Social Media Marketing

To Tab or Not To Tab

It’s raining Smartphones and Tablets since last one year, isn’t it? No wonder, everyone out there is considering investing in it. Off-late, We received mails and lots of queries from our members asking us many questions about tablets, of which the core and most frequently asked ones were:

• What will I really be able to use it for?

• Is it worth the hype and the cost?

• Its priced High, why would I not go for a laptop instead?

• It seems to be only a quarter the size of my laptop but claims to do more than my laptop can do for me. Is it true?

Worry Not! In the due course of this article, I will try and lay at rest at least some of your core queries to a great extent, while also trying to answer the most vital question of them all: “Do I really need a Tablet?”

When we hear the words Tablet, few names immediately spring to our minds from the following:
Apple iPad2, Samsung Galaxy Tab750, Motorola Xoom, Blackberry Playbook etc.

I have enjoyed using all the four above, but for the purpose of this article, I will be sharing my views on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 750

.

We are going to focus on the main consumer centric features that YOU, would really want to know.

Ease Of Use: The Galaxy Tab ships with Android 3.1 (Upgradable to 3.2 via Samsung Kies). Samsung has glossed it over with their Proprietary UI called TouchWiz. This makes even more spunky and easier to navigate. Case in point, the notification bar at the bottom right gives you quick access to toggles for connectivity, orientation, brightness, settings, clock and the calendar. The icon dock at the bottom is visible wherever you are, so you never get confused and can easily return to the home screen in a jiffy. The volume keys and the power button are placed ergonomically at the top facilitating quick access.

Power and Fluidity: Under the hood hums a powerful Dual Core Cortex A9 1Ghz processor assisted by the Nvidia Tegra 2 T20 chipset on an Android Honeycomb. What this means for the layperson is experiencing smooth transitions with excellent fluidity while navigating menus, apps and others. It has an amazing multi-tasking capability with beautiful rendering of high quality games and media and to top it all off, a support for 1080p videos even. This means that your tablet will happily chug along even if you are browsing the net, streaming music and editing your documents, all at the same time.

Camera: The Tab has a 3.2mp camera at the back and a 1.3mp camera at the front. It might not replace your Digicam or DSLR but it can easily be used for some spur of the moment stupendous shots. It also has a few options like smile shot, panorama & action shot. The addition of an LED flash at the back further allows you to shed some light on your shots if you get the pun. Overall, when you are on a Video conferencing using your Tab, you would love the experience, clarity and the feel of it.

Connectivity: The Tab has the options of connecting to the Internet over wi-fi or 3G. 3G speed depends on your ISP so I cannot comment on that. But we tried video conferencing over wi-fi and it served us just fine. In addition to Bluetooth 3.0,the Tab also sports Wi-fi direct allowing media transfer between two devices at blazing speeds.

Let’s say you are travelling or are at a friends, family members or at Clients place and you have drawn some really cool designs, layout or clicked some wonderful pictures which you have added as part of your PowerPoint presentation, all you need to do is turn on your Bluetooth or wi-fi or 3G and just send it across to the other device. The connectivity and data transfer is very smooth and fast.

Click to Enlarge

Android Apps: One of the greatest advantage of any Android based device is the humongous and overwhelming additions to the already scores of apps from the Android Market. There is an app for each and every requirement. From fun to productivity, you have it all. Documents to Go/Think office – For all your document editing purposes.

Some really wonderful apps that I have loved using so far are:

• Bord

• Drawing neon

• Evernote

• Polaris Office

• Cam scanner

• QRCode Scanner

• Calendar that auto syncs once you have signed with your Gmail app

• Gmail

• Infinite Design

• Nimbuzz

• Opera Mini

• Mozilla Firefox

• Photo edit

• Adobe Photoshop Express

• Voice Search

• The Times Of India TOI App

• The Economic Times ET

• Wall Street Journal Reader

• Zip Viewer

• VLC Direct

• WordPress

And the list is simply endless……

Flash Player support:This is yet another big feature of this tablet. Browse your Flash files easily on your tablet Browser and enjoy cool animation effects and website features.

Battery Life: Battery life averages out at around 8 hours at least with comfortably using core apps that would take you through your work and play for the day. Keep in mind that as the display is the biggest drainer here, so keeping a low brightness setting or using the “auto” setting should help to save some power.

