Monthly Archive for February, 2009

The Good Old Johnson Grammar Days

Published on February 26, 2009 in Anu. 2 Comments

A lot of what I write will not make sense. This is not an edited peice of text, instead its spontaneous.Not written in proper english … just figments of my memory …

Its one of those rare days when I feel all nostalgic and miss my friends from school, remember the young carefree days, the innocent companionship …

There are lots of things that come to my mind. In no particular order a few are …

The most surprising day for me was in the 10th class when Malathi ma’am announced that I am in the running for the post of the School Head Boy !! Me !!! … Happy :) … Shreyasee, Ramya, Harish and I went from one classroom to another, staffrooms, the administrators office, the princpals room, introducing ourselves. We were the four people the school would vote and choose to become the Head/Assistant Heads. The next day results were declared, and to my astonishment I became the Head Boy. Harish became the Assistant Head Boy. Likewise Shreyasee and Ramya were chosen Head and Assistant Head Girls respectively. However, throught the year I did not do any noteworthy work :) … It was always Shreyasee … well, as we have in chemistry that every strong acid has a weak conjugate base, the same applies here as well. All I ever did was display the 3 shiny stars on each of my shoulders, and flash the head boy batch. And if you have never worn stars, let me tell you, they are heavy. So in a manner of speaking I did have to carry a heavy burden the whole year.

There’s only one person in this whole wide world that I want to meet but have not been able to. His name is Veerat Jaiswal. There was always something special about him that I cannot express in words. Somehow I liked his company. Apparently he has married against the wishes of his parents and doesn’t live with them anymore. My search continues …

A lot of friends I had back then … Nishanth, Tajuddin, Praveen, Kaushik, Sai Pavan deserve special mention. Nishanth was the joker of the class, hilarious, and yes the reason that I passed all my telugu exmas :D . The very day I became the head boy he had an advise for me – ‘Singha, never listen to the teachers, they’ll make you work much more than what you should ! ‘ …

Rizwan is a senior who has to be mentioned. During the school days we shared the passion for programming. He would tell me new tricks. He was the one who taught me file handling and sub routines in BASIC, prior to which I used to write all my codes as a single function. He was an amazing friend. I even went to a trip to Chennai just because he was going too. Well thanks to you now I am here about to graduate out as a computer engineer and happy about it.

Someone else needs to be thanked too – Zahreen teacher. She was our computer teacher then. She used to encourage me. I remember her getting me extra programming questions so that I do not solve the ones that she had brought for the class. And I would always try to get everybody’s attention by solving all of them and jumping up and down eager to blurt out the algorithm. Yet she was patient with me.

While we are on the topic of programming, I might add that just as Rizwan was the best coder in my senior batch, Bharat K Molleti was the best amongst us. At an computer exhibition held at school, Rizwan made a program to calculate dates and do lots of cool stuffs. Bharat simulated piano in dos !!! imagine using your keyboard to play music in DOS. It was awesome coding. Mine was the easiest and yet the cachiest of them all :P … you see, KBC had just released then, and I coded the KBC. Everybody wanted to play. haha … unfortunately, I did not know how to generate random numbers back then, and neither did I know how to use the web :( :( :( .

I was a bit annoying too. I would suggest our maths teacher to take extra classes instead of the PT / Library class :P !! Yeah, I was stupid back then. I would show off that I was better at maths than most. I wonder what people must have thought about me back then. Let me tell you, I am no more like that. Changed I have in ways more than one, yet remain the same Anuvrat that you always knew.

A few memories include Haritha irritating me … quarelling with Sana all the time , Sravu … Yogi ke saath fight, after which he would invariably cry … Sri Hari sir … Sridhar sir’s leaving the school … all of us went tothe staff room to plead him not to leave … and if I am not wrong … shayad main Ankita ke saath bhi baitha tha kuch din .. towards the end in class tenth … us bechari ko mujhe jhelna pada :) …

Sridhar sir is the guy who shaped my present. He told me that if I wanted to try for admission into IIT I must be strong at algebra. He suggested me Hall and Knight Algebra to practise algebra.

