Gratefulness…

Before I start this post, a word of thanks to Rahul Gaitonde, who posted one of my older posts on Nokia N-Gage (:-) Keep on writing buddy, someone is reading :-D) on his blog and rekindled my writing spirit. It is like Amitji watching Himesh Reshamiya’s attempt at acting in ‘Aap Ka Suroor’ and appreciating it. Gives me enough fillip to create ‘Aap Ka Suroor – 2’, nonetheless. The only sad part is that I have replaced my ‘N-Gage Classic’ with the ‘Nokia N-70 Music Edition’ phone. After much R&D, I managed to narrow down on this one. Other phones which I considered were Nokia E-62, Nokia E-61 and Sony-Ericsson w810i. This time, I wanted a phone that looked like a phone and thus had to eliminate both the E-series phones. Another shortcoming of E-series phones is the lack of FM tuner. What made me decide on N70ME over w810i was the 1GB RSMMC, familiar Symbian OS environment and the fact that I was upgrading from one of the first generation N-series phones (Yes, I’ve heard that N-Gage Classic and N-Gage QD were the first two N-series phones).

The Nokia N70 Music Edition



It's a 108.8 x 53 x 17.5 mm, 126 grams black phone with Triband GSM and WCDMA. It comes with 22MB internal memory, a 176 x 208, 256K colour TFT screen, a 2MP camera and a VGA camera. On the connectivity front, it supports GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Bluetooth 2.0 and USB Pop-port.

On the software side, it has Symbian OS 8.1a (S60 UI) and comes pre-loaded with a lot of software like QuickOffice suite, Acrobat Reader, etc. Has decent stereo sound output and comes with a 1GB RSMMC, enough to store around a couple of hundred mp3s. And this feature-packed phone comes at a price of INR 13200.

Pros and Cons

• Has looks of a decent executive phone


• Has next generation connectivity options like 3G and EDGE, lacks WLAN though


• Good PIM capabilities


• 2MP Camera comes with a cover


• Not very impressive battery life


• Decent Sound quality, but inferior to most of the walkman phones


• Comes pre-loaded with useful software


• Comes pre-loaded with 100 songs (No necessity at all)


• Visual Radio

Why Music Edition?
The things that differentiate an N70 from an N70ME are

• 1 GB RSMMC


• ME Headphones


• 100 pre-loaded songs

The music edition headphones are the ones that come with an N71. I haven’t really compared these with the N70 headphones but I’ve heard that they are better than the original N70 headphones. Visual Radio (FM Tuner) makes it a complete music phone.

What has changed?
One striking difference between N-Gage Classic and the N70ME is the ease by which I can set up the phone for different functionality. Settings’ Wizard lets me configure, GPRS and EDGE for any GSM operator in India at the click of a button. Configuring GPRS in N-Gage Classic was more complex. Things like connectivity with PC, Synchronization, etc have all become a layman’s stuff as opposed to techie stuff earlier.
All in all, N70 Music Edition is a great value for money buy.

Talking of music, Sleeveless Mini Mathur – 3 ;-) has commenced and this time the judges include Udit Narayan, Alisha Chinay, Javed Akhtar and the ever-available Anu Malik. If you have no clue what I’m talking about, it’s Indian Idol -3. Lack of Sonu Nigam on the panel of judges hurts but again, can be done away with so long as Mini is hosting the show. It still being the early, piano round episodes, I get to hear more of music and less of those emotional result declaration episodes where everyone takes Atalji-style pauses wherever possible.

Among the other things, I have learnt the macro-economics behind the relationship between inflation, money supply and appreciating Rupee, the hard way. Having bought a lot of tech-stocks on correction, and having averaged out on every subsequent correction, here’s my attempt at explaining the rupee appreciation.

The Rupee appreciation was a long anticipated event taking into consideration, deluge of foreign investment (FDI and FII) inflows in the recent past and around 200 billion dollars worth foreign reserves in the Indian exchequer. However, like india, most of the Asian countries have prevented their currencies from appreciating for a long time now in the fear of losing out on exports to their other Asian counterparts. However, in the backdrop of high inflation at the time when some of Indian states are going to polls, government took every possible measure from CRR hikes to price control threats to some industries to curb inflation. The appreciating rupee came to the rescue here as rising rupee means cheaper imports and thus lower costs. The RBI intervened as little as possible and let the rupee appreciate. Weakening of dollar against all major currencies was also one of the causes of rupee appreciating against the dollar. Now, with inflation tamed to a more acceptable level and exporters crying out loud against this sharp rise, government has assured the India Inc. against any such further sharp movements in the rupee. However, as told by commerce minister, Mr. Kamal Nath, appreciating rupee in the long term is a fact of Indian economy and that whether they like it or not, the exporters have to live with it. Huh!!! I think that is enough for today…