Top 5 Best Tablet PC features, specs, review and price in India

Tablets are overflowing in the market. Yes, they are. And to distinguish between themselves, I decided that a Top 5 Best Tablet PC features, specs, review and price in India mention was necessary. In the  Top 5 Best Tablet PC features, specs, review and price in India, some are actual products and some of them are concept product which might materialise in the near future. But it is solely interesting to see the way all these top 5 tablets perform.

The Top 5 Best Tablet PC features, specs, review and price in India are given below and do not represent any sort of ranking or preference from their order-

• Apple iPad
• Dell Inspiron Duo
• Samsung Galaxy Tab - Features, specs, review and price in India
• Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid/ Lenovo LePad
• HP Slate/ Hurricane

If you want to get more info on this review, check out my Top 5 Best Tablet PC features, specs, review and price in India article to know more.

Recover or Track lost or stolen cell phone (mobile phone) using Tracker software and IMEI number

Hey Folks,
At some point of time, we may have realised that probably a cell phone or mobile phone theft is the worst thing to happen to a person. After all, it has taken over our everyday life and literally controls our life and sometimes, they are also prized possessions. Thus, it is pretty important that you protect your mobile phone or cell phone from such cases. "You can recover your mobile or cell phone using IMEI number", a pretty hotly searched topic on the internet but unfortunately, not many people do get their mobile phones back using this method. In short, it is very hard to recover your mobile or cell phone using IMEI number because they can be traced only when the police goes to the network provider and asks them for the whereabouts of the cell phone and a process I have hardly seen ever completed unless you are a celebrity or an eminent personality. But there are always precautions such as the Tracker softwares which play an important part to protect your mobile. If your mobile has GPS, you can get your tracker to even pin-point the thief's location making his day a bad hair day and day to forget. Such is the power.


So, if you wanna know more on how on the facts of recover your mobile or cell phone using IMEI number and how to Track your lost or stolen cell phone using Tracker software, click on the links above to safeguard your ultimate prized possession today itself.

nVIDIA CUDA experience - HD Movie Playback - CoreAVC

Another CUDA Day coming up for me and now, it is business as usual for me. Got hold of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in full HD (High Definition) from a friend of mine for testing purposes only. Already seen it in the movie theatres and no wonder the action scenes make it my family’s favourite. Now High Definition content is encoded in the H.264 format and the format extension is .mkv. What a disaster! Windows Media Player cannot play .mkv files and I don’t wanna install hoggers like VLC Media Player. Eat too much of RAM and memory. I like to leave anti-viruses on while watching a movie as part of my periodic PC maintenance. Sadly, it seems it isn’t possible when playing HD with VLC. So what will I do? No VLC and WMP, what are my options left?

So, I start searching the net to play HD content which can also use the new found CUDA prowess I got all thanks to Digit and nVIDIA. So what do I come up with? A software name CoreAVC. Now what it basically does is add support for the .mkv format in Windows Media Player and not only that but also, utilises the nVIDIA CUDA power reducing load from the main CPU and taken over completely by the GPU, a process also called offloading tasks to the GPU (which is the nVIDIA GT 240). Now, it doesn’t have a trial and I need to buy one to use it. Now my Dad being so supportive of me quickly gave his credit card and I made a transaction worth $9.95 (or roughly Rs. 456) for this software but is it worth paying for? Let’s find out.

Before I planned to try CoreAVC, I decided to give VLC one last shot at. Installed it and started it up. That’s it; VLC consumes CPU around the range of 30-50%. BAD! And memory usage was also 105 MB. Worthless. Screenshot below will tell you the ugly story-

http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/887/trans1.png

So uninstalled it and decided to give the new CoreAVC a try. Greeted with a nice “Designed for nVIDIA CUDA” logo during setup and my heart felt happier. Program setup screenshot in the link below-

http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/6579/coreavc.png

But it still needs to be tested. So installed it. Setup finished pretty quickly. Now, decided to fire up Windows Media Player to see what it does. And voila! It does the nVIDIA CUDA magic. The CPU usage was only around 3-10%. Cool. Lots of room left for other tasks. And memory usage was similar to VLC’s. A screenshot to demonstrate the CUDA power-

http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/1044/transz.png

So at the end of the day, it is simply more than obvious at which software emerges triumphant here. Windows Media Player has always been the underdog in performance but CoreAVC changes the complete outlook of Windows Media Player and makes it a much desired high performance HD player. So the next time, you get HD content in your home, just fire up Windows Media Player with CoreAVC and simply sit down to enjoy the magic. Oh yes, and some finer details regarding the video if you wanted to know more about the test video.

Movie Name - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Format - .mkv

Resolution - 1920x800

Frame Rate - 23.98/second

Bitrate - 1536 kb/second

CoreAVC verison - 2.0

Edition - Professional

My Experience with nVIDIA CUDA

Wednesday has been declared the CUDA Day and due to this very occasion, it is a privilege for me to write about all CUDA supported applications can do in the real world. I will go through all the details pretty briefly.

