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Tech

Review: BlackBerry Z10

Our tech reviewer tests the new and interesting BlackBerry Z10, and explains some of the fuss behind Blackberry’s newest offering.
by Manik Kakra

BlackBerry has been in a lot of trouble for the last two years or so. Their loyal customers have shifted to iOS and Android, and their financial statement doesn’t look impressive, either.
In an effort to overhaul its whole mobile business, BlackBerry has come up with its new operating system, built again from the ground up, BlackBerry Z10. BlackBerry Z10 is the veritable messiah to take this OS into the market. We take a look at this device and the new OS, and how it differs from the existing players in the market.

What it looks like: The BlackBerry Z10 sports a 4.2-inch (1280×768) screen, and has a rubberised back. The phone feels like a premium piece as soon as you hold it, and fits in your hand very nicely. There are no cheap materials or colours on its body.

On the right, there are volume rockers and a voice control button in between (see pic on left); the left side has an HDMI port and microUSB port. The front is dominated by that screen. On top of the screen, there’s a 2 MP front-facing camera, LED light and speaker + sensor. On the bottom of the screen, you get a bold BlackBerry branding and primary mic. On the back, there is an 8 MP camera with an LED flash, and BB logo in the middle. On the phone’s top, there is a 3.5 mm headset jack, Power/ Lock key, and secondary mic. The bottom side has just a loudspeaker.

There are no physical buttons on the front, making it a full-touch device like the Nokia N9.

Screen test: The phone’s screen is quite bright and colours look very vibrant on it. There is not much chance you would see any pixels, and usually videos look impressive on it. The buttons on the side are also of high quality – you get a good feedback on pressing them. BlackBerry has done well in the construction of the phone as there are no rough edges. The call quality and network reception on the device we tested were top notch.

Camera quality: The 8 MP camera isn’t something extraordinary. It performs well in daylight conditions but the images aren’t the best from among the high-end smartphones out there. Although the lowlight images were really bad, most of the images in natural light should satisfy an average smartphone user. The focus works quite well, too. You can either tap on the screen to take a picture, or press the volume up button.

The camera UI is quite interesting. BlackBerry has overhauled it and made it quite convenient for the user to change settings within camera like TimeShift (burst mode), and frames.
Hear this: The audio quality on the phone through loudspeakers was disappointing. You get distorted sound even when playing on 70 per cent volume, and the loudspeakers, at the bottom, may get muffled while using the phone. Having said that, the in-ear sound was noticeably better. It was loud, clear, and the basic earphones, though no match for dedicated audio earphones, seem good.

Battery life: Battery life on the phone was average. I was able to get 16 hours on a single charge with regular usage.

Software brouhaha: Let’s now talk about the software – BlackBerry Z10. The software is nothing what we have seen from the company earlier. The BB10 OS is based on full-touch interface. The outlay is quite interesting. As soon as you switch on the phone, you get to see the Menu (or App tray). By swiping left from the first menu screen, you go to Hub, and swiping right takes you to other Menu screens.

Hub, as the name suggests, is one-stop umbrella for all your messages – Email, Twitter mentions, BBM, and SMS. You get all of them neatly placed in the Hub. Whenever there’s a new message, the LED notification light starts blinking, just like in the older BB devices. When you go into an app from the Menu, you have to swipe up from the bottom of the screen (ahem, webOS) to come out of the screen, and you will get to see multitasking view, showing you all the opened apps. All these preview panes have a small close ‘X’ button in order to close as well as remove the app from the multitasking page.

At the end of it all: The phone performs really well, and the UI is very fluid and quite intuitive to use. With its 1.5 GHz dual-core S4 Pro processor, and 2 GB of RAM, the phone almost never lagged and performed smoothly. The app switching works brilliantly and there were no app crashes.

Talking of apps, the BB AppWorld is seriously a downside to the OS. Though there are nearly 1 lakh apps available, there are too less good quality, important apps. BlackBerry has tried to give several native apps – Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Dropbox – but most seem half-baked. Take Twitter for instance; there’s no way to change font size, you cannot remain on your timeline position, and so on.

Email, which has been a strong point for BlackBerry, remains a solid point. The Email experience is one of the best you could get. That, along with the keyboard, are the best things about this OS. The keyboard is quite different from what we have seen on touchscreens, but once you start using it, you realise how nicely it works and how the prediction gets better. The Web browser is also very nice, and loads pages without showing too many weak links.
The OS doesn’t bring something new to the table for users which iOS or Android don’t already have. Yes, the gesture-based UI is good, but it could mean a new user has to learn how to use his new BlackBerry phone.

It is clear that BlackBerry has made a serious effort in the past one year. The BB Z10 is a really nice phone, but it may well be a little too less for users who are already used to iOS, Android, or Windows Phones. Having said that, if BlackBerry keeps providing updates and brings the Q10 to the market quickly, it could mean better time for BlackBerry in the Indian market.

