King 6600

Its name is 6600, Nokia 6600. It is undoubtedly the King of all phones. And its only gradually that I have come in terms with the amazing powers this wizard of phones possess.
When I bought it for quite a hefty price, I had to listen to a lot of comments on its cost-worthiness. But I did get to hear some ‘its-worth-it’ comments from some who found the features real interesting. Just a week later, Nokia cut down prices of most cells by quite some amount. Something they didn’t do for the previous 6 months I was keeping a price-watch for 6600. That felt bad!

Today it is available for an unbelievable price (some 12K officially and even lesser otherwise). If anyone is thinking of buying a new cell, then I will strongly recommend the one and the only – 6600… You can chose the newer Nokia cells (priced quite high currently) which have similar features, but 6600 is the best deal at this moment. And here are the reasons why

Apart from the trivial features that generally ppl look for like camera and screen resolution, I would try to put some that are the true 6600 pluses
>>Symbian OS: Having an OS is the best thing a mobile can have. It suddenly opens up plethora of options for your cell. The feature set of the cell can increase multi-fold. With an OS, you can install new applications and games. The best part is that great number of such applications and games are available on net (my fav – http://www.imserba.com/)
>>MMC Storage: 32 MB Multimedia Memory Card is provided MMCs of sizes greater than 1GB are available. A phone without memory is the mobile greatest handicap (Sony Ericsson T610). You have millions of things to try but you can have only five at a time – not fair!
>>The Nokia 6600 phone is the first device compliant with Series 60 Developer Platform 2.0. Develop using Symbian OS v7.0s C++ APIs, or in Java using MIDP 2.0 and related APIs for Mobile Media, Mobile Messaging, and Bluetooth. In short, there is the latest version of J2ME available but you need a phone that can support it, and 6600 does. Why should you bother? Well, it will make all the fascinating applications being developed run on your phone.
AND THEN THE BEST PART – YOU CAN DEVELOP YOUR OWN APPLICATIONSJ. I am still in the process of learning more about J2ME and Nokia 60 platform but I am quite sure it will be a great feeling to run your own application on your cell.

And just to give the idea of the kind of applications and games that are available
There are games with high quality graphics (no more just snakes) and sound. Some of them are so good that you do not realize that its on a phone - as good as a desktop game. Prince of Persia, FIFA 2005, MotoRacer have their mobile versions
And there are applications by which you can control your PC from your phone, your phone can turn into remote control of any device, you can have Office (doc, ppt and xls) on your phone. What more, I have also seen an application which repels mosquitoes. What more can u get…


So… what are u waiting for… get yourself a brand new 6600…

Tennis the menace

I happened to watch and follow the Australian Open more closely than I have done for some time now. Few marathon matches were breathtaking. And the final was really amazing. Marat Safin and Lleyton Hewitt played awesome tennis. I liked the way Safin played.
The point is that the event rekindled the awe that I used to watch tennis with (just like every kid wants to become a pilot, every youngster wants to play tennis). Off late, my interest in tennis was on and off (with toggling of ATP rankings of Sharapova and Serena) but the Australian open brought it back. And at such time, Parag popped me the question – Would you play tennis with me? That weekend we both were hunting for tennis rackets across Pune sports’ shops. Our criterion for tennis racket was simple – it should look cool. Then the cost factor and finally the quality came into picture. So we did find two rackets (Dev Sports on Laxmi Road happens to have a lot of them in spite of being such a small shop. Camp also has a lot of shops with lots of options). When I first showed the racket to my mom, she stared at my badminton racket (which had failed to see the badminton court ever since I bought it). But I assured her that tennis was the game for me.

Luckily, that evening we went to a tennis court and we had our first encounter with this fabulous game (la Club Hirabaug). More than anything, that one hour taught us that the most important entities on a tennis court are not the umpires, not the linesmen, not the audience but the ball boyz/girls. We spent 50% of our effort in getting the ball back to the court. Thanks to our power-play. One of my full-blooded double-handed backhand made me jump off 8 feet wall and climb back. There was a scratch here and a bruise there, but its all part of the game. We also realized that bigger court does not mean easier to find accuracy. Single handed shots fell short of the net, double handed shots made the court look short. Drop volleys were tough to reach, baseline shots were too fast to reach. And to serve you needed more than just the nerve. In short, its not an easy game at all. But it is surely very enjoyable.
After that, I happened to play tennis a couple of times (its just a few days mind you). And each time I wanted to play longer. Though the game is highly energy-sapping, I was glad to have had energy to wish to play longer. Ratnadeep and Mandar too joined the club. Couple of times we couldn’t find the court empty and had to fall back to plan B – table tennis. But tennis will remain the game to look forward to, surely for quite some time to come.
Let’s hope no weekend is tennisless and this ‘tennis-the menace’ continues for days and days to come.