THE NEW O2 ATOM LIFE 3.5....HMMM.....NICE!

O2 Atom Life 3.5

=>Plenty of handy programs
=>Quick internet connectivity Messaging is a problem
=>Camera is not good
=>Poor battery life

If you've seen one Windows mobile you've pretty much seen 'em all. There'll be no grand changes to the UI, if any. Essentially, the Windows Mobile OS is designed to be a business-person's delight with the multitude of services it provides. We would naturally presume it's a portable computer. Of course each company that develops a new Windows Mobile device, will have a few specific programs that resonate the company's presence in that phone. Lets see how the Atom Life, O2's latest, fares.


Form Factor
It looks like most of the other O2 XDAs conceived before. But it looks a little better with its matt black and silver finish. It has a VGA camera mounted in front for video calling and a 5 way nav-pad at the bottom of the 2.7-inch touch screen display that sports a 240x320 pixel resolution with 262K colors. On either side of the pad are 2 Open keys, the call Take and End keys and 2 dedicated keys for the Start menu and O2 Media Plus menu. They're placed dead center of the 2 stereo speakers.

The top of the phone is where the Hot-Swap miniSD card slot and the power key are located. On the right hand edge is where you'll find the stylus. At the bottom of the phone is the mini USB port for PC connectivity and charging and the 2.5mm earphone socket. The rear has the 2.0 megapixel camera, with flash.



On the right hand side of the phone there are 2 keys. Both dedicated to serving certain specific functions like the camera and voice recorder. And on the other side are the volume keys. Funny, I thought they'd also work as the zoom keys, I was wrong. And at the bottom of the left side is the Infrared sensor.



Tech
The O2 Atom Life runs on an Intel XScale PXA 270 Processor at 624 MHz. It's equipped with 64MB RAM and 1GB ROM. Memory can be upped using using miniSD cards. It's a GSM phone that supports GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA and Wi-Fi. So connectivity-wise you can't ask for more. The Atom Life operates on Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 PocketPC edition and thus far I wasn't able to find any hang-ups.

SAMSUNG'S SHINING WITH THREE METAL SERIES PHONES :- SGH E840 , SGHD900i , SGH D840!!

Samsung launched three new Metal Series phones today - SGH E840, SGH D900i and SGH D840. The latest SGH E840 is also touted to be the world’s slimmest slide-up phone.

Speaking on this occasion Mr. H. C. Ryu, Managing Director, Samsung Telecommunications India said, "India is a very critical market for Samsung and the launch of the world’s slimmest slider Metal phone is a testimony to our commitment to meet the growing aspirations of consumers for sleek, aesthetically designed phones that accentuate their personality without compromising on premium multimedia capabilities."

According to the company, the design inspiration of the Metal series is drawn from the core attributes of metal itself i.e. power and prestige, and is designed for power players.



The SGH E840 is equipped with full mirror LCD, hidden touch keypad and 2.22-inch wide TFT LCD screen. For build, the phone uses premium materials such as tempered glass and metal. It also features a 2 mega pixel camera, FM Radio, MP3 player, mobile printing, document viewer and 70 MB internal memory with expandable microSD flash external memory (upto 2GB).



The SGH D900i is a 12.9mm slim slider that comes with artistically designed metal lining body offering loads of high-end multimedia features like 3 mega pixel camera with dynamic user interfaces, vivid 262K color screen, Bluetooth stereo headset, FM Radio, New camera UI, enhanced battery life and speedy shutter.



The SGH D840 comes packed with a 2 Megapixel Camera, MP3 player with integrated dual speaker, multi-format music player for listening to music on your Bluetooth stereo headsets wirelessly along with 80 MB of internal memory and external microSD memory.

Ryu said, "The Metal Series range completely embodies everything that Indian consumers are seeking in a mobile in terms of unique metallic design and flawless performance, making it an instant attraction to business users, fashion conscious consumers and multimedia enthusiasts."

All the Metal Series phones are secured with mobile tracker, emergency SMS alert and privacy lock.

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive!!!! Come On Don't Tell Me Its Too Much.....!!

=>World's first 1TB hard drive
=>Very good transfer speeds
=>32MB Cache Rupee/GB ratio turns out to be expensive
=>Runs a little hot

We have with us the world’s first Terabyte or 1000 GB internal hard drive - the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000. There are a couple of firsts with the 7K1000 and one of them is the 32MB buffer or cache memory used with the 7K1000. A hard drive cache stores the most recent reads requests made to the disc and also pre-fetches the information that is most probably going to be requested like the sector or the sectors succeeding the information just requested. This improves performance as the number of accesses to the hard drive are reduced.




And finally this is the first drive from Hitachi in the 3.5-inch category (3.5-inch is the form factor of desktop hard drives whereas 2.5-inch for laptop hard drives) that features PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording). PMR is used to increase the areal density of the storage media to meet such a large capacity. Perpendicular recording is capable of giving up to 10 times the storage density of the conventional longitudinal recording. Seagate first used PMR in their 750GB hard drive.




Hitachi has used five platters for the 7K1000, each nearly 200 GB. The downside of using five platters is that it affects the response time of the hard drive as well as increases the temperature. The response time of a hard drive is the time between when the data is requested by the CPU to the time the first byte from the hard drive actually reaches it.

We all know how important good marketing is and hard drive manufacturers are no different. Your operating system employs the binary system of zeros and ones and for it 1KB = 1024 bytes, whereas the manufacturers like using the decimal system for advertising the hard drive capacities and according to them — 1KB = 1000 bytes. Consequently, 1MB according to the binary system would be — 1MB = 1024 x 1024 = 10,48,576 bytes whereas according to the decimal system 1MB = 1000 x 1000 = 10,00,000 bytes. This difference rises exponentially as we run into gigabytes. Secondly, formatting the hard drive takes some space off it. Bottom line, the formatted capacity of the drive is 931 GB. That’s almost 70 gigs taken off it and is little less than the formatted capacity of an 80GB hard drive.

Specification Table

Model Deskstar 7K1000
Capacity 1,000 GB
Spindle Speed 7,200 RPM
Platters 5
Cache 32MB
NCQ Yes
Interface SATA/300
Warranty 3 years
Price Rs. 19,300