Hands on review: LG GD900 Crystal

Now that I've used my new cell LG GD900 Crystal for more than couple weeks now, I'm ready to write the review of this cell. After reading this, you can decide for yourself whether to get yourself one of these or not. You'll have my opinions too.



Body and Looks :

First thing first. When you have the cell in your hand, it doesn't look anything stylish or extra-ordinary. At least not while the slide is closed. But once you slide out the transparent keypad and it lights up with your touch (literally), it does inspire awe. The transparency really looks cool as we've not seen anything quite like it before. It's a thing to flaunt.

But then again, is there anything else to it, more than just the transparency? Well, there sure is. It provides you ways of doing things differently. For once, you don't have to put your fingers on screen for everything you wanna do. You can simply use the keypad to type text, launch applications using gesture, zoom in and out of web-pages, images etc. But that doesn't mean the main screen remains untouched. Every once in a while, you'll end up navigating on the main screen. For example, you can't key in a 'backspace' from the keypad; to open a new msg, you have to touch the onscreen notification; to launch anything from homescreen, touch the icon on screen. The list goes on. In short, the keypad reduces your touches on screen, but the screen still receives a lot of them and ends up being a fingerprint market.

Checkout the cell from different angles below -

Gallery 1 : Looks & Feel

Box Content	Transparent Key/Touch pad
Backside	Profile view

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Ease of use :

Let's see the user-friendliness of this cell. There are 4 home-screen in this one. Shortcut, Widgets, Contacts & favorites. You can have any one homescreen at a time and can switch between them by swiping your finger from left to right (or opposite direction) on the homescreen. Or you can do the swiping after tapping the middle soft key below the screen which will cause the homescreen to zoom-out to reveal the homescreen cube. You can customize each of these homescreens, apart from setting a different wallpaper for each of them. For shortcuts, you can choose up to 9 shortcuts from 43 shortcuts available. Similarly, you have 10 widgets like calendar, world clock, alarm, radio, calculator, msg/email/miss call alert etc. The contacts homescreen shows your favorite contacts, which you set yourself. You can make a call, send a msg or edit the contact details from here itself. Favorite homescreen shows your favorite pics & audio files and you can view or play them from this homescreen itself, as detailed later in this post.

To customize any homescreen, touch and keep your finger placed on any icon on the homescreen. The customization screen will appear. All these homescreens are very very useful indeed and you get very dependent and used to them.

There's a quick menu which appears when you touch the topmost bar of the screen, where the battery charge, signal strength etc appear. This quick menu enables you to turn bluetooth, wi-fi, alarm on or off; lets you launch the music player, shows event (missed call & unread msgs) notification and lets you change active profile (Normal, outdoor, silent etc).

There's also a multitask window. Keep your finger on the middle soft key below the screen for sometime to open it. It consists of 9 fixed applications; Contacts, Browser, Msging, Games, Email, Music, Memo, Organizer, FM. Sadly you can't add or remove any icon from this window and can only move them around. Whichever application is currently running, it's icon will be jumping at it's location. You can end all running applications by touching the 'End all' button. You can also assign touch gestures to each of this applications. Assign any gesture to any application on the Shortcut window and you can launch that app no matter what you are doing on the cell by drawing that gesture on the keypad/touchpad. Bad news is you have 9 pre-designed gestures. You can't make your own gestures for apps.

All in all, the accessibility of all the apps is very easy and the homescreen is very useful. Everything is at your finger tips.

Gallery 2 : Interface & Usability

Menu Screen	Homescreen cube
Multitask / Shortcut Window	Shortcut Homescreen	Quick Menu

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Calls & Messaging:

Ok, let's talk about the basic features of a phone. Calls and SMSs. The screen during an incoming and outgoing call looks cool and reminds you of iPhone. Sound quality in an ongoing call is satisfactory. It's crisp and clear. But there's some problem with the ringtone volume. It keeps reducing and increasing on its own. And sometimes you won't even hear a ringtone even when there's an incoming call. So, I have to keep it in vibrate mode all the time, so that I don't miss a call. Same goes for SMSs. If your keypad is out, the MSG alert volume reduces drastically and you might not be able to hear it. So, be on high alert when traveling with this cell in your pockets.

