Skip to main content
iPods? Nahhhhh

Ever since the pod hit the market, it had created a big industry of other wannabe players. Agreed that Apple's iPod is not the first of its kind, but the quality and simplicity the product made the world sit up and notice.

As with most of us, I had also been tempted to get a pod of my own, but somehow been unable to justify the need for a music device, at least while at India.

Unless you are jogging during the mornings or commute using a public transport, I do not see a big reason to use an iPod. If you have your own 4 wheel transport (My opinion is, it is unsafe to listen to music on a two wheeler), chances are, they have a port to read in from your music device. But, do you need an expensive music player for that? With the advent of mass storage devices, high capacity flash pen drives, all you need is a medium for storage, not a music player. I just saw at a computer shop at Spencers, creative mass storage harddisks with the capacity of 120+GB (great for lossless FLAC format music files anyone? Hmm... This looks like a good idea for my next article...) available for picking.

While in office, you have your trusty high performance desktop or your laptop to host your music. I'm sure you are not going to listen to music as you walk to your cafeteria. So a desktop or a laptop would do.

The one advantage that I see is, you always carry your cellphone. So, if your music player and your camera and your phone and your PDA and your computer are bundled into one, I would probably take a look as it does not increase the number of devices and dangling pairs of earphones that I have to carry.

Perhaps the deal by AirTel and Vodafone with Apple would allow the availablility of the iPhone into India. I would wait a year or two for the prices to come down to own one.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Inside a Text Editor Ever since my college days, after dabbling with vi and a few other editors, I always had an yearning to create my own. Now, I am still stuck with XEmacs and jEdit and had a chance to compile / study the sources and documentation of EMACS and a free editor component called Scintilla. Until now, I was under the the belief that text editors used a doubly linked list to represent the text in memory. The advantages of this approach being insertions and deletions are much more easier which is just a matter of just un-linking a node off the list. But the shortcomming is that they tend to fragment memory with each node or line take a bit of memory. The other alternative approach is to have a dynamic array which is a contiguous space of memory and can sometimes be directly written off to a file. The disadvantages are that insertion and deletion are costly and you need to reallocate quite frequently. While goint throug the source and documentation of text editors, I chanced ...
1 comment
Read more
Battle of Wesnoth Been on the lookout for a free turn based strategy game and chanced upon the Battle of Wesnoth . Despite it being an open source game (meaning, you get the source), it was incredibly polished akin to any of the other turn based strategy game (Alpha Centauri), be it the background score or the graphics or the tutorials. The game itself is set in a period similar to the D&D or nethack era. For the film buffs, if you have read or seen the Lord of the Rings, you would probably be able to relate to the clans that populate the game world. The game play, as with any turn based strategy game requires background information on each of the units that you own, their strengths and weaknesses and a lot of planning (a kin to chess, but with a lot more parameters) where factors like day - night cycles are taken into account (e.g, humans fight well during the day, but the orcs are better during the night). It is encouraged to keep your older units as they gain experience and beco...
1 comment
Read more

The Age of the Hybrid?

Honda recently offered a slash in their new Civic Hybrid model. Though not all are sure if it was a publicity move or an inventory clearing sale, I believe with good mileage figures and a growing concern on how green everyone should be, hybrid cars will see an increase in prominence in the Indian roads. The Indian market is price sensitive. Be it an industrialist who is buying a Rolls Royce or a car enthusiast pining for a BMW, the inevitable question remains: "What is the mileage?". This has led to a slew of Diesel cars in the market . Though economic to us, it still fails against the 'green' parameter. The other competitor to hybrids are the all-electric vehicles which may be termed greener (assuming that the cost of production, battery is far less harmful than the actual emissions), they lack in range, ability to quickly recharge (which seems to be a 5 minute affair for it's counterparts) and the lack of accessible recharge locations (do you think at the curren...
Post a Comment
Read more