Bhandardara is a good place to go, especially in monsoon. I am from Pune so please note that all my references are with respect to Pune.
This is roughly 190km away from Pune but takes "at least" 5hrs to travel by own vehicle. So keep this in mind and start early if you are planning to go there. Bhandardara could also be approached from Mumbai side but I dont have the details. One day return plan from Pune looks very ambitious.
If you are approaching from Pune then you will have to follow Pune-Nashik highway upto Sangamner. In Sangamner, you will need to take left turn for Bhandardara (Akole अकोले). In Sangamner, do not follow Google Map route, as its a very congested and small road. Instead ask somebody for bigger and longer road.
Please do not take the shorter route that Google Map suggests from Pune to Bhandardara. It was learned that road from Bote(बोटे) (or any other suggested route) is shorter but its very small road and road condition is not guaranteed. I have not traveled by this route, so this may not be correct. Use your own discretion here.
If you are travelling from Pune do not miss the sharp left U turn before bridge near randha falls. Else you would reach Mumbai-Nashik highway. Its easy to miss this turn. Thanks to GPS, we did not miss it.
All hotels are located at Shendi(शेंडी) bhandardara. Actual bhandardara is a very small village and is located in front of the dam wall. Shendi is at higher elevation on the right side of dam wall.
Bhandardara is a small place so make sure that you have essential numbers with you. If you are planning to stay there, which you will if you are travelling from Pune, try to book the hotel beforehand. We went adhoc and had very difficult time finding a place to stay.
Very few accommodation options are available including MTDC, Yash resort, Yash agri and Anandwan, which all were full when we went there(except Yash agri).
Yash resort has prohibitive price in range of 3000 per night. MTDC would be much affordable. When we went there, it was late(10PM) and it was difficult to even locate hotels. Yash resort/MTDC was full but security guard there was kind enough to come with us all the way to Yash agri to check the accommodation availablity. Yash agri is away from Yash resort and its near impossible to find it on your own if you are travelling after sunset.
Yash agri has cottage like appearance but its not very good. There were different types of insects and lighting was less than adequate. We had no other option hence had to stay there, but I would suggest to avoid it. In all honesty, we are thankful that they offered accommodation but its very very difficult to stay there.
Coming to site seeing, bhandardara itself is a dam so backwater, river, scenic view, boat ride is all there to be seen. There is also spill gate(overflow gate) which is unique in my opinion. I have not seen such gate elsewhere. When water overflows from there, it would be impressive for sure. In addition, there is garden located in front of the dam wall. In monsoon, when water is released, water flows over huge rock and you can see the umbrella fall from garden. Note that if dam is not full, water is not released and you wont be able to catch umbrella falls. Hence travelling in mid-late august is suggested. Garden in itself has nothing special, but it has stunning dam wall view and river flowing nearby.
You can travel to Ratanwadi(रतनवाडी) which is 14km away. You will need to follow road on the left bank of the dam to reach ratanwadi. There is old shiva temple of Amruteshwar mahadev (also called Rataneshwar mahadev, रतनेश्वर महादेव, अम्रुतेश्वर महादेव) there which is worth the watch. It dates back to 8th century. Its not a big temple, but its beautiful. Also the way towards temple is littered with waterfalls and road itself is very scenic. Road is ok in condition with small potholes here and there but nothing to worry about.
You can go to Ratangad(रतनगड), Kalasubai(कळसुबाई, highest peak in Sahyadri range at the height of 1646m/5400ft), Konkan kada(कोकण कडा), ghat devi temple, agasti ashram if you have time. From konkan kada, you can see konkan and sahydri ranges from distance. We did not go there.
There is also randha(रंधा) falls which is 8km before bhandardara. This is huge fall and has large water flow(if you travel at right time). Height is impressive too, but you cannot approach this waterfall from bottom. So you wont get complete and proper view of the fall, neither will you be able to witness its roaring sound. Never the less, its good place to see. There is also a small bandhara(बंधारा, small dam) nearby where you can enjoy water.
Overall, its a nice place to visit in monsoon for special reasons mentioned above, but in other seasons too, you can witness Sahyadri ranges and water. Make sure the you have place to stay and expect calm and serene environment, instead of man made attractions. If possible, trek to Ratangad, Kalasubai is a must do.
I will soon upload few photos here so check back soon if you are interested in "ankho dekha hal" :)
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Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Buying the tablet - 2
So that was all going through my head, and finally I made my decision. What follows is thorough discussion on how I reached this decision.
I was looking for cheap tablet, but that does not mean that I wanted it as cheap as possible. I wanted something which would work properly and which would offer acceptable compromises.
Display
I already decided screen size and 8 inch was the way to go. But resolution was something which I was not too much concerned with. Now a days, In 5 inch phones its normal to see 1920x1280 or like resolution. Its great to have, but for tablets its not required. P88 has 1024x768 resolution. And believe me, it appears mediocre but its very very good. I dont find any need for higher resolution, but obviously if you are expecting retina display like sharpness, its not the case here(especially for text).
Point to note here is, typical viewing distance of tablet is higher than phone and hence lower resolution has lesser effect. Also it depends upon quality of display. Small text is somewhat ugly, but its not a major issue.
So resolution is something you can let go but IPS panel HAS to be there. I have a laptop which has pathetic viewing angles. Even when screen tilts by 5degrees or you move your head by couple of inches colors follow all shades in shade card and you see never before seen picture :P So I did not want this to happen for tablet. IPS panel has great viewing angles and saturation/contrast change is very minimal. So I would say this is must have feature. Some chinese manufacturers falsely advertise MVA matrix as IPS, so you need to be careful there. In case of P88, it has IPS panel and its viewing angles are excellent. Its also very bright indoors. In fact if you are watching some high quality image and you put it on table, it almost feels like printed image. However, in sunlight screen washes out and its barely readable.
CPU and GPU
Android requires lot of power to run. Even when you forgo OS, its always good to have excellent CPU as applications are going to get CPU hungry day by day and in general their complexity is going to increase; so its very important to have good CPU. P88 has dual core CPU clocked at 1.6Ghz which is extremely good.
Multiple cores are good to have, but in general having quad or octa core does not scale the performance linearly. So dual core was good enough for me. Also higher clock matters if you want good responsivness. So rk3066 offers excellent clock speed too. In some cases, advertised clock rates make the system unstable and consume battery a lot so actual retail versions of the same product has clock rates reduced.
GPU in my opinion is not as important, but games and other functions like HD video playback etc require this, so if you intend to play games then this should be sufficiently good. P88 has Mali-400 GPU which is good if not excellent. Here again, I was ready for compromise but I did not want a slouch either.
Antutu score of 10600 is excellent and Samsung Galaxy tab 2 cannot match these scores for sure. High end android tabs might be able to outperform this but then they cost at least thrice what P88 costs.
Other stuff
Camera was not important for me. But I preferred tablet having front cam, just in case I want to use it for skype call etc. But back camera is redundant in my opinion. You dont carry tablet around like you carry your phone anyway. For serious use, most of the people use real digital camera. So I did not care about the camera much. Though P88 has 3.5mp camera at back, its very poor quality. Front cam is also very dark but with sufficient light you can have video chat if you want.
Charging port is micro USB in case of P88. Its not very useful as you will have to let go the only USB port you have when you charge the tablet, because of this. I would prefer separate charging port. But there are few options in that regard. Also having proprietary connector would create problems in case if charger breaks, so having micro USB is good in that sense.