Making a call is easy. You can tap any of your favorite contacts on the 'Contact' homescreen and you'll get options to Call, Msg or Edit that contact. Else, you can open the phonebook by touching the contact icon in the bar at the bottom of screen and touch the 'call' icon at the right end beside the contact name to make a call. Or if you call the person frequently, just access the call history by touching the left soft key. And of course there's the option to entering the whole number manually from homescreen.

Speaking of call history window, it's missing basic features. There are no separate views for 'Dialled calls' or 'Received calls', even though there's a separate 'Missed calls' view. You have an 'All history' view where you can see all kind of calls, SMS & VT history. There are 3 more views for Calls only, Msg only & VT only. But lack of 'Dialled calls only' and 'Received calls only' view is a downer.

Coming to msging, there are hell lot of options for typing SMSs. With the transparent keypad, with the onscreen virtual keypad, with the virtual qwerty keypad; and even hand-writing. Even though the last one is not very apt and keeps throwing wrong letters every now and then. I read somewhere that adding new words to the T9 directory is difficult in GD900. But I didn't find it so. It's pretty usual. Type a wrong spelling, an exclamation mark appears, touch it and it'll take you to the 'New word' window. The usual way it is done on every cell. In addition, you can also open the T9 dictionary and add new words to your hearts content. One difficulty with SMS typing on GD900 is regarding selecting text to copy. Getting the cursor to your point of interest is very difficulty. Even though there's a magnifier. You touch the msg box and keep your finger there for some time; a magnifier with the current cursor position will appear. Now as you drag your finger across the screen, the cursor and magnifier will move with your finger till you reach your desired start location and lift your finger. You click the 'Block cursor' so that text between this start location and next location you select will be highlighted for copy. But getting your cursor to the end point is difficult. For once, the magnifier doesn't appear anymore. And where ever you touch the screen now, that becomes your end point. You can't change it without starting all over again. Try doing that 3-4 times and you end up totally pissed-off.

You got to be extra careful if you intend to send a msg to multiple recipients. You have to add everyone in the 'To' field only. If you add any number to the 'CC' field, the msg will be treated as an MMS and you'll end up paying MMS charges for every single one in the list.

But it's not all bad. Firstly, when you open the inbox and touch a msg header, it expands there itself and you see the msg contents. Scroll the msg and you see other msg headers below it. Touch any other msg header and the last open msg wraps and the new msg opens. Below each opened msg you get usual options to Reply, Forward, Delete, Call, Copy, Move etc. There's a 'My folder' option where you can create multiple folders and save your msgs as per their content. No more a single 'Saved msgs' folder for all saved msgs. The coolest feature is the 'Threaded box'. It's like your facebook wall and your SMS conversations appear in threaded & chronological order. You don't have to keep switching between Inbox and Sent items view.

Gallery 3 : Calls & Messaging

Outgoing call screen 1	Outgoing call screen 2
Contact Homescreen menu	Text magnifier

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Camera :

With an 8 megapixel camera on board, you expect a lot from the phone. And honestly, it doesn't let you down. I had read on other review sites that the picture quality is noisy and it can't take good pics in low light environment. But I didn't face any such problems so far. To be fair, I haven't taken so many pictures with this cell so far. But whatever I've clicked with it, have come out well. In fact, some of them look awesome and alive. The very first random shot I took from this cell - of things scattered on my bed - is full of details. Color saturation and brightness levels are amazing. But when you take high resolution shots, like in 8MP mode, the resultant picture is full noise and very grainy. Checkout those shots below. Pictures taken in dark environment or at night are also grainy. Oh, and did you know that the GD900 comes with a front facing secondary camera, though it's not high on specs.

Updates after using the cell for 10 months: The camera is worthless. Total piece of junk. The very 1st few pictures taken were good. But thereafter, all the pictures are very noisy and ugly. If you are depending on this camera to take some nice pictures for you, you are in for a huge disappointment.

Let's talk about options available in the camera. After launching the camera, go to the options menu by touching the top left icon on screen. The on screen menu is much better looking than most stand alone digital cameras. You rotate the semi circle at the left end of the screen to navigate between different categories. You get to choose between Primary & Secondary camera, 10 different image size (ranging from 3264x2448 to 320x240 pixels, mms, contact), color effects, white balance, auto shot timer etc. You can even pick the ISO rating you wanna shoot at. There are options for image stabilization, auto focus, face tracking etc. There's a Continuous shot mode too. But alas, no 'Panorama' mode. :-( Gonna miss that from w810i. Its omission is really surprising and heart-breaking. Also, there's no option to append picture time stamp on the clicked image.

