Raj Agrawal

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Mobile Post Apocalypse – Holy Wars

June 23, 2015 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

I remember holding a Nokia 6600 and being in awe of how revolutionary and cutting edge it looked. It’s a bulky and completely outdated phone by todays standards, but back then it was an absolute beauty. A never before seen form factor, bulky but good-to-hold curves and a brilliant camera for its time really made the phone desirable by many.

I remember the Sony Walkman phone, which was in a league of its own. Sony owned the camera battles back then, but the Walkman phone offered more; unprecedented sound quality, and walkman-like music management. There were other players – you bought a Motorola just for the looks. There was nothing like a Razr back then, and there is nothing that looks like the Razr even now. Every major competitor before Apple brought something new to the table. There were no lists of consumer-friendly phone specs that you could compare. You simply had to choose one which fit your needs the best. DPI, megapixels, cores, rom; none of these things mattered much. And the phones were generally very stable.

There will not be another Nokia 3310, or at least a phone which will be as popular. Why? It’s because back then, spec sheets did not matter much.

Mobile post apocalypse - Analogy (Poussin, Nicolas: The Victory of Joshua over the Amalekites - An excerpt from the The Jewish Bible)
Mobile Post Apocalypse – Pictorial analogy (Poussin, Nicolas: The Victory of Joshua over the Amalekites – An excerpt from the The Jewish Bible)

Apple revolutionised mobiles. It’s true. Whether or not you’re an Android fan, this is something you simply have to accept. Touchscreens were never very popular. Using a stylus to operate smartphones today can get really cumbersome. O2 had a lot of clout among the business elitists, but the world was mainly either Nokia, Sony Erricson, Motorola, or Blackberry. Blackberry owned the majority of the business market, and the other three ruled everything else. All Apple had to do was make a good Touchscreen phone. And it did. And it brought something new to the table; something which was acceptable as the next big thing; something which did not seem ahead of its time. That’s really all you need to do; make something which feels like a logical follow up without really trying to change the world. Apple did just that, and suddenly they were innovators. Every new piece of technology they put into the iPhone became a standard. DPI became the next screen rating. Cameras suddenly felt obsolete in comparison. Music was already their bread and butter and coin. It’s like the world was just waiting for a good ‘smartphone’ – a term that brings about mixed feelings, but that”s for another time.

War is, on many levels, a mind game. Your strength lies not in the strength of your units, but in your ability to use them properly. You cannot always be innovative in a war. You simply have to do what’s necessary; fight fire with lava. And sometimes you just have to do what your opponent does, but for free. And that is what Google did. Android created a mobile ecosystem, which was comparable to iOS, was free, and was open source. Their aim was not to cater to the few elite believing in shelling out a bomb for quality. Their aim was to cater to everybody. They created a model where mobile manufacturers did not have to worry about software. All they had to do was create good hardware which could support Android, much like a PC. Apple was untouchable uptil then, having a daunting monotony on the mobile market. Android is the natural competition the world needed to strive in an Apple dominated world.

The result – Samsung is now one of the top phone manufacturers in the world. HTC have left that O2 image behind and made some excellent phones. This automatically enables a sense of doubt for Apple, which makes it strive to make it products better. And any competition is good competition.

As an end user, I can rest assured that the next phone I buy will be of higher quality than the last, and this trend will only continue. At a certain point, Android left its Apple-copier image, and started taking initiatives of its own. It did what google does best, integrate search into the ecosystem, which is Google’s main source of income. They initiated the Nexus series of phones – the purpose of which was to increase their search base, by selling premium quality phones at mid range prices. And this has worked very well for Google. Nexus 5 is now the standard by which Android phones are measured with. Sure there is the Nexus 6, but it feels like a failed experiment, with its obnoxious pricing. The Nexus 5 is Google at its best in the Android space, and the remastered 2015 edition coming out is a testament to that.

My main gripe with this holy war is this – there used to be a magical (sorta) feeling about holding a mobile phone. When I had held a Nokia Communicator, the sense of awe I got was completely different than holding a 6600. The joy of flapping and unflapping a Moto Razr was unlike anything out there. I could throw around a 3310 and know that it will still ring when I get a call. There was art; art with flaws, but art nonetheless.

Being a software engineer, I now realize that the best way to build a software fast, is to reuse. Almost every phone today is reusing the same curvy edges slim trim design. Almost every Android phone today has a home screen which looks exactly the same.

It still feels great to hold a LG G4, but there’s not much that can surprise me. Sure the phone can look after my every need; way more than any phone back then could possibly do, but it just feels part of my daily life, and not something that I should treasure. And I see this in almost every industry these days. Maybe that is what customers want; a fixed standard set of specs for their daily lives. But when every phones feels the same, you don’t have much of a choice. I used to get butterflies at the thought of buying and exploring a new phone. Now it just feels like i’m buying upgraded software.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: 3310, 6600, apple, google, iOS, LG, nexus, nokia, samsung, sony

More Nokia Phones To Feature Dolby Digital Plus

March 28, 2012 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Update: Nokia 808 PureView will be launched in the UK on 23rd April, 2012..

