In my last post we saw Samsung unveil the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 750. While I was not very impressed by the first Galaxy Tab (I’ll tell you why in a very short while), the 750 in its all new avatar has simply blown me away! We are gonna go through a few of the features that really stand out.

I have to admit, I am never really amazed by how much Gigabytes of storage a handheld has or how fast it’s processor is. It doesn’t really bother me that the 750 only has a 3MP rear camera. The reason being that it is safe to assume that these numbers are bound to grow over the months. In a few months time we’ll probably have 3Ghz dual core processors in cellphones. Its a given. Plus, do you really want an 8MP camera on your tab??

Here are 3 features that have amazed me the most in increasing order of their awesomeness (No1 being the best):

3. Splendid Design

The first Galaxy Tab was ugly to say the least. It was bulky and so very Nokia-ish (I hate Nokia phones BTW). It was 7 inches diagonally and 12mm thick! It was neither a smartphone (obviously there’s nothing smart about a 7inch phone) nor a regular tablet. Samsung thought they had come up with a brilliant device, but they had not. Well, now they have!
Take a look at the image below:

Doesn’t it look just amazing!! I know it looks very similar to the iPad but it is still much better than their last Tab.

The Galaxy Tab 750 also has dual speakers neatly tucked into the sides. Always good to have dual channel surround sound on a handheld.

Given it’s looks the Tab is definitely gonna turn some heads around. Why this is a feature I really liked is because even though a little late, Samsung finally have the slimmest and the lightest tablet in the market. Also having the best screen and biggest battery out there is a plus!

2. Better Accessories

Tablets try to hit that sweet spot between cellphones and laptops (desktops are almost a thing of the past now). You know Samsung have done just that when you look at all the accessories they have built for the Tab.

Apart from the leather pouch and book cover, they have also built a bluetooth keyboard, a dock with a keyboard of it’s own, a regular dock and an HTML adapter kit (they have to be purchased separately). Now you’ll never have to bother about buying expensive accessories from other companies and worrying about compatibility and connectivity issues.

Why do I consider this as an admirable feature? Because it shows that Samsung gets the bigger picture and that it cares about their user’s needs and is doing everything it can to fulfill them.

1. The new TouchWiz User Interface

Android 3.1 Honeycomb brought about true multitasking. It is a little hard to believe previous Android devices didn’t really multi-task, but check out screenshots below and you’ll understand.

Presently there are 6 mini-apps that can work on top of (alongwith would probably be more appropriate here) other applications. You could be working on your spreadsheets while having your calculator on top! Multi-tasking can really boost your productivity. I’m telling you, very soon you’ll be tempted to chuck away your laptop for this tablet!

Widgets on the homescreens are customizable! It comes as a great relief to me. Earlier phones had widgets that would take up the entire screen. It doesn’t really make sense having just one widget on one homescreen. Wouldn’t I simply use a full fledged app instead? I had raised this question to the tech lead at last year’s blogger meet for the Samsung Wave and Galaxy S and they didn’t have an answer then.

Some widgets will just shrink/expand in size while others behave differently in at different sizes! Cool eh?

There are a whole bunch of other nifty little improvements that make the overall experience pleasant.

The Quick Panel helps you change frequently used settings in a breeze

Customizing homescreens just got better!

The browser supports full flash. I tell you, the Tab can easily replace the laptop in the near future!

Even the Government is going paperless. It's high time we did our bit!

A bigger screen is like more real estate. Neatly spaced out email client means that you wont be missing your computer.

The revamped YouTube app looks kickass!

The Music Hub lets you listen to all your music as well as acts as a music store that lets you preview songs and buy them directly! Smart, I say!

Here is why I am so excited by the new interface. Although it has only subtle changes from the vanila Honeycomb interface, all those changes are those which a lot of techies have been demanding over the past year. But to really drive home the point, we’ll also look at the iPad2 interface.

Eermm.. There is nothing much to talk about really. It is just a bunch of shiny icons that launch apps. There is nothing much to it.

The reason why I would prefer the Samsung Galaxy Tab 750 to the Apple iPad2 is because while the iPad arrogantly screams “Buy me now. I have lots of flaws. But next year there will be a better iPad that will have fewer flaws. Buy that one then”, the Galaxy Tab humbly calls out “Buy me and you’ll never regret”!!

Click to see full specifications of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 750

In case you missed the live launch of the tab, you could even watch the recorded video on youtube.

Psst: This blog is on the verge of a major revamp! If you liked this post, subscribe to full feeds or join me on my Facebook page.