Video recorder is also kinda good. The highest video resolution available is 720x480 at good-enough fps, which is great. The most amazing feature is the shoot speed. Apart from normal shoot, you get slow mode - which will record in those super cool 'max payne' mode and fast mode - where time will fly. :-) Play with this toy for some time and you'll get a hang of this.

Gallery 4 : Camera

Camera options	First shot
Shot @ 8MP mode	Shot @ 8MP mode
Natural light shot	Shot at night

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Connectivity :

Next, connectivity options. There's 3G, Bluetooth, USB and Wi-fi. Haven't got chance to try 3G and Wi-fi yet, even though it detected the presence of the Wi-fi network on my office floor. The other two options malfunction a lot. Last night I was able to transfer 5 songs via bluetooth from my laptop but this morning I was not able to transfer some pics. The cell and the notebook won't shake hands at all, even though they both are on each other's bluetooth device trusted list. To eliminate laptop from the 'cause of failure' list, I transferred the files to my old SE w810i easily via bluetooth. But the GD900 won't shake hands with him either. Dumb piece of tool with a broken 'blue' tooth.

The USB connection isn't any better. Install the PC suite on computer and connect the cell via USB. The cell detects the USB connection but the dumb PC suite doesn't. It offers 'help' regarding 'how to connect', but when you click it, it automatically starts searching for bluetooth devices. There's no option to search for devices connected via USB. Even when cell's bluetooth is on and it show's up on 'how to connect' help window, when you select the cell and click 'Connect' it asks for a password. Which password, dude? I never set a password for USB or bluetooth connection!! You enter a string and click connect again hoping a password prompt will now appear on cell; the usual drill. But the cell remains unfazed. Your only option is to disconnect and connect the cell again and again till the PC suite shows mercy and recognizes the cell's presence.

LG GD900 PC Suite

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Music Player / FM:

Now let's move on to applications. The music player UI is quite good. You get a list of all your tracks in the default 'All tracks' window. Touch any track and it expands, just like SMSs in inbox, to reveal track info like Artist, album, genre, album art etc. Though the album art fetching fails most of the times and the player is able to fetch only a few song's album art. Click the play button and the song starts playing, with visualization. :-) This looks totally cool. There are 5 visualizations to choose from in the context menu. Tilt the cell 90° to hold it in landscape mode and the player also reorients with the left side of the screen having current playing track and right side having the track list. You can also mark some tracks as your favorite and play them directly from the 'Favorites' homescreen.

The sound output while playing songs is good. In the player, you get several preset equalizer but you don't get to customize one. Also, there's a one touch dolby digital sound toggle icon.

Gallery 5 : Music Player

Music Player Normal

Music Player Landscape mode

Play from Homescreen

Coming to the FM application. The UI gives you a classic FM feel. But there are problems with the reception. First, the auto-scan option doesn't discover most of the stations. For me, it detected only Radio Mirchi and couple others; missing a whopping 7 stations, including Radio City, Indigo, One. Even when I manually tuned Radio one, I kept getting a lot of static every now and then; even when I was getting a clear reception of the same station on my old cell. Bad bad radio. [I had to give up listening to Radio all together. :( :(] Moreover, if the cell receives an SMS while you're listening to FM, it doesn't even make a noise. You won't know of it until you look at the screen. That's a downer. w810i used to stop the FM playback, sound a msg alert and resume FM. That's what made me totally carefree while listening to FM on road. But now I'm missing all the msgs on road.

On a related note, not particular to GD900, touch phones take away the flexibility of normal hard key phones. With w810i, I could easily switch between FM & Walkman while on road, even without taking the cell out of pocket. I could feel the FM/Walkman toggle button with a simple touch and press it to toggle between them. And if I didn't like a song playing on the walkman, I could move on to the next track by feeling and pressing the 'right' button of the wheel. No such option in the touch phones. :-( So, practically, touch phones are not that touch friendly huh...!!