It has 3.5mm audio out and HDMI out. I have never used HDMI out, and it was not on my priority list. It has micro sd slot upto 32GB which was very important for me.
16GB of internal memory offered is great. I could have chosen the same tablet even if it had 8GB or lesser memory but 16 gigs was more than enough and I did not require any additional memory card because of this, at least initially.
Battery
Now this was other parameter which was deal breaker for me. P88 offers good battery life in my opinion. Having at least 4000mah for 8 inch tablet is important. But remember that battery usage also depends on kind of cpu/gpu you have. Well known cpu/gpu draw are more memory efficient. P88 offers at least 4hrs of video playback which is ok.
Here I did not want cheap battery which would last only couple of hours. I did not want any cheap battery which might explode either. So I feel you should not buy ultra cheap things as battery would be big question mark in that case. So when you choose your tablet, pay attention to ownership reports for battery performance.
Design and build quality is excellent in this case. No squicks at all. No gaps and excellent finish. Bezel is small and if you want you can hold it in one hand over your palm. But its slightly wider than ipad mini, so its not very comfortable to hold that way for me. But it gives you larger bezel than ipad mini, so its easy to hold any orientation with normal grip(like you hold a book)
Now the let downs -
Wifi
I read about many good chinese tablets having poor wifi connectivity. Either those used to offer unstable wifi, where it catches the signal but data speed never picks up and drops to zero then again normal etc; or it does not detect network at all after you are say 50feet away. So pay attention to those details as well. Not having 3g and bluetooth means good wifi is very essential. P88 was not reported to have these issues. But my dlink router somehow seems to have problems with this tablet. Its an old router which does not support N standard, but still other devices work properly with it, so I wonder why only this tablet fails. So I do have unstable wifi with my P88, but I am blaming my router for this. I do get connection but speed often drops and time out errors are common. But this may not be tablet issue.
System stability
This is difficult to verify unless you have the table itself in your hand. IAfter using it for some time, it gave 'unfortunately xxx has stopped' kind of errors. Those would appear for almost all the apps like launcher, gcore etc and I wasnt able to see my home screen. Reboot helps at times but not always
When this happened for the first time, I had to reset my phone, which deleted all the apps and data.
Then I flashed custom firmware 'winter in russia' by ruslankin(big thanks to him) http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/63010-%C2%ABwinter-in-russia%C2%BB/ which had CWM built in. Then I wiped dalvik cache, cache and fixed permissions and that problem went away.
But I have faced this problem quite a few times(at least 5-6 times in last 3 months) but above mentioned solution worked in all the cases. Once when it happened, my entire home screen was reset. This is annoying, especially when you start your tablet and it doesnt work. I dont know the problem for sure, may be its app or corrupt memory or something else, but its fixable so I am happy for now.
Accelerometer
This is very noisy, even when you put your tablet on table, accelorometer output keeps fluctuating. This is big issue for some games and for some apps like google sky map. I hope this could be fixed by firmware updates, but it wasnt fixed in last 2-3 firmware revisions, so I think its hardware issue.
Touchscreen is good in general. But touching small areas like cross to close the tab in browser, or to reload page, or to select piece of text, or to position cursor to correct spelling could be annoying at times. In case of closing tabs, touch wont be registered at all or it might do something else; basically touch at times get sensed at undesired location.
While positioning the cursor, lets say to correct spelling, you require immense accuracy. If you have not zoomed in to sufficiently large size, when you move your finger away from screen(untouch) cursor might move to adjacent character.
So finally, overall I am happy with my purchase of Teclast P88. I bought it from aliexpress for approx $140 in April 2013. If you are not going to use it for work, its an excellent tablet to have. For any serious stuff like work, wifi and stability are question marks. So if you use it carefully(like installing only required apps), it might serve that purpose as well.
I intend to use it for on the go stuff like reading books, watching videos and games. It performs those functions very well.
Teclast has done excellent job and putting cost down and still maintaining quality in all areas is difficult. Teclast would surely improve things as they go ahead.
So thats all about my review cum buying guide and it was a loong post. So I would stop here. But I think that what parameters I considered for buying would be helpful for others and review might help somebody to make the decision. So thats it for now... Happy buying!
I was looking for cheap tablet, but that does not mean that I wanted it as cheap as possible. I wanted something which would work properly and which would offer acceptable compromises.
Display
I already decided screen size and 8 inch was the way to go. But resolution was something which I was not too much concerned with. Now a days, In 5 inch phones its normal to see 1920x1280 or like resolution. Its great to have, but for tablets its not required. P88 has 1024x768 resolution. And believe me, it appears mediocre but its very very good. I dont find any need for higher resolution, but obviously if you are expecting retina display like sharpness, its not the case here(especially for text).
Point to note here is, typical viewing distance of tablet is higher than phone and hence lower resolution has lesser effect. Also it depends upon quality of display. Small text is somewhat ugly, but its not a major issue.
So resolution is something you can let go but IPS panel HAS to be there. I have a laptop which has pathetic viewing angles. Even when screen tilts by 5degrees or you move your head by couple of inches colors follow all shades in shade card and you see never before seen picture :P So I did not want this to happen for tablet. IPS panel has great viewing angles and saturation/contrast change is very minimal. So I would say this is must have feature. Some chinese manufacturers falsely advertise MVA matrix as IPS, so you need to be careful there. In case of P88, it has IPS panel and its viewing angles are excellent. Its also very bright indoors. In fact if you are watching some high quality image and you put it on table, it almost feels like printed image. However, in sunlight screen washes out and its barely readable.
CPU and GPU
Android requires lot of power to run. Even when you forgo OS, its always good to have excellent CPU as applications are going to get CPU hungry day by day and in general their complexity is going to increase; so its very important to have good CPU. P88 has dual core CPU clocked at 1.6Ghz which is extremely good.
Multiple cores are good to have, but in general having quad or octa core does not scale the performance linearly. So dual core was good enough for me. Also higher clock matters if you want good responsivness. So rk3066 offers excellent clock speed too. In some cases, advertised clock rates make the system unstable and consume battery a lot so actual retail versions of the same product has clock rates reduced.
GPU in my opinion is not as important, but games and other functions like HD video playback etc require this, so if you intend to play games then this should be sufficiently good. P88 has Mali-400 GPU which is good if not excellent. Here again, I was ready for compromise but I did not want a slouch either.
Antutu score of 10600 is excellent and Samsung Galaxy tab 2 cannot match these scores for sure. High end android tabs might be able to outperform this but then they cost at least thrice what P88 costs.
Other stuff
Camera was not important for me. But I preferred tablet having front cam, just in case I want to use it for skype call etc. But back camera is redundant in my opinion. You dont carry tablet around like you carry your phone anyway. For serious use, most of the people use real digital camera. So I did not care about the camera much. Though P88 has 3.5mp camera at back, its very poor quality. Front cam is also very dark but with sufficient light you can have video chat if you want.
Charging port is micro USB in case of P88. Its not very useful as you will have to let go the only USB port you have when you charge the tablet, because of this. I would prefer separate charging port. But there are few options in that regard. Also having proprietary connector would create problems in case if charger breaks, so having micro USB is good in that sense.
It has 3.5mm audio out and HDMI out. I have never used HDMI out, and it was not on my priority list. It has micro sd slot upto 32GB which was very important for me.
16GB of internal memory offered is great. I could have chosen the same tablet even if it had 8GB or lesser memory but 16 gigs was more than enough and I did not require any additional memory card because of this, at least initially.
