Mobile phones in India were launched in late 1997 or early 1998 if my memory serves me right. For the first time mobile users, the choices were very limited. The “brick” like Nokia 5100 with the antenna and the crazy packages that came along with the deals that charged as high as Rs.14 for incoming calls and a higher amount for outgoing calls. Very few people had them and the ones who had them were obviously the rich and famous. I was in college then and recall how owning a laptop in those days was a big deal.

I still remember how a friend of mine was going back to Kerala on a train and had a few interesting companions – a laptop user who started to pull up the laptop and according to my friend “show off” and another, who went a step further to pull out his laptop and plug in his mobile phone to browse the internet. These were days when telephony in India was prohibitively expensive and this left my friend flummoxed!

Turn back the time and in just over 10 years, the face of mobile telephony has changed. With the devices getting smaller by the day and features increasing by the day, the mobile phone is pretty much the be all and end all of any modern Indian man – pardon me for sounding a bit biased here, I still believe the women don’t get it with gadgets and start a lot later than men here!

The in-thing is the new touch screen phone and this seems to be the next big thing in the mobile world! I don’t know who came first between HTC and the iPhone, but these two together have effectively changed the way the world sees mobile phones. I recall the hype the iPhone created in the US when they were being launched in 2007. Crowds braved bad weather and wanted to make history and waited overnight at stores to get phones as they were launched. For the connoisseur of the mobile, the iPhone was dubbed the Idiot Phone.

Why?

Simple – It does everything that a phone is not intended to do, what with an integrated bipod and a fancy camera and auto tilt screens. The iPhone has evolved over the last 2 years and there are newer and better versions out in the market. When India got its chance to get the iPhone officially, the hype was no different.

The iPhone has done to the market what no other phone over the last few years did – touch screen phones are the rage in town today. The last time I remotely remember anything like this being a rage was when we had the season of phones with a stylus. One may argue that this was the mother of the touch screen in a manner of speaking. But that said, the styles fever wasn’t as hot or anywhere as close to the touch screen fever.

In a matter of a few months, the competition has reacted and reacted strongly. Nokia’s 5880 is huge hit. It brings the traditional “durability” factor along with the touch screen phone that most people think lacks in the iPhone. With its provision for expandable memory and the market wining strategy of half the price of the iPhone, it’s a hot deal in town today.

The eye brow rising, WOW change for me comes from Blackberry. Who on earth thought that Blackberry with its huge office email using base will go touch screen. They were so renowned for their QWERTY keyboard and they changed, releasing the Blackberry Storm very close on the heels of their release of the Bold. I was reading an article where they shamelessly accepted that they had to make this change to keep pace with iPhone for the fear of being left far behind.

One thing is certain though. Technology being technology, things will change and change fast.

Any guess on what will take over from the touch screens?

Image Credit: powerbooktrance

Popularity: 33%

The 1990s saw a humongous rush to secure an attractive and promising domain names. ‘Squatting’ was more pronounced for domain name registrations which went on to became a lucrative business opportunity.

Hoping that a worthy buyer will come along and make good the exorbitant price tag they carried. Quite a few did, like business.com, which went under the hammer for $7.5 million in 1999. More recently creditcards.com found a buyer at $2.75 million. Most of these were sold before the dot-com burst in 2001. Most of the domains names registered worldwide are under .com suffix, while .net comes a distant second.

This low investment, effortless business opportunity for several wannabe entrepreneurs across the globe has seen it charm fade away. This received a further blow, when last year the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which regulates top-level domain names, announced that it would open up the system to allow any suffix.

More recently, in Feb 2009, the “.tel” (touted to be world’s largest phone book ) was launched where this was available on first come first served basis, which meant registration of domains under the nose of popular establishments, vis-a-vis bmw.com etc. For those of you beginning to rush to check on the more recognisable names, NASA, FBI, Microsoft, IBM, Google and so on, don’t fret, as they have already secured their “.tel” addresses, earlier this year, while some of the popular Indian names, like “rediff.tel”, “ndtv.tel”, etc. are still up for grabs!

However, this needs to be bought for a minimum of 3 years initially costing $327 to $375 based on the country and domain registrar you register from. From 23rd March, .tel domains would be registered at $20 a year.