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Applications:

Now for some good features. The photo & video applications are quite good. You can launch the 3-D photo gallery from the main menu window while holding the cell in landscape mode. Swipe your finger across the screen or keypad to navigate. The gallery shows both Video and image files. To view any pic, just touch it on screen and you see it full screen. Any video can be played in the same manner. The on screen controls for the video appear when you tap the screen while the video is playing. And they look cool. There are 3 levels of zoom for the video playback; small, normal and full screen. And none of them throw distorted images, thankfully.

There are full fledged image and video editor tools available on board. While playing the video, open the context menu and click 'Edit'. You'll get options like Trim, Merge, Dubbing, Text/Image overlay, time scaling etc. Similarly, for images, you get options like Filters, selective filter, Adjustments (Brightness, contrast, exposure, saturation, hue, white balance etc), add text/stamp, draw lines etc. You'll enjoy your time editing your images to perfection. But sometimes it throws 'Out of memory' error,even though you see 500+ MBs free in memory. Not sure which memory it is talking about.

Gallery 6 : Applications

3D Media Gallery

Video Player

Anyway, next, browser. The look and feel of the GD900 browser is simple and good. You can zoom in and out of pages by pinching your fingers or moving them apart on the transparent keypad. It works just like a multi-gesture touchpad of current notebooks. But then again, this also malfunctions. Sometimes the cursor arrow appears on screen and I'm no longer able to do anything from the touchpad, apart from moving the arrow here and there uselessly, as it can't even click on links. I have to highly zoom into the webpage, by moving my fingers apart on the main screen, and touch-click the link with my finger. Sometimes even that fails. God-damn-it. And it is more horrible when you use Opera mini, assuming you have installed it. Forget about using the Keypad/Touchpad. If you try to scroll the page by swiping your finger on the keypad, the scroll will end only after reaching the edge of the page. Zoom doesn't work from keypad. Every interaction has to be done on the main screen. In short, what was touted as 'the best experience of web browsing on cell' turns out to be the most frustrating one. Even the opera mini on my simple w810i worked better than this.

The 'Alarm' tool is pretty useful on this one. You get to create and save multiple alarms and can turn on any of them anytime. For example, you can create one alarm to wake you up every weekday at 8 AM, one alarm for Sunday 12 noon, one for 6 AM for your flight or whatever. You don't need to create and set an alarm everyday. Create multiple different alarms once and turn on which ever you need anytime. There's also a 'quick alarm' which lets you set an alarm which you'd like to go off within an hour, say after half hour. Pretty convenient.

Then there's 'Organizer'; pretty heavy on features but lacking some basic usability. It's a full fledged calendar with options to add schedules and task. You get a month, week & day view. Schedules are something like MS outlook calendar event. You get to set event type (Appointment/Birthday/Anniversary), Start/End date/time, when to sound alarm etc. Task are much simpler and kinda useless. You get to set only date, note & priority. A saved task only sits in your scheduler and doesn't ring a bell. There's no reminder facility for a task. If you want to be reminded of a task, save it as a schedule. That's another feature I'm gonna miss about w81oi. There I could very quickly add a task and set the reminder. In GD900, I'll have to open calendar, open 'add schedule', set different properties and save. Huge task for a simple reminder.

One cool feature in the scheduler is 'msg scheduling'. You can type a msg and schedule it to be sent on a future time. Open 'New Msg' from Organizer, set the date, time, recipient and msg; save; and the msg will be sent on the set time. Pretty convenient way of greeting someone on their birthday in case you forget it on time.

There's also a 'Date finder' where you can find a future date. i.e., if you want to see what's the date 100 days from today, this is your tool. Sadly, there's no 'past viewer'. You can't find what the date was 100 days before today; unless you guess the date and see if 100 days from that date is today. :-)

Memo, stopwatch, world clock, voice recorder, unit converter are basic and do their work. Calculator has scientific mode as well.

There are 9 pre-installed 'M-Toy' games, most of which are motion-sensor controlled. Had high hopes on them, but it turns out to be huge let down. All the games are out-right boring. Some are not even games. The 'Mellow Candle' is a game where you light a candle by touching its tip. That's all. Didn't even understand what's gameplay rules of 'Wheel mania' and 'Golf slope'. Other games are also irritating. So much for motion sensor...!!

There's movie maker which creates a slideshow with your pictures and library/custom sounds. Some of the themes are pretty cool and the movie generated looks good.

