It was just about an year ago that we heard about the $35 Android Tablet from India which would revolutionize the education in developing countries. Mr. Kapil Sibal promoted it with utmost fervor until it was found that the BoM itself of the tablet was more than $50 and none of the guys claimed to have “invented” it even knew about its existence until a few days before the announcement. Ultimately, it was discovered that the tablet was just a rebranded chinese import which the government wanted to bring down to $35 price point by subsidizing the cost and not by somehow inventing cheaper parts. What more proof can we get about it’s non existence that it hasn’t materialized after so much of time and even the company that was supposed to be making it according to the government (HCL) has said that it has nothing to do with it.

That was that but it seems like the episode has given a brilliant idea to a few others as well. Import cheap/sub-standard products from China, rebrand them, ask government for subsidy and claim to have “invented” a revolutionary low cost computing device. iWebLeaf is a case in point. I came across them through a couple of articles where this little company formed by a couple of engineering students has invented two ultra low cost products: A 3G data card for 1300 INR (~ $30) and a Laptop for 5000 INR (~ $110). I was pleasantly surprised and my initial reaction was to applaud the effort. Then I noticed that these products, although announced for quite some time and having gotten a LOT of mainstream media coverage on almost every news channel, have not come to the market yet. The reasons for the 3G card are unknown but the laptop was said to have been dropped because of lack of Government support (read “subsidy”).

Disclaimer: Before you read any further, please note that I’m an Indian myself and stay in India only (i.e., not a condescending NRI). I am a developer myself and love innovating and innovators and have the greatest respect for all that our country has given to the world. This piece is a rant against only those few individuals who make the rest of the India look bad by claiming authority over fake innovations.

Being a part of the semiconductor industry for quite some time, I was curious to find out how they achieved this feat which no one else including big name companies have been able to do even after years of research (XO-PC). I looked at the purported specs of the laptop and it struck me that yet again, the BoM itself was much more than 5000 INR. When I raised some questions about this, the “innovators” replied that they are saving all this money because they “developed their own processor DXA16″ which is equivalent to a 1.6GHz Intel Atom. What again raised even more doubts in mind was that they said their processor didn’t have anything to do with Intel and they didn’t even have to take an X86 license even though they claim windows support for the laptop, which means that their processor MUST be x86 compatible. Secondly, they mentioned that they have got jobs in TCS and CTS and won’t continue further. I’m completely flummoxed why an under-graduate student who has designed his own commercially viable micro processor in a college lab during a period when other students struggle to just write 10 line assembly programs, would go and join a mass-recruiting services company. If I was him, any company from Intel to TI to Qualcomm to ARM would be ready to hire me for any salary that I demanded. On top of this, they gave weird reasons to drop it that they want to do it only for Orissa and no other state, etc.

It was also mind-blowing that they made such great inventions but their own website doesn’t have even a single word about these. All they have there is the run of the mill Web-Hosting, SEO, site design, blah blah.

Anyways, another person on the same forum where I raised the doubts uncovered an ugly truth. Their data card is nothing but a rebranded chinese card. See this link: Cheap 3G Data Card.

Points to note:

1. This card has the exact same specs including speeds, features (e.g. same RAM, ROM amounts, sd card etc)

2. It costs around $35 for a single piece including shipping. So, for bulk purchase, you can easily get it much cheaper and sell it around the $30 price.

3. It looks exactly the same  with just an iWebLeaf logo slapped over the version sold by these innovators.

Pics:

iWebLeaf Data Card:

Chinese Data Card:

Note: You can also see this video of iWebLeaf Data Card and compare it against the rest of the pics on Deal Extreme site for the chinese card.

