The Voice of freedom choice in the Computing Industry

Blackberry Storm - An Iphone for the enterprise.

I had my first hands on with the Storm yesterday at a Verizon store. Luckily I was able to play with it for a good half hour. The storm brings in all the goodies of the Blackberry enterprise capability with the additional click-able touch screen. That is , if the touch screen made a really difference to business users. A bit more on the click-able screen. - It seems the LCD is floated on top of four (or more) soft switches underneath, which picks up push made to the screen. This in turn gives a click effect both visually and functionally. I loved the beautiful screen and the high quality finish of the device. Also the fact that it packed a 3.2 Mp camera and a re-movable battery was a plus. The surprise is its add on memory capability, where I can insert a micro SD to increase memory. Or I could carry a 5 or 10 16GB micro SDs to give me capacity to 160GB. This is something iphone cannot boast off. The turn off was a lack of wi-fi feature. But in effect enterprises (like Gov etc) would not want their employs to use free public or a neighbors wi-fi to send data. By getting rid of wi-fi they have removed a potential intrusion point. I am certain Blackberry might soon bring out a Wi-Fi model for the new wanna-be1 Storm users, teens etc featuring a Wi-Fi .All in all I see the Storm and the Iphone as 2 separate animals. But I have seen the media compare them as if they are in direct competition, just like they were comparing PS3 and the Wii when these 2 were released. My recommendation would be to not to go by media review and go out to the nearest Verizon store and check it out, if this is the right phone for you or not

Labels: RIM Blackberry STORM Review APPL APPLE iphone 3G T-Mobile Google G1

posted by netrama @ 11:44 AM 0 Comments

APPLE and its OS are meant for really dumb and stupid people*

In spite of having a love-hate relationship with MSFT , i have always been a Windows person.
Recently , after all the hype and marketing push by Apple (for some reason an Apple ad I saw today claims that MSFT is spending more on Ads ...look who is talking!), I decided to try out Mac OS X. Here is what I have concluded.
From the beginning the OS-X looked like a toy with no user control on the hardware beneath. There was a step in the installation process , that asks you to enter your profession. Right there and then it all became clear why there was so much hype. First of all the list was not in a Alphabetical order. It looked like the list as made by the money thief that runs Apple. The top of the list was Media, Print .....some where down in the middle were engineers and at the bottom of the list was Student. This felt like an insult. The entire OS-X seemed like a piece of work that Microsoft could turn out in 2 weeks time , if they had their pick on hardware, with the Quanta or FOXCONN engineers spending a few pizza nights at the MSFT campus.
Just using the OS made me feel like a stupid, idiot and dumb. Now I am not blaming Apple HW...they are nicely designed (and why not there are idiots here ready to pay for Chrome and white colors) . But I cant compare HW since MSFT does not have any PC hardware of its own.
Now both Apple and MSFT platforms are Intel based , with hardware designs beginning to look like clones. This when I realized that Apple is taking away freedom of hardware choice from its end users completely. You are tied to propriety Apple architecture.
I have realized that you have to be really really really *computer dumb (the list starts with Media and Print people) to be using Apple at all in the first place. This is when I saw the big picture- the market for dumb computer users is the biggest pie out there. Anybody who knows to use the keyboard and Google will be able to tune Vista out of its few kinks and make it work like a charm. But it seems like there are more dumb out there than I had imagined , and even more dumber to pay insane markups on essentially the same hardware. Dont know what Apple is plotting now , a computer with just one Power Button , and no keyboard ?? ---concept borrowed from the hippy mp3 player by the same company.

posted by netrama @ 10:15 PM 0 Comments