UPDATE: In case you missed the live event, you could even watch the recorded video on youtube.

What is VoIP?
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a technology that enables voice transmissions to travel over an Internet Protocol (IP) like the Internet rather than over traditional phone lines. Speech is converted to packets of voice data which are sent over a broadband internet connection to another phone where the stream of voice data is reassembled into its original form.

Erm.. Will that reduce my office’s phone bills?
Most certainly. It has been seen that in some cases, companies have seen monthly savings of upto 80%!! It is a relative figure though. If you are a very very small company which doesn’t need to make a lot of phone calls, doesn’t need number extensions, it might not seem very profitable. But otherwise, VoIP is the thing for you. I know the recession is behind us but who doesn’t like a little cost cutting!

If it will save me money, I’m in. Tell me more!
Not only is VoIP a great way to reduce phone bills but it also improves the professional appearance of a small office. Many features are included, such as Virtual Receptionists, Dial-by-Name, Virtual Departments and Call Queuing. These features can make the customer facing presence of a small business much more streamlined, professional and efficient. VoIP is much less expensive than traditional phone service, especially in cases of heavy long distance or international calling. It is also far more versatile than analog telephony and provides many more features that were not possible with analog phone systems.

What additional features are we talking about? My current system gives me everything I want!
We are talking about features like Call Transfer: Attended Transfer & Blind Transfer, Call Conference (upto 30 people at a time!!), Call Logs, Password Protected Voicemail, Voicemail to Email, Virtual Receptionist: Custom messages according to time of the day, employee extension. You can even setup different greeting messages for different incoming numbers! Outlook Integration, Online Backup and Storage, Cell Phone integration, Softphone Support. I’m sure your current phone system does not provide you with all these features. Plus its at a much lower cost!

I’ve been using Skype for a while now. It doesn’t give me all these features.
Skype is for grannies wanting to talk to their grandchildren. For your business, you need business VoIP phones. Give www.volcaocity.com a shot.

Exactly how much will it cost me? Will setting it up cost me time, manpower and money?
Check out the great pricing options over at Vocalocity. They have an efficient team that will set everything up in a day or two. Their seamless portability will also make sure you don’t lose business even for that day.

The Burj Dubai. Construction began in 2005 and is expected to be complete by 2008. At an estimated height of over 800 meters, it will easily be world's tallest building when finished. It will be almost 40% taller than the the current tallest building, the Yaipei 101.

This is what downtown Dubai will look like around 2008-2009. More than 140 stories of the Burj Dubai have already been completed. It is already the worlds tallest man made structure and it is still not scheduled to be completed for at least another year.

This is what downtown Dubai will look like around 2008-2009. More than 140 stories of the Burj Dubai have already been completed. It is already the worlds tallest man made structure and it is still not scheduled to be completed for at least another year.

Recently it was announced that the final height of this tower will be 1200 meters. That would make it more than 30% taller than the Burj Dubai and three times as tall as the Empire State Building.

The Burj al Alam, or The World Tower. Upon completion it will rank as the world's highest hotel. It is expected to be finished by 2009. At 480 meters it will only be 28 meters shorter than theTaipei 101.

The Trump International Hotel & Tower, which will be the centerpiece of one of the palm islands, The Palm Jumeirah.

Currently, the largest amusement park collection in the world is Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando , which is also the largest single-site employer in the United states with 58,000 employees. Dubailand will be twice the size.

Dubai Sports City. A huge collection of sports arenas located in Dubailand.

The Dubai Marina is an entirely man made development that will contain over 200 highrise buildings when finished. It will be home to some of the tallest residential structures in the world. The completed first phase of the project is shown. Most of the other high rise buildings will be finished by 2009-2010.

he Dubai Mall will be the largest shopping mall in the world with over 9 million square feet of shopping and around 1000 stores. It will be completed this year.

Ski Dubai , which is already open, is the largest indoor skiing facility in the world. This is a rendered image of another future indoor skiing facility that is being planned.

Some of the tallest buildings in the world, such as Ocean Heights and The Princess Tower , which will be the largest residential building in the world at over a 100 stories, will line the DubaiMarina.

Amazing eh? If you liked this post please digg / stumble it.

This is part one of the 2-part series. Be sure to check out the other part too.

Dubai in 1990 prior to the craziness

The same street in 2003

The very street last year!

The Palm Islands in Dubai. New Dutch dredging technology was used to create these massive man made islands. They are the largest artificial islands in the world and can be seen from space. Three of these Palms will be made with the last one being the largest of them all.

Dubai is said to currently have an estimated 15-25% of all the world 's cranes!!