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Now, some quick drawbacks.

• Camera - 8 MegaPixel worth of shit. You should just forget that this cell has a camera. It's of no use.
• The battery charge indicator is almost useless. It doesn't correctly show the charge level. For whole day it can show full and then suddenly drop to 2 bars to empty within an hour. There's no way to check the percentage of charge remaining.
  Same with the signal strength. It shows either full house or zero signal. I haven't seen anything in between till now.
• When a contact has multiple numbers and you need to select one of them for making a call or sending a sms, the cell doesn't show which number is for what. You select the contact from the contact list and it shows you all available numbers for that contact. But you can't see which number is for cell or home or work. That is very frustrating. You can see those icons only when you are editing the contact details.
• The headphone supplied is pretty weak. First, it doesn't receive FM properly and misses most of the channels. Then, when you are using it during an ongoing call, the person on the other end of the call won't be able to hear you clearly. And if you are in a noisy environment, say on road, it's almost useless. And one day, the headphone just stopped working; just like that.
• The cell restarts/hangs pretty often; though not as much as I was told by certain forums. So far, my cell had restarted while browsing web, editing video clip, switching between music player & msging. It's a freaking mess. Every now and then, the cell is switching itself off. If the cell goes without doing this for 3 consecutive days, I consider it a lucky week.
• There's no in-built support for 3.5 jack. But that's not such a big issue. The headphone assembly consists of a 3.5 jack adapter. That would do.

So, all in all, is this a 'good enough' cell? A quick look at the Pro's & Con's -

Pro's -

• Full touch screen cell with 1.5 Gb internal memory, 8MP camera, 3G & Wi-Fi at 12.5 grands. Unbeatable.
• Nice & user-friendly home screen.
• Multitasking and gesture shortcuts.
• Clear voice quality during calls.
• Threaded msg box. Multiple 'saved msg' folder.
• Multiple ways to type msg, including full QWERTY and hand writing.
• 8 MP camera. Good picture quality. Slow/Fast video capture.
• Secondary front facing camera for self shot and video calls.
• 3G, Bluetooth with A2DP, Wi-Fi.
• Sleek music player and FM. Dolby digital sound.
• Full fledged Image and video editor.
• Multiple saved alarms, exhaustive scheduler.
• Message scheduling.
• Doc viewer which can read doc, pdf etc.

Con's -

• Worthless camera. Very grainy and ugly pictures.
• Camera - no panorama shot or timestamp on image.
• Ringtone volume keeps changing on its own.
• No 'Dialled calls' or 'Received calls' view in history.
• Very difficult to select and copy text in text msg.
• Bluetooth and USB connection malfunction big time.
• Buggy and non-user-friendly PC suite software.
• FM unable to spot most FM stations. Throws lots of static.
• Massively buggy browser. Difficult to browse.
• Boring motion-sensor games.
• Bogus battery charge and signal strength indicator.
• Restarts / hangs a lot.

There you have it. All pro's & con's of the LG GD900 crystal. If you ask me, I'm not that much satisfied with this cell. Originally priced at 27 grands, I had expected a lot lot more from this cell. But the fact that it is now available for 12 grands makes you feel ok about it. It also makes you wonder what brought down the prices so drastically..!! Is there some major flaw that I'm missing...!!?? Bluetooth and USB connections are really pathetic. What other flaw is there? But then again, when you are getting full touch screen, with transparent sleek keypad/touchpad, 1.5 Gb internal memory, 8MP camera, 3G & Wi-Fi enabled cell at 12.5 grands; I guess some flaws can be looked over. Other products at this price range have at most 1Gb internal memory, max 3 MP camera and no Wi-Fi at all. So, I'd say - if you are looking for a feature reach phone at mid-range budget, a cell which you can flaunt - go for LG GD900 crystal.


Checkout more cool snaps of LG GD900 Crystal at Leonardo Lightbox Gallery

Lenovo IdeaPad Y560

Hi people. I'm blogging after a long time. Wrote my 1st post after the long break some days ago on my 'Personal' blog - genius @ play.

Anyway, this post here is kinda public appeal. Specially for anyone living in the USA.

Thing is, I'm planning to purchase a laptop but it is still not available in India. The coveted laptop model is Lenovo IdeaPad Y560 064627U.