FICCI Frame 2012, Mumbai – Dolby Laboratories recently showcased their latest efforts with the recent Nokia Line-ups including Nokia 603, 700, 701, PureView 808 along with the elderly, Nokia N8. All of these phones pack in Dolby 5.1 surround sound technology. 

The main Dolby technology/ feature we are basically pointing at is the Digital Plus. In our curious attempt setting all other phone aside at the venue, we first performed a quick run through some of the highly touted features of Nokia 808 PureView (Prototype Model) and apart from the brobdingnagian 41MP Camera, we realized that the Dolby Digital Plus is a decent and an humble add-on. You can enable/ disable the Digital Plus feature while streaming the media with a convenient on-screen button, and needless to say, the audio quality is immersive with the Digital Plus enabled.

Nokia 808 PureView hasn’t launched yet. It’s due release in the first quarter of 2012. While all other phones we’ve talked above, will receive the Dolby Digital Plus feature in the upcoming software update.

Nokia 808 Pureview Prototype (Back)
Back view
Nokia 808 Pureview Prototype (Front)

Filed Under: Consumer Technology Tagged With: Mobility Market, nokia

The Reign Of Rude, Fast And The Smartest Phones!

March 4, 2012 by Raj Agrawal 1 Comment

The year 2012 is going to be a huge step forward for the mobile market. The current generation is now poised to become the previous generation and new technologies are geared up and ready to replace the old ones. And, as with the advent of any new technology, every mobile company will try and get new handsets equipped with these new advancements as soon as possible to the masses in order to establish a following and make maximum use of the monopoly thus acquired due to lack of competitors. Today we look at the most anticipated handsets of the year along with the features which they claim will make them stand apart from other phones in the same specification range.

HTC One X

New 2012 Smartphones

With the S2 beating the Sensation this generation, HTC had to come out all guns firing to ensure that it is not eclipsed by Samsung again. And hence, the One X. Featuring a swift Quad Core processor by Nvidia, this is probably the most anticipated quad core handset right now, until Samsung spill the beans on the S3. It also has enhancements to the UI and enhancements to the camera which enables it to click photos at a much faster rate and also enables burst mode which can allow users to click many images in an instant. Add to this the amazing build quality, and you have a complete phone, one which will give Samsung a run for its money.


Nokia 808 Pureview

New 2012 Smartphones

Touted as being the biggest surprise of Mobile World Congress 2012, this phone has taken the world by surprise. Nokia seems to have given up playing the following game, and is trying to explore new areas of innovation to regain the ground that it seems to have lost. Instead of trying to create a superphone which has everything, it’s trying to delve into the one area which has been their forté over the years – Camera. This beast of a phone has a 41 megapixel sensor which interpolates images into 5 mp snaps. The kicker over here is that each pixel is actually a scaled down version of 8 megapixels, and hence the image does not lose any quality while zooming.


Asus Padfone

New 2012 Smartphones

The Galaxy Note created a huge confusion among the users as to whether the device is a phone or a tablet. The Asus Padfone brings utmost clarity in this regard by being both a phone and a tablet without creating any ambiguity. So basically, what we have a here is a phone which is inserted at the back a tablet, and it becomes one with it to serve as the latter! The main advantage of this is the bigger screen and the improved battery life. Asus claims that with the tablet and the dock provided with it, battery life can improve almost 9 times as much as that of the average smartphone, which is huge! And with ICS (Android 4.0) integrated into it, there no reason not to put this as a prime contender on your wishlist when you go mobile shopping next time.


Huawei Ascend D Quad

New 2012 Smartphones

Samsung did something different when it launched the S2; instead of putting a pre made processor into the phone, it created its own processor. Today the Esxynox is considered as the fastest processor of the last generation. It beats both the Tegra 2 and Qualcomm variants by quite some distance and made the S2 the absolute phenomenon that it turned out to be. Huawei seems to have taken inspiration from Samsung’s approach and are packing their own processor into their flagship Ascend D quad handset. They also claim it to be the fastest phone in the world, which is quite a tall claim with the next gen Tegra and Qualcomm processor making waves with their performance in the mobile market. But if the performance of the phone supports their claims, then we could have a new winner in the mobile market.


Samsung Galaxy S3

New 2012 Smartphones

Samsung are quite mum about this one, but we know its coming. And we’re waiting; not just us, but the whole world is waiting. S2 owned the last generation, and the S3 is the only phone that can match the hype. Other competitors might have all the fancy new features, but S3 has the brand and following behind it. And it’s not like it won’t have tricks of its own; Samsung will make sure it packs the absolute best features available in the market today and make another classic which will blow us away. And i hope we don’t have to wait for too long for that to happen.

So these are our picks for the most anticipated and new smartphones of 2012. Feel free to comment on the article or add handsets/ of your choice in the comments section below!

Filed Under: Consumer Technology Tagged With: Android, htc, Mobility Market, nokia, nvidia, samsung, tablet