Mangal … librabry … smell … you can guess it … Mangalnath had to go back home .. :D :D :D :D

Library .. Aarti teacher … and who can forget Yogi’s aunty – Saroj Sharma Teacher :) … Vani teachers pinch .. Surya Kumari teacher .. Annapurna ma’ams boring classes …. she actually called me to the staffroom one day to tell me that I must pass geography to pass the tenth class !! ..

ohh and yes .. I did fail in a subject once … :) … I failed in geography class test … when the teacher called out my marks and looked at me, I did not know how to react … should I feel sorry for having failed the test, or should I feel happy that it was just a class test and not an exam … anyways, I returned her a smile … The following week, I got a call from Malathi ma’am … she was entering the marks in the report card and couldn’t believe I had failed … she wanted to make sure before entering the marks. … that remains the only failure till date …

And a girl had crush on me !!! My reaction – ignore her :) … And that is exactly what I did for the next 2 years that we were at school. It was ridiculous … Aur mujhe to ye baat yaad bhi nahin thi .. unless Haritha reminded me  :( … But now I have grown up, matured … Will I react differently if I come across her by chance ? – I do not know … btw … the girl’s name is BKD … this is one memory I want to forget …

the ccmb school bus … g shashank … playing cricket every evening … priyanka’s phone number … 4150 … :D … aah … J Shashank and Priyanka … they would always pick on each other … J was the only one in school who could defeat me at chess … unless I lose the game by over confidence … Mallikarjun defeated me in class 10 .. it was me and my big inflated ego of being the better one in chess that I failed to see his move :( … Amardeep … J and I would have this competition of who could solve the maths problems quicker …

Akhila would always agree to sing the school choir at assembly if I failed to find any one else … she was a good friend too … back from the 7th class days, which I suppose were the best in m life .. Lily teacher .. I wonder where is she now …

The Nirjhar Ghosh .. who would always be willing to pick up a fight with me when we were in 4th / 5th class … grew out of this habit later on … but it was only in class 10 that we became friends :) … there are very few bongs that i do not want to kill on sight … he’s definitely one … :D

I want to meet each one of them … I owe my happiest moments to them … they are the friends who are hard to find …

The school’s completely changed in looks now … i am always afraid that i might lose my way if i wander alone inside the school now … but the teachers are all the same … they did recognise me … feels good that people remember you …

But each one of us is in a different place now … i do not know if i will ever meet them in a group and get to spend time as we used to at school … akele milne mein wo mazaa nahin hai jo sabke saath hota hai … aadhe log US mein hain … baaki sab hyd waalon ke paas time nahin hai apne office se  [ ... i hate this reason ... y the hell do u work in such a company which curbs your social life ... life's not all about money ,.. there's more to it ...  ] …. and now i shall be moving to b’lore … with prolly no chance of ever returning to hyd …

I got bored of writing … perhaps I will complete it some other day ..

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Bitwise 2009 Engima Answers

Published on February 22, 2009 in Miscel. 10 Comments
BSOD

BSOD

I know its too late for this, but then my blog received a visitor who got here searching for answers. Also, the forum has become dead now, and its a pain to go back searching for all the answers. So here it is, all the answers are given below. Only the answers are here. You may play the enigma at Enigma-Bitwise09. A few of the answers have comments in []. They are not part of the answer.

  1. Enigma [A change from the traditional BITWISE answer]
  2. Server
  3. Java
  4. Super Computer
  5. Handshake [We spent lots of classes last year in networks course studying HANDSHAKE]
  6. Multimedia
  7. Deadlock
  8. Oracle
  9. BSOD [The easiest of them all, pretty obvious. Any windows user will know about the BSOD :D ]
  10. Gateway
  11. Segmentation Fault [Haven't ever managed to complete a program without getting stuck with this error :( . I have made a signal handler to catch seg fault ;) ]
  12. Garbage Collector [Loved this one. One of my favourites.]
  13. Terminal
  14. Facebook
  15. Memory Leak
  16. Multitasking
  17. Data Mining
  18. Overclock
  19. Infinite Loop
  20. Nibble
  21. Paging [The question with the weirdest logic.]
  22. Brainfuck [Try this language. Even the HELLO WORLD is a difficult program to code !!]
  23. Password
  24. LISP [One of Mallu's evil questions.]
  25. Sun [Another of Mallu's almost-impossible-to-guess question]
  26. Cipher
  27. HP [Hail the lord of Mortals - Mallu da. None in the department could figure this one out :P :P ]
  28. Rete Algorithm
  29. Opera

Hehe … I am not giving away the last answer. Look back at the 29 answers and try to think this one by yourself. Lets see if you can reason out like us :P   .

PS: Mallu is Vinu Rajshekhar

PS: Though a lot of people poured in the questions, the most notable were those of Tharki (Arpit Kumar). Each was a bigger PJ than the other !!

