The Truth.

There are some facts in life that you do not want to accept, no matter how true they are. You keep running away from them and start fooling yourself that it is all a lie and that there is no such a thing. But then one day it hits you in the face and you have no choice but to face it. A similar thing happened to me today.

I knew it since a long time. Still I chose to ignore it and continued my attempts to achieve what I wanted. But today the truth hit me like a truck and I had no choice but to face it. I knew that I might be doing a mistake. Now I am sure, I was wrong. I can't believe that I thought, even for a second, that I even stood a chance. I shouldn't have got myself into this. Now I am feeling sad, very sad, and all this could have been avoided. I am purposely being cryptic here, since it is regarding a person, and I don't think I would want to reveal that person's identity. In fact I probably shouldn't even be writing this, but somehow I thought I should. It think it would make me feel lighter. I don't think it's working. I guess only time could heal me.

Next time, I'll be more careful.

Smart Boy! :D

A first-grade teacher, Ms. Brooks, was having trouble with one of her students. The teacher asked, "Harry, what's your problem?"

Harry answered, "I'm too smart for the 1st grade. My sister is in the 3rd grade and I'm smarter than she is! I think I should be in the 3rd grade too!"

Ms. Brooks had had enough. She took Harry to the principal's office.

While Harry waited in the outer office, the teacher explained to the principal what the situation was. The principal told Ms. Brooks he would give the boy a test. If he failed to answer any of his questions he was to go back to the 1st grade and behave. She agreed.

Harry was brought in and the conditions were explained to him and he agreed to take the test.

Principal: "What is 3 x 3?"

Harry: "9."


Principal: "What is 6 x 6?"

Harry: "36."

And so it went with every question the principal thought a 3rd grader should know.

The principal looks at Ms. Brooks and tells her, "I think Harry can go to the 3rd grade"

Ms. Brooks says to the principal, "Let me ask him some questions."

The principal and Harry both agreed.

Ms. Brooks asks, "What does a cow have four of that I have only two of?"

Harry, after a moment: "Legs."

Ms. Brooks: "What is in your pants that you have but I do not have?"

The principal wondered why would she ask such a question!

Harry replied: "Pockets."

Ms. Brooks: "What does a dog do that a man steps into?"

Harry: "Pants."

Ms. Brooks: What starts with a C, ends with a T, is hairy, oval, delicious and contains thin, whitish liquid?"

Harry: "Coconut."

The principal sat forward with his mouth hanging open.

Ms. Brooks: "What goes in hard and pink then comes out soft and sticky?"

The principal's eyes opened really wide and before he could stop the answer, Harry replied, "Bubble gum."

Ms. Brooks: "What does a man do standing up, a woman does sitting down and a dog does on three legs?"

Harry: "Shake hands."

The principal was trembling.

Ms. Brooks: "What word starts with an 'F' and ends in 'K' that means a lot of heat and excitement?"

Harry: "Firetruck."

The principal breathed a sigh of relief and told the teacher, "Put Harry in the fifth-grade, I got the last seven questions wrong.

The Motorola AURA

One of the most expensive mobile phones ever made, lies in my pocket now. The Motorola AURA, a very special device compared to what I have used so far.

First of all it costs over a lakh of rupees, which is probably more than the combined cost of all my organs (except for my brain; its priceless). To what most people will think, the AURA is not loaded with features or comes embedded with diamonds. The money you pay all goes in the quality of materials used for making the phone. The high quality stainless steel body with chemical etching, the 62 carat Sapphire Crystal glass, world's first circular display, anodized aluminium keypad, Swiss made main bearings for the blade mechanism with carbide tungsten coated gears, you get the idea.

However the phone lacks some of the most basic features such as 3G or even an ambient light sensor for the display. There are also some other flaws, but you'll need to wait for the full review on Techtree (which I'm writing).

Whether the price is justified all depends upon which way you look at the phone. However this is not something that I would buy, even if I had the money.

