Aircel Pocket Internet Review

July 5th, 2009

If you are looking for information on setting up Aircel Pocket Internet on PC / Laptop, then read my post explaining it by following the link.

This was my first trial on Aircel Pocket Internet. Read my speed review part 2 here.

I was using Airtel Online / NOP for quite a while until recently Airtel pulled these back. I know the reason behind Airtel’s move to withdraw Airtel Online / NOP – there has been a number of hacks and tricks around through which one can use Airtel Online / NOP on pc, even though they aren’t for pc and to be used only on mobile and comes with a nominal charge of 99 Rs for unlimited mobile browsing for a month on the postpaid plan.

Quite dejected, I decided to test the Aircel’s Pocket Internet. Power cuts for two hours – one each in morning and evening, I decided to spend my time walking during power cut.

I walked to Thippasandra market in Bangalore, which is quite near to my home, and went into at least 4 mobile recharge stores for Aircel’s Pocket Internet. All had the poster mentioning about Aircel’s Pocket Internet cards worth Rs 14 and 98, but when I asked “Aircel Pocket Internet card iddaya?” (Do you have Aircel’s Pocket Internet card, all of them told “NO”! Well, everyone had the poster of this ad posted on the Wall !! Its quite a shame that Aircel people aren’t educating these people about new offers, schemes and something like this when they provide such ads to be pasted on their shops!

I ended up in front of a small shop where they sell the DTH services and they looked to be selling the mobile phone SIMs and recharge coupons too. Seeing the same sticker again, I repeated the same question to get the same answer ! But this time my question was noticed by a man standing in front of the shop – he must be the actual owner of the shop and I asked my question to the boy standing inside the shop. This person asked me what I am looking for.. I pointed at the same ad which was on the wall – I am looking for this. He asked the boy, do you know what is this – The boy said ‘NO’. He shouted at the boy, we are the distributor and you don’t know what is this, how others will know then? I told I have visited 4 shops prior to this.. The person made a quick phone call to some Aircel office and confirmed that we can do an easy recharge to get the plans activated. I was happy, at last I can get Aircel to test the Pocket Internet!

I took the SIM, got a life time recharge done for 49 Rs and activated Pocket Internet with another recharge of 98 Rs.

Now the real review of Pocket Internet

On my Sony Ericsson K750i, I could open the mobile friendly pages without any issue, but the GMail for Mobile didn’t fetch my emails. So I would say, on mobile phone this connection works fairly okay for light web browsing. I tried downloading mini fring of 575 KB, this is where I felt the connection lacks ! It took at least 20 minutes for me for the 575KB download with many network errors and resuming download.

I connected mobile to my PC to test the speed and run a speed test using http://speedtest.net . For the dial up settings for Aircel Pocket Internet on PC/Laptop, one may use *99***1# if Pocket Internet is the first internet profile in the phone, with user name and password empty. iGoogle took close to 90 seconds to load, I tried opening up GMail.com which opened up in about 30 seconds, but subsequently it showed ‘Internet Connection Lost’ message on top of the GMail page.

SpeedTest.net page didn’t load completely for continous attempts for an hour! Finally I decided to load the SpeedTest.net page components using my broadband and then do a refresh to test using Pocket Internet. The initial latency check on SpeedTest.net showed something close to 5800 ms and gave an error after wards, I couldn’t continue the Speed test at all.

Whichever is cheap isn’t always the best – This holds true in this case as well. For 98 Rs one can browse at home, cheap, but mind what you can do in 5 minutes on Broadband, needs an hour or more on Pocket Internet. Are you ready for it? By the way if you are too much dependant on a cyber cafe which uses age old machines and have many viruses in it, safeguarding your email credentials can be achieved with use of Pocket Internet connected to your own PC / Laptop – I am not seeing any reliability score for this connection.

 

Airtel, why did you stop the 99 Rs Airtel Online? It was much better than this so called ‘Pocket Internet’ !



Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Facebook for Nokia available at OVI store

June 19th, 2009

I did try Facebook for Nokia app from OVI store on my Nokia 5800.
Well, if you haven’t been to OVI store yet, open http://www.ovi.com and sign up for an account. OVI store hosts applications for your Nokia phone – both free as well as paid.
Coming back to Facebook for Nokia, if you are a Nokia 5800 user, you might have already seen a facebook widget under your internet and browser section. This is not a standalone application, but a link to the facebook mobile site. What I mentioning here – Facebook for Nokia is a full fledged standalone application through which you can even upload a new snap taken using your phone camera.
Once you sign up at the OVI store, you can download an OVI application onto your mobile phone to browse OVI store, and install application straightaway.
I did download OVI app and installed facebook for nokia on my Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic. The application looks really cool, why dont you try it as well?

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Installed Orkut app on my Nokia 5800!

June 5th, 2009

I had posted earlier that Google has launched Orkut Application for mobile phones. Today I installed it in my Nokia 5800 and it looks great on the bigger mobile touch pad, similar to the GMail application I am using on my Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic .

This application is a beta release from Google (version 1.0) which allows you to access your scrapbook, make status updates and upload a photo from your phone camera. Main feature is the last one, you can use your phone’s built in camera to capture an image and upload into your Orkut account ! This feature isn’t available in the WAP version of Orkut which can be accessed on mobile. Another feature is the offline mode, even without internet connection, you can view scraps, friends’ photo album etc which you have already downloaded on to the application.

If your phone supports Java, you could try this app by pointing your phone’s default browser to http://m.google.com/orkut where you can follow the install link.

Those who do not have the java enabled phone (which is a rare chance now, but still few of you may be using those) you can still access Orkut through the mobile friendly Orkut site on the same link as above.

Have fun, post your feedback on using Orkut app on Nokia 5800 or any other phone and discuss it here !

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Posted in Mobile | 3 Comments »

ScribeFire blogging tool

June 4th, 2009

Thanks to BlogSchool.in , I came to know about this wonderfull tool which help me blog frequently !

Scribfire is basically a firefox extension which allows you an easy way to manage your blog posts. You can work offline on a post using this extension on your browser, making n number of edits before actually publishing on to your blog.

Once you add this extension, you can set up your blog account in it and
start blogging right away. You need not go to and forth on your blog
admin panel to edit your posts, you can do it right from scribefire and
with one click post on to blog ! How is that?

Browse to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1730 and add scribefire to your firefox. You can see a small quicklaunch icon of scribefire on your browser bottom tray. Once you click open, you can add a blog which already you post to by supplying credentials. I have tried this for my selfhosted as well as wordpress.com hosted blogs and it worker great.

Give it a try and post back what do you feel !

Below is a snapshot of me making this post from scribefire !

ScribeFire blogging extension for firefox

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

Yay! Nokia replaced my 5800 Xpressmusic !

June 3rd, 2009

You might have read that I was one among the early bird owners of defective Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic phones.
It all started with an earpiece problem which I didn’t notice much for ten days and was thinking that it was a network issue, but those speakers were defective.

I realized its hard to maintain a touch screen like what Nokia 5800 has and prevent it from scratches. My phone developed scratches.. I ordered a set of scratch guards from dcmugen store in ebay to protect my Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic phone from further scratches.

I got my earpieces fixed (replaced) and everything looked to be fine, but it was beginning of another set of issues. I updated my firmware to version 20 from 11. That was around the time I fixed my defective earpieces at Nokia care. Now what happened, the display used to get blank at times while in use and I have to switch off and on my key guard switch to get the display back. This too I didn’t realize as a big issue, but another issue was the menu colour in my Nokia 5800 used to change while in use for 3-5 seconds and used to get back to normal. This was an irritating thing on a phone I bought paying a very high price.

My phone was about 2 months old then, I waited for the version 21 update to see whether it fixes the problem, but it didn’t. I tried all other things I could do like doing a soft reset and formatting the C drive of phone.

