Ekalavya Bhattacharya

In August 2010 I’d written a post on this blog saying, ”The future of Group Buying sites is still dicey in India”

From August 2010 to August 2011, nearly 100+ new deal sites sprouted out of nowhere. CEO’s of prominent digital companies are still quitting to set up their e-commerce ventures!

But the bubble had to burst. At least the ‘Group Buying’ bubble.

First to go is Taggle funded by Battery Ventures. Mahesh Murthy writes an open letter about the whole thing and it is worth a read.

A lot more will die for sure.

Don’t quit your current jobs and join random e-commerce ventures!

Just logged into Facebook and saw this…

Tata Docomo, Cricinfo and Adidas Cricket all had something to say about the Indian National Cricket Team! i.e. something about the India - England test match but surprisingly none of them used the word ‘Cricket’ in their update!

Still Facebook via some new algorithm of theirs figured out that they were talking about the same thing and displayed all their posts together!

Has this been on for long?
Pretty interesting.

This will actually help users see different pockets of content!

Update:
Wow! Its pretty cool.
I just made a test post:
“3rd test. India vs England. Testing new algorithm. Indian National Cricket team.”

And it got displayed with the other posts in the feed stream…

Finally upgraded from my Nexus One to a Samsung Galaxy S2.

A little on the expensive side but will hopefully be worth it.

So why was this phone bought:

Awesome screen.
1GB RAM
16GB internal memory + Micro SD card slot
Awesome camera which shoots 1080p HD
Dual Core 1.2 Ghz

Looks awesome, feels awesome!

A short review after spending a couple of days with it…

The phone had a very plastic-cy feel to it. It just doesn’t feel like a phone which you shelled out 30K for!

Though its unbelievably light and a beauty to look at! My advice will be to get the Black Rubber Case-Mate cover for this phone. Cost me Rs 675/- at Alfa. Costs around Rs 710/- on ebay. The cover adds to the beauty and the feel of the phone.

TouchWiz seemed lame. Replaced it with GO Launcher. I’ve always been a fan of GO SMS Pro and GO Launcher…even though most people prefer ADW and Launcher Pro. This launcher works superbly on the phone. The GO widgets are pretty cool.. Especially the task killer widget on screen and the GO Weather update (w/ the HTC Widget Theme).

Gaming - Well have only played Angry Birds on this till now. Was pretty smooth. Best thing was being able to recover all my 3Star scores from my Nexus One via the app AngryBirdsBackup. Will try out other games which utilize the Dual Core nature of the phone over the next week or so.

Camera quality is ok. Video camera quality is superb. This phone has the capability to retire the sub-20K handycam category for sure.

Battery life - Pathetic. One of the reasons I bought this phone was because I was pretty sick of my Nexus One not lasting a complete day. This doesn’t last through a day either. Will have to probably root it and use another ROM. Some guys at XDA have reported a battery increase of nearly 50%.

Browsing - Pretty cool. The large screen makes internet browsing awesome. Will definitely cause an increase in content consumption graphs. Better have 3G on your phone. If you don’t…please don’t buy this phone and buy a Micromax phone instead or maybe a Nokia 1100.

2 things which might take you a little time to figure out…

Plug and use as a USB drive…
This will get you to scratch your head for a few minutes. The default plugging is usually to access the SD card. So how do you access the pictures you’ve taken and add songs to your phone?
Settings > Applications > Development > USB Debugging (Keep this checked)

Toggling between 2G and 3G:
My Nexus One had a simple switch between 2G and 3G on the Mobile Network Settings page. But the Samsung Galaxy S2 doesn’t have it.
So basically you need to switch the network mode…
GSM/WCDMA (3G) / GSM Only (2G)

Will put up another review next week!