“.tel is your place on the internet, which will act like a switchboard.” said Kash Madhavi, the chief executive of Telnic, the London-based company that runs the .tel registry. “You can say, ‘Here are my Facebook details, here is my mobile number, and people will always be able to find you.” In the near future these will become more valuable when the need for mobile content increases further and a stripped-down web pages made available through mobile phones such as Blackberry, Apple iPhone etc.

Happy buying, if you foresee a big moolah, in this.

Image Credit: Existentist

Popularity: 15%

Blogosphere is full of news about Nokia planning to launch an application store on the lines of Apple. As a Nokia user I was happy to hear  this. I have been using Nokia N95 for over a year and am very happy with it. Needless to say my next phone would be Nokia.

On hearing this news, I decided to take a look around and see what apps are available for Nokia. I then reached for Nokia Beta Labs and took a look around.

While I evaluate rest of stuff that I wanted to share one of the app I found interesting.

Step Counter

An interesting application, while counts steps (pedometer) that you take in a day. The following are the features that this application offers:

• Step counter to track number of steps taken
• Time and distance spent walking
• Track of day wise steps
• Set a daily step limit etc.

After looking at the features I was keen to understand how it worked. I was surprised to know that Nokia N95 has an embedded accelerometer, a device which helps identify the orientation. The same helps iPhone to switch view when turned sideways.

I can only imagine how many more applications will developers write to use this feature. While I evaluate a few more and come back. Take a look at the step counter and start getting fit.

Don’t you think it is time for Nokia user can rejoice again?

Popularity: 8%

It’s weekend and after clearing up some email, I started exploring new stuff around. I stumbled upon Google Latitude. Yet another Beta from Google you must be thinking, but I must tell you this one is worth exploring.

Not too sure if you have heard of Nokia Friend View, Google Latitude is very much on those lines. Simply put Latitude is a spy in your pocket

Latitude is an add on in Google Maps for mobile. It lets you sign in with your Google Account, and sets your current location using the GPS (Global Positioning System) device on your mobile. These days many mobile phones are coming with GPS devices and this will exactly make use of that.

Here’s what it lets you do:

• Update your status-For instance I have updated my status here in the picture as “Testing Google Latitude”.
• Add friends and share your location with them.
• See their location on Google Maps
• For those concerned about invasion of privacy it lets you manually set the location, so for instance you may be on the road, but your location may show as office
• It also provides an iGoogle gadget which you can use on computer to view locations (pictured here)

It works with most locations, if it says “not supported in your region”, just change the URL on your browser to point to .google.com instead of say .google.co.in .

On the whole it seems to be an excellent piece of work from Google and with recent steps Google is taking in terms of Social Networking with Friend Connect and now Latitude, they may very well be on their road to creating the world’s largest network of social networks.

For now good work Google, you guys keep pushing the limits on use of technology and bring it to masses.

And readers get on to Google Latitude and give it a try!

Popularity: 15%

Nokia N79 & N85

Nokia has unveiled two new high-end phone models, the N85 and the N79, and declared its battle against increasing competition in the market. The news lifted share price of Nokia by more than two percent as it signalled the investors that the company was on track of giving tough competition to its business rivals Apple and Samsung.

The N79 and N85 models will go on sale in India in late October. The N79 has a 2.4-inch screen, a 5- megapixel camera and comes with a 4GB Micr, o SD card and the N85 has a 2.6-inch LED screen, a 5-megapixel cam and 8GB Micro SD card.

Both these phone also have 10 pre-loaded N-gage games and have FM transmitters for streaming your music over a nearby radio.

Nokia currently holds 40 per cent of the global cellphone market and approximately 60% of the Indian market. It has even higher market share among the expensive phones, helped by the success of its flagship N95.

The company is expecting higher profit margins from these new phones but with the release of iPhone in India, I have my doubts on Nokia being able to skim the Indian market.

Popularity: 70%

Over the years, you would have collected tons of photos, music and video on your PC. Here is a quick how-to to get the content onto your PS3, Nintendo Wii, XBox 360, iPhone, PSP, iPod Touch, WAP 2.0 + Streaming supported mobile device like the Blackberry Curve, select DirecTV receivers, DLink DSM series, the Philips Streamium series, any media player supporting streaming such as Windows Media Player / Realplayer / Quicktime  and several other similar devices.

