Currently Amazon.com lists the Nexus one phones starting at 680 USD or 31000 Indian Rupees. Add around 3-4 thousand to that and you get the Indian Grey market price of around 35000 rupees for an Unlocked Google Nexus One phone.

Before going into the viability of getting a Google Nexus One imported into India or for that matter asking a relative to bring it, we look at some of its features.

The Google Nexus One runs on the Android operating system, not a lot of Indian smartphones run on Android, heck not a lot of any kind of smart phones run on the Google Android operating system and the Nexus One Google hopes will change all that.

One of the USPs of the Nexus One is said to be its voice command feature for searches and normal phone operation etc. Ok, lets reverse a little, my Nokia Symbian phone does that too and I loaded the Google Symbian app on it a few days ago and it also has voice recognition.

The Google Nexus One boasts of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1 Ghz processor, now thats a lot of computing power for a phone. The touchscreen is  480 by 800 pixel and has a diagonal width of 3.7-inches. The phone has a AMOLED display which people are claiming is out of this world.

The phone has a 5 MegaPixel camera and has a LED flash. The phone features no hardware keyboard like the Iphone which its supposed to kill. The no hardware thing is a turnoff for me. I love the QWERTY on my Nokia E-series phone.

Overall, the Nexus One is one mean performance machine with good parts and excellent performance, but the price is a little out of reach for most people. I would much rather buy a laptop than this, but to each his own, Indian fanboys of the Google Nexus One will surely order one for them. Teardown by Isuppli pegged the cost to manufacture a Google Nexus One at 175 USD.

Its strange how company after company keeps ignoring India as a launch market for smartphones. First it was Apple with its delayed Iphone launches in India and now its Google. Even HTC waits a lot before bringing its obsolete world models into India it seems.

Gurgaon kid Puru Pratap Singh drew the above Google doodle for a competition organised by Google, the above is the 1st ever Google Doodle made in India.

The first ‘G’ is a peacock, the ‘o’ stands for wisdom, the second o stands for the discovery of water on the moon by ISRO, the next ‘g’ is about Kashmir, the ‘l’ is representing the Amar Jawan Jyoti and the last ‘e’ represents Mahatma Gandhi.

The doodle is active for today i.e. 14th November 2009 which happens to be Children’s Day.

Plus the new Orkut is not even uncluttered, the huge advertisement on the right column has been shifted to the top and adblock no longer kills the whole element so there is a sick huge void in my Orkut window when I use Firefox. The huge ads are the biggest turnoff in the new Orkut.

The menus are less intuitive, took me 2 days to figure out how to use the communities section and get the latest post times from my various communities. Friend updates it seems are no longer optional, despite having them disabled in the old Orkut I am thrown this huge list of status updates from friends which tries to mimic Facebook but is very unfacebook at the same time especially with all the junk HTML Orkut seems to allow.

Orkut went down the day it allowed all the junk HTML and javascript coding. Compared to that facebook has a much better style and restricted media options and thats what makes it cleaner. Hope the Orkut devs are taking notes

Indian publishers who access the my account tab will be able to see that the secured delivery via DHL option is no longer there and only a local courier option is there. These couriers will be sent via Bluedart which is infact one of the fastest domestic couriers of India and probably pretty reliable too as banks frequently trust them with their credit cards etc.

But Google is still tightlipped about electronic fund transfers for India, we heard its due to taxation issues and laws,lets see how this new Blue Dart saga turns out for Google  and its Indian publishers when they start receiving Bluedart cheques from next month.

A statement from Google Adsense India team read :

“AdSense publishers in India will receive standard delivery checks mailed via the local courier service Blue Dart for no additional charge. Cheques mailed by Blue Dart should arrive within 10-30 days of the cheque date.

So the Secure Payment option has been removed from all the Indian adsense publishers account.

Blue Dart is not able to service all areas throughout India. If you live in a location they don’t service, your check will be sent by Registered Post and should reach you within 2-3 weeks of the mailing date.”

1. Google Chrome – The Google Chrome TOS were pretty draconian and had a lot of ownership issues. Google quickly attributed all that to TOS reuse , and corrected the error after the Internet slammed it hard and people started dumping the browser.

2. Facebook – In a controversial move, Facebook tried to take ownership of all photos and stuff posted by all its members. This led to a huge hue and cry and a large number of people actually left Facebook after the announcement. The effect was so huge that Facebook immediately tendered an apology and reverted back to its old TOS.

Even now if you try to deactivate your facebook account , you are shown an apology and asked not to quit facebook :

Here is what it says :

Are you deactivating your account because you are concerned about Facebook’s Terms of Service?

This was a mistake that we have now corrected. You own the information you put on Facebook and you control what happens to it. We are sorry for the confusion. See http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130 for more information.

- The Facebook Team

Just the Internet democracy at work

It was being touted as a Wikipedia Killer, but “Knol – a unit of knowledge”  seems to have died a painful death so to say. No one uses knol, i didn’t ever remember whether the URL was google.com/knol or knol.google.com , They both redirect to the subdomain though.

Knol was supposed to be the first place one would go while searching for a particular topic, but i am unimpressed. I searched for computer graphics and got pages about women in the computer industry and computer buses , ports etc. If you cant find a topic in Knol, then knol isnt so great, is it ?

Wikipedia had welcomed the entry of Knol into the online knowledge sector, it had said the more the free content, the better. However it seems that Knol seriously lacks on content and content quality. Also the images on Knol did not have separate pages like Wikipedia and had no individual licensing information.

There was also criticism to the Knol from other quarters, people had said that Google might try to fudge rankings to ensure that Knol ranks higher up in the search rankings. Google however dismissed all such allegations.

Knol also scared the media industry, a lot of people in the industry said that Google is slowing switching over , first it was a data searching company, then it became a data organising company, and now its a data generation company seriously threatening a lot of media houses.

For the time being though it seems like knol isn’t used by all

The HTC Dream which will be manufactured by High Tech Computer Corporation is going to be the first Android phone to be marketed and released. Android as some of you may be knowing is Google’s mobile platform. The Dream will cost $179 when purchased along with a T-Mobile plan. The good news is that HTC has a very strong base in India and might launch the phone pretty early in India at a very competitive price.

The Android platform is designed to take on the likes of Windows Mobile, Symbian and other generic and specific mobile phone OS manufacturers. However this particular phone is intended to compete head on with the Apple Iphone. The Apple Iphone has been a moderate success in the US and a complete failure in India.

The HTC Dream features a capacitive touchscreen interface, GPs, 3.1 MP camera, Accelerometer and a Qualcomm 528MHz processor. Its interesting to note we dont even know the processor used by Apple.

On the software front too, the phone is pretty good. As you can see in the video, it has built in Gmail, Youtube player. It features multiple desktops like most Linux systems and allows drag and drop for icons (How cool is that). The menu is brought up with swipes.

It also has a full QWERTY keyboard, gotta say looks pretty promising.

We keep you updated on the new Iphone 3G, and as things would have it a lot of companies are making software exclusively for the Iphone 3G, many of them like Ebay, and certain GPS GIS companies are innovating hard. So what do you expect from google ?

A supercool version of Gtalk which perhaps shows your GPS location and allows you to talk with crystal clear voice clarity. Well sorry, but thats not gonna happen. The Gtalk for Iphone will only be a text chatting service, disappointed ? So are they just porting Jabber for the Iphone in fancy Google colours ?

The Indian Iphone users will also be disappointed, but dont be. Skype will answer your Iphone needs

Your friendly Iphone 3G reminder for Indians looking to buy the new Iphone

Remember when the Iphone 3G launches in India, it will only be available from Airtel and Vodafone and will probably be locked and come with a hefty plan and high termination fee. Your best bet is still to get the old Iphone for a bargain and get it unlocked, that baby still turns heads. Also other market players like HTC Diamond, Cruise etc. and Asus P320 phones may be given a thought. Personally i am addicted to Windows Mobile these days.

I have a few songs bookmarked on Youtube, which i usually listen to when i am feeling bored.

But WTH ! , Youtube seems to be blocking content on the basis of country now which is totally outrageous. Also i noticed there is no email contact to send a query to youtube, only a snail mail address. Pathetic from them ! I was able to see this video before the Youtube India site was launched.

We had all these interviews from Youtube India’s new boss in the newspapers telling how Youtube India will be great, but i am terribly disappointed.

Anyone else too got the “this video is not available in your country” message from Youtube ?

To add more the storage limit of my Google Apps account is even greater at 3864 MB!

Seems like Google is true to its word.

Furthermore, we shall keep giving you more space as we are able to.