Laptop: I was even more skeptical about their laptop now. And I was flabbergasted with surprise when I found out that all it took me was around 2 minutes of search for “cheap chinese laptop” on china trader sites like alibaba/traderkey etc and I stumbled onto a company called Enzo-Tech. If I could do this in 2 minutes, couldn’t the rest of the mainstream media folks do a little bit of fact check with their vast resources? They produce a 10″ Mini Laptop which, just like the data card:

1. Has the exact same specs as the iWebLeaf laptop (except that they list Atom as the processor instead of DXA16, which is a farce anyways)

2. Looks exactly the same with just iWebLeaf stickers pasted all over. (Pics below)

The only concern here is that even this laptop is not available for the low price that iWebLeaf mentioned. This laptop sells for around $200 in small quantities. If bought for very large quantities (e.g. in thousands or 10s of thousands by a government), the price would come down radically and with a little bit more of subsidy, it can achieve the price that iWebLeaf mentioned. But it would still be “cost price”. Sale price to end users will have to be much higher due to customs, logistics, handling, shipping, etc even if they were to sell it on a no-profit basis.

iWebLeaf Laptop:

Enzo-Tech Laptop:

Note: You can also see this video of iWebLeaf Laptop and compare it against the pics/specs on Enzo-Tech’s website and see that it is the same.

What to make of it? I don’t have anything against these guys as entrepreneurs. They have every right to import, rebrand and resell products. A huge number of people and companies do this. What I take offense to, however, is to claim that they invented these things which isn’t true and then blame the Government for not allowing them to prosper by not spending the tax money I pay for their benefits. Moreover, this not only shames other “True” Indian innovators when these fakes are discovered but also sets wrong examples for our budding engineers to choose the shortest path possible to get 15 minutes of fame and then a job instead of really doing something to make the nation proud. I’m also yet again dis-illusioned by our mainstream media who will report anything and everything under the sun just to get more eyeballs and TRP without doing any sort of fact-checks. Yes, YOU SO CALLED TECH JOURNALISTS, I am calling you out.

In the end, I will make my offer to iWebLeaf guys again as I made to them elsewhere. Prove me wrong and I’ll myself heap praises upon you and your products through my blog and all other publications that I influence. Also, I will make sure to hire you in my company with at least 5 times the salary that you are getting in TCS/CTS.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled iWebLeaf – India’s $35 Android Tablet Spawning Fake Innovators?, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

This post describes my first attempt at making Kinect work with a PS3. Microsoft’s new XBOX 360 accessory, kinect has made a powerful entry into the market, becoming the fastest selling gadget of all time. Looks like their “You are the controller” tagline is working. Of course, Sony’s “similar” accessory Move is selling well too but is far behind kinect adoption probably because nothing beats the lure of making something work with just “The Force” .

Now, of course, kinect doesn’t work with PS3 obviously but then if we can’t break the rules, we can at least bend them a little towards our way. I’ve  created a mashup that allows you to use kinect as an input controller for the PS3.

Please note that this is pre-alpha quality software currently. I haven’t updated to a lot of recent code for the below libraries and also haven’t done most of the performance/feature improvements yet. The axis performance specially needs lot of tweaking and it works well only while sitting. Putting this out purely as a proof of concept. For the things that I plan to add soon, please see the Todo section below. Follow me at @shantanugoel for latest updates.

VIDEO IN ACTION

The program makes use of several other programs in order to provide this functionality. To compile/use it, you also need the following programs:

1. OpenNI Libraries – To get data from kinect

2. NITE Libraries (Choose “Middleware” on the page) – Builds on top of OpenNI to provide gesture detection etc

3. PrimeSense Libraries for kinect – Kinect drivers to get raw data

4. DIYPS3Controller – The main component for PS3 connection and also known as sixaxis emulator. This emulates a DS3 on the PC and send the inputs to PS3 through bluetooth.

Installation/Compilation/Usage

1. Make sure that the above 4 things are installed on your machine and working fine.

2. Download the source of this project to the NITE Samples directory. You can even place it anywhere else but you would need to tweak the makefile to account for the changed paths.

3. Make any changes to the source that you need.

4. Change the included ps3 controller config xml file and place it in one of the locations where diyps3controller can find it.

