Category: Technology

How to use Samsung Pay in India using Galaxy devices

Screenshot_20170310-144551
I had the opportunity to receive an update on my Samsung Galaxy Note 5 for the Samsung Pay app. Back then when Apple launched apple pay they marketed it as the next wave of payments and (as usual) just with yet another Apple ceritified payment terminal payment could be as easy as waving your iPhone across the counter when you were with a merchant.
However Samsung had to do something to counter this onslaught of Apple and they looked at this whole payment thing in a different light. What if they could replace card swipes across existing payment terminals with an app (and needless to say some hardware technology) ? They could then pull the carpet under Apple’s feet. And that is precisely what they finally did. Launched Samsung Pay. An innovation that did not need any change in existing hardware at any merchant. The only thing was that Samsung had to align with the banks for virtualizing their cards on the phone or equivalent devices such as the smartwatch and it was pretty much done.
This whole thing became so seamless that you could use it from day one. Its unfortunate that while the feature was already available since 2015 end in other countries it has made it to India only by 2017 which is really late and I hope Samsung learns from this. But then demonetization, alignments with banks, etc have impacted the launch a bit and they had to clearly plan it out. Alignment with banks in India is still a cumbersome process but something Samsung has finally completed. Not all banks participate with Samsung but many are about to sign up and you already have the major ones such as SBI, HDFC, Axis and ICICI on board. Standard Chartered and Citi are on the way too. Given these biggies control most of the banking market in India, pretty much many of these cards would then be covered under Samsung Pay.
Screenshot_20170310-144606
So what really does it take to use the application? You need a supported version of a Samsung smartphone such as Samsung Galaxy S7, Note, etc  or a smartwatch such as the S2 or S3 series. You need to install the application, add your credit or debit cards that are supported by the application. Adding a card involves authenticating the application to use your bank details by verifying an SMS sent to your registered mobile number. Its really that easy. And you are done. As for the smartwatch you can install Samsung pay application which is specifically tuned for the watch and add the same cards there as well.
Walk over to any merchant near your house, make a purchase and when you are about to pay, fire up the card by swiping up from home screen, choose your card, and you have options to pay using PIN or fingerprint. Once you input either of those an MST (magnetic secure transmisison) happens and your card data is provided to the card reader. Then on you still need to enter the 4 digit PIN for your card and your transaction is completed.
The same thing works from both the Samsung S3 frontier smartwatch as well as the smartphone and will be a big boon in how easily a payment can be made. Imagine taking out the right credit card from a bunch of cards in your wallet? Those days are over. And if you have a watch, even the days of using your smartphone to make that credit card payment will be over soon Smile
Take a look at the video and if you like it, and you appreciate Samsung’s innovations for its users, please do like, and share the post.

TPLink Power Line Wireless Extender review and Amazon USA buying experience from India

From a long time I had tried different things at home to improve my wifi network range between my first floor and ground floor at home. The thing is that my ground floor portion has atleast six pillars making mobile and internet signal penetration almost impossible. So I cannot take calls, or browse the net sitting in my family room in the ground floor.

As though that was not enough my super fast ACT broadband connection was provided in first floor which necessiated me to have some way of propogating the signal back to ground floor. I tried my ever faithful netgear wn3000 RP wireless range extender. but from about 25mbps all I got at ground floor due to using this was about 5mbps. Frankly its nothing to do with the extender itself as many people would mistake it, its to do with the way my house has been constructed.

Most people discount this fact and start complaining on the wireless devices. Most of the wireless signal part is also about how it has to traverse through your home. So this having failed my next best, baddest and biggest bet in the recent decade worth of time was to go in for a power line wireless extender. The concept of this technology is very simple. The signal from router is fed via an ethernet line to a powerline adapter plugged into a power socket DIRECTLY into the wall.