Configs are -

Price - $1,049.00 [around Rs. 46,650]
Intel® Core i5-430M Processor ( 2.26GHz 1066MHz 3MB )
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 1GB
4 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz
15.6 " HD Wide LED 1366x768
500GB 5400
DVD Recordable (Dual Layer)

There are lot of cool features in this model. Namely -

• Enhanced Experience RapidDrive technology:
  It combines fast SSD storage with a standard HDD to give even faster Windows 7 boot and shutdown times and better application performance. You can boot Windows 7 around 66% faster than a normal PC. The RapidDrive version will be 8-11 seconds quicker. You can open applications 2X faster, and open large documents and install new software around twice as quick as an equivalent PC without RapidDrive.
• Switchable graphics:
  This is a feature where a low power consumption integrated GPU and high performance dedicated GPU is combined which allows users to extend battery life by toggling between performance and energy-efficient modes. Thus, you can have the best of both worlds with maximum performance when you need it (say, when you are playing a high-end game) and long battery life when on-the-go; without rebooting the notebook.
• 3D display:
  The IdeaPad Y560 supposedly comes equipped with a 15.6-inch 16:9 high-definition display with three dimensional conversion capabilities, which works for 3D-enabled games and movies. It comes with a set of special polarized glasses.
  
• Additional features:
  SlideNav: Access frequently used documents and software with a touch-sensitive slide bar, and choose split-screen functionality for viewing; OneKey Theater: switches PC display & sound effect from normal mode to movie mode with a press of the touch-sensitive switch key; and Ambient Light Sensor that automatically adjusts the PC screen brightness based on the user’s distance from the display.

Ever since I've come to know about this laptop, I'm eagerly waiting for this. It was supposed to be launched 'early March'. But it is April now and still, is not available in India. :( On top of that, there are some unanswered questions. They are -

• The Lenovo site states that the "RapidDrive technology" is optional in Y560. So, does the above specific model [064627U] has this? Or do I need to pay anything extra for this?
• What exactly is the benefit of the 3D display in day to day computing? Is it worth it?
• Most of all, when will it be available in India and what is the expected price? As per US price, it should be around 46-47K.

So, now the appeal to my readers. If you're in USA, could you please get me answers? Google didn't help. BTW, Lenovo Customer Care [USA] number is 1-877-958-4465, which I'm not able to connect to from here. Drop me a comment.







Update 1 :
Lenovo IdeaPad Y560 is now listed in the Lenovo's Indian portal. But it is priced at Rs 52K+; which is slightly higher than what I was hoping for.



I called up Croma, Staples and eZone; but non of them still have have it in their stock.


Update 2 :
The Y560 is now available with different resellers; but the price is as high as 59,000 Rs. And on top of that, I got confirmation from the Lenovo customer care that the Y560 model doesn't come with RapidDrive technology or the switchable graphics as yet. So, I'm now officially chucking the idea of buying this laptop. Other options in front of me were Acer Aspire 5740G, Dell Studio 15 and HP dv6. The last one is priced 58k+. So, that one is out of question. HP Envy is yet not available in India. So, the final battle is between 5740G and Studio 15. Both have almost same configuration, just a little bit of difference here and there. Let's see which one I finally buy this weekend.

Get 1024 GB HardDrive for free

Weekend is approaching and I'm feeling a bit lazy 'coz there's nothing planned and nothing to do this weekend. Hey, lemme pep up my PC. I can play some high end games on it then - all weekend long. That's it then - let's see what we need to build a monster PC with lotsa silicon juice. Lemme list what we've got -

• Case : Cooler Master Stacker from nVidia. Attractive aluminum chassis with rounded edges, smooth curves, a streamlined design, tool-free installation, enhanced thermal management and top-mounted I/O panel.
• Processor : Intel's Core2 Extreme Quad Core : 2.66-GHz
• Mother Board : nForce 680i SLI. Includes NVIDIA SLI-Ready memory support, dual PCI-E x16 SLI video slots, a third PCI-E slot for graphics/physics expansion, and dual Gigabit Ethernet.
• Video Card : nVidia's 8800 GTX 768-M cards. DirectX 10-compatible, with a core clock of 575 MHz, shader clock of 1350 MHz, and an effective memory frequency of 1.8 GHz.
• Memory : 2 GB DDR2 RAMs from Dominator.
• Optical Drive : Lite-On's LH-20A1s. Writing speed of 20x for DVD+/-R media, 8x for DVD+/-R9, 48x for CD-R/ROM, and 12x for DVD-RAM.

