After a flood of touchscreen launches in India this year, which includes Apple's iPhone, Samsung Omnia and BlackBerry Bold, US-based cell phone maker Motorola is out with its GPS-enabled touchscreen device, MOTOMING A 1600, in India.
Packing a host of multimedia features, the sleek A1600 which comes with a transparent flip cover is Motorola's challenge to other touchscreen smartphones available in the market.
And to add to the festive spark, the phone pleases buyers on the pricing front too. Here's looking into the features.
Motorola's touchscreen phone is GPS-enabled offering navigation maps and landmarks of 30 cities. The phone has satellite based GPS which offers users lifetime free GPS navigation maps.
The phone also offers voice-guided navigation and location based reminders across major national and state highways.
The phone supports turn-by-turn, voice-guided navigation, and easy search of points-of-interest like hotels, colleges, petrol pumps, airports, railway stations, cinemas and tourist attractions. It also provides coverage across national and state highways in India.
According to Motorola MobileDevices India and South West AsiaLloyd Mathias, the phone is Motorola's first GPS-enabled mobile phone. He added that the navigation service is free with no activation charges, independent of mobile networks and can be used even without inserting the SIM card. 
The Linux-based phone has a 3.2 megapixel camera and 8X zoom for multiple capture modes.
Among the key multimedia features, the phone comes with MP3 player and Music ID, and provides users direct access to MOTOMUSIC service.
MING A1600 also provides video capture and video playback at 30 fps (frames per second). MOTOMING A1600 supports Class 2 Bluetooth wireless technology, support a talk time of up to approximately 405 minutes and a standby time of approximately 176 hours.More>>
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
MOTOMING A 1600, in India.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS
Hard drive capacities have been reaching for the skies, while the prices have been nose-diving; even the highest-capacity drive is within reach. We got our hands on one of the hottest drives in the market today, the Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS, a 500 GB behemoth. Let's see how well it fared in our tests.
Features
The large capacity of the drive is advantageous for reasons other than the obvious -- because of the growing size of operating systems, for instance; Vista takes over 6 GB in the basic install, while the upcoming version of Windows may take even more. Versions of Linux also take huge amounts of space. We tend to dump everything we get from friends, or download TV shows, movies, games, and software (thanks to our "broadband" connections) onto the hard drive -- and never bother to delete it, so a smaller hard drive always ends up running out of disk space. It is therefore logical to opt for a very-high-capacity hard drive like this when you purchase one.
This 3.5-inch drive features perpendicular magnetic recording technology, meaning a greater areal density - more data per given area of platter, and thus a reduction in the number of platters, which in turn reduces the amount of heat generated. It has a rotational speed of 7200 rpm and has a large 16 MB buffer for uninterrupted data transfer.
As you can see in the photo above, the drive features a SATA interface - this is the faster 3.0 Gb/s SATA-II. The drive features ShockGuard technology, which protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks. In addition to this, there is the SecurePark feature, which parks the recording heads while the drive is spinning up or down (or when it is off), thus eliminating the chances of the recording head touching the disk surface. This improves the life of the drive and makes it more reliable.
To enhance the reliability of the drive, there is Data Lifeguard - a set of data protection features that include shock protection, environmental data protection, and real-time embedded error detection and repair. Data Lifeguard automatically finds, isolates, and corrects problems that may develop over the life of the drive.
Advanced acoustic and power-reducing technologies in the drive make it operate very silently even during the high-stress mode of operation during benchmarking. The drive also runs cool; it seldom crossed 40 degrees celcius during our entire test run. Like most WD drives, it features IntelliSeek, an algorithm that calculates the optimum seek speeds to lower the power consumption, noise, and vibration. All this translates to lower power consumption, which can help keep down your electricity bills especially if the PC is on 24/7. In addition, a silent hard drive is a good thing for any HTPC.
Performance
We connected this drive to our test rig's SATA port to put it through our tailor-made test process. We used benchmarking tools such as H2Bench, HDTach, HD Tune, and SiSoftware Sandra Professional Business XIIc.
H2Bench is a low-level hard drive testing utility and gives an indication of the raw performance of the drive. The drive was not formatted while we conducted this test; it did not hold any filesystem. The drive returned a very good score of 187.2 MB/s in the "core test," putting it on par -- and even ahead of -- most desktop hard drives. We also measured the access times for the whole disk, and found them to be 12.63 ms for reading and 7.08 ms for writing.
HDTach RW 3.0.1.0 is yet another low-level test that does not require the hard drive to have a filesystem.
HD Tune Pro 3.00 is a hard disk benchmarking utility capable of performing lower-level as well as filesystem benchmarks and displaying the result in the form of a graph. We ran the read as well as the write test to measure the transfer speeds, burst speeds, and access time across the entire drive -- and obtained the results as in the figure.
SiSoftware Sandra Professional Business XIIc: We created a fresh NTFS partition on the test hard drive and ran the File System benchmark module on the freshly-formatted partition.
The drive brought up an index of 76 and an access time of just 6 ms. As you can see in the graph above, this drive is well ahead of all the other 500 GB drives in the SiSoft Sandra database, meaning it is a commendable performer.
The File Copy Test: In the real-world copy test, we copied 4 GB of assorted as well as sequential data from one partition of the drive to another to see the internal transfer rate. The results of the real-world file copy test went thus:
4 GB assorted intra-drive: 123.7 sec (33.11 MB/s)
4 GB sequential intra-drive: 175.9 sec (23.29 MB/s)
In the inter-drive write test, this WD drive put up an impressive show again. Take a look:
4 GB assorted write: 65.2s (62.82 MB/s)
4 GB sequential write: 51.3s (79.84 MB/s)
We did not do the inter-drive read tests from this drive because the host drive was slower than this drive when it came to writing.
All and all, the drive put up a tremendous show, and is one of the fastest mainstream hard drives we've tested. However WD terms this as a performance drive, and going by its performance, we completely agree with them.
A Final Word
The Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS is backed by a solid 16 MB of cache. It is good to have one big drive instead of several smaller ones; this drive boasts of fantastic performance, and is one of the best mainstream drives we've tested. "Mainstream" is the keyword because this drive comes dirt-cheap at a street price of just Rs. 4,400, and what's more, if you scout around, you may even get it for a couple of hundred rupees less!
One more important thing to mention is that all Western Digital drives come with a 5-year "onsite" warranty -- all you need to do is fill up an online RMA form and WD arranges for your drive to be duly picked up from you as well as the replacement delivered to your door. We have tried this out and the whole process takes less than a week and you have to face no hassles. Now that's what we call convenience!
