Dell XCD 35 - My New Gadget

It's been quite long that I haven't posted anything and so I'm back here again!

September-October 2011, had been the best months for me as I got two beautiful and sexy gadgets \m/

First, on my birthday I got a Cisco Wireless Modem+Router. And then I bought my first ever Android phone - Dell XCD 35.

Reason why I bought new phone is, after using my old Samsung phone I was so bored and pissed off because now a days everyone is carrying the power with them, Android/Windows phones! I had seen so many people buying smartphones just for the sake of showoff.I wanted to be connected to the virtual world 24*7, which was impossible with my old Samsung Phone. I wanted to experience the power of smartphone and so one fine day I took the decision of buying a new phone.

Reason 'why' Dell, it's a sophisticated brand which was giving value for my money.I was confused while buying the phone (as usual). But 'she' was with me not to guide but to control and make sure I'll buy what I would really afford :-D

After visiting at least 6/7 shops all over the Pune, finally I got a fair exchange deal! I sold my old phone for 2,500 bucks which I had bought last year for 8,700 :-S . Reason for such a large depreciation, I was using so damn outdated shitty piece *grrrr*

Price for Dell XCD35 was 8,500! A wonderful smartphone for smart price.

Finally given below is my rating/review for Dell XCD35

1. Price
Very cheap and value for money phone! I bought it for Rs.8,500

My rating: 9/10

2. Look and Feel
It's great not so bulky not so sleek, fits perfect in your hand. Beautiful back cover with a DELL logo on it. Awesome Screen quality. The device has three small but hard buttons it. Yes, you read it correct the buttons are hard to press.
Technical Specification of Display
8.9cm(3.5 inch) 800*480 pixels WVGA resolution
262K color (18 bit color) TFT
Capacitive Touch screen

My rating: 8/10

3. Camera & Sound Quality
If you want to buy this phone for entertainment purpose as in Listening music on loud speaker, clicking the photos then you'll be disappointed with Dell XCD35.
This phone has very poor sound quality for listening songs on loud speaker or even on headphones. It has only one speaker :-(
Camera quality is Good but this phone lacks some good features when it comes to Camera. There is no dedicated key for camera which is actually unbelievable!
My Rating: 6/10

4. Performance/Memory/OS
XCD35 runs Android 2.2 (Froyo) in it! Wonderful OS :-)
Phone specification says
Flash: 512M
RAM：256M
Internal Memory: About 200 MB for user.
Expandable with Micro SD memory card (up to 16GB)
If you own an Android phone which do not has much internal storage then you might curse yourself for buying it :-D
Dell XCD35 has a decent internal storage. My phone shows approx 162mb. Whenever you download any android app, it's gets installed on Phone Memory. Some of the apps can be moved to SD Card but not all apps give you that option :-)
But then in 8500 bucks you shouldn't expect to have 1TB Internal phone storage!
Performance wise this device is nice! I haven't seen it running slow at any point of time. I have many apps connected 24*7 to Internet via EDGE.
My Rating: 8/10

5.Battery
Before telling you about battery please keep it in mind that Dell XCD35 is a Smartphone which runs on Android. If you have poor knowledge about what is smartphone, apps, 3G/EDGE connectivity then probably you would need to search on Google and read some related material.
As this is being a smartphone which Ideally would be running many apps connected and running all the time, battery life is bit low.
If you don't want to use apps which needs to be connected to the internet then Battery wouldn't be an issue. But if you are like me, always connected to the virtual world then better carry the phone charger with you! I would say it has good battery life and it depends on how you use all the features. If you understand the features/settings properly then battery wouldn't be issue for you!
My Rating: 7/10

Overall I would say if you want a decent smartphone in a very affordable price then go for it!
Overall Rating: 7/10

Here you go the XCD35

RIP Steve Jobs :-(

And finally he is gone :-( Tribute to his work and his remarkable journey, Apple has put on THE Hero's Photo on their homepage. And some touching words


I had once seen a video of 'Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address'

Truly inspiring! This is what he had said,


'Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle'

World has lost The Maestro,one of the main contributor to Many Technological advancements.

Rest in Peace Steve Jobs!

My Favorite Online Radio - Bombay Production.com

This is one of the best thing I've ever found on internet..!! Link to Bombay Production, this website has hell lot of wonderful songs ranging from Kishore Kumar to K K, Rehaman :-)

Wonderful Buffering(at least at my home) so no problem while listening to my favorite track :-)

Cheers to the makers of Bombay Production :-)

Review: Samsung Superb (Code: S 5560)

I bought this gadget in August 2010 when everybody was behind buying a Full Screen Touch Phones ;-) I wanted to buy Nokia N97 then I thought of buying Android based Phone and finally settled on Samsung.

Reasons why I bought this phone:

1. It has 5 mega pixel camera with decent zoom.
2. A Full Screen touch interface.
3. Attractive stylus which literally looks like pencil.
4. EDGE as I was quite sure that buying 3G enabled phone so soon wasn't a good decision.
5. The most important thing is price..! I got it for 8.8k INR

And now after using it for a year let me tell you it's Problems ;-)

1. Worst thing is Message storing capacity, it can hardly store 500 sms.
2. Very slow processing as in Try listening songs and browse through the menu you'll understand how pathetic is this shitty piece !
3. App Base. Where the hell is it? No where, search for some java Apps and be happy with it.
4. The default browser of Samsung Mobiles Sucks, big time !
5. Biggest turn off is while on call you can't browse through menu..!! You can just send messages or write memo WTF.

One good news --> Samsung has stopped S 5560's production.

