Vipul's Blogs

For The Love Of Nokia E71.

Vipul — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:18:27 +0000

If there are three things i could not live without in my life, those would be my sports shoes, money and my smartphone with an internet connection with it offcourse. These days i’ve been using my Nokia E71 and as thought of and heard of, its simply magnificent. With its metallic slim body to fast symbian OS, bright wide screen to a useful QWERTY keyboard, the Nokia E71 has it all. I would say its more than worth the money you pay for it. Its a complete business phone with decent multimedia features with it.

A smartphone has to be used to its fullest potential in order to make it stand out from the other phones. I have gone through various softwares on the internet of which some are free while others are chargeable. These are some of the most useful softwares I found for the very slim and sexy metallic smartphone called the Nokia E71. Check out the list:

1) Nokia Sports Tracker – This is the one software i truly adore. The Sports Tracker is a software which converts the Nokia E71 into a performance tracking device for an athlete. It synchronises with the GPS, notes, calender and map. It monitors the distance, time, laps, etc. taken by an athlete for various activities like running, walking, cycling, etc. So for all you fitness freaks out there, get a grip on this one.

2) Profimail – Profimail is a powerful e-mail client for your Nokia E71. It allows you to read emails on the go and also send text along with attachments such as photos, voice recordings and office documents with it. The Profimail is chargeable but not much. In order to run this software you only need to have an internet connection and so it does all the email jobs that a blackberry does.

3) Gmail Mobile Application – The Gmail mobile application is gmail’s own free software which runs smoothly on a WAP connection. It gives a vibrating alert, everytime a new email hits your gmail inbox. It has a very simple interface, where you can also compose text messages and send them off instantly. A must have for a WAP enabled Nokia E71.

4) Mobitubia – Its an award-winning application which enables you to watch any video from the Youtube video directory and also save them in flv format on your memory card. Its a free software with a great 3D interface. The interface looks great on E71s 320×240 resolution wide screen.

5) Ebuddy – Ebuddy is an instant messenger client which i use to stay online on numerous messenger services at the same time. It again is a free software and could be run with the help of a WAP connectivity. With this application you can simultaneously stay connected and online on MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, Facebook, AIM and ICQ.

6) Resco Photo Viewer – The Nokia E71, being a business phone, lacks some of the multimedia features which a Nokia N-series mobile phone possesses. It lacks the image editing features like croping, color adjusting, image effects, etc. The Resco Photo Viewer serves all these features to the E71. However, the advantage or disadvantage of this software is that any modifications which you make to an image could be seen only through the Resco Photo Viewer. The original image file in the gallery is not modified. This is a chargeable software and is very important if you like to edit the pictures which you click from your phone.

7) Opera Mini – You got to have Opera Mini browser installed on your phone for its solid and smooth functioning. Opera Mini gives you the options of surfing the web with a mobile version of websites or the PC version. It is a free and simple browser and is known worldwide for its performance.

8) Bolt – Bolt is my favourite browser. It gives a full PC view of any webpage. The speed is also very fast.

9) Advanced Call Manager – A must have software. Although now found pre-installed with the E71, this software manages your incoming calls in the way you want it to. You can block incoming calls, activate voicemail, blacklist a particular number, enable an answering machine and do lots more with the help of it.

10) Gravity – Now for those who love to use twitter like me, Gravity is the best twitter client you can have on your S60 device. With real-time updates and continuous refreshing, it is super fast. Gravity has got a great interface as well. This software is chargeable and worth buying and also comes with a free full functional 30 days free trial. Just try it once and see for yourself.

11) Handy Calender – It is one of the most useful and must have software if you are someone who needs to be well-organised in their profession. Unlike the default calender, handy calender provides different views (month, week, timetable, day, task), so that you can easily access and do the necessary tasks on your dates. It also has a zoom in facility, something which the default calender does not have. It comes at a very nominal cost.

12) Handy Expense – The very useful application in tracking your expenses and have a control over the unnecessary ones.

13) Google Maps – It is my favourite application when it comes to maps. It shows in-depth details along with the real pictures from the satellite. One can also stay online on the maps with friends through lattitude.

14) Handy Safe Pro – Is an application which stores your bank account numbers, passwords, credit card numbers, etc. One can even store any logins or suitcase lock code in the Handy Safe Pro.