From there an additional powerline adapter is plugged at another location in the house along same power line. So now data is transferred from the ethernet lines of your router onto power lines in your house to reach the second powerline adapter. From there on it is converted again into wireless signals and transmitted as WiFi at the second location. This obviously has a stronger signal than any run of the mill type extenders. Further there would also obviously exist a confusion of how that second wifi connection would be named and whether devices in your house always have to latch onto different wifi devices at different levels or rooms in your house. The simple answer is YES and NO. Yes you could have it that way, and NO it need not be that way as you could just clone your existing wifi connection with a single button press on the powerline extender and its the same SSID (network name) whereever you are at home.

Note though that you would need to just switch your WiFi off and on once at least when you move locations within your home in order to catch the stronger signal of the two places though network name is same.

Now was the harder part – how to order it from USA since either Americans believe we dont need better technologies, or Indians love to live with older technology and outdated gadgets being sold here. In a market where mobiles and PCs rule the roost, powerline adapter is the last thing anyone would want in India seems like.

I had two options here. One is to ship it within USA and pay tax and ask someone to bring it home, and the other is to ship it directly to India thanks to Amazon’s new shipping possibilities. Of course on one side this meant state tax and on the other side this meant customs duties. I found that the customs duties were lower than state tax prompting me to opt for the latter mode.

And sure enough as stated, I got the package to my home without a fuss on or before the stated date. What you must remember to consider is to ensure that the adapter is capable of taking a 220V power supply inspite of having rectangular pins. Please please always look at this carefully to avoid buying the wrong product or having to blow up the product you just bought by giving it a wrong power input.

Why Clique from Henge docks is a perect companion for your iMac wireless keypad and trackpad

This was a long pending quick review of the Clique dock from [Henge Docks](http://hengedocks.com/products/clique-magic-trackpad-and-wireless-keyboard-dock). To put in simple manner, this is a dock to hold the Apple wireless keyboard and the Apple wireless trackpad (both amazingly created and crafted accessories) together in one horizontal plane.

Selling for about 25$ (within usa, plus shipping for international) this was a nifty addition for my aging iMac. So i ordered the same and when the package arrived, it looked stunning. There were instructions all over the place and the packaging was looking excellent. Like all USA products, extensive packaging, one would like to put it!

The package contained the henge dock within a layer of packaging foam which looked nice and soft. Once I removed the dock my expectations were grossly undermet. What I expected was a hard aluminium or titanium matte finished dock surface and I was completely astounded to see that it was made of a more thinner, flexible material.

While one can understand this dock has to hold the keyboard and trackpad under some pressure to keep it slotted in place, still the expectation out of such a body frame was definitely not met as far as I am concerned. I felt for the first time that anything I bought in the USA was made of cheap quality and below par of what is done in that country as a design practice.

That said, it does the job of keeping the accessories in place and provides one lengthy surface which makes typing a little more predictable. The Apple keyboard is known to be a keyboard on which one can type really really fast, and this dock adds to that pleasure.

For those of you wondering whether we will mistakenly put our hand on the trackpad while typing, be rest assured that such a thing does not happen. Also you can see that nifty little power button which switches on that keypad by nudging it to the right.

So in summary, if this were a ten dollar item for the quality provided, I’d have been overjoyed, but for one and half times more, I hope Henge docks is able to provide the same sturdy material that apple uses for its hardware.

They can also learn from [other manufacturers](http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive-ev-220) about how to produce [complimentary looking hardware](http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=910) !

Apple to likely introduce the 7-inch iPAD mini to compete againstcurrent bestsellers

In the crowded tablet marketplace, we already have thousands of android tablets like Samsung, Google Nexus 7, Amazon Kindle HD, Barnes and Noble Nook, Acer Iconia, Asus Padphone, Blackberry which was a failure as such, and a host of Indian ones like Beetel, Micromax, and few others.

(image courtesy: Engadget)

While Steve Jobs always believed that a greater than 9 tablet was the most perfect form suitable for daily use, the myriad 7 tablets already in the marketplace seems to defy that logic and in fact being more suitable to be carried around and used more effectively. Now with Steve gone, Tim Cook and co, seems to be thinking otherwise to increase their tablet market share by entering into the categories of 7-inchers with the iPad mini which is to be announced shortly.