The Dubai Waterfront. When completed it will become the largest waterfront development in the world ...

All of this was built in the last 5 years, including that island that looks like a palm tree.

Upon completion, the resort will have 2,000 villas, 40 luxury hotels, shopping centers, movie theaters, and many other facilities. It is expected to support a population of approximately 500,000 people. It is advertised as being visible from the moon.

The World Islands . 300 artificially created islands in the shape of the world. Each island will have an estimated cost of $25-30 million.

The Burj al-Arab hotel in Dubai . The worlds tallest hotel. Considered the only '7 star' hotel and the most luxurious hotel in the world. It stands on an artificial island in the sea.

Hydropolis, the world's first underwater hotel. Entirely built in Germany and then assembled inDubai, it is scheduled to be completed by 2009 after many delays.

The second part can be found here. If you like these posts please digg/stumble them. Expecting some SU love on this one!

I’d like to mention that there are ad spots up for grabs. If you would like to advertise on angadsodhi.com, please have a look at the ‘Advertise‘ page.

Looking forward to your comments. A couple of comments could get you into the top commentators list. Getting a quality backlink from a PR3 blog should now be easy pickings!!

Here is just some of the exciting stuff that he’s got over at his site.

Note: This is a guest post by Debby Phillips who is a part of Affiliate Marketer’s Give Back. The initiative she has taken is truly noble. I asked her to write me a guest post on this blog and she obliged.

Affiliate marketing guru, Missy Ward, started a group called, Affiliate Marketers Give Back to benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure. It is a group of 15 affiliate marketers that will walk 60 miles for breast cancer on September 12th-14th in Seattle, Washington.

Jen Fluker and I heard about the group and immediately joined. My grandmother is a breast cancer survivor, and I am walking in her honor.

We started a blog, www.marketleverage60milewalk.com, so that we could document our training and fundraising efforts. The rain seems to be working against our attempts to train!

Donate. Raise awareness. Do your bit!

Each walker is required to raise $2,200 each. Jen and I have asked our family and friends for donations. MarketLeverage has agreed to match every dollar that is donated. So far our group has raised $29,136.09 of our $45,000.00 goal.

If you would like to help Jennifer and me in our efforts to raise money for this important cause, please follow the links below to donate. Thank you for your support, and please be sure to go to www.marketleverage60milewalk.com to follow our progress.

Jen’s donation link

Debby’s donation link

–Debby Philips

Here’s what’s up for grabs:

• Asus EEE PC
• 50$ AMEX Gift Card
• 2GB USB Pens (3 of em!)

So head over to the Enkay Blog. You just need to subscribe to his feeds and/or blog about the contest (the way I’ve done here).

Psst: Enkay Blog was the one who beat me in the Balkhis ML contest!

The contest was pretty straight forward. Solve the daily clues, make comments on the blog. And that’s it. Sounds good on paper, doesn’t it? But take a look at the top commentators list. The winner ‘Enkay Blog’ posted a mammoth 243 comments during this past week! Out of those 243, he did almost 140 of them in the last 5 hours! That’s like a comment almost every two minutes! Sure deserved to win the Flip Mino. Congrats dude!

The second prize winner was Rakhshinda who had just 2 points more than me. Can you believe that! I lost an Ipod NANO by one point! But I’m happy atleast I get to keep the AMEX card. Now I can show my friends that I won an AMEX card from Market Leverage. Sure to generate a lot of envy. Now that my exams are over, I’m looking forward to getting to know Market Leverage better. I’ll write about that soon.

Thanks Syed Balkhi for having this great contest. I loved being a part of the comment war. Congrats to all the other winners – Enkay Blog, Rakhshinda and Tyna. Thank you Market Leverage for the card.

If you saw her go clockwise, your right half of the brain domiates the left half and the other way round if you see her going anticlockwise. The ‘Left Brain’ people and the ‘Right Brain’ people are said to have some characteristic features. Different studies have proved slightly varying results. One such set of characteristics can be found here.

If you stare at the image, you sooner or later begin to doubt it’s authenticity. At one point of time you feel her switch directions. What’s even more notable is that if you get a bunch of people to stare at it for a while all of em will feel her switch at the very same time! Somethings fishy, right? But it should not be. If you notice, the pic is just a completely black figure. What I mean by completely black is that you don’t get to see the third dimension i.e. depth. So you can’t actually conclude whether the raised foot goes behind the other foot (thus anti-clk) or in front of it (thus clk).

Show this post to people around you and get their say on it. I’d really love to hear your opinions on this one. Comment whether you see her rotating clockwise or anti-clockwise. Tell me if you think this is fake.

