Nokia X5 : 'Comes with music'

Square seems to be hot topic of the season, and music seems to be the mood for business.

After Motorolla and Microsoft releasing their mobile phones in square form-factor, Nokia has also announced its 'square' smartphone.

This phone is called the Nokia X5 'Comes with music'. Nokia had previously launched another mobile phone, also named X5, for chinese markets. Maybe the earlier X5 may not be for sale in other countries.The current Nokia X5 'Comes with music' phone is a slider phone with a square form factor, and looks like a cross between a smartphone and an express music handset.

The phone has a slider which reveals a full QWERTY keyboard. The phone runs Symbian S60v3 Feature Pack 2. This phone when close looks similar to Motorolla Flipout or Micosoft Kin One.

The phone also has a set of pretty cool features.It has a dedicated music button. It also has a shake sensing feature called 'Surprise Me'. While playing music if you spin the phone, it will select and play a random song automatically. When the music is not playing, you can shake the phone and  it will tell the number of unread messages in the inbox. The phone also gives you access to a large number of social networking features.

Nokia has priced this phone at 165 Euros (around Rs. 9,500). Yes, it seems a catch. This phone is expected to be released in the third quarter of this year.

More specifications af the phone here.

Project Natal gets a new name: Microsoft Kinect

The moment gamers all around the world have been waiting for has arrived. The E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) 2010 is starting tomorrow, to be held from June 15 to 17.

E3 is an annual trade show for the computer abd gaming industry. It is considered to be ultimate expo in the gaming industry.

Microsoft has the spotlight for this years E3. Information has leaked out about two announcements Microsoft is about to make at this expo.

The first is about the much awaited Project Natal. Rumour is that it has been given an official name : Microsft Kinect.  Project Natal was announced at the last years E3. And now it may be officially launched at this event. Information is also available on the games for Kinect. It seems that 4 games are ready for use with Kinect - Living Statue ( a song and dance game), Obstacle Course ( move through obstacles, ducking and jumping to avoid them), River Rush ( row a raft though the whitewater rapids), and Ricochet (get bombarded with virtual balls).

Another information that has leaked out is the release of a new version XBOX, the XBOX Slim. More details are not available now.

But this news has made the Xbox fans happy. Looking forward for the E3 Expo to start to get more information about this and many more.

For those doesn't know what Project Natal is, its Microsoft's revolutionary controller free gaming device.
For more info about Project Natal click here.

For more details about E3 2010 , click here. 

Crysis 2 : Releasing date preponed

Electronic Arts and Crytek's mega blockbuster game Crysis 2 was expected to arrive at the end of this year. However, as per reports, a new trade ad by EA states that Crysis 2 is set to arrive in Autumn 2010. Yes, you read it correct. You got to wait less for this amazing sci-fi shooter game.

Crytek has used new CRYEngine 3 for developing the Crysis 2 which comes for the first time for consoles - Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 besides PC. Award winning sci-fi novel writer Richard Morgan is writing the story of Crysis 2 that takes place in urban settings of New York.

Just to be clear, Crysis 2 is the sci-fi action shooter sequel to the first game and would be available for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Let's hope to see more Crysis 2 videos at the E3 Expo 2010 that starts next week.

Betterfly : Find people not companies

Ever wanted to find someone to help you from the internet? Then your dreams have come true.
A newly launched service called Betterfly provides exactly that.
You can now find individuals on the internet rather than just companies offering services.

Basically it is a community site with a marketplace where people can seek services of other professionals directly.

If you’re looking for cooking classes, music lessons, yoga training or any other type of educational instruction, you can use Betterfly to search the site for coaches, trainers, tutors, stylists and other “Betterists.” Users can also search for a Betterist by a variety of criteria, book appointments and leave reviews.

Moreover you can be a Betterist yourself, i.e, you can offer your services instead of searching for services.
Betterists can use their page to offer services, list their expertises, take appointments, manage their calendars and blog about their professional endeavors. Their individual Betterfly sites also include reviews from other users.

The site is still pretty new, so the ratings may not have been high yet. But it might prove useful the next time you are trying to learn something from the internet.

Visit Betterfly here.

Google Pacman doodle: A tragic loss

Most google users where took by surprise on May 21st when they were greeted by a very unusual google doodle.

Instead of the normal picture doodles, there was a fully functionung game of Pac Man. Google had chosen to make this their google to commemorate the 30th birthday of Pac Man, most probably the worlds most popular games. The game featured a yellow pizza shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun.

Google had recreated the original game logic,graphics and sounds, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. This was google's first interactive doodle. It was availaable for 48 hours on the google homepage.

Much interesting as it may seem, it brought about a large loss on working time all around the world. Statistics shows that, an average user spent 36 seconds more on google.com.

That translates to 4,819,352 hours of time the Pac Man doodle stole from the google users. This time is in addition to the 33.6 Million hours of visits they get.
This much time is equivalent to $120,483,800, if the average google user is worth $25 an hour.

This money would be enough to pay all the google employees ( all the 19,835 of them), right from the owners Larry and Sergey, down to their sweepers for straight 6 week.

Yes thats what google stole from the world economy by simply integrating a Pac Man doodle on its home page.

And word has also been out that this also resulted in confusion among many google users, who even contacted google customer care asking if they could disable it from their homepage.

Evan though the doodle has been removed from the google home page, you can play it here.

Twitter's Performance Problems; Capacity doubled

 As some of you may have noticed, twitter seemed to have been facing problems. The twitter over capacity page is what many have been getting for a past few days.

This has been because of the quick growth rate of twitter in terms of users and data. Much quicker than the twitter engineers can keep track of things.

As explained by a twitter engineer, the current failures has been dues to 3 great mistakes:

• The team put two important, fast-growing, high-bandwith components on the same segment of Twitter’s internal network. 
• The network wasn’t being monitored the way it should have been.
• The internal network was also temporarily misconfigured.

As he says, they are trying to solve these problems. They have doubled the capacity of the internal netwok, changed the way its monitored and rebalanced traffic.

He also said that they are working with their hosting partner to provide improvements on these 3 fronts so that they can keep ahead of the high growth rate of the site.

So from now on you may get lesser twitter failure messages.

For those of who have joined twitter, follow me here : http://twitter.com/aravnd326
For those who haven't, join here : https://twitter.com/signup

Logitech C910 HD Webcam

Logitech recently launched four High Definition Webcams, of which the C910 has the best specs.

Until recently webcams were struggling with the VGA video capturing capability. Even though it was replaced by megapicel cameras, it failed to perform well.

But not anymore. Logitech has braought about an age of High definition webcams.

The Logitech HD Pro Webcam C910 is full 1080p camera. It can shoot video at 1080p resolution and do video chat at 720p.

Its also got stereo microphones and an autofocus Carl-Zeiss lens.

And the price for all this? Well $99.

Logitech has 3 other more budget friendly webcams in this series : C510 ($59), C310 ($49) and C270 ($39).

 All this being said, the Indians might want to stay clear off this for a while, unless they have got a pretty fast internet plan with lots of data transfer limit.

C910 pictures :