Easy Connect for data transfer: You can easily connect with Your Android OS Supported Laptops and Or Samrtphones for eg. Samsung Android Phone or an Acer Aspire One that supports Android OS.

USB Port: Now this is a Power Feature. Although you can’t expand the memory using a memory card, there is a work around if the 16/32/64 GB of storage falls short for you. The Tab has an extension via a USB Port which allows you to connect with your USB devices. So just connect a pen drive with higher storage and you are good to go. The same port also serves as the charging port, thereby enhancing the design factor. Try it out with different Pen drive USB’s. I have so far tried it with a 16GB pen drive and it works smooth.

Easy to Type-in the Tablet Keyboard with a good, clear and crisp display and smooth functions:

As I wind up writing this post on my Galaxy Tab WordPress App, here are some final pointers to look at:

Conclusion:

Now after going through many aspects of the device, we come to the vital question: “Do I really need a Tablet?“

• If you are a Corporate executive on the move, who constantly needs to be connected to the net and also needs to deal with documents, scan through data, text; reply scores of emails, use tools that will enhance work productivity all, while on the go, then this can be a wonderful answer for your heavy laptop to a great extent. Sleek, Stylish and very reliable.
• If you are an entertainment junkie, who wants his music or movie collection with him, but is not happy with the minuscule screen of his media player, then this can replace your portable media player for you. That coupled with the ease of adding USB port & or a pen drive, makes this an amazing experience with great sound and video quality.
• If you are anyway looking to buy a new laptop and want all the above features at a price which I feel does justice for this superb device, with the added advantage of easy portability, multi-purpose use, internet on the go, clicking pictures, fun and entertainment, extended data USB connect, ease of data transfer, etc, then this is the device for you!

With more and more manufacturers like Motorola, Apple, Acer, HTC, Asus, LG and Sony bringing in more features, the quality and standard of tablets is improving rapidly, at the same time the prices are reducing due to their competitiveness. With the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich as well, there was never a better time to pick up an Android tablet. We hope this article helped you to make a better choice on which tablet to pick.

Do you Tab or are you planning to? Please do share your experiences with us here.

Ciao – Ravi.

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The Dell XCD28, that’s right, I grabbed one of the very few firsts from Dell’s new Android phone in Mumbai, India this week. Priced at approximately Rs.10,500/- the light on wallet and easy to use and handle Android phone comes with a lovely 2.8 inch QVGA screen with some useful pre-loaded applications.

DELL XCD28

Looks simple and is very easy to use. One of the cool features is its multiple screens that you can configure on with different apps for you and pace it accordingly for you to use while on the go.

Android Apps with Geo Location (click)

• So you can have an empty screen with just your chat of google talk & on the second all your quick office apps (that’s right you have an Office reader too  – You have the free reader with buy the premium / full version for word, powerpoint, exel etc) and as for the third screen, I am sure you will put it to good use.

• This entry – level phone powered with the awesome Android 2.1 OS, has a 3.2 megapixel digital camera and a lots of free and paid applications available at your fingertips thanks to the magic called android.

The Dell XCD28 comes in only black model for now and it also offers full internet browsing, a media player supporting multiple formats for videos, music and photos and features such as geo – tagging and location based applications.

We have so far tested it with Foursquare, Google Maps, Twitter, Facebook Gowalla and it seems to be working fine with a few tweaks needed to begin with while setting it up.  (Connect with Us on the Links)

Its not easy to configure the GPRS and rest of the stuff with your carriers in India who seemed to be poor on brand know-how but with the team at Dell known for their customer response time, it becomes a much easy task. Would quote a special thanks to Mohan D (Dell Consumer Team) &  Pramesh G (Dell Consumer Sales) for helping us with our queries too.

Screen Login Security Personalized

Core Features: Specifications of Dell XCD28 (Black)