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Read

Review: Jobless Clueless Reckless

Debutant novelist Revathi Suresh tells us about writing a book for young adults ‘with exactly no story in mind’, among other things.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Writer Revathi Suresh’s book, Jobless Clueless Reckless, was released very recently. It’s a sweet little story of a teenaged girl living in an (apparently) dysfunctional family  her father and mother are almost separated, neither have enough time for their two children, her brother is strange, to put it mildly, and her life is as different from her friends as could possibly be. (see review at bottom).

In an interview, the author tells The Metrognome about  writing her first novel, how a story was born out of nothing at first, why she thought writing would be ‘easy-peasy’ and why the suspense of not knowing what she’ll write next is killing her.

Excerpts from the interview:

What inspired this story?

I don’t know about inspiration, it was more that I was at loose ends. Or at least that’s what the people around me seemed to think and I sort of fell in with their idea of me, you know? I had quit my last part-time job and had plans to retire and be a stay at home mom-wife and swing on a swing because housework gets done on its own magically, right? Luckily for me, everyone else around me had better plans for me and kept going, ‘So what are you planning to do now?’, and brushing aside my claims of being a homemaker.

I guess their hopeful looks got to me at some point until I gave in and decided one fine day that I would write a book because that’s what the whole world and its mom are doing right now. Have you been to bookstores lately? (There are) So many new books by so many new authors. I think even the guys who work there moonlight as novelists. So what I’m saying is, I thought writing would be easy-peasy and so cool because I wouldn’t even have to change out of my night clothes to open my laptop. And that’s how I started banging away at my keyboard one fine day with exactly no story in mind. Somewhere along the line it became a book, so I guess magic does happen after all.

How long did you take to write this book?

Two years. Mostly because I didn’t write for a good part of that time. About 40 pages into the first draft I gave up and decided I was never going to finish it, so what was the point. It took me around six months to get the courage to open that particular Word file again. Then I took another I-can’t do-this-anymore break around page 117 or 118 and returned after many months. I’ve figured out that’s my style. Ditch, don’t write. I must say it works spectacularly well.

How close is the central character to you or someone you know?

Kavya is no one I know and she’s every teen I know, if you get what I mean.

The Manisha angle is very interesting, especially since there is no happy ending to it. What was the inspiration for this part of the story?

Again, no inspiration as such. I wanted a first chapter that would suck a reader into the book right away. Only, having created that mysterious opening I struggled for a bit to close that story. I had a few options and I tried them all out. One was that I leave it open-ended but that did not go down well with some of my draft readers. Two was to make her out to be what all Kavya’s friends think she is. But that would mean agreeing that Kavya’s delusional and I wasn’t happy with that at all.

Three was to actually follow through and write a mystery, but that requires some clever planning and plotting and I wasn’t up to that. Finally, I managed to conclude the Manisha story with the help of another hanging thread I need to tie up  Kiran. In an earlier draft, Kiran kind of faded away but that wasn’t working out either, so it’s nice that one chapter took care of the two of them in the end.

What are you working on next?

Nothing right now. But who’s to say what I might cook up in a year or two from now? It might just be the family dinner or another of these I-want-to-escape-writing-so-badly-that’s-why-I-keep-going-back-and-doing-it-all-over-again-books.The suspense is killing me.

What have you written prior to this book?

This is not the first book I’ve written but this is my first novel. I have written commissioned books for IETS and a few years ago I worked with them on this really exciting UNICEF-Karnataka government sponsored Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan project for reluctant readers in rural Karnataka. Many years ago I also wrote a commissioned biography of an industrialist (and it wasn’t as boring as it sounds) which was particularly challenging because he’d been dead twenty years and trying to get a picture of his childhood and early life was pretty difficult because none of his contemporaries were around. In another lifetime (I really am a relic) I was an editor at a Chennai-based publishing house where I worked with Subashree Krishnaswamy to bring out a magazine called Indian Review of Books. The two of us also edited fiction (mostly translation) and non-fiction for an EastWest imprint called Manas.

Why I suddenly became a teen, I don’t know.

Review of Jobless Clueless Reckless:

Not being a writer myself, I’ve always wondered about something: how does one write about a subject or develop a story around a character without a) The subject being autobiographical and b) The writer being even a little bit like that person.

I wondered this especially after I read books like Khaled Hossaini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, the story of which revolves exclusively around women. Hosseini’s written that story with such sensitivity and dignity, it seems astounding that such a tale – of suffering in silence, of hiding great secrets in an aching heart, of gracefully submitting to a terrible fate, all because one is a woman – could be told by a man. That might sound childish in an increasingly gender-neutral world, even insensitive to some, but that’s just my opinion.

