Saturday, August 30, 2008

Why I will never buy an iPhone?

The iconic iPhone has officially arrived here in Bharat. At the stroke of the mid-night of 22 Aug 2008, it was introduced in India, as it was done world over. But there was a marked difference, no one was queuing out there to get the first hand on that device. For the price tag that it is supposed to be sold, its definitely not for the Indian masses. I am one of them.

Ever since I have been using mobile network, I am using smartphone. First it was Nokia 6600, and now its Nokia E51. So actually speaking I am smartphone user form the beginning. For the past two times I have bought a smartphone, I have always got a basic model that has got all features. I got E51 lately because its the cheapest phone that has all the connectivity options including WiFi and can handle most of the file types that I frequently use on my desktop and laptop. I am price conscious, and always look for the best offer in the least price. My earlier posts on mobilis/simputer had effectively indicated by what I mean by this product pricing issue. This is the prime reason, I will never get an iPhone. The second reason is openness in installing applications, which is tightly controlled by Apple. The third reason is based on speculation: does Apple use the Darwin core on iPhone, if so why is it not making it available to the community?

Moreover, the iPhone does not support (as of now) some common file types that I use frequently. The only advantage it seems to provide over my E51 seems to be pretty looking and touchy interface. To pay almost thrice the cost for such features, is simply not convincing for me.

An iPhone that is tied like this, to the network, is highly priced is simply not worth it. I would better wait for Windows mobile 7? or something more interesting for Linux world like OpenMoko.

Friday, August 29, 2008

MeTA Studio update

Had been a bit too caught up with many activities... so didn't get time to post on the updates. Well here hare some of the updates on MeTA Studio...

First and foremost, a software report describing the MeTA Studio platform has been accepted for publication in J. Comput. Chem. (currently ASAP). I hope that this brings in wider audience and more developers for the MeTA Studio platform!

And well after that wonderful news, here are standard set of improvements on the platform.. again no major updates right now, but expect quite a few in coming versions:
1) More cleaner federation framework interface for writing user level applications. See scripts/ directory for examples.
2) Federation framework now includes a new service for transferring files (binary or otherwise).
3) Many bug fixes and enhancements as enlisted here: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list