5. Run make -f kinect-ps3.mak

6. The executable will be available in Samples/Bin directory of NITE.

7. Run kinect-ps3 (without any arguments)

8. Run emuclient (from ps3 controller software) and choose the new xml config file

9. “Become the controller”
Default Config:

Menu Profile – This is the default profile that kinect-ps3 starts with and allows to operate the PS3 menus. Moving hand in any direction will move the ps3 menus as if you were using the DPAD with those directions keys pressed. If you run out of the kinect’s watched space, then just do a backward push with your hand, bring your hand to center and then again do the backward push and continue scrolling. This is like you lift your finger up and then start dragging from edges of a laptop’s touchpad.For selecting any item, make two successive push movements with your hand without changing any x-y direction.
Game Profile – This profile can be switched to by doing 3 successive backward movements of the hand while in Menu profile. Right now I’ve implemented only directional controls in game profile because I’m still struggling with multiple hands detections and skeletal tracking. A full profile will be activated soon enough. Currently, the your hand’s x/y movements and directly translated to right stick x/y movements (e.g. this is looking in different directions in various FPS games). Moving the hand towards or away from kinect (z-axis) translate to left stick y movements (e.g. this is moving fowards or backwards in most FPS games).
Issues/Queries/Suggestions

Please direct them to me by commenting here or emailing me at shantanu AT shantanugoel DOT com

Coming Soon/ToDo

-Full Menu and Game profiles

- Skeletal tracking for better game profiles

- Switching back to menu profiles from game profiles

- Easier way to specify user custom profiles instead of changing code for the same

- Performance improvement for game profiles

Full source code of the project has been released at https://github.com/shantanugoel/Kinect-PS3 under GNU GPL v2.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Making Kinect Work With PS3, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

According to TechCrunch, that is. TC has a post on its blog right now (from none other than Michael Arrington) that says Toddlers Pick iPhone Over Windows 7 Phones 10-1. The article says that this is because a toddlers’ app maker’s notes that their app sold 71.5 apps per day on average on the iOS app store, while the number was 7.5 on the WP7 marketplace. Go read the article (it’s pretty short) and come back to read the below.

As I posted in the comments there, the “article” has fail written all over it. Points to note:
1. Moms make the choice, not toddlers
2. The sample set is too small
3. iPhone has been selling for 3 years and WP7 for like 1 month..so D.U.H
4. The iPhone apps also sell on iPod/iPad.
5. It’s not “Windows 7 phones”, its “Windows Phone 7″ lol. One of the most prominent tech blogs can’t even get the name right.
6. Acc to TechCrunch, “Data like this hints at the total run rate for Win7 phones“, so basically WP7 has already sold around 12 million already (Total iOS devices sold till now is around 120mn acc to Jobs). That’s mighty impressive for a one month run..

On a serious note, I didn’t expect this post to be coming from Mike. Or maybe this is like that recent editorial plagiarism scandal where the newspaper editor said that he was tired so he got it written by his juniors..

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Android/iPhone Beware: WP7 Phones have already sold 12 million devices, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I received a few portable speakers as review pieces from x-mini a few days ago. I tried all of them but thought of posting a review of the most interesting model out of the lot, which is the X-mini Happy. Would also be posting a review soon of one more model that I liked quite a bit which is the X-mini Max II.

In The Package

The package included the following things:

- The X-Mini Happy Capsule Speaker

- USB Charging Cable

- A soft cloth pouch for carrying

- A set of earphones

- User Manual

Notes:

1. The manual mentions that a microSD card should also be present but I didn’t find any in the box.

2. The USB charging cable comes with a 3.5mm cord attached to it as well. This led me to believe that it could be one of those charge and play type cable which could carry sound over it as well but that wasn’t the case and only the USB charging part was usable. Perhaps they bundled the cable from another one of their models which allows this.

Things I liked:

- Inbuilt retractable 3.5 mm cord. Really loved this as I hate carrying so many cables with me while travelling. With this cable, you can easily connect it to any of your sound sources with a 3.5 mm slot (e.g. laptop/media player/phone etc) for instant sound gratification and then stow away the cable at the bottom when not needed.