The Nokia N97

Finally got my hands on the Nokia's latest and greatest smartphone, the Nokia N97. The phone feels awesome in hand; well worth the price. The sliding mechanism especially is brilliant. I haven't used the phone much and worse is that I ain't reviewing it (which in some ways is good, actually). But I will try and use it some more as when I can.

As of now I cannot afford it, however I would surely like to buy it in the future when the prices drop and I have more cash to spend on mobile phones (I am saving it right now to spend on a new PC).

Happy Birthday to me!!!

Yay! Today is my birthday! Appy Budday to me! :)



And a happy new year to all my readers. Yes, that's all four of you. :p

Sony Ericsson's saviours are here.

Well no matter what the fans might tell you, Sony Ericsson isn't doing very well. The company was doing great when it was launched and quickly gathered a large fan following. The same however is not true today. Once known for making few but excellent phones, the company's current portfolio is filled with dozens of mediocre handsets, each one slightly different from other. Instead of sticking to it's initial policy which is what made them famous the company instead decided that they should instead concentrate on increasing their range of models. The problem with this idea is that once there are many models, each one within a distance of a thousand rupees from the other, the company then has to make sure that no one model gets all the attention and that they all sell equally. Which results in neither phone having it all and being perfect and instead each one lacks a crucial feature which the other has. No more do you get a phone that has all that you want.

If that wasn't all then there were the quality problems. Earlier SE phones had a reputation to be bullet proof and last ages. You can still see some people walking around with the ancient T610 or P900. But that's not the case today. Cracking keypads, peeling paints, wobbling sliders have become a common complaint with SE phones. SE phones also have high number of recalls due to manufacturing glitches. Their camera phones were once unrivaled, producing some of the finest pictures among mobile phones. Now all that you see are bump in megapixel with quality that is diminishing with every phone they make. Same goes for their Walkman phones, which were once considered the best music phones out there. Now they are way behind Nokia, Samsung and Motorola in terms of sound quality (although SE is still ahead when it comes to gimmicky features).

All this resulted in some extreme dissatisfaction among the users and fans of the brand. Many have now jumped ship to either Nokia or Samsung. And you can't really blame. They waited and waited for SE to be back to what they once were, the brand that they all loved and respected. But that never happened and so finally being frustrated they switched over.

But I believe (along with many others) that the situation for SE will now improve. For now they have two new phones coming which have a chance of turning around their fortunes and winning back all those fans who left them. The phones I am talking about are the Cyber-shot C905 and the Xperia X1.

Sony Ericsson C905:
The C905 is another one of SE's Cyber-shot phones, but this one's not just for enlarging the product portfolio, but a serious attempt from SE. You can tell from the specs that they gave it everything that they had, every thing a camera oriented feature-phone can have. It has a stunning 8 Megapixel camera with auto-focus and active lens cover. There is the Xenon flash above the lens and another LED flash for video recording in the dark (most phones just one of the two). Then there is face detection, smile detection, image stabilizer, Geo-tagging and red-eye reduction and something called Smart Contrast which automatically adjusts the contrast of images. The EXMOR sensor for the camera is a CMOS unit developed by Sony themselves in Japan. All that's missing is on optical zoom but otherwise it has everything that one can think of.


The quality of the images as can be seen from various online reviews is excellent. The details, the colour reproduction, the resolution are all great. The xenon flash helps a lot at night in producing bright, sharp pictures with good focus.

Apart from the camera the rest of the phone is pretty good as well. It has a mineral glass which is scratch proof. There is built-in GPS and Wi-fi, probably for the first time together in any feature phone. And then there is the usual range of features that we've come to expect in a high-end phone. Altogether the C905 is a fine camera phone that does it's job well and has already started getting praises from critics and users alike.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1: This is SE's flagship handset for now, the Xperia X1. The X1 is the first handset from this new series of smartphones, and will be followed by X2, X3, etc. This is SE's first handset running Windows Mobile operating system and many more will follow it. It's easy to get overwhelmed while writing about this phone because of it's impressive specsheet. For starters there is a 3.0" 800 x 480 pixel WVGA touch screen display, the highest resolution supported by Windows Mobile. Then there is the unique Arc Slider design, which means the display slides up in an arc towards the person holding it when one wants to type on the full QWERTY keypad inside. Due to this the display comes at a better angle while typing compared to other devices.