This is when I concluded that my phone has a hardware issue, and not a software issue. I decided to take it Nokia care again. It was 10 days back. The next day I got a call from Nokia Care to come and collect my phone. I went there, but withing my initial 10 minute inspection, I found a blank screen again and the phone was again taken back for servicing. I waited further, but yesterday they confirmed that I am getting a replacement handset in the place of the defective one.

They didnt provide me a sealed box, instead a new one with my old battery in it. I am writing this review after using it for a day and I feel more relieved for now.
Thanks again to Nokia Care, but Nokia should have taken more care while releasing their first ever touch screen phone which incidentally happened to be my first Nokia phone :(

My adice to fellow Nokia 5800 users

  • Within warranty, do not try to experiment with your phone. There are many tricks around for repairing the issues such as varying valumes in earpieces. You do it yourself, you are breaking the warranty. Nokia will not answer your questions for free afterwards.
  • As far as possible try to go to a main Nokia Care centre with a phone which is within warranty, they would have got better experience with this set than a guy sitting in a shop at the corner of your road.
  • Try to use a scratch guard for your phone if you are concerned about keeping the screen scratch less.

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Windows Live Writer and 403 error on Blogger

May 28th, 2009

I was trying windows live writer for the first time, a big applause to Microsoft for providing this too for free. Windows live writer makes the life of a blogger much easier.

Windows live writer allows you to frame your blog post from your desktop or laptop and publish on to the blog using a single click ! This helps us treat blog posts just like a word or power point file, make necessary changes to your post, edit it locally in multiple sessions, while it is saved in your computer locally and publish at once. You need not go back and forth on your blogger or wordpress admin to make drafts and changes, everything is easy using Windows live writer.

Now coming to my issue, I tried creating a post on my wordpress blog (like this one) using Live writer, no issues for me to get it done. Only to make sure we check the XML-RPC publishing protocol on in wordpress writing settings.

Now when I tried posting into blogger, it gave me a 403 error and says could not upload or something like that. The issue was that my post contained images. While posting images into blogger, actually images are saved on to an album in your picasa account. When you post from blogger’s interface, an album matching to your blog name is automatically created. But, while posting from Windows live writer, it actually tries to upload to a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album in your picasa account, which might not be existing. Well in my case it wasn’t existing and that was the root cause for this issue.

I manually created a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album on my picasa account and retried publishing the post from Live writer – Phew ! It worked !

So just in case you are facing the same issue as mine where you are getting a 403 error while trying to create a post on blogger, with the posts containing images, cross check whether you have a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album on your picasa account. If not, add manually and retry. It should work fine.

Let me know if this post helped you in any way !

Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment »

My 5800 tube is at Nokia Care again

May 22nd, 2009

Well, I explained earlier that I am facing another typical problem with my Nokia 5800 tube – The menu color change issue with my Nokia 5800 :(

My phone is a little over two months old and was a victim of the known Nokia 5800 earpiece speaker volume issue, and it had the display problem as well.

I updated firmware to version 20 from version 11 the day prior to getting it repaired for the speaker issue. The display issue came into attention since then. While in use the menu colour changes to violet, yellow pink etc for a duration of 3-4 seconds and gets back to normal. Also the screen goes blank in between, I need to switch off and on the screen guard to get the display work again.

After doing some research on Nokia discussion forums, other mobile phone discussion forums, I concluded that few Nokia 5800 users face similar issues as mine with the display.

My initial assumption was that it could be a software related issue, I waited for the version 21 upgrade and did it few days back. This didn’t solve my issue. I did a phone reset using *#7370# which formats the phone memory, which again did nothing to solve the issue. This made me conclude that there could be something serious issue with the hardware. Two of my friends own Nokia 5800 and they never had something like this.