15) Media Safe – Media Safe is one software which allows you to store any kind of media file such as videos, images, sound files or text with any format in case you want to keep these files hidden and password protected inside your Nokia E71.

16) Panoman – Panoman is a camera application for your E71. It allows you to capture a continuous 360 degree image with your solid 3.2 MP camera. One can capture beautiful photographic images with it.

17) X-plore – X-plore is a mobile phone explorer which enables you to send any kind of file or application through bluetooth. It allows you to quickly search and locate any type of file located within the system of e71.

18) Snaptu – Snaptu is multi-purpose application which serves as a newsreader, facebook client, picasa client, etc. along with its main purpose being a twitter client. It is a great application for any symbian phone and is also constantly updated for its betterment.

19) Yahoo Go – This is a Yahoo’s own application for all you yahoo users which provides access to yahoo’s different features such as mail, weather, flickr, news, etc.

20) Handy Converter – Handy Converter is an all in one converter for your device which can convert not just currencies, but also different units of weight, area, volume, speed, temperature, etc. It could be very needful during any time of the day.

These are the 20 best applications which i found useful on my Nokia E71 device. All these applications could be found by googling them on the internet. I am constantly in search for better applications for my device. Altough, i haven’t had any success in getting the best of games for this marvellous phone. I would love to hear your views about this post and your software finds on the net as well. Keep coming back as i keep updating this post.

The Fakers And The Makers.

Vipul — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 03:06:00 +0000

Visiting networking sites has become a daily activity and a part of our life. It helps us stay connected with our friends, enables us to share pictures, videos, experiences, blogs, blah, blah, blah. In my opinion, to me they have become a niche. And so i feel discontent when i see people misusing it to earn money, easy fame and even causing a hostile environment sometimes without a proper knowledge of things or acute reasons. The biggest problem of which i am just sick off is the number of fake identities that are just sneaking into our networks. I think that the freedom to customize is been taken in a wrong way over here. Taking the advantage of the customize features, i see people creating fake names, obscene content, writing s**t and naming it as thoughts. O come on, atleast stop posting celeb photos and fitness model pics as your default profile pics. Whats wrong with posting your own photo? I think that the website moderators should strictly ban such photos and copyrighted images used as default profile pic. One more point that needs to be looked upon by the websites, is the fact that there are a lot of profiles out there which are using networking sites as a mean for flirting without actually knowing the purpose of it. Okay, it is understandable for a novice user, but the website moderators could do much better in educating such novice users regarding the precise use of the networking site. We have got other flirting and dating sites available on the web for those purposes. Let them know their roles. The idea of increasing the friends count blindly just pi**es me off. I mean how could u call someone a friend who stays a million miles away, with whom u haven’t had any conversation since the time he/she has been added and the purposes of adding was just to reach a milestone of 100 or maybe 1000. Thats not cool. These so called friends are then used as a traffic for their commercial products. WTF…. These are the two things i would want the likes of Orkut, Facebook and Myspace to look into very carefully. I will keep on posting about any other problems which i find in the networking systems. I would love to hear from all the reader of this blog and know about the things which they think would improve our networking activities.

Heaven In The Neighborhood Itself.

Vipul — Sat, 16 May 2009 09:20:08 +0000

Life in a metro city like Mumbai (Bombay) is fast-paced and could get a bit stressing at times. People start to look for a change in the living once they encounter such stressful moments. Last month, i went through a similar kind of situation and so i decided to take some time off work and go out on a vacation. I chose to visit my aunt’s native place.

The place is called Devgarh.It is situated on the western coast of the state of Maharashtra in India. The western coast of Maharastra is called the Konkan coastline. I reached there by taking a more than 15 hours roadtrip. As soon as i reached there, i got a very a peaceful and quiet feeling. However, the sites and scenes are naturally beautiful. I had been to this place after 11 long years, yet still nothing has changed over here.

The first among many memorable places is Vijaydurg. Named after the famous fort over here, the Vijaydurg fort is the chief attraction for the tourists. Maritime history tells that the fortess was the scene of many a bloody battles. The board at the entrance of the fort tells about its history. Vijaydurg fort alias Gheria was constructed by Shilaharaj king Raja bhoj. It was later on ruled by Adilsha and finally by King Shivaji before the British. There is a wall constructed strategically inside the sea before the fort in order to crush the warships heading towards the fort. The fort streches out in the sea and a walk inside its precincts is worthwhile.

