Test post from blogger for Android

Just wanted to test this Blogger-Droid Application for Android. Hope this might help me to update the blog more frequently :-D

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.1

From Dumbphone to Smartphone =)

I have been using dumb-phones for around 6 years. They were alright for my day to day needs, not that I didn't miss some features time to time. But they were simple and reliable companions. Then I came across a Samsung i900 Omnia , not as the primary phone though. IMO it wasn't much reliable for my day to day work, battery backup was bad, Sound quality was not up to my standards, Touch screen was an abomination >_<, and not to mention I hated Windows Mobile 6.5 with that resistive touch screen.

My C902 was almost 18 months old (Still rocking) and I wanted a change, Something reliable with good feature set and something "Smart" xD. So it was either Symbian or Android, I had already ditched WinMo after the bad experience with the i900. Funny thing is I always tend to forget iOS as a smart phone OS (You know what I mean :P ).
Symbian is stable and has a lots of applications but at the same time the UI is boring + old skool. Not to mention more and more developers are abandoning the Symbian ship.

I went ahead and bought an Xperia X10 Mini, teh cheapest and smallest Android device on earth. I must tell you, it's an Eagle in a Parrot's clothing, don't be deceived by the looks. The little thing sports a Qualcomm MSM 7227 600MHz CPU, 256MB Ram (128MB user accessible), and all the bells and whistles you could think of, got a pretty decent camera, and heck it's even got the same Adreno 200 GPU as it's big brother Snapdragon Q8250 (as far as my research is correct). UI is very fast, animations are smooth, capacitive touch screen is a treat to use, and since this thing is small (2.6 inch touch screen) it doesn't draw unnecessary attention when I'm travelling in the Bus :D. On the first day I took it to the office most of my office friends asked me "How do I open the slider ? or the Qwerty Keyboard", LOL

In the next post I will upload some of the cool apps I use.
and BTW here is the link for the Phone specs :)

Updating the blog

Hi folks,

After a long break I'm gonna update the blog, and btw, the previous post was regarding my SSD and not having an official TRIM firmware. After fiddling with some custom firmwares and tools now my SSD sports TRIM. :)

That's for now, Adios

Getting the SSD finally , but no TRIM yet

So finally I’m getting an SSD kudos to Mahen and Anusha (for dragging me into this :P). "SSD" (Solid state drive) might be an alien term for some of you; it’s a drive that is based on Flash memory cells (unlike your traditional hard disk which is based on a magnetic media). Which is quite fast in terms of sequential transfer speeds, random write/ read speeds and has an ultra low latency (~ 0.1ms) compared to your venerable hard drive (~ 13ms).

The new kid on the block: Kingston SSDNow 40GB MLC boot drive, in fact an Intel X25-M G2 drive in disguise. It comes in 2 retail versions one with the desktop bundle and the other with just the 2.5” (Notebook) drive. We opted to get it from Newegg and Mahen had ordered it through comgateway.com, but few days later we got to know Newegg has run out of stocks and had to search elsewhere. Dell had it but was out of stock, it’s the way it is, they are supposed to sell like hot cakes given the price tag. Then we tried Amazon, they had it but only the Notebook version was readily available, we had no chance but to opt out with it, besides you are not missing much, just the 2.5” to 3.5” enclosure, cables and the CD contains Acronis True Image ; not a deal breaker at all.

As of yet this drive doesn’t support the TRIM extension though Intel has already released a TRIM firmware for their X25-M G2 drives, Hopefully Kingston will release a TRIM firmware once Intel starts shipping their 40GB drives. SSDs degrade their write performance over time, once the cells started to fill up with your data + junk data that you deleted from the drive (you know that a hard drive doesn’t really delete data when you delete a file; same goes with SSD), Let me explain you the reason.

SSDs are made of zillion memory cells each cell holding a single bit, so these cells are grouped together to create a unit called a page (4KB usually). These pages are arranged to create a so called block which is usually 512KB (128 pages). You can write into these pages one by one but when you have to delete a single 4KB page you must erase the entire 512KB block, weird ha? That’s the way it is, you have no way of controlling it. Luckily the SSD controller applies wear-leveling algorithms and it ensures each and every memory cell of the SSD across the drive is used for writing data, thus eliminating writing to the same cell over and over again, but once every cell is used you have to overwrite the existing cells that are filled by junk data you had deleted from windows. This is where it gets interesting. Imagine you have a file to be written which is 256KB in size and imagine the block which is selected by the SSD controller has 256KB of valid and 128KB junk data, so you have 128KB of free space on the block. Your file needs 256KB and the block has 128KB of free space, so the controller needs to erase the 128KB junk data prior to writing your file, as I said earlier the controller can’t just erase a single page or couple of pages, it must erase the whole freakin 512KB block. So the controller reads the block, gets the 256KB of valid data and caches it in the controller cache/ DRAM memory. Now it erases the whole block and writes your file which is 256KB along with data on cache. Wait! What happened? Did the controller write 512KB worth data to the block? Yeah. Feel dizzy? LOL. You wanted to write a 256KB file and ended up reading old 256KB and writing 512KB of data which in turn crippled your write speed severely.

So technically your drive might become slower even when you have plenty of free space on it. TRIM to the rescue, though you need to have a TRIM supported OS (Win 7) and a TRIM supported firmware with your drive. When TRIM is enabled a simple delete operation you pass to the OS goes through the SATA controller of your motherboard from all the way up to the SSD controller and it really erases the deleted file from your drive. So your drive is free from junk data and it’s always ready for writing to it the absolute data you want. Delete operations may become slower since it has to do all the boring read-erase-write operations. That’s not a big deal. Remember if your drive doesn't support TRIM you have no way of regaining the full performance unless you secure erase the drive, formatting or partitioning cannot help here. So that's it for now, Sorry if it was boring to you. :D

Hopefully we will get the SSDs before this weekend and planning to visit Mahen’s place to eyewitness his Alienware-MX17, that’s a once in a lifetime chance for me I guess. catch ya' all later.

