Raj Agrawal

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Picostone Basic review: Home Automation, Done Well

April 22, 2018 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Home automation a.k.a smart-home-technology has been evolving since 20th century. It all started with the need to automate menial tasks, and appliances were thus invented. Over years, the technology has greatly evolved and such appliances can now be operated through smart IOT devices. You could be at home, or may be half-way across the world – it won’t make much difference. Your smartphone is all there’s needed to remotely control your home appliances. I’ll talk about my experience with Picostone Basic, a device that let’s you achieve just that.

What’s in the box?

Main Device (1 Unit), Connector (1 Unit), Fuse (1 Unit), Connecting Wire (1 meter), User Manual and Warranty Document.

Specifications

Number of Switches controlled (on the same circuit board)Upto 4
Input Voltage230V/50Hz
Output Voltage230V/50Hz
Power Consumption1W
Input Voltage for Switches230V/50Hz
Communication Security256-bit AES encryption
Connectivity802.11.b/g/n WiFi
Min Power per Channel5W (Resistive Load)
Max Power per Channel220W (Resistive Load)

Installation

The entire setup spans between 15-20 minutes and can be performed by your local electrician. The device is roughly the size of your palm and should fit well in the circuit board cavity. If there isn’t enough space, it may be left hanging outside the board – This can be aesthetically unpleasing, so as a work-around you can ask the the electrician to mount the device onto a surface-box (you may need to purchase this from your local electrical store).

Picostone basic supports upto 4 switches and once the installation is complete, all 4 of them become 2-way switches.

The device hosts it’s own private wireless network. This is particularly useful when you’re at home and when all sources of internet are offline.

The Main Device
From left to right – Connector, Fuse, Connecting Wire

 

Security

Picostone is designed to prevent unsolicited access. The device connects to WIFI networks only with a WPA2 security level (AES 256 bit encrypted).

During first time registration, the device owner has to register their account via OAuth/ email. This user also has the authority to add one or more trusted users (family members per se).

The settings screen where you can add more users (click to view a larger image).

App (Android) and device reliability

v2.0.0.39 of the app looks pretty and works fine. The in-app switches are responsive on a WIFI network, but there’s a noticeable delay while on mobile internet. I discovered a glitch during a momentary electricity outage in my area (happens quite often during summers in Mumbai). Once electricity was back, Picostone could not remember which switches were previously “turned on”. After speaking with the support team, they considered the anomaly at priority and promptly fixed it! The device have been working reliably otherwise.

Scenes and schedules

This is one of my favorite features. While adding a scene, you’re basically creating a custom profile for your room. One of the scenes may be configured to turn-on 2 appliances at the same time (for instance, 1 light source and 1 ceiling fan), while rest can be turned off. Likewise, you can create several combinations of such one-shot toggles.

Scenes that I created (click to view a larger image)

Additionally, you can schedule each of the 4 appliances to automatically toggle on/off at a specific time of the day.

A handy option to set schedules (click to view a larger image)

Dimmable appliances

For added convenience, you can also regulate the speed of your ceiling fan. As a recommendation from the company, it’s best to use a step-regulator (with upto 5 levels of speed) for seamless experience.

Customer Support

I’ve had several interactions with the support team and they’ve always been prompt. I hope their quality of support persists in future too.

Pricing and discounts

Picostone Basic is priced at Rs. 11,800 (MRP). I know, it’s a little steep on the price. You can avail the device at a good deal during their end-of-season/ festive sales.

Warranty

The device comes with 2 years of replacement warranty. Currently there’s no way to extend it – but they’re working on something similar to benefit their existing customers.

Other available variants

Very soon, they’re launching a new variant called Picostone Polar. It’s aimed at allowing users to control ACs and set-top boxes with the same Picostone app. So with basic and polar together, most of the appliances at home at covered.

Conclusion

It’s super-quick to setup, performs well, is backed with good after-sales service and also a little expensive. I’ve used the device for a fairly long time (more than a month) and it’s been good so far. If you don’t mind spending a little more on a good quality product, then Picostone basic is definitely worth considering.

Filed Under: Consumer Technology Tagged With: home automation, iot, picostone, picostone basic, review, smart home

Review: The 10,050mAH Power Bank From ASUS

June 14, 2015 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Power banks can be real life savers – a statement no smartphone user will disagree with. I’d say, if consumer-tech industry has come up with anything purposeful in recent times, then it’s these cute-and-handy blocks of portable power. And ASUS appears to be sinking well into the smartphone scene. Now they have come up with well chiseled power banks too. They not only looks gorgeous, but also pack well in a sexy design.

(A quick heads up – This will be a review specifically and ONLY with the ‘form factor’ in context. Almost all leading companies offer well performing power banks. So performance is presumed to be at par with all similar products).

[foogallery id=”12416″]

Strength:

The form factor! Zenpower has been touted to be a credit sized portable devices. And there’s really no doubt about it. It’s convenient to carry and you can easily snug it into your pant’s pocket.

