This Christmas get a free palm smartphone

Well, nearly free at $99 with rebates on Sprint. I simply can't believe that Palm is launching Centro, a slim and small CDMA smartphone at such a price. I also think that this is the best looking palm phone ever.

Palm has proved its intentions clearly, that its now going to look beyond the smart phone market, which is just 8% of the total mobile handset market in US and going to make deep inroads into the entry level handset market as well.

Many believe that Palm is going to start a price war, many may even say that this is Palm's last hurrah. I say that this is the turn-around time for Palm and this is the device that's going to change Palm's fortune for better, so start buying Palm's stocks ;-)

Talking about features, it has Palm OS, 1.3 Mega Pixel Camera, Inbuilt Messaging and other usual Treo features. Full specs here.

I think after trying a lot of different things Palm finally seems to get it right and its definitely way to go for Palm.

Mushrooming Social Networking Sites

New social networking websites keep cropping up everyday in India and I am really frustrated by all the invitations I receive on my office email id from totally strange people. I can understand that people send invitations to get the prizes which are generally offered by the websites.

While some websites give you option to prevent all further invitations on your email, youmint only gives option to decline an invitation. I would like to prevent any invitation being sent to my official email id, if possible.

Also I would like these websites to be good internet samaritans and have a policy that if somebody keeps inviting totally strangers on their website and if they get multiple reports to confirm that, sender is banned from their website and yes I am here saying "Don't Be Evil" :-)

Also I am not sure where is this new crop of networking sites like www.bigadda.com, www.youmint.com, apnacircle.com, www.yaari.com, www.desimartini.com heading? I think nowhere and 90% of them are going to be closed down within a year. Also most of them seem to lure users by offering either free iPods or free SMSs.

They all are trying same things, same way and obviously all of them can't be successful doing the same things as dozen others.

We won the World Cup

Yes!! Once again after a gap of full 24 years, cricket lovers in India have got the opportunity to celebrate a World-Cup win. India won the 20-20 World Cup beating the arch-rivals Pakistan in a nail-biting final. This was a young team under the leadership of MS Dhoni and this was Dhoni aka Mahi's first tour as captain of national side and no doubt he passed with the flying colors. Kudos to whole Indian team and congratulations to all the Indian fans. We definitely have lots to cheer about and see even our stock market is celebrating by crossing 17000 mark just 6 days after crossing 16000. Seems like India is on a roll :-)

Use VS.NET to program for Blackberry

Research in Motion (RIM) announced a plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio.NET in May which will allow .net developers to target all Blackberry devices using .net web-services architecture. Its now available for download from here.

Key benefits of the BlackBerry Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio include:

1. Familiar Development Experience - The plug-in integrates within thefamiliar Visual Studio development environment, and allows developers to visually design, implement and debug applications for BlackBerry smartphones.
2. Leverages Developer Skill Sets - Customers and system integrators can leverage their developer skill sets in order to reduce costs and accelerate the development of applications for the BlackBerry platform.
3. Seamless Wireless Connectivity - Leverages the inherent security, manageability and efficient wireless connectivity of the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution.
4. Platform Interoperability - Allows enterprises to create rich client applications for BlackBerry smartphones that interoperate with .NET-based systems via Web Services.
5. Rich Client Application Functionality - Provides the ability to create rich client applications with a flexible user interface, offline data storage, asynchronous push, and secure data access.
6. Enterprise-Class Security and Manageability - Applications developed will leverage the same security architecture of BlackBerry Enterprise Server. IT departments will benefit from simplified management and centralized control of their wireless deployments with reduced administrative overhead and a lower total cost of ownership.

To know more about this and other development options for Blackberry please visit: www.blackberrydeveloper.com

Touch iPhone and Dream Gphone

On 5th September 2007 Apple reduced the price of iPhone 8GB model by $200 to $399 just 2 months after its much hyped launch. It has also dropped the 4GB model. Many early buyers are accusing Apple of unfair pricing and feel cheated. Apple is offering them $100 credit to pacify. Financial analysts didn't like the news as well and Apple stocks fell next day.

If you can't wait for iPhone to be available at a store near you, I will suggest you to buy HTC Touch, which many believe is an iPhone killer. And another news doing the round is that HTC may sue Apple for naming its latest iPod model as iPod Touch. iPod touch looks quite similar to iPhone and has most of the same features minus the Phone.

Also in past few months rumors about a phone from Google aka Gphone gained momentum and some believed that it can be launched any day. Rediff.com, the numero uno Indian portal even went ahead and claimed Gphone will be launched from India. Only if there would have been some truth in the rumors, Gphone would have been launched by this time and probably I would have started considering switching my Palm Treo 680. Google's head of research has denied Google's interest in any hardware development a few days back so probably this will end any speculation about a Gphone now.

Anyway I am sad but I am happy with google for making the world (read cyber-world) a better place to live in so even if they don't really launch the Gphone, I think they have done enough and continue doing some pretty innovative things in technology like DNA database, face and speech recognition, digitization of libraries etc. etc.

Update on 7th Many 08: Vodafone bringing iPhone to India in September 2008