Battery
Now this was other parameter which was deal breaker for me. P88 offers good battery life in my opinion. Having at least 4000mah for 8 inch tablet is important. But remember that battery usage also depends on kind of cpu/gpu you have. Well known cpu/gpu draw are more memory efficient. P88 offers at least 4hrs of video playback which is ok.
Here I did not want cheap battery which would last only couple of hours. I did not want any cheap battery which might explode either. So I feel you should not buy ultra cheap things as battery would be big question mark in that case. So when you choose your tablet, pay attention to ownership reports for battery performance.
Design and build quality is excellent in this case. No squicks at all. No gaps and excellent finish. Bezel is small and if you want you can hold it in one hand over your palm. But its slightly wider than ipad mini, so its not very comfortable to hold that way for me. But it gives you larger bezel than ipad mini, so its easy to hold any orientation with normal grip(like you hold a book)
Now the let downs -
Wifi
I read about many good chinese tablets having poor wifi connectivity. Either those used to offer unstable wifi, where it catches the signal but data speed never picks up and drops to zero then again normal etc; or it does not detect network at all after you are say 50feet away. So pay attention to those details as well. Not having 3g and bluetooth means good wifi is very essential. P88 was not reported to have these issues. But my dlink router somehow seems to have problems with this tablet. Its an old router which does not support N standard, but still other devices work properly with it, so I wonder why only this tablet fails. So I do have unstable wifi with my P88, but I am blaming my router for this. I do get connection but speed often drops and time out errors are common. But this may not be tablet issue.
System stability
This is difficult to verify unless you have the table itself in your hand. IAfter using it for some time, it gave 'unfortunately xxx has stopped' kind of errors. Those would appear for almost all the apps like launcher, gcore etc and I wasnt able to see my home screen. Reboot helps at times but not always
When this happened for the first time, I had to reset my phone, which deleted all the apps and data.
Then I flashed custom firmware 'winter in russia' by ruslankin(big thanks to him) http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/63010-%C2%ABwinter-in-russia%C2%BB/ which had CWM built in. Then I wiped dalvik cache, cache and fixed permissions and that problem went away.
But I have faced this problem quite a few times(at least 5-6 times in last 3 months) but above mentioned solution worked in all the cases. Once when it happened, my entire home screen was reset. This is annoying, especially when you start your tablet and it doesnt work. I dont know the problem for sure, may be its app or corrupt memory or something else, but its fixable so I am happy for now.
Accelerometer
This is very noisy, even when you put your tablet on table, accelorometer output keeps fluctuating. This is big issue for some games and for some apps like google sky map. I hope this could be fixed by firmware updates, but it wasnt fixed in last 2-3 firmware revisions, so I think its hardware issue.
Touchscreen is good in general. But touching small areas like cross to close the tab in browser, or to reload page, or to select piece of text, or to position cursor to correct spelling could be annoying at times. In case of closing tabs, touch wont be registered at all or it might do something else; basically touch at times get sensed at undesired location.
While positioning the cursor, lets say to correct spelling, you require immense accuracy. If you have not zoomed in to sufficiently large size, when you move your finger away from screen(untouch) cursor might move to adjacent character.
So finally, overall I am happy with my purchase of Teclast P88. I bought it from aliexpress for approx $140 in April 2013. If you are not going to use it for work, its an excellent tablet to have. For any serious stuff like work, wifi and stability are question marks. So if you use it carefully(like installing only required apps), it might serve that purpose as well.
I intend to use it for on the go stuff like reading books, watching videos and games. It performs those functions very well.
Teclast has done excellent job and putting cost down and still maintaining quality in all areas is difficult. Teclast would surely improve things as they go ahead.
So thats all about my review cum buying guide and it was a loong post. So I would stop here. But I think that what parameters I considered for buying would be helpful for others and review might help somebody to make the decision. So thats it for now... Happy buying!
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Buying the tablet
My beloved Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone is showing its age. Not that it failed on any hardware part, but the Symbian OS now seems and feels unbearably old.
However, what it used to achieve with its puny 450ish MHz clock and some 128MB of RAM and 81MB of internal memory was very good.
So, I was thinking about having a go at Android, but latter thought, why not try the latest trend : Tablet!
It seemed perfectly good option for trying new software platform and also to try never before tried form factor. That was the point when seriously started thinking about buying the tablet.
Note that tablet is not phone. Portability of your phone is unbeatable. Having feature rich phone is much much more useful than tablet. You can use your phone to capture moments, as mp3 player, for taking notes(your purchases, text notes, your card numbers etc), for navigation, for communication(voice call, data call, sms, bluetooth file transfer, chat), as browser, to check mails, alarm clock etc. Tablet can have these functions too, but the fact that its not portable and its not with you always makes many of these functions unusable. On the other hand watching videos, reading books is much more enjoyable on tablet. Playing games too is much more pleasing on tablet. So having immensely tablet was not my priority and in general I think that its not required. Having cutting edge phone is much more productive than having cutting edge tablet. However, tablet can perform some functions of laptop and hence for some people stuff like checking mails, browsing, 3g connectivity might be important while considering the tablet. But still I feel that other uses that I mentioned first are not possible with form factor of the tablet.
Now, being in India, there were very few branded options. Apple Ipad, Asus transformer are out of reach because of their price. Google nexus 7 and Samsung tab appeared good options, but nexus 7 was still not available. Also nexus has serious limitation of non expandable memory and quiet frankly I was unhappy with the fact that Asus would launch it in India in June 2013, mostly because newer version of nexus would appear in the west :x
Coming to Samsung, it was a good choice too. The lowest Samsung tab was priced for around 13000 INR which was very aggressive pricing.
But when I tried 7inch tabs, I was overwhelmingly disappointed(This is another time when I really appreciate Apple for introducing 8inch size, Apple designers proved their excellence yet again).
I do not understand why 16:9 aspect ratio was selected for tablets. This ratio makes PDF, web pages reading extremely uncomfortable.
Imagine rotating your monitor vertically. Agreed, that we read PDF on monitor quiet comfortably, but somehow, on tablet it looks really small. If you try to read it in landscape mode, there are too few lines on screen and you will need to scroll frequently, while in portrait mode, you cannot fit the page by width as it becomes too small to read.
8 inch is perfect size for reading here, in landscape mode there would be enough lines to read before you scroll and in portrait mode you can fit entire page and still read it!
I decided to buy tablet mainly for making my travelling time more productive. Read PDFs and other ebooks, watch movies/videos, play puzzle games 3G connectivity was not a priority for me. Another potential use was to use it for playing MP3/FLAC to my dedicated speakers and if all else fails then use it as photo frame! 8 inch is a perfect size to do all these things.
As a start, chinese tabs appeared very good option. I was not sure about the usefulness of tablet as I prefer my laptop for any meaningful work and I dont need to work while travelling as such. So tablet was more or less redundant for me, hence was ready for calculated compromise.
Chinese tablets looked like godsend alternative. It was cheap, it was value for money, quality was acceptable, it could be ordered online and it had good combination of required features!
So that's how I finally ordered my Teclast P88 tablet.
A quick look at the features -
Excellent IPS screen with good resolution
Very thin at just 9.6mm(same as Samsung galaxy S3), 8 inch size with narrow bezel, White color
Rockchip 3066 dual core CPU clocked at 1.6Ghz
Mali-400 GPU
1GB of RAM
16GB of internal memory
10600 AnTuTu score. Many latest android phones/tablets struggle in 6-8 range of AnTuTu score and cost 15-20k INR. So this score by this tablet is AMAZING.
