Adios

Change is a constant, so after using the http://www.blogger.com/ for past 6 years or so to quench my seasonal blog thirst, I now move to http://www.wordpress.com/ and the new blog would be @ http://ireflexion.wordpress.com/ I hope to more active in the coming years and hopefully have few readers! Reason for moving out? Well, none in particular, as I said, Change is constant, I need change. My sincere thanks to the blogspot.com team.

Ubergizmo

Apple Inc. has managed to make every mobile phone maker go back to their drawing board ever since Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone (2G) in his key note in 2007. Now the iPhone, 3G, the ubergizmo that comes with everything you can think of plus the kitchen sink has landed in India. Many love it, some hate it, but almost no one can resist not to tinker on it.


Nokia and other brands being in the mobile business for the last 15+ years are now atleast 2 years away from embracing some of the features that's in iPhone right now! Wanna bet? Check this video "iPhone magic"





Still ain't convinced? Read on...


If the first generation mobile phones were inspired by Star Trek TOS, then the iPhone is surely inspired by the "all touch tablet PC" shown in Star Trek TNG and Voyager (during the late 80s). For the uninitiated, find details on Star Trek here (Or contact me if you are really enthu, I will convert you in to a Trekkie in no time)

iPhone = Mac PC running OS X for mobile edition + iPod Touch + Internet browser (supporting wifi, 3G and Edge) + last but not least the phone :)

This means it has lot of potential, which needs to be unleashed by 3rd party developers. Luckily Apple released iPhone SDK this year and all the enthusiastic developer are writing applications for the iPhone.

Anyway, let's quickly run in to some of the cool features/applications that iPhone has -


Games - There are tons of them and they can give Xbox, PS2, Sony PSP, Nintendo Wii run for their money. Games are mostly "all touch" and "gravity defying" (read accelerometer).

Check out Star Wars unleashed running on my iPhone



Stocks - Yep, you can get the current stock prices and also get an historical data rendered as a chart. This built-in application pretty much covers all the stocks from almost all the stock exchanges around the globe (Yahoo Finance!)





Mails - Work seamlessly with any POP3 or MS Exchanger server account. Trust me, the way you handle mailbox in the iPhone, you will stop using Outlook. Basically you use your fingers to scroll through the mails and when you want to delete them, just run your finger across a mail, this triggers a 'delete' button to popup on top of the mail.


Safari Browser - Simply brilliant! I have never been impressed about browsing world wide web until the experience with Safari on iPhone.


Music / Movies - What can I say? iPod has made Sony walkman to be kept in a museum


Skeptics - There are lot of sites which bashes out at the iPhone, let's see what are the so called features that are missing from iPhone

• FM Radio - Err, grow up guys, do you really listen to FM, especially in Bangalore?
• 2 MP camera - Those who are really in to photography never compromise on anything less than a SLR. Camera phones are for the school going kids.
• No Java support - Well, this could be officially added by Apple anytime, but for the "hackers" read this read this
• Can't share any music - There is a good reason behind this and it has been so with iPod's, but again there is "a way" to get around this problem
• No physical keyboard - Trust me, you will never need one. Virtual key simply rocks
• No copy and paste - Well, we are not using Windows, are we?
• Completely tied to iTunes - You are joking? (clue - look for T-PoT)
• No external storage - 8 GB / 16 GB ain't enough?
• Apps/music/video only from Apple store - You are making me laugh! (Google "jail break")
• No MMS - yep, that's true. But MMS is for college kids or bollywood actors, innit?
• Can't share any mp3, video, image using bluetooth - Apple philosophy, which can be over ridden
• Cannot insert any other SIM card - You can as long as you are with the same carrier. But this can be "unlocked"

Verdict

Nothing is perfect in this world, so iPhone does have its downs, but what the heck, the whole experience of using this mobile is so unique that you forget everything else. Suddenly there is a plethora of mobile devices announced by Nokia and HTC, but none of these can come close to iPhone in the near future. iPhone clicked because of MAC OS X. Symbian is an infant compared to the OS X. Windows 7 looks like it has a big hang over from OS X.

Check this video of the early version of Windows 7 (Windows Surface, anyone?)

So if you really want a cool gadget to satisfy your geek instincts, then go ahead and pick an iPhone. But do it from the Apple store, they know what they are selling unlike Airtel and Vodafone.

Jail broken!

Yep, I have done it. My iPhone 2.1 is now jail broken and ready to be loaded with cracked 3rd party apps. Please note that jail breaking does not void any waranty, however is still illeagal as people install 3rd party applications from internet instead of actually buying them from iStore, ouch!
How to do this? Well, google it and you can find upteen number of sites talking about this. I plan to put down a step by step guide as it took me a while figure out the best way to get this done.

The Ubergizmo

Finally, I have it in my hands. I am now the proud owner of the iPhone that made me go head over heals! The phone has set me back with a cool 31, 600 Rs for which I had to sell one of my kidney, but it's worth it!

Project Management

It has been a while since I blogged! Can't help it, I am now at a stage where lot of people look at me to answer them. There is my wife and son, who are a priority. Then while at office, I need to make sure that I keep my clients and managers updated with daily activities of my team handle a team of programmers and last but not least code in .NET!

But that's how it is supposed to be, so I have no complaints, except for a wish, if only days were longer than 24 hours or if human body did not need any sleep or may be I could create my clone(s)!

It has been 2 busy weekends, attending PMP training. But on the whole, it was a good exercise, I came across people from different walks of life, most of them much senior to me. Training itself was exhaustive and I realized some of the best practices followed by Project Managers around the world.

End of the day, I am still a software geek so I am looking around for Project Management Software Tools, which I will try to list down -

DotProject- This is one of the first tools I had come across, Deepak Shenoy introduce me to this tool and made me use effectively for my team at WNS WT. Best thing about this tool is that its quite feature rich and is open source.

Project .Net - I haven't had any experience with this tool yet, but as I browsed through the website, it looked very promising. Project .Net is a commercial open source, web based enterprise project management. It is very rich in terms of features, check this out - Dashboards (personal, project and business), collaboration tools like discussion groups, document management, templates, work flow management, scheduling - simply awesome. By the way, Project .Net is written in Java and has nothing to do with Microsoft .NET framework!

Microsoft Project 2007 - Probably one of the first (yes it existed from DOS days) and most widely used desktop based project management tool, what more do I say. I have heard rumours that the next version of the Project will adorn the ribbon style UI interface, which was made "popular" by MS Office 2007.

Mingle - This tool stands apart as its meant for the Agile practitioners. Mingle is developed by ThoughtWorks Inc. which is a big time Agile practitioner and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, that's a beauty. I have not downloaded this tool yet, but intend to evaluate it soon.

Pocket Manage - Well, its not exactly called pocket manage, but its an application that runs on Nokia Communicator or any PDAs with support to MS Project 2007 format support. Real life saver for project managers who attend lot of meetings but hate to take their laptop along with them!

That's it folks, for now. Here is a complete list of project management tools listed out by wikipedia