Hey they do listen!

Seems like I was not the only one who wanted a Bluetooth phone without a camera. I have been crying out loud for months to anyone who was willing to listen, and even to some who weren’t. But there have been none forthcoming. Until now.

Enter the Nokia 6021 – just my kind of phone. No frills, all features.

Almost everyone tells me to shut up, buy a camera phone that has all features I want and to never use the camera, so everybody goes home happy. My reply is to why pay for a feature that I know I’ll never use. I’m sure keeping camera out of a phone will knock off anything between 1-2 K INR (25-45 USD) from the price of a phone. Of course, I’m just guessing, it could be more or less. So why don’t you offer me the exact same phone at the lesser price and I’ll lap it up.

Obviously, there were/ are enough people like me and we’ve been heard. NOW everybody can go home happy – except you ofcourse – you always find something to complain about.

Google Will Eat Itself

Their “mission statement” (?):

“We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on our website GWEI.org. With this money we automatically buy Google shares via our Swiss e-banking account. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself – but in the end we will own it!”

If this doesn’t make you curious, what will. Read on!

Technology that works

Everyone’s always highlighting things that don’t work here in India, so I thought for a change let’s talk about something that does, and quite well at that.

Train enquiry allows you to track movement of trains in “real time”. Well, it’s not exactly up-to-the-minute information on the trains but it does give you the (exact) time of departure and the (expected) time of arrival at all major stations along the route of a(ny) train that is currently running. The information is updated every 30-60 mins, so you can get a fair idea of the current position of the train. And it’s pretty accurate too – I can vouch for that!

I’m not sure if too many people know about this but it’s pretty cool to see Indian Railways provide this information online. If they can put this information on a map and have data for multiple trains, I know atleast one person who might drop in to their site just to watch all those trains go by… he he. We seem to have this idea of our railways being stuck in the 19th century, despite all the changes they’ve made recently like the online reservation system (which has been a huge hit). But let’s give some credit where it’s due.

So check the site next time before you leave your house to pickup someone from the station – it might save you the trouble of waiting a couple of hours at the station.