Shortcoming:

The device comes with a very short charging cable (a problem with most other brands too). A charging cable should ideally be longer, or at least the package should offer two separate cables. Where one cable can be long enough to plug into wall sockets. And the other cable can be meant for portability.

Current pricing: Between Rs. 1,500 to 1,800.

Digression – The number 10,050 is quite amusing. I think it’s only intended to help consumers uniquely search, recognise and associate (10,000 + the extra 50) mAH specifically with Zenpower. I doubt if they actually programmed the device to specifically hold the extra 50 mAH.

Err… what Raj? Okay. Just look up “10,050 mAH” on Google search.

Specification sheet:

  • Packed with 10050 mAh Lithium-ion
  • 2.4A Quick Charge
  • 11 Safety Features (especially JIETA Protection) and 6 international Certifications
  • 215 gms in weight
  • Available in 5 color models
  • Protective Bumper – slip, scratch resistance
  • Plugging cycle test for 5000 times
  • Aluminum casing that can withstand 60kg of pressure.

Filed Under: Consumer Technology Tagged With: asus, battery, lithium-ion, power bank

Review: InFocus M2

May 31, 2015 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Every other mobile company today has its own version of a budget smartphone. They’re majorly targeting a consumer base that does not seem to care about specs, performance, graphics, frames-per-second, and all that jazz. All they want is the best phone to fit their budget. And mobile vendors like Xiaomi have come up with phones that are extremely well priced in this category, but at the same time deliver on specs and performance.

Now a US based software company InFocus – have recently stepped in the Indian smartphone scene with the ‘M2’. Interestingly, it’s a high-specification, budget smart-phone; at a crazy-low price tag of Rs. 4,999 available exclusively at SnapDeal.com.

Here’s my experience with the InFocus M2.

Call Quality

I’ve used a Nexus 5 for comparison, and the call quality of InFocus M2 is surprisingly better. This goes to prove that, big smart phones don’t always do the most important job very well; that of being a good phone. The call quality was crisp, and you not have to be very close to the speaker to be audible at the other end. Even while travelling on densely populated loud roads of Mumbai, the phone fares very well at noise reduction.

Messaging

The InFocus M2 does not come bundled with 3rd party keyboards like Swype. So until you setup your phone and choose to download one, you have to rely on the default keyboard. Which is a real pain to use. The keys are small, and their detection areas often seem to overlap. This will result in you making a lot of errors, which turns out to be really frustrating.

The autocorrect works as expected, and gives quick, accurate results. On default settings, I typed gibberish on the Nexus 5, and the keyboard defaults to the closest correct word. But Infocus M2 will provide all the closest options, and will default to what you have typed. This is not necessarily bad if you’re typing something native, in english.

Camera

The camera on InFocus M2 is somewhat of a disappointment. The InFocus M2 comes with an 8 MP rear and 8 MP front camera. That’s nice, but only on paper. The camera sensor is decent and the effort required to click a stable picture is monumental. 8 out of 10 photos I clicked were at least a bit blurry. When stacked up against a powerful Nexus 5, the camera falls short in more ways than one. The noise is evident in every photo, and while you won’t be able to call it a bad camera, it certainly misses out on all the important details.

Flash on the InFocus M2 is a monster. Every dark image is illuminated enough to make it look as if it was almost taken in daylight. This is another thing that the Nexus 5 can learn from such budget phones. The response time for photos in daylight is really good. The camera comes bundled with a host of useful features like smile detection, zero shutter delay, GPS location information; all handy additions which make for an overall decent camera package, “if” you can manage to get a still shot.

Video Camera

Compared to the still camera, the video camera of InFocus M2 gives much more stability. Though blur is always evident, the pain of shooting non-blurry photos is gone. The response time is quick, yet again.

Gaming

The surprise factor of the phone is it’s incredible performance. One may judge a phone’s performance by how fast and responsive it is, but all expectations sail low when there’s cheap phone on hand. But this is where InFocus M2 surprises, shocks and pleases! The first game I loaded up was Injustice: Gods Among Us. Though not a looker (as most mobile games fail to be), Injustice is a very power hungry game. And the InFocus tames it just the same. I loaded up Riptide Gp2, which is used for game benchmarks all over the world, and the InFocus handled it with ease as well. Every game I played made me feel as if i’m playing it on my Nexus 5, and this speaks volumes about the performance of the InFocus M2’s GPU.

Software

History shows us, that every Apple competitor tries to copy Apple in some way. It might be the curved edges, unibody design, the style statement, the camera; everyone tries to have a part of Apple in whatever phones they own. As such, the InFocus does not stray away from the trend. But InFocus M2’s attempt at copying Apple’s aesthetics is a bit unique. The default launcher has no menu for apps. Every Android phone till date has had a menu, where all the apps are stacked. But InFocus M2 strays away from such. Any app you download will be stacked on the home screen on a separate page. You’ll have to swipe left of right to find and access it. This reduces the complexity and gets right down to the point; not a bad thing to have. But Android does not feel like Android without the home menu. It feels like a mix breed of Apple and Nokia to be honest.

Filed Under: Consumer Technology Tagged With: budget, infocus

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