Great list huh? This will make your PC a bleeding-edge machine. Oh, I forgot to include a Hard Drive here. Let's settle that. How about a 160 GB segate Baracuda HDD? It's got SATA 3Gb/s interface, 2-MB cache buffer, 78 MB/s maximum sustained data transfer rate and spindle speed of 7,200 rpm. A decent enough HDD - huh? But this one comes at a cost. That too, slightly a bit at the higher end.

Now listen to this. How about Western Digital’s 1TB [That’s 1,024GB] external hard drive - My Book? It's got Serial Bus Transfer Rate of 800 Mbits/s , FireWire 800 & 400, USB 2.0, i.e. Triple Interface and much more. It can hold upto 285000 digital photos, 250000 MP3s, 76 hours of Digital Video, 400 hours of DVD quality video et al. Oh MY MY. It comes at a price of $400 - a little price for so much it offers.

And now the biggest thing U can imagine. How about getting it for free? :o Yeah, that's right. This one hell of a HDD - 1TB monster external drive could be yours for free. Haaaah - I can see you drooling already and craving for more. Wanna know how to get your hands on this?

Primarily, it's as easy as buttering the bread. Head over to John's site SiteFever to check the details. All you've got to do is write a post on your blog about this contest that he's carrying out and also write about what you're gonna do with that much capacity. And oh, U've got to link to his post in order to send him a pingback, as only pingbacks count! And if John is impressed enough, he'll handover this MyBook to you as a prize / gift. Easy enough - huh? But try your best. 'Coz there could be only one winner here and everybody is already vouching for it. And of course, though I'm letting you know about this offer, I'm your opponent too. ;) I soooo wanna get my hands on it. Oooooohhhh.

I was just imagining what are all the things that I'll do once I get it delivered to my doorstep. The shear possibility is giving me shivers. First of all, I'll just keep blogging about winning this for a couple of days, if not more and make sure that each and every person I know - knows about this win. :D After that, I'll start lapping up the juice. Presently I'm slugging with a 160 GB Baracuda HDD with all but one of the drives already packed to the brims. Everything I download is dumped on a single drive [drive P:]. So, that drive is now in a mess - content of all type scattered all through-out it. I need more space o breath. This 1TB MyBook would be such a huge relief. When I get my win 1TB, this is how I'll use it -

• Divide the whole 1TB HDD in drives of 75GB [more or less] each.
• A special drive of 200+ GB exclusive for Gaming. I'll no longer uninstall old games for installing new space hungry games. Bring them on.
• Another special drive of 200+ GB for all my high quality video, movies and songs. As I said, it can store upto 400 hours of DVD quality video. MAN ... All my movie needs are going to be fullfilled.
• Likewise, each drive will have it's own content type. Pics, Documents, Installers, Backups - all will have their own drives
• Pictures. And lots n lots of them. I already have a HUGE gallery of them. And now it's chocking the P: drive. So, am gonna move all my pictures to a special 'Snaps Only' drive; Organize them by date and event; and put up a show every-time someone visits me @ home.
• My Blogs, man - all 7 of them are now gonna be backed up. I'll back up everything that's mine and is online.
• And why just my blogs? MyBook's got much bigger belly than that. If not the whole internet, I can atleast download and backup anything I want from the internet. Now that's WWW made a small world. :)
• And I'm gonna install all those heavy duty softwares. Adobe Creative Suit, Macromedia, AIR, Silverlight, Corel and the brands. Unleash my creativity.

Somebody stop me. I've getting goose bumps. Ok, John - promise me that you'll give this to me. :p Plz PLz PLZ.