LoiLoScope - A video editor using nVIDIA's CUDA technology gave me lots of reason to try this baby at an ideal time. And the timing is right because I have a brand new Sony Handycam in my hand and a very recent Manipur trip videos of my family. So I fire it up and the first thing anyone will notice is it's GUI. Easy, user-friendly and eyecandy stuff, gives you all the reason to make better video edits than the rest of the editors around. Made a very small video editing of my failed football talents, but guess what, I was able to do all the basic video edits within a matter of 15 minutes and that is the first time. Impressive. But that's probably not the best for me. The best was it's ability to upload the video to YouTube directly. All I had to provide was Login, Password, Title and Description and I was done. Made my task so simple and CUDA encoding was lightning fast. Also format support AVHCD is pretty good which my Handycam uses. So thumbs up to this brilliant software. Look at the images and especially my so called failed football talent in the video below.

Image Gallery-

Image 1- http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/2851/loilo1t.png

Image 2- http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/4586/loilo2x.png

Image 3- http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/2993/loilo3.png

Video Gallery- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRtv6GbwCPw

Badaboom - Badaboom is probably the tool I was waiting for. Have a Sony PSP so video watching on it while on the move to college too is a pretty regular. Dad uses it quite often too to watch Bengali movies. Thus the importance of Badaboom. And it does it's job just as it says, upto 20x faster. Superb speed. Used to use PSPVC before but it is a complete flop compared to this. Badaboom also provided me quite a lot of options before video encoding for PSP. Used the latest Prince of Persia movie trailer to show it's prowess. Images and video below showing the lightning fast encoding process and the final quality of the video viewed in PSP.

Image Gallery-

Image 1- http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/5664/dscn2752.jpg

Image 2- http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/5876/badaboomc.png

Video Gallery- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqLR5P8dLQ4

vReveal - Now, before trying vReveal, I was quite speculative of things it said it could do. Something like working wonders with videos that are dark, shaky, noisy, pixelated or blurry. So an interesting piece of software. But could it deliver? Curious to know. The answer is Yes. In fact, it delivered even better than I thought of before trying it. It might be always like you want but with the right settings and tweaks, could do a gem to your blurry and bad videos. Trying it is pretty simple. A very simple editing interface reminds me more of a la Picasa style. Options were right in front of the eyes and if you still don't believe that your blurry and pixelated videos are not worth a look at, think again because they can be brought right back from the dead. And using it is probably the easiest thing for even a computer illiterate let alone a geek. And a most point, it is very fast. Saved 39 minutes of my time using nVIDIA CUDA. Pretty cool. Check the comparisons below the believe what I am saying. Test video was a clipping from the game Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2.

Image Gallery-

Image 1- http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/7871/vreveal1.png

Comparison 1- http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/7585/vreveal2.png

Comparison 2- http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/8302/vreveal3.png

And last but not the least,

3D Vision - Now, that is interesting. Very interesting indeed. Watching 2D was well, umm, did you even notice it? So many games and softwares used the name 3D on writing but were they really? Nah. But nVIDIA is what's bringing it now. Seeing stuff in 3D is like actually seeing the real deal, you notice the depths and the distance of objects from screen is easily noticeable. So you can now tell which object is closer and which is farther away from the screen very easily. Now 3D cannot be explained with images, so may I suggest you that head out there, buy a new Zotac GeForce GT240 and you will know how good seeing the real deal is on the virtual world. I didn't really like the Red and Blue glasses because they were pretty strenuous for extended uses but am planning to buy a new one from nVIDIA website which is better than this and retails for $149. Probably worth the buy. I can't say much now because I am searching for a 3D movie now, so, Shhh..., please do not disturb anymore and have a look at a screenshot of the Stereoscopic Player to view 3D movies.

Image Gallery-

Image- http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/5453/13659980.png

I hope this thing shows why nVIDIA CUDA is the best. Are you still reading this? Come on, start moving and get yourself a Zotac GeForce GT240 right now before stocks last. So shoo. Move it fast.

TechKnow: Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) for F1 cars

Yesterday during the Australian Grand Prix, many would say history was made as the Brawn GP team finished 1-2 on the podium. Yes, what a moment and everyone knows that. But there were some F1 cars which were using something people were calling the KERS. So, let us know on what this KERS thing is exactly.

KERS, when expanded known as the Kinetic Energy Recovery System is a very unique and a debated addition to F1 racing. As most people watching F1 have already known that it's sort of a speed boost and gives a increase in the speed for a few moments. It gives a speed boost of exactly 6.6 seconds giving a total of 82hp during that period. So where is the energy to give the boost coming from?

 

 A flywheel KERS

It is coming from the Kinetic Energy lost during the braking of an F1 car. The wasted Kinetic Energy is transferred from the rear end of the wheel to a battery or supercapacitor and when fully charged, can be used for that speed boost.