It would be interesting to wait and watch how well Apple does in this segment of overcrowded 7-inchers. With microsoft entering the tablet with its surface offering, its only time that will tell whether the fragmentation is an exact 33% of the big three: Google, MS and Apple, or whether Apple would still dominate this category as well going forward.

Well whatever it is, this proves more and more that only the big and powerful market leaders can actually get some sales going in anything they make be it hardware or software, though some others keep trying in a bid to win over them either in form or in function.

Via: Engadget

Tags: bangalore, bengaluru, blog, apple, ipad, mini, india, launch, date, a6, processor, 7-inch, tablet, android, surface, microsoft, google

Indian Railways launches RailRadar web app for tracking trains realtime

As part of its technological advances, the Indian Railways have launched a web application at http://railradar.trainenquiry.com/.

This application uses google maps and tracks trains realtime with blue on time codes and red running late codes on the maps. It now gets very easy for finding whether a train is running late or note and where it is exactly !!

There is no mobile app for the same yet, but it could introduced soon for android, windows and apple iphones if railways can put their mind to it.

Tags: railways, bangalore, bengaluru, blog, railradar, app, web, rail radar, trains, timings, tickets, irctc, routes, desitnations, stations, late, early, timings, maps

The new Nokia Lumia 900 review from The Verge website. Great phone, but software has to catch up a lot !!

 

The Verge put up a crisp review of the new Nokia Lumia 900 which was released by AT&T recently in the USA. One can compare this to the Samsung Galaxy Note in terms of dimensions. However this has a clear black display and not an AMOLED and the focus point about this phone is its industrial design in terms of hardware. Since microsoft uses lots of playing around with fonts for its menus, and not much of icons or pictures, the phone is definitely fast to use. However not many people would be comfortable with this mode of user interface and menus after seeing Apple and Android which would deter them from buying this phone. After the Nokia Lumia 800 dropped to 23000 from 30000, a straight 7000 jump in amount in India, it is clear that this is to make way for the next hardware beauty the Lumia 900. One can expect this to be priced at 30000 and further drop to about 25000 in coming months after launch.

What is left then is to see how people receive the windows software and how many more useful updates are provided by Microsoft in future. Hope you enjoyed the video. Do leave your comments and let us know if you will buy this phone or not?

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

7 reasons TO NOT buy or TO buy the iPhone 4S in India

So the big iPhone launch event is now over and the dust is settling down. I must say that Engadget has done a fine job of updating on the event progress while it was on. It takes a lot of effort for a tech website to be spot on with respect to the updates. Given its experience in handling past Apple launch event this was a cakewalk for Engadget this time as well. Finally Engadget also summarized the whole event in a short bulleted fashion for people who don’t have the time to read the full scoop.

(image courtesy : Engadget.com)

Given this introduction let us then discuss the top 7 reasons why you should NOT buy the iPhone 4S. These reasons come out of my experience with using the iPhone 3GS for a year or more. So lets head straight on then …

  2. Closed filesystem – While for a person who does not bother to look beyond his iPhone, he can live entirely only with the phone without having the need to transfer anything out of the iPhone. Unfortunately not everyone is like that so one would like to have the ability to transfer important documents, photos, and other files out of the iPhone. This need may arise since we would use the phone with the associated data service to download a lot of useful things from the net. Imagine not having the feasibility to transfer it out of the phone. You might ask me if this is totally impossible – well not exactly – you can do so if you transfer it to another iDevice only.

  3. Absence of ports – I do agree and everyone here would also tend to agree that Apple makes a wonderful set of products. But omitting things like a USB port or a mini HDMI port only means that Apple would want its ecosystem to be protected to such an extent that one has to buy an iMac or iPad to transfer data out or an Apple TV product to transfer video content to a TV. I have a boxee box, which does all that and more by connecting up to a simple WiFi network and it needless to say has a HDMI port, USB slots, SD card slots and wireless NAS accessibility via uPNP protocol. All at < 200$ (Rs.10000). In today's world, I cannot fathom paying 650$ without any of these just for the sake of lifestyle.

