Nikhil Dev

I was really impressed when I got to see the new iPhone that my friend got from the US. But the Google Android interface totally blew my minds.

With the new Android platform, you cam play regular games like Quake and Counter Strike on the platform. The best thing about this is that its free, its open source and its made for different handsets. So in this case we dont have to depend upon a company that FORCES you to stick on to a mobile service provider of THEIR choice. Watch the video.

I still remember when Android was announced by Google in November, the shares just rose like crazy. One of the fastest growths in the history of Google. But of late its taken a lower end and we are not hearing much about it. Google wanted to show to the world what Android is capable of and would be a really strong competitor to the iPhone.

Just today I was going through one of these articles on the internet and it is rumoured that Google might team up with Dell and the Dell phones would come preloaded with Android. Although Android is under heavy development, it is said that we might be able to have a working model till the end of this year. Dell has been in the PDA business before and it certainly has Know How on how mobile phones are built. Combine Dell’s Hardware expertise and Google’s Engineers and you have a winner at your hands.

All this while what I have been looking for in a video playing software is codec support and stability with a lot of features. But just today I came across this WONDERFUL software that adds a whole new definition to what a video player should also do.

This one is called Miro and has been recently released and can be downloaded from http://www.getmiro.com/. The best about this software is that its a complete package fro video lovers. It can play almost any video format from MPG, DivX, 3GP, .MOV and lot more. In addition to this, Miro gives you the option to subscribe to video feeds that services like YouTube and Google Videos offer. So now I no longer have to go to the you tube site to watch a video.

Another awesome feature that Miro has is the ability to download YouTube video to your desktop. Just search up for a video and click on it. The video is downloaded from YouTube to your local hard drive in the .flv format. You can later play this directly from Miro of convert it using some encoder.  I have always been looking for good reliable firefox extensions to dowloaded YouTube videos to the local computer but Miro has made it the easiest. And now that YouTube is allowing higher quality video uploads, you can use YouTube as a Video storage and download them back anytime using Miro.

Go Ahead. Give it a try. I am sure you will love it.

This news is something that really is a good move by some company to put an end to the iTunes Music Store domination. I was reading this news article today that Universal is teaming up with Google to release a service called gBox which is a music store just like iTMS but will sell DRM-free music for much lesser price. iTMS charges about $1.29 for a single track and these are DRM protected. DRM protected means that you cannot play them on any other music player other than iPod. Not even using another software on your computer. Now that is what sucks. When the DRM protection is removed, the track can be played on any other music player or using a media playing software. gBox will make this more easy by offering the tracks at only $0.99 which almost 30 cents cheaper to iTMS.

Google’s involvement with gBox and UMG’s DRM-free experiment looks sinister enough many observers believe gBox will pose a direct threat to the iTMS. But when you get down to it, Google’s participation may simply be what it does best: search and making oodles of money from AdSense.

Now how does gBox fit into the Google model? Simple search and make money out of text ads. Its as simple as that. Its not that we are pissing off Steve Jobs, just that we are grabbing a portion of the market which is still a virgin.

Its been quite some time and I have totally forgotten to read my subscribed feeds. I had install Google gears on my laptop a couple of weeks back and was too lazy to sync then. just today synced then now I am surprised to know that I have just about 1981 feeds to read

now the fund part is that Google gears allows you to have just 2000 posts, at first I had though that I could never read that limit. But looks like the days is not too far.

For all you people who want to know more about what Google gears is all about, here is a small description from my side.

To read any feed, you always need to be online. Google as taken a step ahead and made the feeds available online. All you need to do is get onto a windows machine, go to the google reader website where you have subscribed to all your feeds. You have instructions on how to install the gears appliance on your machine. Install that and bookmark you Google reader link. After you have restarted your firefox,  you have a down pointing arrow. Clicking on that will download all the unread posts to your machine. Now you can use the bookmarked url to read those posts even when you are offline. The next time you connect to the internet, the arrow would be pointing upwards. clicking on that will upload all the changes to the feeds like the read ones to the reader server and arrow will turn t down pointing again so that you can download the new feeds. now how much more easier can this get. I think I will be able to read more posts now.

Give it a try