So head over to Balkhis.com and give yourself a shot at these cool giveaways.

Source:
I actually don’t remember the source. Had it on my comp for a while so I decided to share it with you people.

Did I just hear you go, “Oohhh cho chweet. What a cute puppy!!”. Well.. You’re partly right. She is adorable. But she’s not a puppy at all. Infact, not even close! She’s actually a polar bear. Probably the world’s cutest polar bear.

She was named Flocke by her caretakers at the Nuremberg zoo where she was born. ‘Flocke’ means ‘flake’ as in snowflake in German (cute eh!). The pics you see above were taken when Flocke was just a few weeks old. She’s almost 6-months now and looks more like a polar bear now. See the pics below.

And if you are a geek who isn’t amazed by four-legged creatures, you still have a lot to be envious of. She’s got her own blog, even her own wikipedia page! Now beat that!!

I’ve always wanted a cute pet. Wait till my dad sees this post. All my life(19 yrs to be precise), we’ve been nagging my mom to get a dog. Now if we tell her we want a polar bear, she’ll probably throw us out!!

Here are a few more pics. I just couldn’t control myself. My flickr album has even more pics. Check them out too.

Useful Links:

• Flocke’s official blog (German)
• Flocke’s blog translated into English by our good ol’ Google.
• Flocke’s page on wikipedia
• My flickr album

Comments always welcome!

I’ve always believed that Google Mail (gmail) is much better than Yahoo Mail. I’ve been using gmail ever since they had given out a few thousand accounts. One great feature of Gmail is ‘filters’. Though few people use filters, filters happen to be my backbone in managing all the shit those social networking sites drop in your inbox. Even fewer people know that a mail sent to <usename>+<something>@gmaiil.com will still be delivered to <username>@gmaiil.com For eg: angad619+orkut@gmaiil.com is the same as angad619@gmaiil.com! Try it out if you wish. (but send yourself an email not me. DUH!) So I suggest when you sign up at any site say Orkut, provide the email address <username>+orkut@gmaiil.com

How will that help? Here’s where Gmail’s filters come to the rescue. In my case, Orkut is gonna send all mails to angad619+orkut@gmaiil.com. So I know that the ‘To’ field of their mails has to be angad619+orkut… instead of plain simple angad619. Therefore I create a filter that has ‘angad619+orkut@gmaiil.com’ as it’s ‘To’ field. Further, I can add a label, say ‘orkut’, to it. Also tick the ‘Skip the inbox’ option.

Your inbox will never show mails from orkut again! However, they can be found under the label ‘orkut’. Tinker around a bit more and put mails from all other services under the filters. There you go. Breathe easy in a clutter free inbox!

However, some sites won’t allow you to have a ‘+’ symbol in your email address. Too bad the trick won’t work in that case. Also, social networking sites like MySpace and Orkut allow you to alter the email address of your existing profile, but Facebook doesn’t allow that. This trick can be used wherever you are asked to submit your email address.

Note: 1.In this post I’ve used gmaiil.com instead of gmail.com just for the heck of it. Just an attempt to get whatever security it can provide!
2.This trick can also be used to find out which service is giving out your email address to the baddies. Suppose xyz.com is a site that gives out free horoscoped and you decide to signup with the email <user>+xyz@gmail.com. The next day you receive span sent to ‘<user>+xyz’, you know who to catch hold of!

Super Note: This post is the first of the category ‘Tips n Tricks’. Expect many more in the near future. If you like this one, consider subscribing to my feeds or signing up for email notifications here:

These are some of my favorites:

So at times when I don’t get the time to come up with something creative, I would like to share some of the good posts I’ve come across in the recent past. They may be from blogs I regularly read, pages that I’ve stumbled across or even pages that some of this blog’s readers have suggested.

This page that I stumbled across deserves a special mention. Absolutely stunning wildlife photos! Here’s a sneak peek at some of these beauties. The entire collection can be viewed at http://www.younggalleryphoto.com/photography/brandt/brandt.html They are up for sale. So you could even buy them. Every pic is worth a photo frame on your wall!

All of these spectacular visuals and many more can be found at http://www.younggalleryphoto.com/photography/brandt/brandt.html

Do your bit for the Indian Tiger:
1) Sign the NDTV petition. Head to NDTV and drop in your name and Email address
2) You can also send an SMS Tigeryour message to 56388

Help raise awareness. Do your bit. Else our next generation may never see the stripped beast ever again. Probably Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes’s Tony might be the only tiger our kids could relate to in the near future.