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Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

Frequent Flyer

Posted in Entertainment, Life, Travel on January 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I am a road warrior. I like my Monday morning sleep and Thursday evening drink in an airplane. When you are traveling so much, you tend to develop certain likes and dislikes about how you want to travel. That includes your fellow passengers as well. For e.g. A newbie in the security line doesn’t know that he needs to take off his shoes. Entire line gets backed up by 5min – 5min is a lot of time in my travel life! Then, the newbie sits in a window seat and wants to enjoy beautiful scenery of nature while the sunlight keeps me up. Newbie, I can’t sleep – have the courtesy for your fellow passengers!

I am not being picky. There are thousands of people who would agree with me. This is just like your office space. You have it set a certain way and don’t want other people to change it. Airplane is my space.

Air travel every week is not easy especially with a perpetual “orange” security advisory. Check-in line, security line, boarding line, baggage claim line, rental car pick up – each of these activities take about 10-20min. My flight time is sometimes less than the airport administrative time. As a result, after running around the airport, only time I get to relax is in the flight itself. It’s not any different for not to frequent flyers as well.

So next time when you travel, think about people like us – come prepared, be courteous and relax!

Safe travels!

@saxenaas: written on a flight as I cannot sleep due to the sunlight in my face 🙂

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iPhone vs. Droid or Apple vs. Google?

Posted in Electronics, Entertainment, Smartphone, Travel on July 26, 2010| Leave a Comment »

My fellow iPhone users

I had quite an exciting weekend as I got an Android phone (Samsung Captivate). I was pretty excited about how Android OS is more customizable and robust. In the last 2-3 weeks I had looked at Droid X (Verizon), Droid Incredible (Verizon) and most recently Samsung Captivate (AT&T). There is no doubt that Verizon network is much better than AT&T but both state of the art Android phones that Verizon launched are non-global (reviews on internet will not tell you that!)

Let me begin with the Android – what’s the big deal about it? It is cool! Really cool in what you can do with widgets, home screens, 2-3 different types of keyboards, multi-tasking, free GPS with voice based navigation and all other tools that Google provides. I enjoyed playing with the phone and did not realize its been several hours already (my wife cannot see this review!). So I got past the basics and moved on to more sophisticated things – email, outlook synchronization, address books, music and apps. This is where things started to get tricky – no easy way to sync Outlook because of which my contacts did not get copied over easily. Email integration is pretty good but by default all your google addresses show up in contacts and takes quite a while to figure out how to remove them. Apps – there are plenty, however separate apps to do different things. It’s not like iTunes which does most of what iPhone requires you to do. So if you were to synchronize your phone on a weekly basis, you would need a cheat sheet of number of things to do or steps to follow. As a techie I would love to do that but as a user I don’t have time.

Now someone might say that this is expected with Android. But here is what Apple has done – Apple has oversimplified things keeping their end user in mind. Things like cut-copy-paste – if you were to do it in Android, you would say – what was Google thinking? Things like customized ring tones, changing settings, switching between apps and many more. This actually comes from the remarkable difference between the two companies – Apple traditionally has been creative and innovative while Google is a group of mathematical geniuses!

If I would have spent more time with Android, I would have loved it for sure, but the point to test was that can someone get Andriod savvy as
quickly as an iPhone? Can an average Joe enjoy a smartphone while the business community is using the high end functionalities? And for someone like me can I save time and yet carry my office and personal things in one equipment wherever I go around the globe?

I am ordering the iPhone4.

@saxenaas

PS: To all Android users – It is a great phone and I am sure you love it but it will take a lot of time for Google to create the magic Apple did.

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Skymall – shortcuts in life!

Posted in Entertainment, Life, Public Service, Social Networking, Travel on June 6, 2010| Leave a Comment »

If you are a frequent flyer or have been in an airplane in the last few years, you may have looked at the Skymall magazine. Every time I fly I grab the magazine first to see what’s new. There is a lot of exciting and very innovative stuff advertised in it. I call it the magazine of creative people. But this time it was different. I noticed a pattern in the variety of products that are being offered. There are so many products which make simple day today tasks mechanical or electronic – in other words they make us lazy! I had this instant flash of characters from Wall-E where future generation has weak legs and can’t even walk. The movie portrays how the human race became dependant on robotic devices for basic tasks in our life.  If there is anything to learn from the movie it is that there are a lot of mundane things which we do and should be doing to keep ourselves active. I also remembered my grand parents telling my parents how their generation was more hard-working and then I hear my parents telling me the same thing. So are we becoming lazier generation by generation? Definitely the electronic age has dawned upon us and has changed the human life – how we do things, types of medical issues we have, how fitness centers are blooming every day! Now I am wondering where am I taking this – I have no complaints about the Skymall magazine because that’s their business. How we live our life is our business – the choices we make and what lifestyle we choose. Human brain is creative enough to think of ways to make life easy – just remember the cost!

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