The Vijaydurg’s beach is hidden from view and not obvious to the casual visitor. Its a stretch of about a kilometre with good views of the fort to the right and a small plateau with a hut to the left. Its relatively clean and peaceful and the locals don’t bother to come here.

North of Vijaydurg is a flat plateau that can be seen from the southern end of the fort. It looks very attractive with casurina plantations and some small isolated beaches. There is no ferry service from Vijaydurg north. One has to go back to the highway and then turn north towards Rajapur.
Just short of Rajapur, look for the turning to a place called Jaitapur. The road leads back to the coast and should take you to the area that you were looking at from Vijaydurg. Its a stony plateau with a lonely lighthouse at its western edge, the road towards which is quite rough and unmarked.

Devgarh – A short 25 km drive southwards, without going back to the highway, brings you to the larger town of Devgarh, famous for its Alphonso mangoes. It also has a post Shivaji period fortress. It is a fishing village. The beach is set in a gentle curve. There is a bright coloured temple located to the left. The road continues up a hill and ends at the southern entrance to the fort. The view from here in the evenings is magnificient, especially on cloudy days when the sky rapidly changes hue just before sunset. The waves crashing on the rocks below provide a fitting serenade to this spectacle.

If you have the time, head north along the beach and take the bridle path up the hill and head for the temple of Kunkeshwar and another beach. You may be able to capture some ‘ethnic’ faces and people on your camera. The local technique of fishing over here is much in vogue.

Vengurla - The last outpost before the Maharashtra coast merges with that of Goa is Vengurla and the beach at Ubhadanda. There are many lodges with basic amenities. A bus out of Vengurla will take you to Sawantwadi and then on to Goa. Standing on the beach at night, one can look at the blinking light house located on Vengurla rocks, about 10 kms out in the sea.

There is just one light-keeper posted out there for couple of years. I could just imagine how lonely life must have been there.

This journey was one of the most memorable and enjoyable experience for me. I hope reading about it interests you as well.

The dilema of choosing the best platform for blog writing.

Vipul — Sun, 10 May 2009 13:39:33 +0000

Like many people around the world, I am a newbie when it comes to writing a blog. And so before coming up with this one i had to spend hours reading and learning blogs from innumerable websites across the internet. From which i came to a conclusion that writing a successful blog requires a special skill although it is disagreed upon by many. Blog writing, unlike any other writing is interactive, easily accessible and also customizable. They provide a real-time bond development between its readers and writers. Simultaneously, i came across different websites which offer a platform to blog writers to prove their skills. Of which the top of the table were Blogger, WordPress and Typepad. After trying out all three, i found that TypePad was a chargeable service. And though not much expensive, it wouldn’t be a wise thing to spend something from the pocket before trying up with something free. Next one on the block was Blogger.

Powered by Google, Blogger is a free service. It is easy to use, simple and because of Google, it gets indexed in the search engines instantly. It even comes up with its own useful blogging tools. But the biggest drawback of this service is that it is mostly overrun by spammers. Also the ads posted on your blogs kind of makes your blog look like a shopping mall for the visitors. To start off though, it is a fairly good option. But stay away from it if you do not wish to keep your blogs amongst spam, hate sites, porn, gambling sites, etc. (in other words, bad neighborhood). For details about what you can find in blogger, click here

The next platform worth talking about is Typepad. Typepad is mostly recommended for business blogs. It allows you to customize templates, advertise your products, it is chargeable but very less, it comes with a very good support and help with it. Typepad comes with thousands of plugins to choose from. To know about the complete make up of TypePad, click here

The third blog writing site i would love to talk about of, is WordPress. Now WordPress itself is split into two. There is WordPress.org where you can download the splendid open source blogging tool and then there is WordPress.com which is a free hosted blog service. WordPress.com provides many different plugins along with a simple and easy to use interface. The only shortcoming of it which i found is their no commercial content terms of service. Other than this, WordPress.com is an ideal choice for any new blog writing enthusiast. To find more of its features, click here

To sum up this blog, what i found out is that if you are looking forward to write a blog as a note, a diary or for personal expression of thoughts, Blogger is worth going for. If you want to use blogs for business purposes, whether you want to become a movie reviewer or whether you are a fortune 50 company, TypePad is the best choice for you. Or else if you are an enthusiast who just loves to write like me and connect with other people through standard and simple ways, WordPress is the way to go for you. Personally, it is my favourite too.