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Am Lovin’ vi

Published on February 20, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

I have fallen in love with vi. I have started usign vi only recently. The concept was a bit difficult at first, but now I think I have got used to it. I still sometimes forget to enter the insert mode before typing, but that’ll come with practise. Also I have now learnt how to yank text, paste it and yeah also used the search and replace feature.

Below is a screen shot of my terminal using the vi. Each tab has a different file open. And the tab which contains the main file, I have divided it into two frames. It allows me to look at different parts of the same file without having to keep scrolling all the time.

vi terminal

vi terminal

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And Then The Coding Begins

Published on February 20, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

As I mentioned yesterday, I have finally managed to complete (read: almost complete) the analytical component of my BTP. Now I need to implement the algorithm and get the results.

It has been a great night out. I have already written ~450 lines of code in C. I have tried the modular approach, breaking things into functions. This way, I test each function individually and am sure that they will work when used together.

Also I have added a new feature in my code this time. Learning from my troubles the last time I coded such a complex algorithm, I realised that a log file proves to be handy. It clearly defines the flow of control, the manipulations and the decisions taken within a loop. Everytime I enter a function, I make a note of it in the log file. Whenever I leave the function, it is noted into the log. All that occurs within the function is properly indented. At the present though I have used a rather brute force method for indenting the log file. I print spaces in the log file using the for loop. I need to find a better way.

Below is the log file that I generated running the incomplete algorithm.

  Number of Processors : 1
  Number of Tasks : 4
  Frame Size : 10
  Number of Groups : 1

  Task   1: e =  18 p =  30 wt = 0.60
  Task   2: e =  18 p =  90 wt = 0.20
  Task   3: e =  18 p = 150 wt = 0.12
  Task   4: e =  18 p = 225 wt = 0.08

  Proc   1: cap =  10

      <<>>naf: 0

      <<>>shr: 6

    Task 1, Frame 0, Share 6

      Frame 0 inserted after -1
      Task 1 inserted into bucket 5 first

      <<>>naf: 0

      <<>>shr: 2

    Task 2, Frame 0, Share 2

      Task 2 inserted into bucket 1 first

      <<>>naf: 0

      <<>>shr: 1

    Task 3, Frame 0, Share 1

      Task 3 inserted into bucket 0 first

      <<>>naf: 1

      <<>>shr: 1

    Task 4, Frame 1, Share 1

      Frame 1 inserted after 0
      Task 4 inserted into bucket 0 first

    <<>>leastFrame: 1
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Getting Started With My BTP

Published on February 19, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

It’s high time now that I start coding for my BTP so as to arrive at some result by the next month. However, I am yet to resolve all the analytical issues related to my problem. The biggest of my worries being a mathematical bound over the under-allocation that a task could suffer when scheduled using the algorithm I am working on.

Let me start from the beginning. I have taken up as my BTech project the topic of scheduling tasks on multi-processor system. PPC alloted me to Mr. Arnab Sarkar (Arnab da I call him). I have been working with him for the past few months to arrive at an optimised solution to our problem.

The problem that we are tackling is that there exists an algorithm called ER-Fair which schedules tasks proportionately on a multi-processor system. Arnab da in his research improved the time complexity by using frames. He divided the time into frames, of equal sizes and then alloted the tasks to these frames. Inside the frame, ER-Fair scheduling can be used to arrive at fair scheduling. The drawback was that ER-Fair requires a higher time complexity than a simple Round Robin algorithm. So the motivation was to replace the ER-Fair algorithm by an O(1) round robin algorithm without compromising on the fairness.

VTRR is one such algorithm. But then I was not able to derive any mathematical bounds for the maximum under-allocation that a task can suffer when scheduled using the VTRR algorithm, and by definition VTRR does not guarentee against under-allocation. So we could be losing fairness if we used just the VTRR algorithm. One pathological case where this happens is when there are 4 tasks to be scheduled and they have weights of 9, 1, 1, 1. The VTRR algo then schedules Task A, B, C, D and only then returns back to again schedule A. But by this time A has been under-allocated. Now consider a system where there are many more tasks than just 4, this boundary case implies a huge deviation from the required fairness.