  4. Camera – When Apple launched 3GS version of the iPhone they provided a meagre 3.2 megapixel camera without flash, even when other manufacturers were already on the 5MP bandwagon with dual led flashes. While daylight photos were not so bad, night shots were pathetic. I am not even still considering the time it takes to edit that photo outside of iPhone as the transfer process itself requires iTunes software on an iMac or a PC. Arguably while apple has done away with the need for a PC anymore, can you think of atleast one time where you would love editing your photos on the phone itself. Its a small screen and you will run out of patience pretty soon. You might be wondering that it still has a 1080P full HD recording ability and hence more superior than a few other phones. Well I do tend to agree, but it all boils down to the same question as earlier – how would you transfer the content out for proper processing before sharing. For novices the phone would do it all automatically by processing and uploading to a video sharing service such as youtube, but for professionals who would like to edit the video more in depth, would find it intimidating when the device does not allow certain things. Coming to apple’s claim that the camera takes pictures in 1.1 second with a 0.5 second timing after the first picture, there are many other phones which also take pictures in about two seconds or so and offer face recognition since a couple of years now and this is nothing ground breaking. If i can wait for 1 second, i can also wait for 3 seconds!

  5. Pricing and rollout countries – Pricing has always been a premium for the iPhone. It continues to be so for the iPhone 4S which will retail for $649 or a little over Rs.32.500 in India on a fully unlocked basis. If you notice carefully India is NOT one of the countries which will get the iPhone 4S on October 28th. This directly shows the step motherly attitude that Apple has towards India. It has not skimped in the same way for the iMac though so far from releasing it on time. There are a lot of factors for this attitude from Apple. In a country where 3G speeds are not as consistent as they should be and in a place where a few thousands of geeks consider that India is geeky just because they use all the tech that is available, it does not mean that there will be millions of sales of the iPhone. The real winners out of phone sales in India would be those who provide dual sim phones with music player and radio, with perhaps a memory card slot thrown in at a rock bottom price of less than 50$ (~ about Rs.2000). Given this situation, a company like Apple which is vying for market share has no business in India with its ultra high end smartphone. And they are in no mood to subsidize it either.

  6. Carrier based subsidies – Unlike in the USA, carrier based phone subsidies and exclusivity for phone launches along with subsidies is not prevalent in India. With mobile number portability in place already, there is hardly any hope for this kind of model to work in India. Without subsidies we are then only looking for a very small percentage of market penetration Apple can achieve with its smartphone.

  7. Other feature sets –

    2. Flash disk size is hardly a differentiating factor these days for phones. I would at the maximum cycle around 1000 songs in my entire phone owning history and if I have 10000 songs while its good, we are talking only of a very select subsection of smartphone owners who are bound to be such music addicts. So if I am not a music and movie addicts there is no way that I can put the iPhone’s 16GB space to have anything else practically given the limitations on what can be stored and what not.

    3. GSM/CDMA universality is again anything groundbreaking. The early advent of dual sim, triple sim, and quad sim phones with multiple combinations of GSM/CDMA are more than already enough to provide the flexibility and for Indian’s going abroad there is a rare necessity to use two SIM cards on the same phone even alternatively instead of in parallel.

    4. iOS5 with iCloud – While the iCloud (which I had written about here) is a brilliant effort by apple for descoping physical limitations of the device storage, the concept itself is nothing groundbreaking. Almost every other provider is now on the cloud. The difference might lie in the way the other providers (versus apple) that let you access the cloud. On windows, accessing apple cloud is the slowest so far compared to say even Hotmail. Amazon cloud is yet to be tested by me and how Google might fare is only a fair guess having used google for a lot of time now. The real problem with iCloud is the missing information or lack of knowledge of how to find the files stored in the cloud. While other providers just list what you have in the cloud, Apple has incorporated the cloud concept into every application. So if I want to open some content, the only way is to get into the application having the ability to open that content, and then find the stored cloud content which I have created. This approach is useless and in no way enables me to get what I need quickly. I do appreciate apple’s clutter free approach in keeping cloud content specific to the applications that can harness it, thereby classifying it properly, but what is the use if I cannot see what I have stored in entireity on the cloud (ala Kindle Fire) ? The notification bar in iOS 5 has no quick launch buttons for bluetooth, WiFi, etc even in iOS5 !!