- Inbuilt SD card slot. You can insert an SD card filled with MP3s into this slot and play those songs from the speaker directly without needing any separate media player. This is an awesome feature. Playback controls are provided on the side and overlap with the volume controls. The speaker supports upto 8GB cards and you can copy songs to-and-fro from the card without removing it from the speakers. The supplied USB cable can also be used to access the speaker in mass storage mode to talk to the SD card.

- Headphone out (or as they call it “BuddyJack”). You can connect your headphones to the speaker and listen to songs. This port has three advantages. First is that you don’t need to fiddle with your laptop/media player’s port if you want to use your headphones for sometime instead of using these speakers. Second is that you can use this speaker as a media player itself by inserting an SD card into the speaker as listed above. Lastly, you can use this port to chain multiple X-Mini Happy speakers together in order to get louder output.

- InBuilt Rechargable Battery Pack. This is another good feature. Many of the portable speakers that I tried draw their power from the USB port. This is good enough to use with laptops but not for media players/phones. The X-Mini Happy speakers have built in rechargable batteries that can be charged from the USB port. The user manual states that the battery should run for around 5 hours when fully charged. In my testing, this was farely accurate and across multiple tests, they ran for around 4-5 hours in general with continuous playback.

- Sound Quality. Volume wise, these speakers can get fairly loud. They were good enough to fill a fairly sized room and I was able to watch a movie by sitting at a diagonally opposite end (around 15 feet) without missing any dialogs. The speakers also had fairly good bass (low frequency) reproduction for their size. This could be due to their unique vacuum resonator (a rubbery tube like design which can be expanded when using the speakers and then compressed to save space while travelling). They were also ok in mid and high frequencies but the thing to be noted here is that for a portable speaker, they are better than anything I have come across so far.

Drawbacks

The only drawback is that this is a single speaker unit so the sound output is monaural. This is also the reason that I prefer the X-Mini Max II capsule speakers more than this (review coming soon) although they don’t come with as many bells and whistles as the Happy capsule speakers. Apart from that, a minor niggle is that the supplied earphones could be better to round out the package.

Conclusion

Are these speakers going to replace my full blown speaker set at home? No. But that is not the point. As a portable speaker, the X-mini Happy Capsule speaker packs a lot of punch while taking only a couple of inches and also playing double duty as a mp3/wma player that I’d pick it without a doubt.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Review of X-Mini Capsule Happy Speakers, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I need a bit of your help in filling out a short survey that I need for a small project of mine that I’m doing with a friend. It will take maximum of only 2-3 minutes of your time. Please fill it out below. If you are reading this in an RSS reader and not able to see the form, please click here to go to the original post to see and fill the form. If you are facing any problems with the survey or have any queries/suggestions etc, please use this contact form to send them to us.

Much Thanks!!

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled A short Tablet/Smartphone survey for a project, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Many people say that Windows Phone 7 is a threat to iPhone because they are bringing in a super platform with a choice of multiple designs and multiple carriers with great Enterprise and gaming support and maintaining the lucrative integration that iPhone provides. Many also say that Windows Phone 7 is a threat to Android because it solves the problem of Apple’s draconian policies, gives choice to customers and all this without fragmenting the OS all over the place.

However, I beg to differ. Windows Phone 7 is a threat to the world wide web and web apps. It plans to help the developers and users by going one up on fragmentation of Android but in the process will fragment the web app world itself. This is because the browser in WP7 is based on Internet Explorer 7. Yes, not IE 9, not IE8, but IE7, which is already four years old now.

Right now, if you have to do a web app, you can do it in HTML5, CSS3 etc and assume that it will work over most mobile handsets out there. Enter WP7 with its archaic browser and the developer has one more headache to solve. His app will be, in most cases, incompatible with the “new” platform and so he will have to code another version that works on IE7 as well. This will not only result in wasted time and effort but in fact, the developer may even have to hold back on features that might not work well on this ugly duckling which will hold the whole pack down for God knows how much more time.