Rating

Design	3/5
Performance	2.5/5
ROI	2/5
Overall	2/5

Barbeque Nation - A My Kind of Place (Unlimited Food)

Kebabs & Grills have never been my favorite because I always need Quantity with affordable price & Quality, well I decide it once I eat at a particular place ;) So Kebabs & Grills which generally costs much for few amount of flesh, well I just can't digest this thought :-D.

So for the first time when I heard about Barbeque Nation long time back, I was kind of excited to go and see how the hell they can provide unlimited Grills for affordable cost* (Here * affordable is for Weekdays and that too Day time ;) otherwise it's bit 'little' heavy on your pocket, this conclusion is done after I visited BBQ Nations for first time.Occasion, well it was my Birthday Party to some of my close friends)

In Pune for Barbeque Nation we have two choices
1st. One of my favorite 'Sayaji', near Wakad at Pune-Mumbai highway. (though I have never been to it, I have heard about the place from many people who have been there & I'm planning to go there soon!) Here at Sayaji Barbeque Nation is at Roof Top, cool isn't it ? :)

2nd.Barbeque Nation, Solitaire Building, Behind Dass Showroom,Near Aga Khan Palace, Kalyani Nagar, Pune 411014 This place from outside doesn't look so pleasant but once you enter inside, It's so damn cool :-))

Ambiance is very nice & impressive!

Lets talk about food :D
To start with my experience let me tell you, we were 4 people went to Barbeque Nation at Kalyani nagar, since we didn't get place at Sayaji :-( and it was Friday night! All are hardcore foodie & Non-Vegetarian off course ;-)

First they served some Kebabs & we were so hungry that we were craving to have at least a bit of it :-D Table arrangement was too good there was a small flag which is UP when you are getting served Kebabs if you are done with it you have to bend it ;-) So innovative :-D

For Kebabs you get a small Kebab Conveyor Grill, which is damn cool & entertaining at same time :-D where you can apply various oils to the Kebabs :-P
All Kebabs were fish i guess :-P i didn't bother to ask anyone as I was so hungry :-D There were prawns, Surmai, Chicken and what not :-D but majority was Fish!
We even had Chicken Tandoori kind of eatable :-P other than Kebab so don't worry if you don't like Fish ;-)

After having two rounds of it we finally moved to main course but frankly Speaking after eating so much of Kebabs we had less space in our stomach :-P

In main course they had lots of food which was ultimate !! Starting from Soup to Biryani :-D

Deserts were good, which had Gulab Jamun, Ice cream, Brownie & some more things i don't remember rest :-P as I was concentrating on Gulab Jamuns..! They were so yummy :-D

In all food was great but we paid Rs.580 per person for Non-Vegetarian which was kind of Ok Ok if you visiting it for first time.
But if you are planning to visit it then I will prefer to go on afternoons ;-) where they charge somewhat around Rs.310
So My Rating for BBQ Nations would be 3.5/5

Certifications

Recently I was planning to do Certifications of Unix. While I was searching for various Unix Certification paths I found this fantastic post by some one called Neo.
Please go through it and let me know what you think :) Because personally I think if you have adequate knowledge then spending some bucks on getting a certification is not so costly ;)

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A word on 'certification'

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I've been working on UNIX-based systems for over 15 years, including almost every flavor of UNIX under the sky. Never, in my career, have I meet a great UNIX person who was 'certified'. All the great system administrator and programmers have the same thing in common - a lot of reading and hands on experience on the job. There is no classroom experience that can substitute for crashing a live server for a major corporation at 3 am and having the responsibility to get it back on line before business opens or you are 'toast'.

I've worked in places where the system administator was in a training class for a week and while they were away, the backup tape for the major systems was full and ejected itself. They had a automatic email in place to warn, but they were in class Then, a consultant who was working on a difficult codeing project for a month lost her files. She went to look for the backup tape to restore the files and found the tape ejected !!!! She cried, really.

I've worked with a lot of folks over the years certified on routers, UNIX, MS, etc. I'm sorry to say that none of these people were 10 percent as competent than the people who had a passion for reading and building, hands on. Most certifications are just ways for vendors and suppliers to make money selling training papers.

Want to be great at UNIX? Get a version of UNIX (Linux, BSD, whatever), build a server from scratch and start building and writing C code. Get Rich Stevens books on system level programming and learn to program at the system level. Write your own server and client code, debug the code, work on interprocess communications, debug memory leaks, build shared libs, build static libs, fix corrupt file systems, etc.

Certification is not good for personal knowledge. It is useful when you are just starting to get your foot in the door of a company who requires certification, but you can bet your paycheck that the experts do not have these 'waste of time' pieces of paper. Do you think that Rich Stevens, who wrote the best books on UNIX is 'certified by a vendor?'
How about Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux? No, they are great UNIX people because they did not take any vendor shortcuts. Patiences, practice, discipline are what builds the foundation for being great at anything, not quick certification classes.

My Old Phone - Micromax Q5fb

I bought this Phone in March 2010 for Rs.4,700 which was actually a fair deal! But I still regret that I sold off my First ever phone, gifted by my Mom which was Nokia N70 in exchange with Micromax Q5fb :(

The only reason I chose Micromax was It's a Dual Sim Phone! Another best feature of this phone is It has a Qwerty keypad, easy to surf web! For me these were the must have features in an Ideal phone!

Problematic things, which I discovered later when I actually bought it :-P are... Bit bulky, loud speakers, Yes those are bloody loud :-( Screen size is small. I also faced problem with it's audio jack, it was faulty and I suppose that is one of the very common problem in Q5fb phones all over India.

In all I would say if you don't have money :-P I mean do not have budget to buy something good then go for this phone, else strict NO.

Overall rating: 2/5