Only setbacks are - has dodgy wifi in my case for old dlink router(this is mostly routers fault, but not able to verify independently), but many others say that wifi is excellent; and poor camera, I have not used this camera except for initial testing, its THAT bad; and not to forget crappy accelerometer, orientation change is piece of cake but accelerometer has too much noise and it does not stay at constant value which makes playing accelerometer games imprecise and boring, may be it firmware, may be its hardware, I dont know at this point of time.
Next I would talk about my step by step feature consideration and final purchase. So fasten your seat belts and enjoy the blabber.
However, what it used to achieve with its puny 450ish MHz clock and some 128MB of RAM and 81MB of internal memory was very good.
So, I was thinking about having a go at Android, but latter thought, why not try the latest trend : Tablet!
It seemed perfectly good option for trying new software platform and also to try never before tried form factor. That was the point when seriously started thinking about buying the tablet.
Note that tablet is not phone. Portability of your phone is unbeatable. Having feature rich phone is much much more useful than tablet. You can use your phone to capture moments, as mp3 player, for taking notes(your purchases, text notes, your card numbers etc), for navigation, for communication(voice call, data call, sms, bluetooth file transfer, chat), as browser, to check mails, alarm clock etc. Tablet can have these functions too, but the fact that its not portable and its not with you always makes many of these functions unusable. On the other hand watching videos, reading books is much more enjoyable on tablet. Playing games too is much more pleasing on tablet. So having immensely tablet was not my priority and in general I think that its not required. Having cutting edge phone is much more productive than having cutting edge tablet. However, tablet can perform some functions of laptop and hence for some people stuff like checking mails, browsing, 3g connectivity might be important while considering the tablet. But still I feel that other uses that I mentioned first are not possible with form factor of the tablet.
Now, being in India, there were very few branded options. Apple Ipad, Asus transformer are out of reach because of their price. Google nexus 7 and Samsung tab appeared good options, but nexus 7 was still not available. Also nexus has serious limitation of non expandable memory and quiet frankly I was unhappy with the fact that Asus would launch it in India in June 2013, mostly because newer version of nexus would appear in the west :x
Coming to Samsung, it was a good choice too. The lowest Samsung tab was priced for around 13000 INR which was very aggressive pricing.
But when I tried 7inch tabs, I was overwhelmingly disappointed(This is another time when I really appreciate Apple for introducing 8inch size, Apple designers proved their excellence yet again).
I do not understand why 16:9 aspect ratio was selected for tablets. This ratio makes PDF, web pages reading extremely uncomfortable.
Imagine rotating your monitor vertically. Agreed, that we read PDF on monitor quiet comfortably, but somehow, on tablet it looks really small. If you try to read it in landscape mode, there are too few lines on screen and you will need to scroll frequently, while in portrait mode, you cannot fit the page by width as it becomes too small to read.
8 inch is perfect size for reading here, in landscape mode there would be enough lines to read before you scroll and in portrait mode you can fit entire page and still read it!
I decided to buy tablet mainly for making my travelling time more productive. Read PDFs and other ebooks, watch movies/videos, play puzzle games 3G connectivity was not a priority for me. Another potential use was to use it for playing MP3/FLAC to my dedicated speakers and if all else fails then use it as photo frame! 8 inch is a perfect size to do all these things.
As a start, chinese tabs appeared very good option. I was not sure about the usefulness of tablet as I prefer my laptop for any meaningful work and I dont need to work while travelling as such. So tablet was more or less redundant for me, hence was ready for calculated compromise.
Chinese tablets looked like godsend alternative. It was cheap, it was value for money, quality was acceptable, it could be ordered online and it had good combination of required features!
So that's how I finally ordered my Teclast P88 tablet.
A quick look at the features -
Excellent IPS screen with good resolution
Very thin at just 9.6mm(same as Samsung galaxy S3), 8 inch size with narrow bezel, White color
Rockchip 3066 dual core CPU clocked at 1.6Ghz
Mali-400 GPU
1GB of RAM
16GB of internal memory
10600 AnTuTu score. Many latest android phones/tablets struggle in 6-8 range of AnTuTu score and cost 15-20k INR. So this score by this tablet is AMAZING.
Only setbacks are - has dodgy wifi in my case for old dlink router(this is mostly routers fault, but not able to verify independently), but many others say that wifi is excellent; and poor camera, I have not used this camera except for initial testing, its THAT bad; and not to forget crappy accelerometer, orientation change is piece of cake but accelerometer has too much noise and it does not stay at constant value which makes playing accelerometer games imprecise and boring, may be it firmware, may be its hardware, I dont know at this point of time.
Next I would talk about my step by step feature consideration and final purchase. So fasten your seat belts and enjoy the blabber.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
My tryst with Linux
Well, I hope that this would turn out to be short and sweet(useful) post.
Since my college(2003-2007) days I have tried many flavors of linux. And my experience, well, has not been that encouraging. IMHO Linux falls short in 2 main areas 1 - hardware support for different types of hardwares 2 - out of the box working softwares. That seem to have changed in recent years. Internet is still essential resource if you want your Linux running smoothly.
At that time, I tried ubuntu, Suse, fedora, red hat, centos, mandriva and what not. They all used to work to some extent but configuring my combination of hardware was overwhelming task for all those distros. Display, sound, mouse, modem anything used to go wrong. Fixing it used to take painful patience and diligence. Worst of all, whatever tricks, tips you tried 6 months back wont work on other hardware/distribution/version/etc/etc. In short, your hard earned knowledge wouldnt stand a chance against the wave of time.
This changed and when I got my laptop(2010) first thing I tried was fedora. This was mostly a good experience, however, I would still not suggest Linux for starters. Windows is an extremely safe and stable bet, and of course its much more productive.
Almost everything worked at that time except wi-fi card. With some googling, I was able to fix that. Still, there was persistent issue of laptop overheating. I did try to resolve it, but it did not work. Using powertop, lm_sensors, lspci, HD SMART utilities did not have much impact. Laptop becomes blazing hot in summer and unbearable in other seasons. It wont shut down because of overheating or anything but I feared that it would melt the plastic parts eventually.
Come to 2013, and I tried fedora 17. This was even better experience as I got everything working out of the box including wi-fi card. Also, having running and stable internet means that I can install/uninstall easily. Otherwise, I would say that its still extremely difficult to make your Linux work properly without internet connection. There are a few thing which needed tweaks. So here is my take on fedora 17 -
You will need to add few more things to default fedora 17 post installation.
- get yourself acquainted with yum
- install non-free repositories
- install vlc and other utilities which would make mp3/video playback possible (yum install gstreamer gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg vlc)
Also I did -
- Enable gnome advance options[which are not so advance] (yum install gnome-tweak-tool)
- Enable power-off option under username menu (yum install gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu)
- install gnome extensions, easiest way is it open extension in firefox and switch on, this installs it automatically.
- install better install manger (yum install yumex)
I again had problem with overheating of laptop. I tried many suggestions mentioned on internet forums but thread like view provided by forums does not help much. In many cases solution works partially and reading entire thread becomes very confusing. So here is gist of what I gathered-
If you have ATI graphics card and newer laptop, chances are that you might face the problem of laptop overheating. This is mainly because of mismanaged power profile of the graphics card. Since GPU is always forced to run under high profile mode, it consumes lot of battery and overheats. To avoid this you can try -
echo profile > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method
echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
What this would essentially do is, it would set power profile for your graphics card to 'low'. Now, this worked in my case to an extent but it was not complete solution.