I wondered this again while picking up Jobless Clueless Reckless by Revathi Suresh. By her own admission, Revathi is ‘well into her dotage’. So how has she written about the life of a teenager?

The answer? Quite well.

The book is about Kavya, a teenager living at an embarassing address – Kansas, Grand Canyon, Bangalore, India – with, according to her summation of the matter, an embarassing brother and workaholic mother. You expect a teenage crush, some catty friends, trivial incidents blown out of proportion, and even a ditzy pair of parents, and Revathi gives the reader all of these and more.

Kavya’s parents have very decided ideas for their children, one of which includes homeschooling Kavya and Dhrittiman, her younger brother. The parents have all but divorced each other, and the two children live with their mother in a home that doesn’t encourage much intimacy – largely owing to the fact that Kavya’s mother has seemingly abandoned her earlier, jollier self for a career-driven woman who works at all hours to the exclusion of everything, even her children.

Several twists and turns later, while Kavya battles the ‘weirdo’ label imposed on her by peers who think she is quite possibly dangerous, to a wild night out with a seemingly demure behenji types who shows Kavya a wild night on the town, to finding out who her real friends are and what her heart tells her about Kiran, the big crush of her life, the story resolves itself to an almost satisfactory (for Kavya) end.

I thought some parts of the story dragged on a bit – the bitchy interactions between the girls, for instance – and the characters of Lara (Kavya’s best friend) and even Drittiman are slightly hazy around the edges. But I thoroughly enjoyed Kavya and Drittiman’s relationship – it is both gruff and touching – especially the way they unconsciously cling to each other in a crisis, and the missing Manisha, who Revathi opens the story with (plus the unresolved nature of her disappearance) is all too real. After I finished the book, I realised I actually didn’t want to know where and why Manisha vanishes, though I wanted to know at the beginning.

Revathi also touches on the subject of older children becoming unwitting ‘parents’ to younger siblings, the pitfalls and pleasures of homeschooling a child in system-obsessed India, and how it is possible to lead a double life and keep the two comfortably separate. All of this is done very well, without sermonising.

All in all, this is a good book to recommend to young adults, especially if you’re trying to wean them away from such horrors as the Twilight series. Jobless, Clueless, Reckless is a good read because it is frank, humorous and does not pretend to be something it is not – much like its heroine.

Duckbill Books, Rs 175

(Pictures courtesy Revathi Suresh, thehindu.com)

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Do

Asha Bhosale gives Rs 5 lakh for drought relief

The Maharashtra State Government has already received upwards of Rs 116 crore via donations from within the State and without.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

The State of Maharashtra has responded well to the Government’s call for help to supplement its efforts in combating the drought situation that the State is currently facing. Hearteningly, a little over Rs 116 crore has been collected already, via donations from students, artists, businesspersons, banks, NGOs and Trusts, and private individuals.

Today, noted playback singer Asha Bhosale visited Maharashtra CM Prithviraj Chavan at his official residence, Varsha, to hand over a cheque of Rs 5,00,000 towards drought relief. Of this, Rs 1,00,000 was the prize money she won at the recently-held Hridayesh Arts event, which commemorated her contribution to the film industry. The rest was contributed by Bhosale.

“It is our fundamental duty to contribute for those who are affected by the ongoing drought crisis in the State. All of us must help the Government in the relief efforts it is carrying out,” she said while handing over the cheque to Chavan.

The biggest donations thus far – both Rs 25 crore each – have come from the Mumbai-based Siddhivinayak Trust and the Shirdi-based Shri Saibaba Sansthan.

(Picture courtesy DGIPR, Mantralaya, Mumbai)

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Event

Saints and poets at NCPA

Two must-watch events happen in Mumbai today, both at NCPA, and both based on the lives and works of saint-poets.
by Medha Kulkarni

You know what’s so great about some Wednesdays? That you have the choice to attend one of two excellent events. Today is one such Wednesday.

Two great events will take place today in the NCPA premises. The first is a film that will screen at the Dance Theatre Godrej, NCPA, while the other is a talk and poetry session about the lives of Marathi saints and poets, followed by a play by Anahita Uberoi.

Scribbles On Akka, Dance Theatre Godrej, 4 pm

India has a long tradition of strong, fearless female poets who have used their art to push into the mainstream consciousness, with issues they deemed important. Unfortunately, our education system is such that most of us have never heard of them or had the opportunity to even get acquainted with their work.

In this scenario, it becomes important to support the people who work to get society acquainted with them, while we learn of our own wonderful literary heritage. The film Scribbles On Akka is one such effort – directed by filmmaker Madhushree Datta, the film is based on the life and work of the 12th Century Kannada saint-poet Mahadevi Akka, a strong personality who wrote radical poems using the female body as a metaphor. These works have been composed and given a visual form against the backdrop of a contemporary musical narrative. The film is a celebration of rebellion, the meaning of femininity and a legacy that’s over nine centuries old.

