Idou, the next revolution or a senseless innovation?

Sony Ericsson is known for the walkman revolution they brought into the mobile industry. Soon everyone was to follow them, and today literally every mobile phone is an walkman player, though still Sony Ericsson enjoys the throne with phones with the best audio clarity in their armour.
I have been a loyal Sony Ericsson fanboy, as I have used T630,K510, K750 and finally now having a P1i.
Sony Ericsson phones provide one of the best sound and camera quality and that has always been their strength. This also prompted them to bring exotic and extravagant walkman and camera phones like w995, and c905. But they have announced another surprising package by the name Idou (read I do U ) which is going to sport a 12 Megapixel camera. Yes, that was not a typo, I did mean twelve megapixel. Initially, even I was astounded, partly due to the amazement and partly because of skepticism. I did feel it was little unrealistic, to have this big a camera on a mobile phone, which is primarily for making calls.
Initially, I even thought this is just a rumour making rounds in internet, but soon was proved wrong when I checked the MWC 2009 coverage. Idou, the codename for the proposed phone, will run the new Symbian OS which is still in development. Neverthless, the preview of Idou prototype, at MWC was indeed cool. The UI is very fluid and deep, the best I have seen. Very much like a improved PSP interface.
The features of the phone include a 3.5" touch screen, with 360x640 pixels, face recognition, xenon flash, aGPS and all the other fancy features any modern smartphone would have. The speculated launch time in 2009 Q3, but we all know what happened with Xperia, so maybe it will be a few months longer.
Well Idou might be the dawn of next generation gadgets, or a senseless innovation. It is not ripe yet to conclude. In the meantime you can drool over these pages.
Idou Specifications
Idou MWC coverage, video.
Idou Official Page
I will be back with the coverage of just launched W995.

-codevalley

Internet Explorer 8 RC, at last a fighter!

It has been some time since I have been using Internet Explore 8 Release Candidate 1, and I have found it very satisfactory in terms of performance. For ages, I always felt that Internet Explorer was a lighter browser compared to the foxes and Operas. But, the real downfall of IE happened with other browsers coming with tabs. Buy somehow Microsoft ignored the importance of tabs, for so long, I remember the first IE tabs, coming with the help of Yahoo! toolbar. But it was very messy nevertheless. Then IE came on with its own tabs. But, still they were very buggy. I remember even in IE 8 beta (even in my Windows 7 version of IE 8) whenever I open a new tab, the browser freezes for a few seconds (sometimes minutes) until the new tab is loaded. This is very irritating, since, we use tabs so that we don't have to wait until the page loads, we can carry on with the current tab.
But things have changed with the Release Candidate 1. Tabs are as fast as it is in any other browser, the tabs opened from a parent tab always group together with a same highlight color, for easy identification.
The address bar is much more than just a mere address bar. As you type, it shows relevant information, grouped and organized in a neat way, with domain highlighting etc.
The in-Private mode and in-Private filter lets you browse without leaving traces on the system. Something that comes handy to keep your browsing personal when you are using your dad's laptop. It also has a crash recovery system, which restores all the tabs back in case your browser has a crash. The compatibility mode is still there and it would be used for most of the sites you browse, unless you are frequent visitor to the Microsoft websites.
The browsers rendering is much better, with anti-aliasing of fonts and sharper rendering of images. Even other apps like Outlook which make use of the IE engine take advantage of this.
It also has a few other bells-n-whistles like the web slices, accelerators, add-in manager, etc which I have not yet used fully.
The only sad part apart from the compatibility mode is that IE 8 RC1 is still not available for Windows 7, I even tried downloading the Vista version and installing which did not work. I hope the wait would end soon.
Summing it up, IE 8.0 RC1 is light as Chrome, feature rich as firefox, at the same time clearer and sharper a faster than any other browser. I think IE 8 for the final release. And I believe it can give a really good fight this time. And, maybe, win too :)

Rating :4.5/5
I am not exaggarating on the rating, I could not find any flaw with it. Not even a single crash as well.
codevalley

User Access Control, a scapegoat?

As Windows 7 is round the corner, lets get a little backwards in the time-line. Windows Vista kept us waiting for over six years, since the release of Windows XP, before hitting the retail stores in January 2007. Opening with mixed reviews, with some curiosity aroused by the Aero graphics engine and a new system architecture, the much hyped Vista settled down as a failure. Various reasons were given for the failure, which included the mammoth amount of system resources it required, the slow system performance, etc. But, one of the most cursed feature of Vista was the User Access Control.
UAC as it is commonly referred to as, is actually a feature which Microsoft added to Vista to enhance its security, by asking the user's confirmation before allowing any program to perform any serious (sometimes trivial) operation. People even went to the extent of rebranding UAC as User Annoyance Control. Norton noted that, "The more a user is prompted, the more likely it is that he or she will dismiss the prompt without reading it, and hence it is a false security model." And UAC became the easy target for Microsoft bashers and Windows haters.
But, is it really an annoyance? I personally felt it is not. Spending a few extra seconds reading a popup is always an easier option than installing a multi-megabyte antivirus software. Atleast you know whatever is happening in your system. Which all applications are trying to execute. I know each time my pendrive is trying to autoplay. It has helped me many a times from getting infected from external media.
After all is'nt this the very same security model followed in the Linux systems? Does'nt it ask for admin rights each time we try to do some system operation? In fact I have felt the frequency of popups more in my Ubuntu than in my Vista. I was rather disappointed when I heard Microsoft has partially removed the UAC from Windows 7. Though Vista may well be a below par product from Microsoft, I think the criticism on UAC was rather unfair. But, well that is MY opinion. You can have your say.
-codevalley

The Open Source Honeymoon!

Open Source, yes, that is what the computing world needs. Think how good it would have been if the software was sold rather than just the licenses of software being sold? Think about the infinite possibilities, you could get away from the blue screen of death, (and obviously get your own green, turquise blue or black screen of death, your choice!). You could remove internet explorer from the bundle and replace it with the browser of your choice (higly recommended), you could even customize the applications and software bundle of your windows and sell it as your own distro (and millions of different colorful bugs). But alas! that is not going to happen, as Microsoft is not going to follow the Linux way.
Look at Linux, how easy life is. Being a Linuxer for the past few years, I am still enjoying my honeymoon with my PC. I am never bored, (yes, there are very little games for Linux who minds) I spend hours formating and reinstalling new Distros. I could even keep my PC fresh and clean because of this, (yeah I do lose a confidential file or two, every now and then in the process of formatting, but who cares?). I can have a two page long list of distros in my bootloaders, so I use one for listening to music, one for browsing, one for office and so on, how convenient. Not like windows, where you have to do a series of clicks and find the app you need. Here you just need to reboot to the distro of your choice.Also, I have nice spending time buying a new hard disk every 2 months ( not because of excessive formatting. I lost only 2 hard disks that way, I actually buy because I run out of space installing OS).
I have also mastered my typing skills, thanks to the console prompt, whatever be the distro, how much ever friendly it be, I get a reason or two to get to the console and set things straight. Also my vocabulary is getting richer day by day, with extraordinary words like Ubuntu, Xandros, knoppix etc. I bet Open Source is the way to salvation! ( I have to log back into windows before I post this, my network card is not detected in my Ubuntu!!! )

"somethings look sexy when exposed, but some are better maintained under hood."

codevalley