Default ATI drivers that come with fedora 17 are good from behavior perspective. There is no flicker, videos work and all, only there is problem with power consumption. Now, installing other drivers might solve this power problem(as suggested on forums). But this installation is not straight forward. ATI dropped support for older graphics card and hence latest drivers may not work. This happened in my case. Also, drivers available on ATI site are not available for fedora. I have Dell Inspiron laptop with ATI 550v card and latest ATI catalyst driver 12.10 does not work in my case. 12.6 should work for legacy cards, as per forums. So after numerous yum install and yum history rollback, I decided to try something on my own. Copy-pasting exact commands on forums did not help in my case. Finally, what I tried was -
yum install xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-legacy.x86_64
This fixed my problem! Now, I have cooler laptop and fully supported driver too!
Now that its working properly, here are some serious advantages of Linux which I would like to mention.
- start within minute, so its very useful when you need quick start
- its a great learning tool
- many free softwares could be easily found and used(like libre office suite, vlc), which may or may not be present on windows(shell scripting, cron, grep etc is not easily available on windows)
- its virus and bloat free. even when you use linux for years, it wont get bloated and would start withing minutes
Since my college(2003-2007) days I have tried many flavors of linux. And my experience, well, has not been that encouraging. IMHO Linux falls short in 2 main areas 1 - hardware support for different types of hardwares 2 - out of the box working softwares. That seem to have changed in recent years. Internet is still essential resource if you want your Linux running smoothly.
At that time, I tried ubuntu, Suse, fedora, red hat, centos, mandriva and what not. They all used to work to some extent but configuring my combination of hardware was overwhelming task for all those distros. Display, sound, mouse, modem anything used to go wrong. Fixing it used to take painful patience and diligence. Worst of all, whatever tricks, tips you tried 6 months back wont work on other hardware/distribution/version/etc/etc. In short, your hard earned knowledge wouldnt stand a chance against the wave of time.
This changed and when I got my laptop(2010) first thing I tried was fedora. This was mostly a good experience, however, I would still not suggest Linux for starters. Windows is an extremely safe and stable bet, and of course its much more productive.
Almost everything worked at that time except wi-fi card. With some googling, I was able to fix that. Still, there was persistent issue of laptop overheating. I did try to resolve it, but it did not work. Using powertop, lm_sensors, lspci, HD SMART utilities did not have much impact. Laptop becomes blazing hot in summer and unbearable in other seasons. It wont shut down because of overheating or anything but I feared that it would melt the plastic parts eventually.
Come to 2013, and I tried fedora 17. This was even better experience as I got everything working out of the box including wi-fi card. Also, having running and stable internet means that I can install/uninstall easily. Otherwise, I would say that its still extremely difficult to make your Linux work properly without internet connection. There are a few thing which needed tweaks. So here is my take on fedora 17 -
You will need to add few more things to default fedora 17 post installation.
- get yourself acquainted with yum
- install non-free repositories
- install vlc and other utilities which would make mp3/video playback possible (yum install gstreamer gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg vlc)
Also I did -
- Enable gnome advance options[which are not so advance] (yum install gnome-tweak-tool)
- Enable power-off option under username menu (yum install gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu)
- install gnome extensions, easiest way is it open extension in firefox and switch on, this installs it automatically.
- install better install manger (yum install yumex)
I again had problem with overheating of laptop. I tried many suggestions mentioned on internet forums but thread like view provided by forums does not help much. In many cases solution works partially and reading entire thread becomes very confusing. So here is gist of what I gathered-
If you have ATI graphics card and newer laptop, chances are that you might face the problem of laptop overheating. This is mainly because of mismanaged power profile of the graphics card. Since GPU is always forced to run under high profile mode, it consumes lot of battery and overheats. To avoid this you can try -
echo profile > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method
echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
What this would essentially do is, it would set power profile for your graphics card to 'low'. Now, this worked in my case to an extent but it was not complete solution.
Default ATI drivers that come with fedora 17 are good from behavior perspective. There is no flicker, videos work and all, only there is problem with power consumption. Now, installing other drivers might solve this power problem(as suggested on forums). But this installation is not straight forward. ATI dropped support for older graphics card and hence latest drivers may not work. This happened in my case. Also, drivers available on ATI site are not available for fedora. I have Dell Inspiron laptop with ATI 550v card and latest ATI catalyst driver 12.10 does not work in my case. 12.6 should work for legacy cards, as per forums. So after numerous yum install and yum history rollback, I decided to try something on my own. Copy-pasting exact commands on forums did not help in my case. Finally, what I tried was -
yum install xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-legacy.x86_64
This fixed my problem! Now, I have cooler laptop and fully supported driver too!
Now that its working properly, here are some serious advantages of Linux which I would like to mention.
- start within minute, so its very useful when you need quick start
- its a great learning tool
- many free softwares could be easily found and used(like libre office suite, vlc), which may or may not be present on windows(shell scripting, cron, grep etc is not easily available on windows)
- its virus and bloat free. even when you use linux for years, it wont get bloated and would start withing minutes
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Spending Model
The other day I was thinking about my spendings. Once in a while I get puzzled when I look into by bank account. When I introspect, almost always I feel like I have been victim of some online security intrusion and my money has been transferred into some hackers account.
But when I look more carefully, though, I realize that its not the case. All my money was and is still there with me. But somehow my spending has been more than what I thought.
Also I am kind of thrifty(my friends might say that this is good use of euphemism). But its true that I and many of us are not able to judge if any perticuler good or commodity is worth its values or not. When buying something, there are many criterias that one can apply. Quality and brand name are some of the very important ones. However, in some cases, its difficult to choose the way as all options have similar weight. Also there are cases when you can't really comment whether its ok to spend given amount of money for something.
I was thinking about this and it was difficult to objectively judge spending decisions. Then I came up with this very simple spending model which can explain if something is worth spending the money on. This helped me a lot to determine few over spendings and in some cases justify/oppose certain spending decisions.
This simple model goes like this -
spending worthiness index(index) = (your monthly salary/100[gc]*expected utility duration[ud] of the product in months)*(importance multiplier[im])/product value
gc - goods count(no of things you wish to buy in a month time), standard value is 100
sf - salary fraction = your monthly salary/gc
ud - utility duration in months(time for which good will last/good would be retired, whichever is earlier)
im - importance multiplier(how much the good is important, alternate way to calculate is - 100/no of such goods you need in your lifetime(applicable for non moveable assets mainly))
if product value < (your monthly salary/100*expected utility duration of the product in months)*(importance multiplier)
For normal people with normal salary/income, this 100 coefficient is good enough. You can alter it to some extent according to your position.
Importance multiplier is usually a whole number and equal to 1 for all normal scenarios. You can decide this number yourself, but general observation is for certain luxury goods, this is higher.
Now if product value is more(or index is lesser than 1), then obviously you are over spending. If its less(or index is higer than 1) then that prodct is worth. Now, it should be noted that for certain product catagories this importance multiplier is not equal to one. In such cases all other products in the same catagory should be evaluated with that multiplier and conclusion should be reached.
Now some real world example,
Lets say I have monthly salary of 25000, and I have bought Nokia 5800 for 18000rs 3yrs back. Now, I am thinking about buying a new phone. When should I buy a new phone?
According to spending model that was mentioned, I have used the phone for 12*3=36 months. 250rs is monthly allocation. Which means, in 3 yrs I have used 36*250=9000rs out of initial spending of 18000. This means that after 3 more years I should start thinking about new phone.
