Like the iPhone the Symbian phones from Nokia all supported applications, or apps as the current calling trend is. They didn’t have a fancy store back then, but the publishers could sell apps, just like Windows/Mac software. May be that’s where they didn’t do it right, but I doubt it. The problem was the app experience varied depending on how powerful your Symbian phone was.

What Apple did with the focus on a lone model (and at the time of writing 3) is that the app developers didn’t have to worry about if it will work on this model and not that. Instead they focused on the application itself. Added to that you have all the new tech that the iPhone had compared to other flagship phones, made for some very very interesting apps.

I believe Apple had finally created what for a lack of a better term an ecosystem in the mobile world. Just like how because you use Windows everywhere you really have to think hard about switch your system to Linux or Mac, Apple has successfully made people stick to this ecosystem. Just consider the number of upgraders from iPhone 2G to iPhone 3GS. In fact, it is so strong, that when I think about switching to an Android – and trust me I do from time to time – I reconsider because of the applications that I would leave behind.

Hopefully Andriod, Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile and Bada will all catch up, and you can chose your ecosystem and then stick to it.

In my opinion doubleTwist is a diamond in the rough. It already offers syncing between tons of devices, and if I was Palm I’d put some money and cut a deal with these guys and go with a iTunes competitor. Specially since the new release has the Amazon Music Store and it’s own music library.

Even though, doubleTwist has a bit more to go before they can really compete against iTunes head to head, I think it has a pretty good chance if things go right for it. Having its own library and a music store was a good step forward. If Palm, Amazon and doubleTwist got together and brushed up on the user interface, it would be great!

Hell just imagine a SongBird and iTunes like experience with a software that can sync your Android, Palm and Apple devices.

I miss my Avro Keyboard. I don’t mind Linux at all. Once I got Xubuntu which feel faster and then added Compiz Fusion to make it look sexy and get the awesome Virtual Desktop shortcuts everything was good. Until I wanted to type in Bangla. You know Avro Keyboard’s Phonetic entry makes life so easy that you don’t have to learn to type Bangla at all. You just try to spell out the word in Roman letters and boom! it’s there in Bangla fonts. The typed the line above in whole minute. That’s how long it took me to find all the characters. Even in the phonetic mode.

Otherwise, Xubuntu is definitely slick. After adding Compiz Fusion on top of that it really makes for a killer environment. Though trying to live on the bleeding edge software can be a bit annoying if you don’t mind living on the stable edge then the application management could not be easier than Synaptic.

Having Firefox on the environment helps further since I don’t really miss my Win32 world as much until I need to get some work done and I need to get the VPN going. Yeah.. haven’t figured that one out yet. Well all in due time.. sometime

What was really interesting was to see the easy avaibility of ASUS, BenQ and LiteON products. Since these are all Asian brands the ease of importing them and their price points makes them a very promising supplier. I even noticed an ASUS EeePC amoung the variety of laptops that are readily available. Also it is much fun to see all the Chinese knock-offs that you can find

This got me thinking. I’ve hit such a weird level of geekdom that I have forgotten that the world is not keeping up with all the techno-marvels the moment that they are coming out. Back in the day it took me about 4 years before getting in line with DVD, and now a mere 18 months later I have Blu-ray discs. Though I have to claim that owning Blu-ray had little to do with Blu-ray itself, but I digress.

Most of the people around me these days keep up with the latest. At best they have fallen behind for a month or so. Words like gigabytes, megabits per second, full-HD, etc. have become so common place that I forget that one might not be able to comprehend how big a 1GB file could be. Which in turn points to how I fail to realize what I geek I actually am sometimes.

Lesson learned. Next time I’ll know better.

They just updated their MacBook and MacBook Pro today. Being one of those guys who follow processor technology closely, I was interested if they shifted to Intel’s new Penryn line. Now I simple Core 2 Duo T8100 would have sufficed in their detailed specs but instead Apple decides it wants to tell you that it uses a 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo. Which could be a T7700 or the new T8300.

To figure out which one it is I had to depend on the L2 cache size since that was the only extra information I could find on the stupid Apple.com. So using that now I can tell that the base MacBook comes with a T8100 and the upgraded one sports the T8300. But why do I have to rely on that? Seriously? Why can’t they say that the MacBook Pro can now be upgraded to the T9300?

So if a laptop manufacturer, decided to start using similar (or same) parts that are already used in the Mac Book line, they can in fact make a laptop that would be able to support Mac 100% (minus the EFI BiOS of course). Now wouldn’t that be something? A laptop built for Windows and Linux, all of a sudden just happens to support Mac completely if you can get around the EFI issue. Now that, as yours truly already state, is just a matter of finding the right image.

After that Google was my best buddy in trying to figure out how I can get parts of the laptop activated under Macintosh. This is mainly since Apple only supports a strict subset of the entire hardware market.Anyway, Google has given me the solution to get my Ethernet working (modifying a kernel extension file), and also lead me to a forum discussion where some guy is working on trying to get the Wireless driver to work. I thought that was the last bit, but soon I discovered that the built-in mic and the audio ports don’t work. No news on that front yet.

All that aside, though I have had a pretty decent experience with Leopard. Just today I got Vista and Leopard both happy side by side. And this post is actually made from Leopard There are some things I love about the Mac. The graphic, the finishing – in one word it’s just marvellous. Then there is Mac’s all famous dock, Spaces and Adium. After using it for the last few days, I can see myself be happy under it. The *nix commad shell by itself is very welcoming.

On the other hand, keyboard navigation through the things could be a lot better. On the laptop I hardly use my mouse. I tend to use keyboard short-cuts for hoping between things. Though on many occasions the keyboard access to things beats Windows, the whole Enter to rename, Enter to trigger a selected button, Space to trigger a focused button and Flw+O to open a Finder item is quite annoying. But I can live with that.

I think I’ll keep Leopard on my laptop. It does take away 17 GB from my document partition, but hey it’s pretty

Welcome

Hackintosh

While I was doing that, I finally installed a test web server on my desktop again after like a year or so. The great news is that now the server is running in 64-bit mode! I really can’t want until more and more of the applications start providing native 64-bit support. If you are unclear about it’s true benefits, let Lord Jobs show it to you. Granted I’m in the Windows world, but really it’s that much better.

P.S> I have managed to finish learning how to solve a 4×4 Rubik’s cube!