This is GULF

* Local calls are free
* Petrol is cheaper than water, Payment for drainage too.
* Any building construction finishes in 3 months .
* Unqualified get more salary than Qualified
* Show-off matters more than real quality & performance .
* Labourers are paid less than what they can earn back in their own country.
* Companies can kick out their employees without any reason .
* Wastas (recommendation) are more powerful than money .
* Cleaners have more Wasta than officers .
* Watchman has more Rights than the Building Owner.
* Office boy & Drivers have more influence on Boss than Manager.
* Gulf climate changes so fast, in one hour u can see raining, dust storm, hot / humid / chilling weather.
* Gulf is located in desert, still u find greenery everywhere .
* If u can ' t earn money in the Gulf, u can ' t earn anywhere in the world .
* In Gulf, time goes very fast, Friday to Friday comes u never know, its sooo fast.
* Every bachelor has a dream of getting married and buying a house in thier own countries.
* U love your parents, friends, relatives 100 times more than when you were together.
* Being at home is more painful than being at work.
* Gulf girls sing Hindi songs but don ' t understand anything.
* A ladies hair saloon every 5 meters.
* Food/Grocery delivery to the car.
* A Starbucks every 10 meters.
* Hard Rock Cafe with no alcohol.
* In one single flat sharing with 5 families.
* A Shopping Mall located every 2 km.
* Highway lanes differentiated for slow & fast drivers .
* Getting a license is more difficult than buying a car .
* Smashed cars are more than bugs.
* Parking charge: 2 Dirham for 1 hour - 5 Dirham for 2 hours & so on .
* No Queues for women .

TRAFFIC SIGNAL IN GULF:
* GREEN : Signal to go for Indians.
* YELLOW : Signal to go for Egyptians and Pakistanis, Americans, Europeans.
* RED : Signal to go for Kuwaitis, Saudis , Palestinians & Lebanese...
IF YOU ' RE SAYING ' NO ' THEN YOU ARE HIDING THE TRUTH.......

The Acer Aspire one!

I bought this one as a present to my wife when she was carrying meenuty.

The specification of the netbook which I bought was,

· 1.6GHz N270 Intel Atom Processor

· 1GB DDR2 533MHz

· Windows XP Home SP3

· 8.9" 1024 x 600 WSVGA glossy LED backlit display

· 160GB HDD

· 802.11b/g Atheros Wireless · 3-Cell 23Wh battery · Memory card slot (2 slots – one for sony memory cards and rest all fit to the other one)

I Loaded: Google Chrome, ITunes, Yahoo messenger, Google talk etc.

1. Build and Design:

The first impression was that the built quality is solid and the construction feels strong (infact it was proved when it was accidently slipped out of my mother’s hand). This is rigid enough to handle the compression is kept inside a bag. The screen cover is also strong to protect the LCD screen. I don’t know how easy it is to dismantle it – because I buy these things to use and not to spoil. If you require the inner hardware details, check some note book review sites. This blog will carry only a review on daily using aspects.

Keyboard is worth mentioning. This is small but I didn’t find any difficulty in typing with that. Initially I faced a problem of missing keys since I am used to type in my Acer 4720g with a normal keypad. How ever a period of time typing in this little monster, I felt the keys are properly placed. No missing of keys was noticed after the initial few weeks.

Multitouch Touchpad.

The touch pad features multi touch. You can increase the picture size and do website zooming (the same function as pressing control and using the scroll button) using the multitouch touchpad. I haven’t seen it in anyother laptops till now (except for HP TX series). The buttons are on the side, rather than on the top or bottom. This sometimes feels odd. However, I don’t use touch pad, but a mouse.

The display is very bright and solid. This is clearly legible in bright sunlight. After all a net book is meant for emailing and internet browsing. I don’t think there is any point in comparing this with a 42inch LCD screen. Overall the screen is clear, visible and color output is excellent. The reading legibility of the screen is very decent. The only thing that made me decide against buying a mini Sony was the screen size. The screen was tooo small to read. I found it difficult to read even the start menu items in Sony. How ever, Acer is neat in doing that.

With the Intel N270 atom processor cloaked at 1.6 Ghz I think the netbook was fast. I loaded google chrome, itunes, and few other software. Still the system didn’t tent to slow down. Its response was very fast. To tell the truth, it is performing faster than my official Toshiba A300 Laptop.

The speaker volume is low (do you expect a net book to give u sound like a HP media station?). The other thing worth mentioning is the webcam attached. It does the job neatly.

Problem I faced: Apart from the good thing above, there are some bad things also. Connecting the wifi to my network was a herculean task. Acer took a lot of time to connect. Even after connecting I had occasional disconnections also. I think that is the software problem. Probably ACER will be coming up with some upgrade to that. It was a nightmare to connect Acer wirelessly to my network!!!

Connectivity:

It has one Lan port, 2 card readers, 3 USB ports, a VGA port and audio jack ports.

Battery life: Battery life is decent. It lasts for two and a half hours on a normal use (with wifi on). If heavy multimedia files are laoded, then it may come down but will how ever last for 2 hours. That’s guaranteed. This computer has solid build quality to handle being tossed around in a backpack or purse, and modest performance to handle common software applications with ease.

Conclusion:

I found this a very good product, value for money. But, ACER if you are listening, please make sure the wifi is connecting properly.

