Sony Ericsson Adopts New Nomenclature System

If you've been wondering about the unusual model numbers of some of Sony Ericsson's latest products it is because, as announced today, they are using a new nomenclature system that will implement several major changes.

For starters, the "i" -symbol will no longer be used as a suffix on any devices. In fact, the full Sony Ericsson portfolio already has eight different handsets without the "i" tag. The "a" and "c" suffixes will remain to designate model versions for the American and Chinese markets respectively.

Model names will begin with a capital letter that denoting the type of phone. "C" denotes the popular Cyber-shot series that consists of camera-centric phones. "S", which formerly denoted slider/swivel phones will now mean "Snapshot", phones that are less well equipped than the C-series. No new models have been designated S so far. "G" stands for "Generation Web" and will denote the lower end of the smart phone line while the XPERIA series will denote the upper echelon. "W" will denote the Walkman line while "R" will denote the lesser Radio series.

The number following the initial letter denotes the status of the phone as high end, mid-range or low end, with 9 being the highest. The next number is the version number, followed by a number that describes the phone's style, 0-2 is a candy bar, 3-5 slider, 6-8 clamshell, 9 other.

There is no word as to what will happen to the K, T, M, Z and P series yet but there is supposed to be a P5 announcement this summer.

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I-PHONE : Unwarranted Hype.

Who hasn't heard of the iPhone? Ask around and you'll see that the hype around this little gizmo is phenomenal to the level of becoming downright scary.

At the launch of the iPhone, consumers were promised that it was a 'revolutionary and magical product that is 5 years ahead of any mobile phone'. But this is far from reality. The much awaited Apple iPhone has its share of quirks.

Here are some of them:

1. Availability: The i-phone will be available in India through Vodafone or Airtel i.e they'll be SIM locked to these carriers. So for owning an i-phone you might have to change your number as well. If you want to use it with any other carrier like BSNL, Spice, idea etc, then it would work only as a Glorified i-pod. As per the Scene now, you have to order it. You just can't walk in any showroom to buy one.

2. Price :The price of i-phone in India is Rs 31,000 that too on a 2-year contract with vodafone. You won't be able to use it with any other Service Provider (Spice, BSNL, Idea etc). If you get it unlocked it will void its warranty.

3. iTunes and Fairplay: You still have to use iTunes to transfer music to the phone. This is unlike most phones, which allow direct drag-and-drop. Also, there's no Wi-Fi sync available with iTunes to transfer music. The songs bought from iTunes can only be played on the iPhone or on iPods due to the Fairplay digital rights management software created by Apple.

4. Useless 3G: In India 3G services are still not available and will not be available anytime soon. Even if they are introduced they'll be beyond the reach of majority of people.

5. Camera: The iPhone is equipped with a 2 MP camera. Sadly, camera is non auto-focus and does not have flash of any kind. Moreover, it flatly refuses to record video, even in any sort of reduced resolution and frame rate.

6. Battery: The battery life of a phone depends on its usage which differs from person to person. Since the iPhone is touted as a video iPod, phone and an Internet device (all in one), its usage will be much greater than just a simple phone. Add to this the battery usage of powering a huge touch screen and Wi–Fi; this means that the claimed five hours talk time may be far from accurate and the phone may have to be charged multiple times in a day. Also, the iPhone features a non-removable battery. So if a user faces any battery issues, the phone would have to be sent back to Apple for repair or replacement (not clear where and how, or how long it'll take).

7. No physical keypad or stylus: The iPhone doesn't have a traditional keypad that most people are used to type on. Instead, it has everything onscreen, including a QWERTY keyboard on which you type with your fingers! No stylus! But in case you are a heavy SMS/email user, would you really like to type out messages on the screen? Even if your answer to this question is yes, think of the mess the screen would be with fingerprints all over it. As the screen of the iPhone reacts only to human skin touch, don't even consider using a make-shift styllus or fingernails.

8. No Voice Dial/Voice Memos: For a phone without a traditional dial pad, the absence of voice dialing certainly seems to be a big let down. The phone does not support voice memos either, so they would have to be typed in using the onscreen keyboard every time.

9. Lack of some Basic Features : It doesn't include A2DP stereo streaming over Bluetooth. The recessed 3.5 mm port doesn't work with many commercially available earphone jacks. You can't set your own ringtones (you may be able to store 1000 songs on the iPhone, but the damn thing won't allow you to use one of those songs as your ringtone).You can't send an SMS to multiple recipients. The built-in 4, 8 or 16 GB memory can’t be used as mass storage.

10. Charging problem: The iPhone doesn't use a standard universal wall charger that usually comes with phones. Instead, it comes with a docking station similar to the ones available for iPods. It gets charged while it is docked. And seeing and you may need to charge it several times a day, according to your usage, carrying around a huge docking station would definitely be cumbersome. The good news is that the 3G version being sold in USA comes with a small wall charger. But same can't be said for the phone in India.

11. No add-on software support : the iPhone is a closed system. No one except Apple is allowed to write applications for the device. Apple has even blocked out the huge user community that develops applications for MAC OSX. If I was one of them, this reason alone would be enough for me to boycott the iPhone. In comparison, any phone that uses Symbian Series 60, Symbian UIQ, Windows or Linux is open to new functionality with freely available add-on software.

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MUST READ!!!!!!!!!

This is a PIECE of Expert Opinion on what he thinks about present state of IT Industry from CEO Of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices)

Gordon Moore famously predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double about every two years. For a generation of engineers, Moore's Law was the goal against which they measured success. How many transistors could you cram onto a single integrated circuit?

But now the time has changed. For many years, Moore's Law was the best barometer to describe computing technology's potential. More transistors translated into more computing functionality. Over time, however, in its endless pursuit of Moore's law, the IT industry increased transistor counts and lowered die sizes to the detriment of the chip design itself. The industry kept adding transistors, but didn't always design technology that was more useful or beneficial. The result was people paid for technology—in the form of more transistors—that they didn't want and didn't need.

Today, Moore's Law illustrates the age-old lesson that bigger is not always better. Think of it in terms of a painter who has a bigger and bigger canvas to work with each time, but keeps painting the same picture.

Moore's Law is still an important observation in terms of what it means for the economics of the semiconductor industry. The bigger canvas still has intrinsic value, especially when it doesn't come with a cost premium. But to treat Moore's Law as the guiding principle for semiconductor innovation is to be blind to the needs of today's technology consumers.

When inventor Bob Metcalfe needed to convince the world to adopt his Ethernet standard, he coined a maxim of his own. Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system. Metcalfe's Law puts people ahead of technology, and forces us to realise that technology is only as powerful as it is accessible. The network by itself is worthless. Only by having users successfully access it does it begin to hold value.
While Metcalfe's observation originated in telecommunications, it unquestionably holds important implications for the entire IT community, especially those of us in the semiconductor industry. What good is a 3 gigahertz computer sitting in classroom if the teacher is technology illiterate? How truly mobile is a laptop if it only has two hours of battery life or if its processor burns up 90 watts of power? How affordable are our servers if the cost in energy to run them begins to outstrip the cost of purchasing the servers themselves?

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DRM (Digital Rights Managment) CRACKED!!!!!!!

Copyright isn’t sometimes RIGHT

Media companies have long tried to stop people from copying data from the unprotected audio CD format. During development of the platform, no copy protection schemes were planned as users did not have access to any CD duplicating products and it didn't seem as a threat. It was much later when technologies like MP3, and file sharing actually started competing with long used audio tape piracy industry, when the record labels and artists realised the enormity of the situation. A lot of companies have employed various methods that allowed songs to be played on standalone systems but not be copied through computers. Sony itself has made numerous attempts of trying to stop illegal CD copying to the extent of producing CDs that had intentional errors in them to confuse software based players.

Recently the media giant has had it's fingers snapped with the ill-fated plan to hide rootkit enabled XCP software in it's audio CDs. This rootkit application stealthily installed itself with administrator rights when the disc was inserted in an unprotected computer. Thus enabling it to restrict or in some cases disable media copying from the system. It went to the extent of disabling CD writing software and hardware. Some hackers even found some ports opened by the application in compromised systems, that could be used to hack into the computer to steal data or install malicious software.

All these unplanned developments opened up a pandora's box for Sony and the company had a pretty tough time defending itself from the wrath of buyers as neither the users were ready to pay nor was the industry. After a long legal battle that continued for weeks, the jury made Sony pay through their nose. The company had to pay $7,50,000 as penalty to the state, additionally it had to give $175 to each concerned buyer.

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Death of DESKTOP

We're close to the Death of the Desktop. If we can have online compilers, we can have all the softwares online. The entire program, with all its features. The User Interfaces are actually better. They're mostly free. They don't require updates.
That one thought is enough to get you ' thinking—will everything be done online? Here's a simple Thought: we have thin clients and centralised servers—so what about the Net being: one large, all-serving server? Not literally, but come to think of it, if there were a Google OS couldn't that be a server for all our computers as thin clients?
So let's see what we do on our computers, we have an OS. we have a hard disk, and we run software. That's about it. All of it could be shifted online in theory.

Just think, you carry a basic OS on a thumb drive and plug it into any of these standardised "con¬necting devices." And data online - Free for basic use, paid for heavy use.
With your hard disk gone, where have your movies gone? Think YouTube. Where have your pictures gone? Think Flickr. And on, and on.

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