Review: Urbanears Plattan - Embodies Scandinavian Minimalism, Tremendous On Performance

Urbanears Plattan
MRP: Rs 5750 (Available for Rs 5306 (Rediff Shopping), Rs 4756 (bitFang.com), Rs 5750 (Flipkart.com))

I occasionally receive headphones that appear to be different from the crowd in some ways. This time, I have received the Urbanear Plattan, which is one such model with looks that mix casual simplicity with style. It is available in several colours, with most colours named after fruits and vegetables. I had never tried this Stockholm-based Swedish brand until now and was a bit sceptical about its ability to perform. However, I was pleasantly surprised at what I discovered. Read on.

The Future Is Here With Wireless AC - Guest Post By Atul Jain, TRENDnet

The following is a guest post by Atul Jain, Country Manager, TRENDnet.


Wireless AC, the latest technology innovation, is currently displacing Wireless N. Consumer adoption is ramping up on all continents and significant business adoption is expected in 2014. As with the launch of previous new wireless technologies, end users have questions when it comes to performance, compatibility, and efficiency.

The biggest advantage of Wireless AC is the incredible speeds it offers. The highest performing routers on the market today offer wireless speeds as high as an astounding 1,300 megabits per second (Mbps). Keep in mind the full Wireless AC specification can accommodate speeds as high as 6.9 Gigabits per second (Gbps), so even faster routers will launch to market down the road.

Mercury 3G Mifi Router Brings Real Portability To A Hotspot

Kobian has launched the Mercury 3G Mifi Router, which comes with inbuilt battery backup. The router has a SIM card slot that can accept a 3G card and easily start sharing internet by creating a Wi-Fi hotspot that can support up to 10 simultaneous users. It also supports 3G dongles, thanks to a USB port, and can share internet from a local network that it can receive via an Ethernet port. With a white plastic casing and blue indicator LEDs, it even looks good.

Kingston Launches SSDNow UV100 For High Performance At A "Reasonable" Price

SSD's or Solid State Drives are hard drives based on semiconductor memory, which means that they have no moving parts and therefore rugged, are very fast, and consume low power, thus generating less heat. Of course, this has been coming at a very high premium until now. Kingston has launched its SSDNow UV100 in its attempt to bring high performance SSD storage at a reasonable price.

The SSDNow UV100 comes in 60 GB and 120 GB capacity variants and has the 2.5" form factor, making it ideal to use even in laptops. It sports SATA 3.0 (6 GB/s) interface with backward compatibility with SATA 2.0 (3 GB/s). True to SSD standards, it boasts of read and write speeds of up to a blistering 425 MB/s. The idle power consumption stays down at 0.08 W, while it averages at just 0.108 W, which means your laptop battery will last a lot longer.

Nokia Refocus: An Innovation That Will Be Imitated

Nokia, one of the oldest surviving players in the mobile phone space, has in recent years changed its tune, and wisely so, by focusing on the mobile software part as much as the hardware. The 808 PureView marked the company's giant leap as far as the camera department was concerned with PureView Technology backed by a never-before-heard-in-a-mobile-phone 41 megapixel image sensor. Taking note of the fact that the weaker Symbian platform held it back, it was only a matter of time before the Finnish manufacturer brought out Windows Phone devices equipped with PureView tech cameras and the latest among them being the Lumia 1020 with a similar 41 megapixel image sensor.

Talking of camera software, there is a plethora of software that Nokia brought to the Lumia series to get the most out of their cameras. The latest one to arrive is Nokia Refocus, which works on the Lumia 920, 925, 928, and 1020 (and also the upcoming Lumia 1520 phablet), all as long as they are running the Amber software update.

EvernoteLife: An Event To Remember

Evernote had a bloggers' meet at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Bandra, Mumbai, where Troy Malone, MD, APAC of Evernote interacted with everyone. The premise of this event was to showcase the Evernote product and talk about new things that the company is into, in addition to the software itself.

The event venue

Cookie Mania And Private Browsing - Guest Post By Govind Rammurthy, eScan

The following is a guest post by Mr. Govind Rammurthy, MD & CEO, eScan.


Do you know that your online activity is being tracked by the websites that you visit? All links you visit, the forms you submit, the credentials that you fill are not a secret always. The sites that you visit maintain a record of what you did last time on their site for months and years to come.

It is all done smartly through cookies. As per Wikipedia, cookies are reliable mechanism for websites to remember information (such as items in a shopping cart) or to record the user’s browsing activity like the buttons clicked, logging in, or the pages visited by the user months or even years ago. Cookies can also store confidential information such as Username and password, credit card number or an address.

Review: Silicon Power Armor A30 1 TB - SuperSpeed USB 3.0 And High Capacity Put To Good Use

I have been reviewing portable hard drives since long and have seen them evolve. They used to be plain boring before; then they became trendy and fashionable. The one which I have for review today is a military grade rugged drive that should be a perfect companion for the road warrior, and yet it looks very elegant. I am talking about the Silicon Power Armor A30 with a huge 1 TB capacity and the super-fast USB 3.0 interface. Silicon Power has been around for quite some time now in the field of storage and I have previously tested USB Flash drives manufactured by them. I therefore have high hopes from this drive and this review will try to find out whether or not those hopes are fulfilled.