The KERS is exemplified in complex high end systems such as the Zytek, Flybrid, Torotrak and Xtrac used in F1. The concept of transferring the vehicle’s kinetic energy using Flywheel energy storage was postulated by physicist Richard Feynman in the 1950s. The Xtrac & Flybrid are both licensees of Torotrak's technologies, which employ a small and sophisticated ancillary gearbox incorporating a continuously variable transmission (CVT). The FIA has defined the amount of energy recovery for the 2009 season as 400kJ per lap which translates to 6.6 seconds of 82hp speed boost. The transfer of power to a battery is the electronic KERS system. There is a mechanical KERS system also which uses a flywheel to store the wasted kinetic energy instead of a battery.

The KERS system was tested for the first time during yesterday's Australian Grand Prix in Albert Park, Melbourne. The KERS system is quite heavy and expensive as a result of which many teams have opted out of it. Among the ones which are using are Ferrari, McLaren, Renault and BMW Sauber. The KERS system does not have much impact in the qualifying times as demonstrated by the poor qualifying times by the above teams but during yesterday's race, overtaking and stopping another from overtaking proved to be quite useful with the KERS and the extra boost was helping quite a lot. This is only the beginning for this new technology but some experts suggest that this might be a safety hazard for drivers using it. It remains to be seen on how the KERS works as the season progresses but whatever it is, it makes the current season of F1 a little bit more interesting after the Rear Diffuser controversy which I will also discuss right here in this blog very soon.

Windows 7 Release Candidate coming in May

OOPS! Microsoft spills it all over again. Now another premature download page for the Windows 7 RC just like what happened for Windows 7 Beta and it confirms that Microsoft are going to release the RC on May rather than April as previously rumored. Seems like not everything is going pretty quiet for Microsoft during the whole development of Windows 7. With a series of leaks even before and after the Beta was released and still continuing, Microsoft should look to take a cue from Apple on keeping things a big secret, even within their own departments. So, the page comes up and people see it. Where is it? See the screenshot below. The page appeared on TechNet.

 

Screenshot of the future Windows 7 RC download page

Well, I can see Microsoft banging their heads against their tables. After all, they had worked very hard to keep this is a complete rumor. All busted. Never mind. Good for us that we know when it's coming.

Meanwhile, here's what you need to know from the above image regarding the RC-

This is pre-release software, so please read the following to get an idea of the risks and key things you need to know before you try the RC.

• You don't need to rush to get Windows 7 RC. The RC release will be available at least through June 2009 and we're not limiting the number of product keys, so you have plenty of time.
• Watch the calendar. Windows 7 RC will expire on June 1, 2010. So if you install the RC release you'll either need to upgrade to the final version of Windows 7 before that date, or install a prior version of Windows. (For more about installing Windows, see installation instructions.
• Protect your PC and data. Be sure to back up your data and please don’t test Windows 7 RC on your primary home or business PC.
• Technical details/updates: before installing the RC please read the Release Notes, and Things to Know for important information about the release.
• Keep up with the news. You can keep up with general technical information and news by following the Springboard Series blog or Windows team blog. Want technical guidance, tips, and tools? Visit the Springboard Series on TechNet. And, you can get non-technical news, tips, and offers on the Springboard Series on TechNet
• Keep your PC updated: Be sure turn on automatic updates in Windows Update in case we publish updates for the RC.
• Microsoft Partners: Learn more about Windows 7 on the Microsoft Partner Portal. 

Here's what you need to have:

• Internet access (to download Windows 7 RC and get updates)
• A PC with these minimum recommended specifications:
• 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor or higher
• 1 GB of system memory or more
• 16 GB of available disk space
• Support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory (to enable the Aero theme)
• DVD-R/W Drive 

This part is the same as the Beta. The rest is what you should get. Download links and general information. Surely, interesting stuff from Microsoft to let us know. The TechNet page now takes you to the beta site again. So, users eagerly awaiting for the next release of Windows 7 will have to wait till May while testers might get a new build next month.

Windows 7 RC download page goes up early
Discuss on what you expect next in Windows 7 RC

Do you have the 'cool' tag to own Microsoft?

This is it folks, the moment we've been waiting for. PC users have suffered the taunting and teasing of Apple's "Get a Mac" ads for years now and it seems Microsoft has finally decided to fight fire with fire, valiantly.

Microsoft's latest addition to their "Life Without Walls" campaign is a new series of videos entitled "Laptop Hunters". In the premier video, we find Lauren who is in search for a brand new 17" laptop for under $1000. Lo and behold; Lauren's first stop - The Apple Store. Can you see where this is going? I think you can.

Oh, but after everything Apple has pulled over the years, do you think Microsoft would stop there? Nuh-uh. Head on over to The Wall Street Journal to be greeted with yet another surprise. Yes, it's a Mac vs. PC slot machine banner! (pictured above) Give it a spin to compare your affordable PC choice with a hilariously weak Mac offering.

Well done Microsoft, we knew you could do it. Superb twist to what you call a classic payback.

Laptop Hunters - Lauren
Laptop Hunters Home

Steve Clayton's Geek in Disguise