Few months back, Anupam Saxena had reported that Airtel is killing off SmartBytes for mobile customers in Delhi. My first reaction to the story was hoping that they wouldn’t do this for Karnataka circle. SmartBytes was great for the rare occasion that you’d require burst data(for example: when travelling or when your home Internet is down) - if you run out of data cap(I detest the pittance of data cap we get, that’s another different story) head over to their SmartBytes website or use the Airtel app & do a top up for SmartBytes - and you get instant data cap upgrade for the billing cycle.

Way back in March, I got a bit tired of iOS and jumped the ship back to Android, purchased a Samsung LOLSUNG Galaxy S2 as my main phone. I won’t get into iOS v/s Android debate now, suffice to say I prefer Android to what it lets me do with the device. Anyhow, I didn’t want to give up on the 3GS - it’s a nice device and always a good idea to have a backup handset.

It’s been about 7 months now since I purchased the Nexus S, and overall I’ve been very pleased about the phone (yeah, yeah detailed review soon. Promise!). However a point of bother has been the battery life- or the lack of it. While it’s better than my better than previous iPhone 3G, the stock Nexus S battery lasts just about a business day. By business day I mean about ~ 12-14hours (though I I do use it heavily - on an average ~3hours of music, about hour and half or so of browsing on 3G, checking mail, facebook, twitter every half hour or so).  And my addiction to the phone means that the low battery life generally becomes a problem when I’m travelling.

Mugen Power Batteries, one of the most popular aftermarket battery manufacturers have brought out some high capacity batteries for quite a few mobile devices, including the Nexus S. Mugen were kind enough to send me a review sample of the Mugen Power Nexus S Extended Capacity 3300mAH Batteries, and I’ve been testing them for the past 3 weeks and have been quite pleased.

Since I’m taking my sweet time in composing a blog post on my Nexus S, here’s some screencaps of my Nexus S homescreens

Nexus S on stock firmware + circle launcher

Short, quick post: I’d purchased a Nexus S recently, and once I got back to India, I had to re-activate my connection again. Unlike the iPhone, however, my Android was unable to pick up the settings automatically & I had to enter them manually. To do this, head over to Settings -> Wireless & Networks -> Mobile Networks -> Access Point names. Tap on the options button -> New APN & enter the settings as per your plan, as mentioned in my previous post comparing various Airtel GPRS plans.

I think this is my first post on iPhone ( barring the rant). o_O. Surprising, since I purchased the iPhone from eBay close to a year ago. Anyhow, being the computer freak enthusiast that I am,  I keep a track of most of the latest software that appears on the tech scene.  I generally have a zero-day update policy - any new version/update that arrives for a software I generally update it. I’m probably amongst the few folks who also read the release notes and change logs prior to upgrading, to find out if there’s some new functionality or enhancement that has been added to the software which isn’t so obvious. (Of course, some say if the new feature isn’t obvious in the UI, it is unlikely to get noticed, to which I agree. That said, do read the release notes. It will contain some good information). With the iPhone purchased, however I had to break this habit.

That got your attention ? Well, brace up, this is a rant.

Most of the Ruby gang are very well aware of the “Stupid SMS series”. For the uninitiated, it was Nitin’s way of…. umm… timepass ? by sending SMS to all of the Ruby gang which made absolutely no sense whatsoever ( I hate to admit it, but it’s true, Nitin is a version of “The Amit").

Anyways back to the post,  couple of days ago, as I was spending time in morning, my iPhone started to buzz away. It wasn’t very surprising, since getting a message in morning isn’t something out of the ordinary. Opened the message only to see it was a blank SMS from an unknown number. Ignored it at first, but then the buzzing went on continuously. In a matter of few minutes my inbox looked like this:

I get quite a lot of mails asking about Airtel’s GPRS services and their settings, so I thought I’ll post this here.

First things, you should know that Airtel provides 3 types of GPRS services:

• Airtel Live
• Airtel NOP (or Net On Phone)
• Airtel Mobile Office

So what’s the differences between them ?

Previously I’d posted about Digia @web – a fully, finger touch operated WebKit-based browser for UIQ3 phones like the Sony Ericsson P1i would be available for download soon in this month. All About Symbian has confirmed that the beta version is now available for download.