  8. Font and screen sizes – due to the limited screen size, even tasks such as facebooking, or emailing on an iPhone is not possible for a long duration. After prolonged use of the iPhone 3GS i have already increased the font size in order to prevent permanent damage to my eyes. Kids playing games on a small screen are only inviting a disaster as far as their visual abilities are concerned. On the outset it does not look like a big issue to many, but as a user of iPhone over a year, I cannot underline the importance of doing certain things on a bigger screen device. Atleast 7 inches of screen size, and most preferably a 10″ screen. This is the most ideal for heavy multitasking even if its just gaming or browsing or reading. This is perhaps where the kindle screen is a better alternative with e-ink technology compared to a retina display which is dazzling rather than practical to the already strained eye.

So if the Apple iPhone launch was all about brickbats, are there no boquets then? Your guess is as good as mine. Apple is a company which stresses on innovation. And when the give a feature they will implement it in a way incomparable to other mobile manufacturers. The TOP 7 reasons why you MUST go for an iPhone would be:

  2. Siri voice recognition – Here is an app which recognizes what you need and contextually remembers and answers all your related questions. Going all the way upto taking the stress out of you to do mundane tasks such as sending messages, shuffling music, etc. But the big question here is whether it will understand Indian English accent? That is yet to be proven and only time will tell.

  3. iTunes match – it is not clear how well this service will function yet. This seems to be a nice feature, but not compelling enough for an iphone buyer in India even if he is a music addict.

  4. the A5 chip – Apple’s processors are always a judicious choice and if you have seen the way an iPad 2 behavious with respect to screen renderings for graphical applications or games, then its not hard to imagine how blazing fast the iPhone 4S would be in the same aspects.

  5. Airplay mirroring – agree that this is a seamless feature, but it also requires equipment on the other end to support this kind of handover of content like a TV taking over from iPhone or gaming on the TV from an iPhone. We are still talking about a good six months before someone makes this possible. For those devices that already have airplay enabled, they will profit from this feature immediately

  6. Battery life – For those who own current generation apple devices they will already know the state of their battery prowess. Start with 100% at morning coffee, and you are < 10% before an evening coffee, leave alone dinner. Apple seems to have understood this and have high claims on battery life. This simply means the new iPhone would very well extend into day two of battery being in good shape kicking out those silly Mophie and other juice products into the bin sooner than later.

  7. Lifestyle device category – I cannot stress on this aspect any further than I always have. Apple makes lifestyle products. One that suits all age groups. So if I can do something on my iPhone, my kid can find something else worth doing for his age, and my aged parents can marvel and photo album swipes for their age and understanding. This is where Apple really shines and one device can keep all ages happy.

  8. App store – Apple we know pioneered the concept of app store and today they have anywhere more than 1,50,000 apps. This pretty much means you have an app that will help you brush your teeth and an app that will potty train your kids and an app which will monitor vital health signs of a sick aged person at your house if necessary. Extending the app store to iMac, iPad and the iPhone apple has ensured that they are on top of the money minting pie for a long time to come. Anybody else who makes mobile devices now has to have a store even it means aping apple and even if it means they have only two apps – facebook and twitter. For me honestly about ten apps should suffice. But it is really the needs and wants of 5% of the worldwide mobile phone market who own this phone that really matters. And the apple app store is pretty much geared to cater to this growing need in style.

So here were my 7 top reasons you should and should not go for the iPhone, now the call is yours. Tell me if you will or wont go for the iPhone 4S by answering the poll below!