A huge system update is coming to XBox 360.. The entire list of changes is gigantic, and a lot of seem to be just bug fixes and incremental improvements (allthough I haven’t read through all of them), but there are a few very significant changes in there. Hidden in plain sight under the Account Management section is this:
Added support to allow users to change the Windows Live ID they use with their Xbox LIVE gamertag
This has been somewhat a pain point personally, and I have seen a *lot* of people asking for this in the forums. Good to know that the team is listening! More details can be found here. Can’t wait till this comes out!!
So after all these years of successfully avoiding the temptation of getting an mp3 player (or is it a PMP?, or a DAP?), I finally decided to give in and get a Zune! After two weeks of using it, I’m totally loving it!
Couple of disclaimers up front.. I can’t claim to be unbiased, I do work for the same company! And I’ve never had an mp3 player before, so I’ve very little to compare it against. Good, that’s out of the way then.
Oh, and I’m not about to write a review or anything, there are plenty of those out there. I’ve just been wondering about a simple thing.. Why doesn’t Zune have an official blog? In this day and age, do you even exist if you don’t have one? Sure, there are a few of their team members blogging out there, but that’s no substitute. I suppose one could point to iPod, which also doesn’t have a blog, but then we have already established that Zune is better, haven’t we . Plus Zune is built around the whole concept of “Social”, so it makes even more sense for them to get out there and starts a conversation..
Long live Nirali Bhatia! Mass Effect is not being touted as the Game of the year for nothing! I’ve been playing it for almost 4 hours straight now, and I’ve been thoroughly impressed so far.. Amazing graphics, a very interesting storyline, and good to see some healthy representation of Indians!!
Why do I have all these posts about money all of a sudden? Weird! In any case, despite the rumours, Mukesh Ambani only manages a second place in the list of richest Indians. A very close second, I might add. The complete list is here. Just think, if the two brothers had remained together, their combined wealth would be around $94 Billion!! As that ridiculous Rani Mukherjee ad used to say.. Mindblowing!
Watching Yes, Prime Minister for the nth time, I was wondering just how much do those heads of states take home at the end of year. Of course, the perks of their jobs vastly outweigh these numbers, but it’s still an interesting list! Oh and these numbers are just vague estimates swooped out of the intertubes with very limited research yada yada yada..
“About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched.
“It’s a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business. We don’t participate in these full stop. We make our own platform and we are focused on driving that into the mobile phone market at large ever more aggressively.”
Of course, if your company owns over 70% of the worldwide market share, you can afford to say things like this.. But comparing Linux to common cold?! Now that’s innovative!! And it’s sure to make Steve Ballmer smile!
Zune has had a few really nice ads in the past.. I personally think this was the coolest ad ever made! Now whether the product itself will be any good or not, who knows!
Whether you like iPhone or not, I don’t and I’m not the only one, and whether or not you consider it the invention of the year, there is no denying the fact that it has had a tremendous impact on the cell phone industry. Just think of how many keyless touch-screen phones were there about a year ago?
Of course, while its interface is undoubtedly quite slick, I don’t consider that its biggest contribution the industry. In fact, there are several things about it I find very annoying.. No, the most important thing that iPhone did was to show the hilariously backward US cell phone market what a good smartphone can do. That’s my opinion anyway.
Not that its the best smartphone around, not by a stretch. Even my beloved N73, despite its old-fashioned method of input, is significantly better in many aspects. But now that so many more Americans know what smartphones are and what they can do, perhaps we can hope for more and better phones in the near future. And some of that is already happening!
But wait.. this post was meant to be about GPhone. About a year ago, the US smartphone market (in terms of OSes) was dominated by Microsoft, RIM and Palm (roughly in that order), the trio accounting for around 90%, while the overall world leader Symbian had a measly 10% share. Now we have Apple in the mix and in another year we’ll also have Google. Things are about to get pretty crowded!
Can Google create the same level of impact and disruption as Apple did? We’ll find out soon enough. But one thing I know is that they are going to find the going very tough without a device of their own.. As Microsoft learned with XBox and Zune, and Apple has shown over and over and over again, there are certain advantages to owning the end to end experience. And you just can’t do that with a “platform”.
. Plus Zune is built around the whole concept of “Social”, so it makes even more sense for them to get out there and starts a conversation..
Whether you like iPhone or not, I don’t and I’m not the only one, and whether or not you consider it the 