The processor is a 528 MHz Qualcomm processor and there is 256MB of RAM with around 400 MB of phone memory. The memory is expandable up to 32gb via M2 cards. Then there is GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, wi-fi, bluetooth, GPS and Quadband GSM support. And all this is powered by a 1500 mAh battery.


Windows Mobile does not have the best interface out there and since Microsoft doesn't seem interested in improving it, the device manufacturers have taken it upon themselves to provide better UI to the users. HTC has done it with it's TouchFLO and now SE has done it with it's Panels interface. There are 9 Panels in the X1, which can be called upon with the press of a dedicated button. You can use any panel as your home screen. The panels can be best understood by watching this video.


As can be seen the X1 is one hell of a smartphone and probably the best Windows Mobile device out there (apart from HTC Touch HD). The current price is a bit high at 39k but it'll drop down eventually. Many people are queuing up to get this phone already and the demand will only go up from now on as the prices continue to drop.

I am sure these two phones will do a world of good to SE. If not then I don't know what will. If these two phones fail then SE is doomed for sure as people have definitely lost interest in their other handsets that resemble the one that came out last month. These two are the only ones who stand out among SE's boring range of handsets. If these don't work then SE's losses are just going to increase and if that happens again, Sony will surely pull itself out of this joint venture (as thay had hinted once in the past) and leave Ericsson on it's own out in the cold. Now that won't be a pretty sight at all.

Orkut does not suck. It's the stupid members who do.

You must have often heard that, "Orkut Sucks!". Well, as I have learned from the past one year of using Orkut is that there is nothing particularly wrong with it. It's a good site that helps keep you in contact with your friends, some of whom are long forgotten and whom you found on Orkut by chance. Actually it's the idiotic, moronic and imbecile crowd that it has on board that sucks. These people are just plain stupid. The kind of people whom you look at and then thank God that he didn't make you one of them. The kind whom you knew back in school or something and were never particularly fond of and are now glad that you aren't in contact. But now thanks to Orkut they can be in contact with you again. Yay! 

As you might know computers have become dirt cheap these days and so is an internet connection. The result is any Tom, Dick, Harry, Ron and Hermione can now start their PCs and log in to Orkut, find your profile and bore you in 5 minutes flat. Some of them buy a computer or an internet connection just so they can log in to Orkut. You see being on Orkut has become the 'In Thing' in India. If you are aged between 15-30 you must have an Orkut account or you risk being disowned by you family and friends. Compared to, say, Twitter which only gets the best of people, Orkut is filled by noobs who have just hopped online, cannot type in proper English because they don't know how or because they just don't care and fail to notice the difference between communicating with someone and boring him to death.

You can't avoid them. They somehow manage to find you profile on Orkut and then send a friendship request. And since you are a really nice guy you can't deny them. You say to yourself, "How bad can it be? I'm sure the jerk has changed now from the school days." He hasn't. Once a jerk, always a jerk. And then you start getting scraps on your scrapbook something along the lines of "hiiiiiiiiii!!!!!" "h0w r u?????" "wat r u duing??????.." "kthxbai". And then you go shoot yourself in the face with a shotgun.

And that's not all they do. They insist you on telling them what all things that you did since you left school. And then they subscribe to every darn shitty service out there that sends people spam messages of 'How to make Money!' and 'Send FREE SMS to anyone!', etc., fucking n00bs that they are. I find at least half a dozen such mails in my inbox daily. 

And it's because of these dimwits that Orkut has got a bad name. The only reason I still have an account on Orkut is because of some good friends that I have. Although these good friends are far fewer in number compared to the idiot friends, they are still enough to let me hang on to Orkut for a while longer. However of late I am having these urges to just go ahead and delete my Orkut account, like many have done before me. I might even do it one of these days. Not because Orkut sucks, but because of majority of people on it who do in fact suck, blow, vacuum, whatever you like to call it.