I took the mobile to Nokia Care today, the guy over there told me that it need to be checked and if needed might need to be sent to the main office for repair and detailed check. He also mentioned that if it cannot be repaired, I will be given a replacement piece, which is a good news for me now. Thanks to Nokia Care again, but so sad, my first experience with Nokia mobile phones isn’t that great due to this faulty Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic :(

I pulled out my old Philips Xenium 9@9++ to be used meanwhile for the sake of making and receiving calls.
Waiting for them to check my 5800 tube and give me the results..

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How fast is your website?

May 20th, 2009

A quick loading website is always preferred by majority of users, but adding more beauty to the website often makes the web pages bulky and a webmaster ends up with a slow loading website.

A webpage consists of the HTML code and other page elements such as cascading style sheets (CSS), javaScript files (.js) and images.

Following are few tips for you to optimize the load time of a website.

Reduce the number of HTTP requests – as I told you, a page output is usually a combination of the HTML code, combined with other files such as css, js and images. As far as possible try to reduce the number of dependent files on a page. For example, you may use a single css file instead of including styles from 2 or 3 style sheets. Combine js files and if possible consolidate into one. Images – those are the main culprits most of the time, try to use images with lesser kB’s and reduce the number of images in a page. For example for background coloring, you may use CSS rather than an image.

Yahoo has a best document for web page load time improvement – Read it here.

Posted in Webmastering | No Comments »

How search engines work?

May 1st, 2009

Earlier I had written a post on how to get your site gets shown up in search engine results , I would like to elaborate the post here.

Assume you have a website, you type yourdomain.com on the search box and hit enter, it is not showing your site in search results, and you are wondering why, the above link will answer few of your questions.

  • Search engines are not programmed to find each and every website online and show up results from them
  • It is close to impossible for any search engine to display results for any page on any website

The above are few facts one need to know about search engines.

How a search engine finds your website?

There are two ways as I explained earlier,

  • You let the search engine know about your website URL (use the add url option provided by them)
  • Invite search engine crawler automatically by getting few hyperlinks pointed to your website URL from others sites which are already in search engine’s database (index).

Second method is best as far as I can say, you can even get your new website in search engine’s index in 24 hours (this method is what SEO agencies do, when they publicise that they can get your site indexed in 24 hours)

Getting into the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)
This depends on the keyword relevance and quality of the content on the webpage and the link popularity of your site. These are basics for any search engines, the weightages do vary from search engine to search engine. Google give more weightage to the incoming authoritative votes (links) from other websites.

Search Engine Optimization is understanding these search engine algorithms and planning the OnPage and Offpage strategies for developing the site for better placement in the search engine result pages.

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Nokia 5800 Menu display color change issue

April 28th, 2009

Well, Nokia 5800 is cool, but equally buggy. I had posted the earpiece volume problem on my Nokia 5800, then my Xpressmusic’s touchscreen got scratches within one month of use, I didn’t scratch it purposely, but used the stylus provided by Nokia in the usual way..

Here is another one in the list.. (sadly)

I upgraded my phone’s firmware to 20.0.012, then started this typical issue. While in use, the colour of menu buttons change once in a while, it can be greenish yellow, greyish yellow and things linke that different from the color which we see usually. The colour then gets back to the initial one within a couple of seconds.

I also noticed that this happens usually while working with an application which try to use some phone resources.

Well, I am not the only one who face this issue, there are many more facing similar issues? Is this a hardware issue or a firmware issue? No one has a clear idea, no clarifications from Nokia about this.

I called up Nokia care and explained this issue. They do not have any information on this, they asked me to bring the phone. Well, I do not want to keep the phone with them for some days for them to experiment, that too within 30-40 days from purchase.

Are you the one facing this issue? Please post when and how you are able to see the colour change, may be that can help us find a common solution.

For someone who is planning to buy Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic, WAIT!! Let Nokia fix all these issues, else you join us debugging this phone, I am not saying this phone is bad, but are you ready to feel some headaches too??

[UPDATE] Nokia replaced my 5800 Xpressmusic !

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Posted in Mobile | 2 Comments »

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