The managed to get the PC benchmarking scores (which determines how better is the performance is) from a popular website.You can see Acer is no: 3 in that. All those above Acer one is using a Core 2 Duo processor.

CMark05 measures overall system performance (higher scores mean better performance):
Notebook	PCMark05 Score
Sony VAIO TZ (1.20GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U7600)	2446
Toshiba Portege R500 (1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U7600)	1839
Acer Aspire One (1.60GHz Intel Atom, Intel GMA 950)	1555
Sony VAIO VGN-G11XN/B (1.33GHz Core Solo U1500)	1554
ASUS Eee PC 900 (900MHz Intel Celeron M ULV)	1172
Fujitsu LifeBook P7230 (1.2GHz Intel Core Solo U1400)	1152
ASUS Eee PC 4G (900MHz Intel Celeron M ULV)	1132
ASUS Eee PC 4G (630MHz Intel Celeron M ULV)	908
HTC Shift (800MHz Intel A110) - Laptop or mobile?	891
HP 2133 Mini-Note (1.6GHz VIA C7-M ULV)	801
ASUS Eee PC 901 (1.60GHz Intel Atom)	746

Hi guys, You have seen my blog on the commando game. That reminds me of the kind of games we used to play on the old gaming machines (yes u guessed right – our own Mario). Now there is one more addictive game which I have already become addict of – the miniclip cricket. You can check the game in the following website: http://www.miniclip.com/games/cricket-defend-the-wicket/en/

 

Do play it and try to beat my score of 386! (I know my position is 3894… still I bet none of you will be able to beat me)

 

Guys, I bought my Ipod classic during the last gitex (this is a yearly technology show organised in Dubai). Now it is almost a year and I think i have gained experience to write about my one and only portable music player!

My wife was using a Toshiba portable DVD player and I was so ashamed of my self that i didn't had one of my own. I am not going to compare these two totally different items - portable DVD player and ipod classic.... but to shed some light on the usefulness as well as uselessness of the monster called ipod classic.

Even before buying this product, i knew that ipod dont have a built in radio. May be this is a marketing strategy of apple... as i found separate radio attachment in few shops - that too costing around Dirham 250!!! Thats almost $70!!! Guys, u can get good 2 - 4 GB portable player with that money...

How ever, the real beauty of ipod classic is not in radio... nor in the stupid itunes (i have never seen a software such complicated)... but in the capacity...

I have 120 GB of space.. for my entire music collection...

Do you believe.. my 10 years music collection is around 80 GB (may be too small for some of you) and ipod can fit everything...

Now the real issue - If you have 20,000 songs.. then its not possible to find a particular song that easy.. especially when the artist name is "unknown artist" and album name is "unknown album". I have around 8000 songs in that category...

I believe.. its better to buy a 4 - 16 Gb player and copy only those songs which you frequently hear. Put everything else in your portable harddisk (costs almost 1/5th of ipod classic) and use your laptop to listen to that. When you are travelling, take the 4 Gb and listen to songs (almost all portable players do have a built in radio, except for apple products). Radio is a requirement when you have more than 40 channels to listen. We find it very usefull in Dubai, were people listen more to radio than simply songs.. Hats off to my fav RJs in hit96.7 Fm..

But, if you are having a home theatre system with built in ipod dock then I recommed you buy ipod classic rather than ipod touch. This is just becauase of the extra internal memory classic is offering.

My verdict is that if you need radio dont go for ipod. If you need to store all your music and video and like to listen to all of then while on the move, buy ipod classic (come one guys, who is going to search and find a song from 20000 songs? u will be searching the song all the way while travelling and by the time u find it out.. u may have reached back home).

One more thing is the music quality - I dont care for that. All the portable players in the market now give a decent quality sound.

Anyway, I am happy with my ipod classic. I take it when ever i travel. For radio, I have my cute old Nokia N95...

Commando 2 Our Hero continues the battle with more missions, more enemies and bigger artillery.

Play this free game now!!

This was a very interesting game. I happen to accidently click on a website and this came up. NO installation required, no sign on required... thats quite a relief :-)

Added on 5th Aug: Infact, I checked out few more games in that website. Its really addictive. Try your self: http://www.miniclip.com/games

About a month back, I was in need of a mouse for my laptop. I went to carrefour and was checking mouse by various companies including microsoft, logitech, targus, etc etc. Suddenly a black one in a box like shape caught my attention. That was a Philips cordless optical mouse.

This one was costing around 80 Dirhams (almost $22). Even though a little hesitant, i bought the Philips. Because till that time i had no idea that Philips manufactured any IT products!!!

After reaching home, i opened the package, there is the medium sized black mouse, with both sides having a rubber material (provides good grip). There was one CD for installing the software, the IR receiver for optical mouse and two AAA batteries.

It was written in the manual that the batteries will last for more than 7 months. Anyway, its almost 1 month and i cant see any drop in the battery level (there is no indicator for that.. its your assumption based on the performance).

The hand rest is perfectly designed and to tell the truth, I am now unable to use my travel mouse after using and getting accustomed to the comfort of this Philips.

Guys, I can recommend this product as a worth buy. For those looking for a laser one, they have a laser variant of the same. Scrolling is very smooth.

Philips included one application along with this. This helps you to configure the keys according to your needs. You can assign short cut keys to your mouse button for frequently used key combinations - eg: copy, paste, etc

I am fully satisfied with this product - especially after buying a branded laser mouse and throwing it out of the window due to its low performance.