used to instruct me to switch on the night lamp, whenever I watch TV during nights. Will say that it’ll reduce eye strain. No! No! I don’t want to file any litigation against Philips & claim rights. >:O) Read the rest of this entry »