• Android V2.1(Eclair)
• 600Mhz ARM Processor
• 3.2MP Camera
• 3G Support
• Dimensions:  102 x 55 x 14.5 mm
• Weight:  100g
• Display :  QVGA
• Resolution:  320 x 240
• Color:  262K
• Size:  2.8 inches
• Camera   3.2MP, Auto-focus
• Video Recording:  Yes
• Games:  Yes (downloadable)
• Browser:  Yes
• Messaging:  SMS, MMS, Email
• Warranty
• 1 Year Dell India warranty for the phone and 6 months warranty for accessories
• Audio & Video
• Music Player:  Yes
• Speaker:  Yes
• Video Player:  Yes
• Data & Connectivity
• GPRS:  Yes
• EDGE:  Yes
• 3G:  Yes
• Wlan:  Yes
• Bluetooth:  V2.1 with EDR
• USB:  Micro-USB
• Input Touch Screen:  TFT resistive touch screen
• Platform OS:  Android v2.1
• CPU:  ARM11 600Mhz
• Operating Frequency:  GSM 850/900/1800/1900 Mhz; UMTS 2100 Mhz
• Java:  Yes
• GSM/CDMA/Dual Sim/Triple Sim:  GSM
• Memory Internal Memory:  200 MB User memory, 512M Flash, 256M RAM Cards Slot:  MicroSD (expandable upto 16GB)   Comes pre-loaded with a 2GB card

With rest of the usual features that you would expect from a user friendly app ready android phone today.

Other Special Features

• The Unlock functioning of the phone is just like your iphone with a tab lock on top of the phone with a special “personal locking” available that’s responds and unlocks to your touch on screen making it secure to use. (As image attachedabove – Screen Login Security Persoanlized)

• Rest, Android OS for it does the magic. The apps move and function smoothly as your DELL XCD28 stylus or fingers use the various functions including watching your favorite video on youtube or tweeting up, while on the go.

• Configuring multiple emails, location based checking-in and the availability of applications for facebook, twitter, foursquare, gowalla was never more easier.

All in all, a wonderful entry phone to use from Dell.

My only query is, are we getting a free upgrade to Froyo soon, Dell are you listening…….

Have a wonderful connect ahead!

Regards

Ananth V

Techdivine Creative Services

“Social Media Monitoring , Geo Location Based Target Marketing Services – Check our SPECIAL CORPORATE Online Marketing OFFERS HERE”

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Giggles, thunderous laughs, tables filled with food and variety of beverages… Three laptops lying in different corners occupied by 2 people each and the whole ambience filled with excitement tells you about just another day of work by artists at Techdivine Studios.

As the VP Resource Management Mrs.Neela Shinde enters in with her gorgeous pet cat on one hand and a cell phone on the other, the currently working 6 artists wave a big smile of “hi” to her…. as she gets settled with one of the teams.   

Ms.Shafaque Patel and Mr.Yasir, the Planning & Budgeting heads at TD studios wrap up with their schedule for the day and load up 3d compositing software on their screen. Just then, we hear, “Ho gaya” as in sounding like ‘Eureka’ by the 3d Modeling head Mr.Nadeem, who catches everyone’s attention and all rush in to see the fabulous looking 3d camera designed by him.

That’s right everyone at TD studios, right from the VP to the Production in charge is a hardcore passionate artist from heart. 

As they constantly put in efforts to render there creative skills out in a still format for ‘check & quality control’ the storyboard head Mr.Vaibhav too walks in to give his views on the current frame.

About 4 hours later they split up their respective works which has been mostly done except for final finishing touches. The stills and raw format of the files are mailed across to few other junior artists and designers who will finish it online by the end of the day and send the final output for QC check to the respective heads through email.

A total of 18 artists thus work into a particular project at a given point of time with services ranging from 3D architectural walkthrough, Print media services and web based services, compositing and visual effects with titling, clay animation, creative writing, and digital art at Techdivine studios.

TD studios is a newly established quickly growing Online designing studio wherein majority of the work is done Off-site and online by highly skilled artists, with skills on a plethora of levels and varied medium, who meet up twice a week for a review and check on the work done.

The best part about them is that they all behave like art students thus always ready to learn and grow from each other and at the same time produce photorealistic CG works with high level of professionalism. 

On Jan 2008, TD studios celebrated its first anniversary which started like a dream with just 1 artist and has grown more through work and as a brand than just numbers and artists as the Concept and Idea head who is also TD’s brand and product consultant Mr.Ananthanarayan V, picks up the best and adds in his multiple skills of both design and management and the fabulous projects and varied technical growth goes on shooting up each and every day with fun and learning.

I Anandhapadmanabhan, providing the financial advice here, might just be an observer to the whole new platform today, but someday would like to see this group of talented artists, manager and skilled dreamers at the top of their game. 

My best wishes to all of you and hearty congratulations for completing a successful and fun filled year at TD studios.

 A Padmanabhan

http://anandhas.wordpress.com