How about a watch? How much you should spend on it? Usually we use watch for more than 5yrs. 12*5=60months. Considering 25k/pm salary, it comes to 250[sf]*60[ud]=15000. Which means you can easily go for swatch/rado watch! Its really worth. it!
For your own house -
You would use it for 30yrs, which means 30*12=360months. 360(ud)*250(sf)=90000. Now this is completely wrong. For such assets, importance coefficient of 10 or more could be applied.
For a car,
utility duration = 10yrs = 120[ud]*250[sf]*10[im]=300000rs.
There is another perspective to the importance coefficient. This should be chosen as -
importance multiplier=100/number of similar things that you wish to have
For example, you might want to own 3 houses. Which means im of 100/3=33 should be applied. If you recalculate again then this is now this is closer to what we usually spend to own a house in bigger cities like Pune.
Similarly for car, if you start at the age of 25, you might own 4 cars in you life time. 100/4=25. If you apply im of 25 then you can spend 120[ud]*250[sf]*25[im]=7.5lakh for car.
How about some commodities? Is pizza worth? Is pavbhaji worth?
pizza : utility duration - 1/30month but probably you eat pizza once in a week, so its 7/30. now 7/30*250=53rs. But pizza is much more costly than 53rs. Which means we are definitely over spending! This also means that you should eat pizza once in 5 months to make it worth. However, pavbhaji is a worthy spending as it costs closer to 53rs and hence you can eat pavbhaji once a week :)
If you calculate most of the good's cost you will realize that this model fits well in most of the scenarios. But there are some definite outliers.
Now some reasoning behind this model -
gc of 100 is chosen because with this value, meaning is, you can buy 100 such things in a month. If you count all things that you buy in a month(even commodities like bread, biscuit, subji, wheat, rice, CDs etc) 100 is a good and large enough number.
Utility duration is important as the amount of time perticular thing lasts varies. Short utility value things cannot be costly as one cannot afford it
Similarly, there is importance attached to some things like car, house or your hobbies, so in such cases higher coefficient could be applied.
Its kind of tricky to find out utility duration and importance multiplier, but in most cases you can find some aggreeable and correct number or you can deduce that number from other thing in that catagory(like pizza vs pavbhaji comparison). Also you can apply usual notions of something being more useful or more costly to alter [im], but 1 is a good default. Like non veg food is more costly than veg food is acceptable and hence non veg food has higher [im]. Or education might be costly, but its very important so its ok to use unusually high importance multiplier for it.
So try using this simple but useful model which can explain your spending decisions to some extent at least. This should give you a good baseline...
But when I look more carefully, though, I realize that its not the case. All my money was and is still there with me. But somehow my spending has been more than what I thought.
Also I am kind of thrifty(my friends might say that this is good use of euphemism). But its true that I and many of us are not able to judge if any perticuler good or commodity is worth its values or not. When buying something, there are many criterias that one can apply. Quality and brand name are some of the very important ones. However, in some cases, its difficult to choose the way as all options have similar weight. Also there are cases when you can't really comment whether its ok to spend given amount of money for something.
I was thinking about this and it was difficult to objectively judge spending decisions. Then I came up with this very simple spending model which can explain if something is worth spending the money on. This helped me a lot to determine few over spendings and in some cases justify/oppose certain spending decisions.
This simple model goes like this -
spending worthiness index(index) = (your monthly salary/100[gc]*expected utility duration[ud] of the product in months)*(importance multiplier[im])/product value
gc - goods count(no of things you wish to buy in a month time), standard value is 100
sf - salary fraction = your monthly salary/gc
ud - utility duration in months(time for which good will last/good would be retired, whichever is earlier)
im - importance multiplier(how much the good is important, alternate way to calculate is - 100/no of such goods you need in your lifetime(applicable for non moveable assets mainly))
if product value < (your monthly salary/100*expected utility duration of the product in months)*(importance multiplier)
For normal people with normal salary/income, this 100 coefficient is good enough. You can alter it to some extent according to your position.
Importance multiplier is usually a whole number and equal to 1 for all normal scenarios. You can decide this number yourself, but general observation is for certain luxury goods, this is higher.
Now if product value is more(or index is lesser than 1), then obviously you are over spending. If its less(or index is higer than 1) then that prodct is worth. Now, it should be noted that for certain product catagories this importance multiplier is not equal to one. In such cases all other products in the same catagory should be evaluated with that multiplier and conclusion should be reached.
Now some real world example,
Lets say I have monthly salary of 25000, and I have bought Nokia 5800 for 18000rs 3yrs back. Now, I am thinking about buying a new phone. When should I buy a new phone?
According to spending model that was mentioned, I have used the phone for 12*3=36 months. 250rs is monthly allocation. Which means, in 3 yrs I have used 36*250=9000rs out of initial spending of 18000. This means that after 3 more years I should start thinking about new phone.
How about a watch? How much you should spend on it? Usually we use watch for more than 5yrs. 12*5=60months. Considering 25k/pm salary, it comes to 250[sf]*60[ud]=15000. Which means you can easily go for swatch/rado watch! Its really worth. it!
For your own house -
You would use it for 30yrs, which means 30*12=360months. 360(ud)*250(sf)=90000. Now this is completely wrong. For such assets, importance coefficient of 10 or more could be applied.
For a car,
utility duration = 10yrs = 120[ud]*250[sf]*10[im]=300000rs.
There is another perspective to the importance coefficient. This should be chosen as -
importance multiplier=100/number of similar things that you wish to have
For example, you might want to own 3 houses. Which means im of 100/3=33 should be applied. If you recalculate again then this is now this is closer to what we usually spend to own a house in bigger cities like Pune.
Similarly for car, if you start at the age of 25, you might own 4 cars in you life time. 100/4=25. If you apply im of 25 then you can spend 120[ud]*250[sf]*25[im]=7.5lakh for car.
How about some commodities? Is pizza worth? Is pavbhaji worth?
pizza : utility duration - 1/30month but probably you eat pizza once in a week, so its 7/30. now 7/30*250=53rs. But pizza is much more costly than 53rs. Which means we are definitely over spending! This also means that you should eat pizza once in 5 months to make it worth. However, pavbhaji is a worthy spending as it costs closer to 53rs and hence you can eat pavbhaji once a week :)
If you calculate most of the good's cost you will realize that this model fits well in most of the scenarios. But there are some definite outliers.
Now some reasoning behind this model -
gc of 100 is chosen because with this value, meaning is, you can buy 100 such things in a month. If you count all things that you buy in a month(even commodities like bread, biscuit, subji, wheat, rice, CDs etc) 100 is a good and large enough number.
Utility duration is important as the amount of time perticular thing lasts varies. Short utility value things cannot be costly as one cannot afford it
Similarly, there is importance attached to some things like car, house or your hobbies, so in such cases higher coefficient could be applied.
Its kind of tricky to find out utility duration and importance multiplier, but in most cases you can find some aggreeable and correct number or you can deduce that number from other thing in that catagory(like pizza vs pavbhaji comparison). Also you can apply usual notions of something being more useful or more costly to alter [im], but 1 is a good default. Like non veg food is more costly than veg food is acceptable and hence non veg food has higher [im]. Or education might be costly, but its very important so its ok to use unusually high importance multiplier for it.
So try using this simple but useful model which can explain your spending decisions to some extent at least. This should give you a good baseline...
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Petrol Car vs Diesel Car
I was searching on this topic when I wanted to buy new car. There is plenty of information available but I did not find anything targeted specifically at what I was looking for. Here is kind of consolidated list of all the arguments, my own thoughts and my conclusion. For other things, interested people can have a look at Team BHP site, http://www.team-bhp.com/
You will find most of your car queries answered there.