We found a way around this by using groups within frames. Tasks are divided into groups on the basis of their shares. This ensures that all tasks of similar weights are put into the same group, therby avoiding the occurance of any case as mentioned above. The weight of the group would be the combined weight of all the tasks. To the external scheduler, a group would appear as a single task which needs to be scheduled. Since we shall be creating fixed number of groups, using ER-Fair algorithm for scheduling the groups should take only O(1) time.

The tasks within a single group can be scheduled using VTRR algorithm. But I met with the smae problem once again, that of deriving the bounds for the under-allocation. This very evening though, Arnab da found another interesting algorithm. It is a slight modification of the VTRR algorithm and performs better in the same complexity range. This one works with ensuring that the error (defined as the amount of work received less what the task should have been serviced) never exceeds 1. If it does, then either the first or the next task is selected on the basis of which task has lesser error. Being a simple round robin algorithm, it is O(1) and easier to implement than the VTRR. Also I have managed to come up with a few equations to bound the under-allocation. I am not getting my hopes high yet, not until Arnab da checks it and finds it right.

Also we met PPC today. It was mostly Arnab da and him discussing the problem and the solution, I was just a third person observer. PPC said the idea is good and told me to come up with some analytical result as to what would be the optimal way of putting the tasks into groups. Also, he said if we code the algorithm and if the observation of under-allocations vs. number of groups comes out as a rectangular hyperbola, dipping quickly as the number of groups increases, then it could be a successful experiment. The reason is that if the number of groups is 1, then the system is equivalent to VTRR which does not have  bounded under-allocation, and if the number of groups equals the number of tasks, then the system is effectively being scheduled using just the ER-Fair algorithm which is not O(1). So if we can show that the idea of a few groups can schedule the system in O(1), it’ll be successful work.

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My .vimrc File

Published on February 16, 2009 in Tech. 3 Comments

Spurred on by my recent experiences with the vi editor, I havedecided to shift from gedit to vi. The insert, command and visual notion was a bit difficult to get hang of at the beginning, but with some practice I am getting the hang of it. There’s so many more features in it than I have used till now. It needs a bit of getting used to.

The first thing I did was to customize my .vimrc file to suit my programming style. I like my code to be syntaxically coloured, indented and prefer spaces over tabs. Also I keep the width of my tabs to 2. I must mention here that most of my programming habbits are because of Udit Sajjanhar – the one semester that he was our TA for the course of compilers.

So here is my vimrc file :

" do not keep a backup file
set nobackup

" wrap off
set nowrap

" tabs are only 2 characters
set tabstop=2

" auto indent uses 2 charaters
set shiftwidth=2

" spaces instead of tabs
set expandtab

" set auto-indentation on
set autoindent

" expand command line using tab
set wildchar=

" show line numbers
set number

" fold using markers
set foldmethod=marker

" powerful backspaces
set backspace=indent,eol,start

" highlight search terms
set hlsearch

" dont wrap words
set textwidth=0

" history
set history=50

" 1000 undo levels
set undolevels=1000

" show partial commands
set showcmd

" show matching braces
set showmatch

" auto-detect the file type
filetype plugin indent on

" on the syntax by default
if has("syntax")
syntax on
endif

" When editing a file, always jump to the last known cursor position.
" Don't do it when the position is invalid or when inside an event handler
" (happens when dropping a file on gvim).
autocmd BufReadPost *
\ if line("'\"") > 0 &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; line("'\"") <= line("$") |
\   exe "normal g`\"" |
\ endif

Here’s the file in case you want to download it : vimrc

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A Fun Bitwise

Published on February 9, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

So here it is, now that the Bitwise 2k9 is over, everyone feels so relieved and obviously happy. Everything went smoothly and happily. There was no hitch (well, compared to what are generally expected, we had the minimal of all the problems). And all the while when the contestants were busy cracking the questions, we were having fun in our own way.

Not just in India, but anywhere in the world, you’ll never find an event start on time. So why should we be an exception [:P].  Now since Bitwise is an international competition in which participants from all over the world take part, I put up a timer on the right hand sidebar, displaying the server time. This time would be used by the contestants to synchonise their watches. The event was to be begin at 1220 hours IST. And I was prepared, in the event of us getting delayed, to slightly change the server time – not that we finally needed it. The event started right on time. Actually we were all ready for the launch ten minutes earlier. The countdown began and just when the timer showed 1220 on our site, we released the problems.

The response was enormous !! The server was heavily overloaded. Many complaints started pouring in about the site not loading up. But in a matter of few anxious minutes, these complaints died down, and we took a sigh of relief.