Mahadevi left the domestic arena in search of God and abandoned all the norms that society imposes, including that of clothing. The film tries to articulate the meaning of this denial through the work of artists, writers and people who have kept Mahadevi’s image alive and dynamic, whether through folklore or art.

The film screening is free but admission is limited and on a first-come-first-serve basis. Do reach early as NCPA has a strict punctuality policy.

Poetry reading and play, Theatre – Sunken Garden, 5.30 pm

It is known fact that India is home to a rich literary heritage that is centuries old. Each State in the country boasts of several saint-poets who have created stunning works in their quest for God.

A celebration of this very legacy is planned tomorrow evening at the NCPA, through a talk and poetry reading session centred around the works of Marathi saint-poets. Renowned poet Prabodh Parikh will introduce the work of several Marathi saint-poets with a specific reference to Dilip Chitre’s translations of the works of sant Tukaram.

This reading will be followed by an interesting play directed by Anahita Uberoi, in which a group of Mumbai theatre actors will read the English translations of poetry by Tukaram.

(Picture courtesy tedxgateway.com)

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Film

European film fest comes to Mumbai

Starting tomorrow, Gallerie Max Mueller will host a nine-day screening of one film each from countries belonging to the EU.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

Gallerie Max Mueller, located at Kala Ghoda, will play host to the 18th European Union Film Festival, which will start tomorrow and conclude on April 28, 2013. The theme for this year’s fest is ‘Celebrating Women’ – a pertinent theme for the times we are living in.

If you’re a film buff, this is a great opportunity to catch films made in such European countries as Estonia (Graveyard Keeper’s Daughter), Bulgaria (Lora From Morning To Evening), Belgium (Altiplano) and Cyprus (Roads & Oranges). In all, 24 films will be screened over a nine-day period, in three time slots (see complete schedule below).

Entry to the event is free.

The 18th European Union Film Festival schedule is as follows:

April 20: 5 pm, After Five In The Forest Primeval (Germany)

April 21: 11 am, Back To Your Arms (Lithuania), 2.30 pm, Your Name is Justine (Luxembourg), 5 pm, My Personal Life (Romania)

April 22: 11 am, Little Girl Blue (Czech Republic), 2.30 pm, Applause (Denmark), 5 pm, The First Assignment (Italy)

April 23: 11 am, Fast Girls (United Kingdom), 2.30 pm, Graveyard Keeper’s Daughter (Estonia), 5 pm, Beyond (Sweden)

April 24: 11 am, My Name is Ki (Poland), 2.30 am, Athanasia (Greece), 5 pm, Water Lilies (France)

April 25: 11 am, Eccentricities Of A Blond Haired Girl (Portugal), 2.30 pm, The House (Slovakia), 5 pm, Take My Eyes (Spain)

April 26: 11 am, Roads & Oranges (Cyprus), 2.30 pm, Eszter’s Inheritance (Hungary), 5 pm, Lora From Morning To Evening (Bulgaria)

April 27: 11 am, The Dark House (Netherlands), 2.30 pm, Princess (Finland), 5 pm, Altiplano (Belgium)

April 28: 11 am, Installation of Love (Slovenia), 2.30 pm, 32 A (Ireland)

(Picture courtesy poppyjasperfilmfest.com)

 

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Read

Maharana of Mewar inaugurates ‘7 Stories For Mewar’

Artist, writer Priya Pereira has created an artists’ book that actually comprises seven stories from the royal House of Mewar.

It was an event fit for royalty.

Shriji Arvind Singh Mewar of Udaipur, Chairman and Managing Trustee of Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation (MMCF) and the 76th custodian of the House of Mewar, was in Mumbai recently to launch artist Priya Pereira’s book.

Priya creates artists’ books that are works of art in the form of a book, often published in small editions and employing a range of forms, including scrolls, fold-outs, concertinas or loose items contained in a box. Pereira has created an artist’s book for Eternal Mewar as well, titled 7 Stories for Mewar.

Commissioned by the Maharana of Mewar, these little books hold seven stories from the illustrious history of the House of Mewar over 1,500 years. “Their beauty lies not only in their stories, but in the fact that they are pendants that can be worn as necklaces. The cover depicts the sun, as the Maharana of Mewar is a Suryavanshi, or descendent of the sun. Placed in each room of the Historic Resort Hotels, Udaipur, it has delighted the guests as more than just bedside reading,” Shriji said.

He said, “Priya’s books are exceptional in their creativity and their readers have always derived so much joy from perusing them. We are especially proud of the books that she has created for us. It is one more beautiful addition to the legacy of Udaipur; we cherish it deeply.”

Pereira first began making books in 1993 under the banner of ‘Pixie Bks’, which has created 40-odd books till date.

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