Coming back to the topic, When going for new car, apart from the company and model, you have the choice about the fuel. So which fuel you should use?
There is significant cost difference between initial price of petrol and diesel vehicle. Price wise diesel car would become preferable only if you are able save enough money (because of cheaper fuel and better mileage of diesel) to compensate for this initial price difference.
Petrol prices are lower in India than diesel. Reason for this is not very technical. Its mostly because diesel is subsidized. Diesel is used in heavy vehicles for Good's transport and hence the subsidization. This keeps the commodity prices low as transportation cost is reduced. Many car manufacturers manipulate this basic price difference and come up with car engines that can consume Diesel. Diesel engine cars are not very popular in western countries and also all premium vehicles almost exclusively run on Petrol.
Technically speaking, Diesel should be cheaper than petrol because Diesel is less refined than Petrol in distillation process and hence Diesel production is cheaper than Petrol production. But this production cost wise difference is smaller and difference that we see in India is larger and out of proportion because of the subsidization.
Petrol engines have better performance characteristics and lesser maintenance. Diesel produces more soot and is more sensitive to fuel and oil contamination, hence maintenance cost is higher. Also diesel engines produce more vibrations. Higher maintenance cost is also aggravated because of higher compression of the diesel engines. As there are no spark plugs in diesel engines, more compression is required to keep the engine running.
Diesel engines are mostly used in high power, slow acceleration vehicles and compared to Petrol, diesel have more resale value. All above arguments about diesel engines are getting more and more weaker with newer diesel engines which incorporate advanced technology like Common Rail Direct Injection (CRDI) and hence buying a diesel car is making more and more sense.
One interesting thing to note is, though, that diesel cars are costlier than petrol cars. Typically price difference is 80000rs to 100000rs in India. And also rate of growth of Petrol prices is much higher than that of diesel. As diesel price change has more impact on economy, government cannot change diesel prices very frequently and with same rate as that of petrol. Having petrol car affects you psychologically more. Because you pay higher per km, you think more before using a petrol car. In case of diesel you hardly need to worry about the fuel consumption as price you pay per km is much lesser than Petrol. Even when you compare public transport rates per km with that of diesel car, diesel is on par. This has huge positive impact on your mind and you tend to use your diesel car more frequently than equivalent petrol car.
After all above arguments I still feel that petrol car is more value for money than diesel cars. Hence couple of years back, I chose to go with petrol car. Diesel car purchase would become good deal only after certain period of time. To achieve this break even(because you pay higher for diesel engine) it might take 2yrs to 5yrs depending on usage. My recommendation is, only if you have 15000km running per year, you should go for a diesel car.
Here is some interesting maths, which can prove my point -
Following is the total cost to travel 500km by both fuels, with current fuel rates in Pune :
2737.69rs : with petrol, distance - 500 km, price - 71.18rs/litre, 13kmpl avg
1271.47 : with diesel, distance - 500km, price - 43.23rs/litre, 17kmpl avg
hence difference : 1466 for 500km i.e. 2.932rs/km difference
Initial price diff between petrol and diesel car - 80000rs
hence, you need 27285.12 km running before diesel car is more profitable.
Some of you might not agree with average of diesel and petrol engine. Hence following is revised calculation which is more in favour of diesel cars because these averages are not realistic -
cost to travel 500km by both fuels, with current fuel rates in Pune :
3235.45 : with petrol, distance - 500 km, price - 71.18rs/litre, 11kmpl avg
1080.75 : with diesel, distance - 500km, price - 43.23rs/litre, 20kmpl avg
hence difference - 2155 for 500km i.e. 4.312rs/km difference
Initial price diff between petrol and diesel car - 80000rs
hence, you need 18561.48 km running before diesel car is more profitable.
I have not considered higher maintenance cost associated with diesel(like diesel engine oil is costlier). Obviously if you own car for more than 5 yrs, eventually diesel car would turn out to be more profitable. But you should also consider that if you can invest 80000(difference between petrol and diesel car) in fixed deposit, it would generate enough interest. This interest you can again put in buying more petrol. This would mean that you would achieve the break even at even later stage. If you are buying car on loan then obviously this break even could take even longer.
Overall I favour Petrol car over Diesel, as of now at least.
P.S. : Before I conclude, some account of total spending I have done on my car(i10 magna, kappa engine oct 2007 purchase) in last two years - Insurance, 9000(second year), 7500(third year)
Paid servicing - once, 3000
Oil change - 900*3=2700
other expenses - some painting 2000, some stupid mouse ate by windshield fluid pipe which costed me around 300rs
Total expenses - 25000 in two years
You will find most of your car queries answered there.
Coming back to the topic, When going for new car, apart from the company and model, you have the choice about the fuel. So which fuel you should use?
There is significant cost difference between initial price of petrol and diesel vehicle. Price wise diesel car would become preferable only if you are able save enough money (because of cheaper fuel and better mileage of diesel) to compensate for this initial price difference.
Petrol prices are lower in India than diesel. Reason for this is not very technical. Its mostly because diesel is subsidized. Diesel is used in heavy vehicles for Good's transport and hence the subsidization. This keeps the commodity prices low as transportation cost is reduced. Many car manufacturers manipulate this basic price difference and come up with car engines that can consume Diesel. Diesel engine cars are not very popular in western countries and also all premium vehicles almost exclusively run on Petrol.
Technically speaking, Diesel should be cheaper than petrol because Diesel is less refined than Petrol in distillation process and hence Diesel production is cheaper than Petrol production. But this production cost wise difference is smaller and difference that we see in India is larger and out of proportion because of the subsidization.
Petrol engines have better performance characteristics and lesser maintenance. Diesel produces more soot and is more sensitive to fuel and oil contamination, hence maintenance cost is higher. Also diesel engines produce more vibrations. Higher maintenance cost is also aggravated because of higher compression of the diesel engines. As there are no spark plugs in diesel engines, more compression is required to keep the engine running.
Diesel engines are mostly used in high power, slow acceleration vehicles and compared to Petrol, diesel have more resale value. All above arguments about diesel engines are getting more and more weaker with newer diesel engines which incorporate advanced technology like Common Rail Direct Injection (CRDI) and hence buying a diesel car is making more and more sense.
One interesting thing to note is, though, that diesel cars are costlier than petrol cars. Typically price difference is 80000rs to 100000rs in India. And also rate of growth of Petrol prices is much higher than that of diesel. As diesel price change has more impact on economy, government cannot change diesel prices very frequently and with same rate as that of petrol. Having petrol car affects you psychologically more. Because you pay higher per km, you think more before using a petrol car. In case of diesel you hardly need to worry about the fuel consumption as price you pay per km is much lesser than Petrol. Even when you compare public transport rates per km with that of diesel car, diesel is on par. This has huge positive impact on your mind and you tend to use your diesel car more frequently than equivalent petrol car.
After all above arguments I still feel that petrol car is more value for money than diesel cars. Hence couple of years back, I chose to go with petrol car. Diesel car purchase would become good deal only after certain period of time. To achieve this break even(because you pay higher for diesel engine) it might take 2yrs to 5yrs depending on usage. My recommendation is, only if you have 15000km running per year, you should go for a diesel car.