So, there it is. If the Android fragmentation reports are true, you can just buy another handset like an iPhone but this comeback-from-the-grave monster will fragment the mobile web app world itself so that you won’t have any reprieve whichever phone you buy. So, I appeal to you. If you want a better mobile future, talk about it, write about it and let Microsoft know that it can and must do better.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled The Real Threat Of Windows Phone 7, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Another nail in the coffin before this Android tablet lives to fulfill the Indian kids’ dreams. Well, not exactly a nail in the coffin. The tablet might still be here, and at the price promised but the thing to note is how low the government can stoop to get bragging rights (and votes). The article elaborates how the IIT/IISC scientists weren’t even aware that such a “project” existed and they were invited to be a part of it just a month before Mr. Kapil Sibal unveiled the epitome of Indian innovation to the world media, telling everyone with gusto how it was a brainchild of India’s premier institutes backed by the revolutionary and modern government. How the low cost motherboard had been designed and fabricated by students where years of research by experts around the world had failed in projects like OLPC.

I’m ashamed of the government. Ashamed that everyone abroad now points at my country and calls us liars. Mr. Sibal, why couldn’t you just say that you scored a really nice deal to bring a really good education device to the Indian masses at a cheap price point? Why harp about the innovation and stuff when clearly there wasn’t any and the only price cut you and your government had brought on was through a bulk order and subsidies? Oh right!! Because $35 tablet doesn’t have much margins to siphon away any money from and the only place left to fulfill that gap is from “Research & Development” Money Quota.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled The Great Indian $35 Tablet Hoax?, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Recently I found an issue with my asus wl-500w wi-fi router that I wasn’t able to change the channel on which it was transmitting. I moved to a new location which was totally jam-packed with other wi-fi networks using same channel as mine which was hampeing my connection. I tried for umpteen number of times. Changing the channel through the web configuration did not give any error but I found that it was still transmitting at channel 1. I confirmed by checking on the “Status & Log” page, checking the logs, and running “wl status” command through ssh and they all confirmed that it was transmitting at channel 1 only, no matter what I set it to in the configuration. I even opened an issue in the firmware project for the custom firmware (by oleg and lly) that I am using but they weren’t able to help me as the wi-fi drivers are binary only.

But by sheer chance, I stumbled upon the solution finally by trial and error. The solution is that you should set the “Bandwidth” to 20 MHz in wi-fi configuration if you are using 802.11 G. If you set it to 40 MHz then it gets stuck somehow but as soon as I changed it to 20 MHz, I was able to see the channel change immediately after reboot. Here is the screenshot of the page where you can find this setting.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Cannot Change Channel Problem With Asus WL-500W, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Android and iPhone OS (iOS) have been at loggerheads for quite some time now. This is a take on which has a better security model to protect its users. I thought of writing it up because there have been a lot of discussions around me lately about which platform is more secure and I keep repeating the same points over and over at every one of them, so thought that in future I’ll just point them to this page

OK, on with the points then. Here is the table that I created for this showing points I considered and which side wins each. Don’t start flaming me though just by seeing the table I will be discussing the points as well below it.

Summary: Well, there is no clear winner. Apple is quite good when it comes to protecting you from phishing (though that advantage goes away if you jailbreak and use alternative means to install apps) and Android has a real sound local security system (though it also has the flaw that users might not always understand why an app is requesting a certain critical permission and install it anyways). So, take your pick and let me know what you picked and please do tell me if I’m wrong in any of my points or missed out on something that needs to be compared.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Android vs iPhone: Security Models, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Update: Removed the post as the person in consideration has contacted me with the explanation of what went down. I’m not sure if it is completely true or this is just as a response to this post but anyways, as I had contended in the original post that it was a stupid little thing that didn’t really warrant any attention or a post but I still did it just because I’m weird, so in the light of the developments, I think it’s best to remove the rants and focus on actual discussion. I’ll be discussing the points put out by Dan over his blog or might make a post about them here..

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Apple is Magical: Daniel Eran Gilder is the Living Proof, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings