Sony Ericsson's Show stopper: Xperia

Xperia, though not even out in market, has already gained many nicknames, like iPhone killer, show stopper, ultimate mobile experience are to just list some of them. For all those mortals who are still scratching their heads on what is this all about, Xperia is the new mobile phone from Sony Ericsson. A a company which was formed just over 7 years ago, is already making their presence felt in the arena. SE is already getting in level to Nokia in terms of popularity, passion and even resale value.
Now, Microsoft and Sony Ericsson have joined hands to give a masterpiece, the Xperia. For the first time, a mobile gadget would be running on Windows Mobile 6.1. Xperia story does not end there, in fact it starts with this. It has an unique, arc design slider with a metal finish and full qwerty keyboard with aesthetically chiselled keys and full 3" touch screen, too add cream to the pie, it also has a 4 way key and an optical joystick. Further you have handwriting recognition, aGPS, EDGE, a 3.2 MP camera to list a few.
The interface; I have never seen such a breathtaking interface. Xperia user interface is based on a bunch of panels. Panels are like desktops, you can fill them with icons and tools you want, and you can have many of them. One for each occasion, like an Office panel which would have all your outlook and meeting gadgets arranged and a holiday panel which will list all your multimedia, games etc. The panels will cascade on a press of the hot key and you can choose which one you want. From the initial videos of the phone, the whole software seems to be very swift and crystal clear.
Now, let us get under the hood, what Xperia is made of. The display has a resolution of 800x480 pixels (no I am not talking about my laptop), running on a Qualcomm MSM7200 528MHz processor, 400 MB internal memory, 128 MB RAM, and a 256 MB storage memory. It can beat my 5 year old Laptop, if you put in a 4 GB MicroSD card to it. Even my lappy does not have the WiFi, or A2DP Bluetooth and 3G. The phone comes in black and silver paints.
Though the spokesperson refused to comment on its price, it could be easily be a topper in that section too. I hope it would be cheaper than 145grams of gold.
Xperia Mini-site
Xperia Specifications from GSM Arena


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Digsby, the new IM cloud.

People might have heard about twitter, it is a place where people can maintain an online, public diary. People could write whatever they want directly from the twitter portal or even through various IMs by adding twitter ID as buddy and sending them IMs. The service is really unique (and wierd, some may think), but nevertheless very popular. It even won the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi)( aka "spring break for geeks.") awards. Twittering is also referred to as micro-blogging.
Now, after creating a new realm in the web, they are with their new product, Digsby ( I could not get a meaning for this word, though). Digsby is an integrated IM client which can handle multiple protocols like Yahoo!, MSN, Gmail, AOL etc. But, that doesnt end there, it can handle e-mails and more amazingly the social networking accounts like MySpace, Facebook too. That might give it an edge over the existing Trillian, Miranda etc. And the interface too looks better.
At first, even I thought Digsby is just another Trillian. But, it didn’t take me much to realize I am wrong. The installation was a breeze( you have binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac, I tried Windows). Then the configuration, you can add your accounts to it, IM accounts, e-mail accounts, and Social Networking accounts( only MySpace and Facebook for now, but they promise for more in future). Once this is done, the main window is divided into panes to show your chat buddies, mails and social links. You can even configure their placement. It looks really organized. Another feature is you can group your buddies, that is, if you have a same buddy in MSN, Gtalk and Yahoo!, you can create a single nickname for that and it would be compact. Whenever you run your mouse over a buddy name in the list, it will automatically show his profile details, fetched from the internet. Another good thing about Digsby is that it has dozens of nice and appealing themes for every taste. I spent over a night choosing my style. The information and alerts come up as nice little pop-ups on desktop. Digsby also lets you create your own widgets.
In the downside, there is not support for Orkut and other social networking accounts. And in the IM side, the buddy images does not come up correctly, even if they have an avatar of icon, set, Digsby tends to ignore it and show the default icon. But things will change in the near future. Atleast, the beta tag is still hanging around Digsby’s neck. So, hope you enjoy the experience with purple colored, egg shapped, capped buddy.
Digsby Home.
Twitter Home.

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AMD out from Hibernation, but Intel never slept?

By this April AMD will roll out its long famed Barcelona Quad cores, onto the retail market. They were supposed to do this by the end of 2007 [read here], but unfortunately, some issues like Visualization problems and breakdown at high workloads kept them from going. But, now they have filled in new silica and are all set to challenge the blue chip maker.
Barcelona is the code name for the new quad series of Opterons, and is a continuation of AMDs quest for dominance in the multicore market. Though most feel that AMD is trailing by an year, they are confident and proud about their offering. AMD says this gives better performance and have a cleaner and compact instruction set, and even does not have extra heat dissipation compared to its earlier dual core variants. Already the Barcelona has been deployed in some high profile computer centers like Texas Advanced Computing Center. Now, AMD is looking at vendors like HP, IBM, Dell etc to sellout the new Opterons.
At the same time Intel has announced it would be ready with its new 6 core processor code named Dunnington (sure, even I feel the name is wierd), which is supposed to hit the markets later this year, also the 'Tukwila' (that's the wierdest) project which is a quad-core Itanium with 2 billion transistors, the already famed Nehalem.
Well most feel Intel is ahead now, at least for the next 12 months, but we cannot rule out the Green boy, he has done it before, he may repeat the "Hamilton act" (as we call in Formula1).

P.S. I am sorry for not posting for last four months, I had some personal debacles, but now it is going to be as frequent as ever.

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