Here is some interesting maths, which can prove my point -
Following is the total cost to travel 500km by both fuels, with current fuel rates in Pune :
2737.69rs : with petrol, distance - 500 km, price - 71.18rs/litre, 13kmpl avg
1271.47 : with diesel, distance - 500km, price - 43.23rs/litre, 17kmpl avg
hence difference : 1466 for 500km i.e. 2.932rs/km difference
Initial price diff between petrol and diesel car - 80000rs
hence, you need 27285.12 km running before diesel car is more profitable.
Some of you might not agree with average of diesel and petrol engine. Hence following is revised calculation which is more in favour of diesel cars because these averages are not realistic -
cost to travel 500km by both fuels, with current fuel rates in Pune :
3235.45 : with petrol, distance - 500 km, price - 71.18rs/litre, 11kmpl avg
1080.75 : with diesel, distance - 500km, price - 43.23rs/litre, 20kmpl avg
hence difference - 2155 for 500km i.e. 4.312rs/km difference
Initial price diff between petrol and diesel car - 80000rs
hence, you need 18561.48 km running before diesel car is more profitable.
I have not considered higher maintenance cost associated with diesel(like diesel engine oil is costlier). Obviously if you own car for more than 5 yrs, eventually diesel car would turn out to be more profitable. But you should also consider that if you can invest 80000(difference between petrol and diesel car) in fixed deposit, it would generate enough interest. This interest you can again put in buying more petrol. This would mean that you would achieve the break even at even later stage. If you are buying car on loan then obviously this break even could take even longer.
Overall I favour Petrol car over Diesel, as of now at least.
P.S. : Before I conclude, some account of total spending I have done on my car(i10 magna, kappa engine oct 2007 purchase) in last two years - Insurance, 9000(second year), 7500(third year)
Paid servicing - once, 3000
Oil change - 900*3=2700
other expenses - some painting 2000, some stupid mouse ate by windshield fluid pipe which costed me around 300rs
Total expenses - 25000 in two years
Saturday, May 9, 2009
To touch or not, that is the question...
Its been long since I wrote anything... But that does not mean that I was not thinking, or I did not had any topics in my mind. More than anything else my main concern was, if at all anybody is reading my blog or not? and if at all it is useful for anybody... But nevertheless, I will still continue the my work...
I bought a touch screen phone a few days back. Its 5800 xpressMusic phone. I am not going to write phone review here. Its a nice phone, nicely balanced around price and functionality. Before deciding about this phone, I always wondered if touchscreen can replace/compete/outperform physical button based interface or not. Well, here is my answer to that.
Buttons are good to perform really fast actions like gaming and texting. And believe me there is no match to buttons. They are simply great, when looked from shear speed perspective. However touchscreen has its own advantages. Some of them are workarounds and not really answers.
On touchscreen usually you get the luxury of typing in full QUERTY mode or half QUERTY mode. Though speed might be slower than typical T9 button speed, its still comparable. Especially so in India because, while texting we many times use hindi/native language/abbriviations. These are really hard to type with multitap. So here touchscreen comes to the rescue. My take is, touchscreen is not a that bad option either.
Gaming, well here physical keypad wins. But having touchscreen exposes some totally new perspective for gaming, and makes playing a few games much more enjoyable. For example, playing sudoku or battleship on touchscreen is amazing. No irritating key presses in succession. In case of games, which require fast user input, though are difficult to enjoy. For example, tetris or snake at higher levels becomes boring. It might be challenging, as still you might struggle to keep the pace, but overall things are slower.
Another thing to note here is, on TS your finger/stylus touches the screen and blocks the view. Especially for gaming this is irritating. However sometimes you get the privilege of random access(as you can directly jump from one place to another) and hence you can do things faster than normal keypad.
Browsing, GPS, calculator like 'jumpy' applications, typing URLs, choosing from n options is very straightforward on touchscreen.
Finally, I would say that touchscreen is slightly more productive in general. Also touchscreens are really big, but there is limitation on size of screen for normal keypad based phone. Phone cannot grow beyond 8in x 5in and some place is always need to be reserved for keypad. Hence total screen area is ALWAYS smaller on keypad based phone. And having more screen area is much more advantageous.
I cannot comment about durability, but here I think physical keypad would win. For all practicle purposes though touchscreen might not fail either...
Closing comments, I would also like to comment about capacitive verses resistive touchscreens. 5800 uses resistive and omnipresent iPhone uses capacitive. Here too, in the long run I feel that resistive screen is better option. And always stylus should be bundled with any touchscreen based phone.
Capacitive touchscreens are more responsive, make no mistake about that. But resistive are not that bad either. After getting used to it, its not a that big deal. Just while tapping you need to use your fingernails, its more about getting used to it. Arguably resistive are more durable. Stylus is a must as viewing web pages, or playing games like sudoku is very easy with stylus. I wonder how it could be done efficiently without stylus. Even if screen is capacitive, when precise touching point is needed, there is no alternative for resistive screen.
So here too, I would say resistive touchscreens with stylus are preferable.
I bought a touch screen phone a few days back. Its 5800 xpressMusic phone. I am not going to write phone review here. Its a nice phone, nicely balanced around price and functionality. Before deciding about this phone, I always wondered if touchscreen can replace/compete/outperform physical button based interface or not. Well, here is my answer to that.
Buttons are good to perform really fast actions like gaming and texting. And believe me there is no match to buttons. They are simply great, when looked from shear speed perspective. However touchscreen has its own advantages. Some of them are workarounds and not really answers.
On touchscreen usually you get the luxury of typing in full QUERTY mode or half QUERTY mode. Though speed might be slower than typical T9 button speed, its still comparable. Especially so in India because, while texting we many times use hindi/native language/abbriviations. These are really hard to type with multitap. So here touchscreen comes to the rescue. My take is, touchscreen is not a that bad option either.
Gaming, well here physical keypad wins. But having touchscreen exposes some totally new perspective for gaming, and makes playing a few games much more enjoyable. For example, playing sudoku or battleship on touchscreen is amazing. No irritating key presses in succession. In case of games, which require fast user input, though are difficult to enjoy. For example, tetris or snake at higher levels becomes boring. It might be challenging, as still you might struggle to keep the pace, but overall things are slower.
Another thing to note here is, on TS your finger/stylus touches the screen and blocks the view. Especially for gaming this is irritating. However sometimes you get the privilege of random access(as you can directly jump from one place to another) and hence you can do things faster than normal keypad.
Browsing, GPS, calculator like 'jumpy' applications, typing URLs, choosing from n options is very straightforward on touchscreen.
Finally, I would say that touchscreen is slightly more productive in general. Also touchscreens are really big, but there is limitation on size of screen for normal keypad based phone. Phone cannot grow beyond 8in x 5in and some place is always need to be reserved for keypad. Hence total screen area is ALWAYS smaller on keypad based phone. And having more screen area is much more advantageous.
I cannot comment about durability, but here I think physical keypad would win. For all practicle purposes though touchscreen might not fail either...
Closing comments, I would also like to comment about capacitive verses resistive touchscreens. 5800 uses resistive and omnipresent iPhone uses capacitive. Here too, in the long run I feel that resistive screen is better option. And always stylus should be bundled with any touchscreen based phone.
Capacitive touchscreens are more responsive, make no mistake about that. But resistive are not that bad either. After getting used to it, its not a that big deal. Just while tapping you need to use your fingernails, its more about getting used to it. Arguably resistive are more durable. Stylus is a must as viewing web pages, or playing games like sudoku is very easy with stylus. I wonder how it could be done efficiently without stylus. Even if screen is capacitive, when precise touching point is needed, there is no alternative for resistive screen.
So here too, I would say resistive touchscreens with stylus are preferable.
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