Smartphones in Battlefield

Posted by BA on Jul 22, 2010 in Android, Handsets, Mobile, Mobile Apps, Smartphones, Technology | 1 comment

Soldiers will be using smartphones in the battlefied. Here’s what this latest Reuters article says:

Raytheon, which makes the Patriot missile defense system, is developing software which could enable a soldier to find enemies in his or her surrounding terrain using a mobile phone running Google’s Android operating system.

The software could potentially be powerful enough to pick up aerial images from an unmanned aircraft or satellite and then focus in on details such as license plates on cars or a person’s facial features.

A typical soldier’s use case:

• Searching for a UAV nearby
• UAV found, Connected!
• Requesting enemy unit locations nearby
• Enemy units and buildings found at these coordinates, touch to view photos
• Incoming orders, move north, keep moving, wait for further orders
• Incoming missile, take shelter
• Your primary weapon is running low on ammo, reload!

And then there can be problems with the software or the handsets:

• Cannot retrieve orders, network not found
• UAV connection lost
• Battery low
• Uh.. the phone software stuck … urgh!
• Waiting for GPS ………………….
• … why dare you touch the phone, it’s an iPhone, remember?

Here’s the whole post.

Mobile Phones are better than Computers – Green Computing

Posted by BA on Jul 16, 2010 in Green Computing, Handsets, Internet, Mobile Apps, Nokia, Nokia OVI apps | 0 comments

Mobile Phones consume very low power

What do you use your computer for? Surfing Internet, chat, gaming, social networking, downloading, desktop computing including documents, spreadsheets or presentation making or just watching your photos and videos? Today’s mobile phones are capable of doing it all, rather sometimes more than the traditional phones. They have faster processors, more ram, faster  wireless Internet connectivity and larger memories.

Today I will start another series of posts that will tell you how to use your phones to do things that you usually do with your computers including desktops, laptops and netbooks. This series of posts will include tips, tricks and software that you can use to avoid the use of computers and just use your phone

Why are mobile phones better?

If you have not done so, you can read my earlier articles that prove that laptops are better than desktops, because they take around 60 watts of power as compared to a few hundred watts. Then we also discussed that netbooks are even better than laptops taking half the power as compared to a full sized notebook. Today we will move one step ahead.

To prove my point I used this app called Nokia Energy Profiler. The app is a free download available on Nokia OVI store for almost all Nokia devices. The application gives you exact numbers in terms of power consumption, network bandwidth utilization and a few more important things that you never come to know when using a  mobile phone. Just like any other computing device, Nokia phones consume low power when idle and take more power when performing more computation.

Here are a few screen-shots. As you can see, when the phone is idle, it takes 0.18 watts on average. When navigating the menu and viewing simple content like photos on the phone screen, its consuming 0.23 watts on average. In the third screenshot, the phone is being used for a voice+video call over a wifi network and the battery usage is at it’s top, that is around 2 watts.

Idle State

Phone Menu Use

Skype Video Call - High Power Consumption

Sudden Spike when receiving call

In the last screen shot you can see the sudden rise in battery consumption when there’s an incoming call ringing and picked up.

In any case, this particular cellphone is using less than 2 watts of power which is way less than the other computing devices we listed above.

Conclusion

Use mobile phones for your computing needs whenever and wherever possible. You’ll save power and will contribute your efforts in keeping this planet green. Happy Green Computing!

16 GB Cards are almost useless in Blackberry?

Posted by BA on Apr 16, 2009 in Uncategorized | 14 comments

I cannot install applications on my Blackberry Curve 8310′s memory card. That has been the biggest disappointment for me since I started using this as my secondary handset. Only the media files can fill up the card. By media I mean mp3 songs, the photos I download from web or take from the 2 megapixel camera, some video recordings and if you want to view some videos copied from the PC.

I got over excited when I got this phone and I bought a 16GB micro sdhc card for it as well. And that has been a total loss ….. well till I found a great way to fill up the memory.

First of all, I found this tricky application that allows you to install the applications of your choice on the memory card. The name of the application is AERIZE card loader. This solved a bit of my problem and now I’m not worried about my phone memory filling up quickly.

But what is the best thing about this phone? Its great super bright screen is the biggest reason I love it. My earlier post here also talks about that.

Now the next question, what do I do to fully utilize the memory card and this nice screen? I convert the movies, tv shows, dramas and video pod casts to watch on this bright screen. I am planning to write a how-to on that but If you have a Blackberry, try playing a few videos on it, not the ones you recorded on its camera, because the camera itself is not so good at recording videos, but try to find some videos that are converted for playback on your phone.

A typical movie takes above 300 megabytes of memory, that puts aproximagely 3 movies in a gig. Am I talking about 40 to 50 movies in my pocket? I find that very exciting.

What do you use to fill up your blackberries? Which blackberry models are you carrying? How good the screen palays these movies? Please leave a comment while I write a how-to.