TVersity

The best part is that this will keep your content centrally, making it easy to re-organize and manage. What’s more – it even lets you stream different formats that may not be natively supported by the device. I found this to be an excellent way to share content across rooms wirelessly without hassle.

What you need:

1. Your Windows PC with admin rights
2. An amazing software called TVersity (download it here)
3. Wireless or wired router (depends on the streamed devices like PSP, iPod Touch etc)
4. 5-10 minutes of your time (if you have a good download speed)
Here is the How To:

Installing Tversity

1. Download Tversity. Its about 11MB in size
2. Install Tversity on you machine. The default options are good enough, unless you are the slightly smarter variety
3. This will be followed by an automatic install of FFDShow and various codecs. Again use the default options

Configuring your firewall to allow Tversity connections

4. Allow mediaserver.exe access through your firewall (Windows firewall, Comodo, Norton, ZoneAlarm etc.). If your firewall requires you to point out this file, you will find it in your TVersity program files folder (Usually

C:\Program Files\TVersity\Media Server)

Configuring your wireless router:

Usually you will have no blocks within your LAN and this may not be needed. However if you face issues, here is what needs to be done
5. TVersity is configured on port 41952 by default. (This can be changed in TVersity admin)
6. You will have to port forward  41952 to 41952 on your router. Please refer your wireless router manual for this if you are not sure

Configuring TVersity

7. Load up TVersity Media Server. The default settings are good enough
8. Click the + symbol on top or use the Sharing tab to add your folders to be shared. Depending on the content, TVersity takes some time to make a note of all the files there.
9. You may want to change some of the settings under the Settings tab. Most of the options are good by default. You may want to check “Automatically stat sharing the media when the computer starts” here
10. You can test TVersity by selecting any of the locally shared content under the Library in the left navigation panel. This should open up your browser and play in your default streaming client on your PC

Viewing in PS3 or other devices

11. Once you confirm that Tversity is running, switch on your PS3, Wii or other device. Some already on devices may require to be switched-off and restarted.
12. Check / configure for streaming content and you will now be able to view and listen to the shared content. Enjoy!

Note: Some devices may require advanced settings to be configured in TVersity. Please refer to the TVersity documentation for additional help.

Popularity: 100%

Image credit: shapeshift

Like all good things in India, the iPhone will end up having its own niche market. There always have been and will be people who will buy it because of its iconic status.

The question is – is it really worth it?

At a minimum of Rs.31000, you can proudly sport a device that has been priced a little above the current price of vegetables. For a device that has sold millions, it is surprising that they have such high manufacturing costs – not to mention the stock price that needs to live up.

Next, what is 3G doing here? Waiting for the future to arrive? It is like a kindergarten student buying a Ferrari because his children will have better roads.

Let’s look at the features – nothing much has really changed except for the tons of applications for the iPhone – How many of us know that we can also install many of these on the iTouch ?  What about the several hundred applications that are already available for Windows Mobile, Sybian and Blackberry devices?

What about the service plans ? That remains to be seen. While calls in India may be cheap, mobile internet is definitely not. And with mobile internet speeds as ours, it’s going to be worth watching what happens to the user experience.

At 2 megapixels, the camera on the iPhone is pretty basic. There are phones offering higher resolution at much cheaper prices. Next comes interoperabilit. Let us see how many phones are there in the market that say, “Please dont save anything in the memory card because I want you to send everything via my services only”. And not to mention the issues that are being raised about privacy and hung iPhones in the other side of the world.

It is time to know just a little more.

Truth is we have people who spend many times more on a mobile phone than they earn in a month. Truth is that this has been a great letdown for the thousands who will still buy the device. Truth is we have people who understand less and use the features even lesser, but will tout the iPhone with all the hype.

For the saner few, there are a lot more good phones with superb features at great prices. From the Asus P320 to the HTC touch to the latest Nokia N96. Or you can always tag along a much cheaper iTouch along with your phone!

For the die hards – go ahead and buy it! its not a very bad phone either.

Popularity: 13%