Just when we were all getting into our new roles of maintaining the system and responding to all the queries, the first shock hit us ! No, it was no fault, no breakdown of system and certainly not of the server going offline. A team had actually solved a question, easiest though, and scored full. We couldn’t believe it. Naresh (Shenoy K) actually pulled out the file from the system, compiled it manually and checked with the test cases himself to make sure that the evaluator had not made an error. The problems team were bewildered. They wondered if their problems were not as good enough as they thought earlier. There were a few nervous smiles, trying to defend their claim that the questions are indeed though.

We convinced ourselves that this was just  one-off instance and that not all the teams will find the same question this easy to solve, that perhaps it was more by luck that talent that this team had cracked the first question in ten minutes. This we did only to be proved wrong in another quater of an hour. Submissions for the same question started pouring in and there were quite a good number of teams with full scores. We just kept our fingers crossed.

But then that did remain a one-off question. Apparently the second question had been changed just hours before the question. The original question was too tough to be solved in such short  time, and the problems team decided to put up a modified version which was easier, evident by the fact that the score was halved. The second question, the one to be solved first, carried just 75 marks, while the other questions were rated for 200s and 300s.

India vs. Sri Lanka cricket match was being aired the same time. We got busy watching the match while at the same time answering the doubts of the contestants. Ghoda (Birendar S Tiwana) had this brainwave the previous day of letting the teams add us on their gtalk id and contacting us over the IM in case of any doubts. The idea was a hit considering the number of queries I had to answer. I was asked all sort of things – from being pestered for hints, to suggestions that the questions were too tough to be solved by a final year student of engineering, to being told of that the sample cases we provided were wrong !

There were a few highlights of chatting that I would like to mention. A girl came online – nita..sharma.niit (obviously name changed to protect identity). She mentioned that the Enigma quiz was a great idea, and that she was enjoying it. Immediately Tharki (Arpit Kumar) got working. He told her that the whole of enigma was his brainchild (he mentioned it was of Arpit’s as a third person), and proceeded to give her his email id so that she could contact him to thank him personally. And she did !!! Her next message was – thanks for the id. I have added him on  GTalk. Tharki left the station and returned to his computer to attend to more pressing business [:P]. Apparently they have become good friends.

We had lots of fun answering the queries and chatting away. We dealt sternly with a few guys, having to tell them that we provide no hints and loved talking to a few who challenged our problem makers – a few of them really made Sudip (Roy) and co. ponder over the boundary conditions. Only a minor changes were made to one or two questions.

Aritro (Aritra Sen) was the server admin making all the changes to the webpages. Tension clearly showed when he occasionally lashed out at anybody suggesting he was slow in updating the  webpage (which he was not). Mallu Da (Vinu Rajshekhar) was the busy man firing away sql queries when we had to sometimes manually check if the file submitted contained malicious code. Naresh and Mallu were our goto guys when in doubt. Akshit (Sharma) and KT (Kaustabh Tripathi) ensured that none of us were hungry. They arranged for snacks and lunch, half of which they ate themselves. Shashi (Narayan) took charge of the feedback. Ghoda was the responsible person, always reminding us that we should not toy/abuse/insult/behave irresponsibly with people while chatting, that we should seriously answer their queries and never mislead them – this suggestion was too hard to follow. Karishma (Kapadia), Nisha (Kiran) and Chuski (Varun Sharma) were there as well, taking rounds in helping everybody out. The problem team members Anvesh (Komuravelli), Ashish (V), Bhuyan (Pramit K), Sumeet (Singal), Ruteesh (K) were obviously present to help us answer the queries.

In all, it was a great day. Everyone was tired by the end. I actually dozed off six hours after the start of the competition. Arindam (Sharma) had come in the evening afer his GATE exam. It was one of the best days of my stay in Kharagpur. Not having slept for almost 40 hours, I bid them goodbye and left for my room.

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My Ubuntu Intrepid + LAMP

Published on February 9, 2009 in Tech. 1 Comment
Ubuntu logo

Ubuntu logo

Until quite recently I was working on Windows XP, when I had this urge to shift to Ubuntu once again. I got hold of wubi for Intrepid and my system was running the gnome in another 5 minutes.