The contest is closing on October 13th. Am eagerly and painstakingly waiting for that day when the winner will be announced. Fingers crossed. Wish me luck. And oh - you can also try your luck. Visit SiteFever and enter the contest. But I'll appreciate it if you do so just to spread the word and not actually win MyBook 'coz I'm all for it. ;)

Sony Ericsson

iPhone

iPhone combines three products - a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching - into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

Technical Specifications :

Screen size             : 3.5 inches
Screen resolution     : 320 by 480 at 160 ppi
Input method            : Multi-touch
Operating system     : OS X
Storage                    : 4GB or 8GB
GSM                        : Quad-band (MHz: 850,1800,1900)
Wireless data            : Wi-Fi + EDGE + Bluetooth 2.0
Camera                     : 2.0 megapixels
Battery                      : 5 hours Talk/Video/Browsing
                          16 hours Audio playback
Dimensions               : 115 x 61 x 11.6mm
Weight                     : 4.8 ounces / 135 grams

iPhone is a widescreen iPod with touch controls that lets you enjoy all your content - including music, audiobooks, videos, TV shows, and movies - on a beautiful 3.5-inch widescreen display. It also lets you sync your content from the iTunes library on your PC or Mac. And then you can access it all with just the touch of a finger.

Music
Scroll through your songs, artists, albums, and playlists with just a flick of a finger. Album artwork is dramatically presented on the large display. And now use Cover Flow to browse your music library by album artwork for the first time on an iPod.

Video
iPhone's stunning 3.5-inch widescreen display is the ultimate way to watch TV shows and movies from the iTunes Store on a pocketable device. Just tap the touch controls for play/pause, chapter forward/backward, and volume.

Click 2 C a Demo

iPhone is a revolutionary new mobile phone that allows you to make a call by simply pointing your finger at a name or number in your address book, a favorites list, or a call log. It also automatically syncs all your contacts from a PC, Mac, or Internet service. And it lets you select and listen to voicemail messages in whatever order you want - just like email.

Receiving and making a call

With iPhone, making a call is as simple as touching a name or number. In addition, you can easily construct a favorites list for your most frequently made calls, and quickly merge calls together to create conference calls.

Visual Voicemail
An industry first, Visual Voicemail allows you to go directly to any of your messages without listening to the prior messages. So you can quickly select the messages that are most important to you.

SMS
iPhone includes an SMS application with a predictive QWERTY soft keyboard that prevents and corrects mistakes, making it easier and more efficient to use than the small plastic keyboards on many smartphones.

Photos
iPhone features a 2-megapixel camera and a photo management application that goes far beyond anything on a phone today. Sync photos from your PC or Mac, and you're ready to browse or email them with the flick of a finger.

iPhone features a rich HTML email client and Safari - the most advanced web browser ever on a portable device - which automatically syncs bookmarks from your PC or Mac. Safari also includes built-in Google and Yahoo! search. iPhone is fully multi-tasking, so you can read a web page while downloading your email in the background over Wi-Fi or EDGE.

Safari Web Browser
With its advanced Safari browser, iPhone lets you see any web page the way it was designed to be seen, then easily zoom in by simply tapping on the multi-touch display with your finger.

Mail
iPhone uses a rich HTML email client that fetches your email in the background from most POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photos and graphics right along with the text.

Google Maps
With Google Maps and iPhone's amazing Maps application, you can view maps and satellite images, or get directions and traffic information, all from iPhone's remarkable, easy-to-use touch interface.

Widgets
iPhone even has widgets: small applications that give you helpful information like stock reports, weather reports, and more in real time.

Multi-touch
iPhone features the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse. It's an entirely new interface based on a large multi-touch display and innovative new software that lets you control everything using only your fingers. So you can glide through albums with Cover Flow, flip through photos and email them with a touch, or zoom in and out on a section of a web page — all by simply using iPhone's multi-touch display.

Intelligent Keyboard
iPhone's full QWERTY soft keyboard lets you easily send and receive SMS messages in multiple sessions. And the keyboard is predictive, so it prevents and corrects mistakes, making it easier and more efficient to use than the small plastic keyboards on many smartphones.

Wireless
iPhone uses quad-band GSM, the global standard for wireless communications. It also supports Cingular's EDGE network, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, which links to Apple's new, remarkably compact Bluetooth headset.

Built-in Advanced Sensors
iPhone's accelerometer detects when you rotate the device from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display, so you immediately see the entire width of a web page or a photo in its proper landscape aspect ratio.

The proximity sensor detects when you lift iPhone to your ear and immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches until iPhone is moved away.

An ambient light sensor automatically adjusts the display's brightness to the appropriate level for the current ambient light, thereby enhancing the user experience and saving power at the same time.






watch the iPod video at Vlog.