Peace out!

Impressions on Sony Ericsson C902

It’s been a month since I bought my shiny, brand spanking Sony Ericsson C902. I never thought I would caught up with this mobile mania, My K550i (@W610i) wasn’t bad at all, due to some *sweet* reason I decided to buy a new mobile. There were few contenders in my dream list, as I’m aiming for not so high (lol) they were not that expensive or dreamy for most of the guys... he he.

Here are my concerns.

1). Fast UI.
2). Multi tasking capability.
3). Good Camera. (Well! Better than my modded K550i)

4). Good Multimedia capabilities.

5). Can it be modded to my needs. ?

6). Good battery life.

And here are the few contenders.

1). Nokia 6500Slide. (S40 / Lacks Multi tasking: Crap)

2). Nokia 6220Classic. (S60 / Great camera, Multi tasking, el-cheapo look though :-/ )
3). Sony Ericsson K850i. (A200 / Superb Camera, Multi tasking, great look, chubby though :-/ )

4) .Sony Ericsson C902. (A200 / Great camera, Multi tasking, slim sexy spy (lol) look, relatively smallish screen :-/ )

So the C902 finally won my heart and cost me 35K. Hehe.

Here are the pros,

1). Well built very slim metal body.

2). Exceptional, stylish camera slider.

3). 5MP Auto Focus Camera with Face Detection, Geo Tagging ( Saves the accurate location of the photo taken in EXIF information, and can be viewed on a map /flickr yada yada) and all new Photo Flash+ 8 Touch sensitive Camera buttons. (After all it's a CyberShot :-) )


4). Great multimedia capabilities. (Super fast Media manager , handles 5MP pics each about 2MB like nothing)
5). Accelerometer sensor.

6). HSDPA- 3.6Mbps : w00t!

7). One of the best displays of SE : Great sunlight legibility.
8). Smart search for contacts, filter SMS into categories.

9). Track ID Music recognition (It Rocks)

This screen shot is from a live footage of mine. lol (Refer the previous post for full details)

10) .Yeah baby! This (A200) can be modded .. :)

11). Great battery life.

Unfortunately here are the cons,

1). Slower UI compared to my K550i :( (Still C902 wins hands down in media playback)

2). Photo flash is not as powerful as Xenon or as SE suggests.

3). Smallish screen. 2.0” (Coz of 8 Touch sensitive camera buttons around the screen)

4). Distant Night shots are far from perfection due to underpowered LED flash, not a complete disaster either.. lol

5). Display is a Fingerprint magnet

Click to view the full sized image

As you can see there are many reasons to buy this nifty thing though there are few drawbacks as well, who cares ? Nothing is perfect.. lol
As a whole I'm satisfied with SE C902 and recommend to everyone

P.S: On a side note I would like to mention that this is the James Bond's phone in Quantum of Solace :P

Pictures : Courtesy of a 5610XM (Yohan :-) )

Sony Ericsson TrackID™ FTW! lol

Today I came up with a cool free feature that Sony Ericsson brought to the table; "TrackID" : TrackID is a nifty tool you may find mostly in W series phones.. I'll tell you how I suddenly become a fan of this tool. I was watching SmallVille on my PC and usually at the end where it becomes sensitive (lol) there was a nice background song playing. It was really nice so I wanted to download the original track. But who is the Artist ? Title of the Song ? Album ?.. I just held my mobile few cms near to the PC speakers, started the trackID service, within like 15seconds - Violah!!. I got the Artist, Track, and Album info directly to my mobile freely..
TrackID was the most handy tool I've ever seen on a mobile phone..
How it Works
1. When music fans hear a song they want to identify, they tap a command on the phone keypad to start the audio recognition process, and then hold the phone up to the music source.
2. The phone captures a few seconds of the audio and extracts a waveform fingerprint of the snippet. The snippet can be from any section of the song, even the last few seconds.
3. The fingerprint is sent to the Mobile MusicID recognition service from the service provider that may be located anywhere in the world.
4. The Mobile MusicID recognition server compares the fingerprint to its database of reference fingerprints and responds with the exact match.
5. The artist, song title and related information, as well as content like album art and download links are relayed to the fan.
Official Page

Does your HSPA modem heat up ?

Long time no see ? lol
OK, I made up my mind buying the Dialog HSPA Uni student package on the day before yesterday.. It is pretty much fast despite the fact that I have very low signal reception at my home. Even when the signal strength was 20% I got around 200-220KBps with IDM.
One thing I noticed was this teenie weenie modem (Huawei E220) heats up pretty much. Even though it may not be a problem for this I thought to add some sort of a heatsink to this. So I grabbed my old dead (sob sob) ASUS P4PE2-X mobo off my junk yard (lol) and removed the Northbridge heatsink, and placed the modem on the heatsink as this, (Edit:: The Heatsink is replaced with up side down now. There was a rubber substance on the Heat sink spreader so till I remove it using some chemicals I had to use it like this)




Although this is a very inefficient method (surfaces are barely touched) I noticed some considerable amount of heat level drops off the modem.
Here is a little video clip to show you how does it look like ( Sorry for the lower frame rate as the blogger has encoded it with a low frame rate)