Now while I was in windows, I had a wamp server installed. The first thing I set myself to do was to install the LAMP, and reconfigure the system to include the wamp www directory as the default directory instead of the /var/www. Here is what I did -

  • Installed SSH client (so that I could connect remotely to my Ubuntu) : sudo apt-get install ssh
  • Install the mysql-server : sudo apt-get install mysql-server
  • Install the apache2 webserver : sudo apt-get install apache2
  • Install php5 : sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
  • Install php5-mysql support : sudo apt-get install php5-mysql
  • Restart the apache2 webserver : sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
  • Install phpmyadmin : sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

And it was done. The LAMP installed. Not to configure my dafault directory

  • I navigated to/etc/apache2/sites-available
  • Made a backup of the default file : sudo cp default default.bk
  • Edited the default file : sudo vi default
  • I changed the default document root to the www directory created by my wamp server

Yay, my site was up and running. When I navigate to http://localhost I could see the wamp index.html. I clicked on phpmyadmin and it worked. The phpmyadmin that I installed on Ubuntu was presented. It’s almost like having installed wamp server on Ubuntu.

But I would like to make a few ponts over here :

  • I do not yet know how to add more than one directory to the default directory list. Will do that.
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Switch Off Your Mathematical Brain

Published on February 5, 2009 in Miscel. 0 Comments

I came across a wonderful puzzle. It presents a sequence of equalities and requires you to deduce the answer to an incomplete equality. Here’s the set of equalities :

8809 = 6
7111 = 0
2172 = 0
6666 = 4
1111 = 0
3213 = 0
7662 = 2
9312 = 1
0000 = 4
2222 = 0
3333 = 0
5555 = 0
8193 = 3
8096 = 5
7777 = 0
9999 = 4
7756 = 1
6855 = 3
9881 = 5
5531 = 0

All you have to do is to determine the value of

2851 = ?

Apparently people with good mathematical background are having difficulties solving this problem, whereas people with almost no mathematical abilities can easily figure out the answer !!! I took it as a challenge and found myself incapable of deducing the answer. I forwarded the question to a few friends of mine, and none was able to solve the question (probably thus indicating that we are good mathematicians :P ).

We gave up and decided to peek at the comments to know the solution. And the solution astonished us. Indeed, there was no mathematical logic involved in this quiz ! All that was required was a simple observation skill. Hope you have better luck solving this one than we had.

Here’s the link to the authors page : Finish This Sequence Of Equalities

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Which Is The Smartest Smart Phone

Published on February 4, 2009 in Tech. 0 Comments
Sony Ericsson

Image via Wikipedia

I love gadgets. I want the best and the latest of those. Which is why the very first mobile that I bought was a N72. Well, it wasn’t the best one at that time, best it was the best option available to me. It was the cheapest amongst the N series of Nokia.

I’ve been using N72 for two years now. The time has come to pass on this mobile to dad and look for a new, better one. But this time around I will not be settling for a lesser phone looking at the price tag. Dad is ready to spend money this time on which ever mobile I fall in love with.

Thus began my search for a new one. The Nokia N96 has always been amongst the news. Nokia being a reliable provider, easier to get serviced in case of any problems. Infact, I think of Nokia among mobiles as Maruti is amongst cars. N96 should be a priced possession. It has large screen, slides the keypad below, slides above to reveal music controls. But it has its drawbacks too. It lacks a qwerty keyboard, and has the same look as my N72. However, it is one of the mobiles I am considering. At present this phone costs around 36K in Hyderabad.

Moving on further, I came across the Samsung Omnia. Released just a few months ago, it has stunning appearance. Completely touch screen, but lacks the Apple’s flick features. The usual features of a smart phone are all available in this one. Though a weak battery life of just 5 hours talktime, makes it a not clear favourite of mine. Mom liked this phone and was ready to buy it immediately. 30K is the price of this one.

And then comes the absolute beauty, the Sony Ericsson Xperia. As far as I have looked about it, it is the most talked about. The latest phone in the market, it has been quick to attract the attention of everybody interested in smart phones. It has Windows Mobile operating system. Touch and qwerty keyboard are both interwined to provide a great experience. Apple’s flick features are also present in this gadget. The qwerty keyboard slides to the left side. I almost fell in love with this phone. The only drawback is its weight. It’s the double of my N72 in weight. Xperia is priced at 42K in Hyderabad at the present.

But these are only three. I would like to look at more options before settling for one. I have browsed for Blackberry, and none of them impressed me. Motorola doesn’t have anything to offer either. I am running out of options. But I shall keep looking. I have got another 3 months to decide the phone that I would like to finally buy.

I shall keep posting the features of all the phones that I shortlist. Hope to find a good one soon.

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