Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8- Review

Rs. 15,990 gets you a pretty good phone in the X8. Unfortunately, there are contenders out there that present a stronger case for your cash, a case the X8, try as it might, cannot ward off. Allow us to reiterate. The XPERIA X8 is quite nice, but there are better options for nearly every need, for a similar price.

Pros
Well built
decent value and feature set
Lots of applications available

Cons
Better phones available for the price
Camera lacks a flash and autofocus

On-screen QWERTY is cramped

We’ve been awaiting the XPERIA X8 for some time now. Ever since Sony Ericsson announced it in a press event open to select technology media to be precise. Our brief hands on at the event, wasn’t enough to derive any valuable information other than the obvious – the X8 was intended as a lower part than the X10 series, and all things considered, functioned as one.

Sony Ericsson claimed they would make the phone funkier by including different coloured back panels, and, true to their word the piece we received has four, not counting the white one already on the phone. You get some nice two-tone colours, ranging from a hot pink/white for chicks, to a more suave light black/white. The X8 looks like a smaller version of the X10, although with a 3-inch display, it’s larger than the X10 Mini or the X10 Mini Pro. The latter we tested recently, and warrants special mention, as it's the only member of the X10/X8 series that features a hardware QWERTY

Social Networking for Biz Comm

Will social networking kill email? Should you ban social networking sites from the corporate network? These are two questions that aroused heated arguments on a LinkedIn user group we participated in some time ago. In case of the former, most arguments went in favor of email, while in case of the latter, most organizations argued in favor of not banning social networking sites. Only time will tell what finally happens, but one thing is definitely clear-social networking sites have emerged as one of the most popular ways to communicate amongst users. So much so that now there are innovative products and solutions emerging that use social networking concepts in an enterprise environment. Who knows-maybe email will become extinct in the years to come!

Trend 1:

Use of social networking technology is gaining popularity amongst organizations. So the trend that's been hot for quite some time now is the use of social networking technology by organizations. It has shown a new way of communication to organizations. In fact, according to Forrester, Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013 and social networking tools will garner the bulk of this money. Forrester has even defined Enterprise 2.0 as the corporate version of Web 2.0. In their view, the key hallmark of Web 2.0 is efficiency for end users. Here, the ultimate goal is to use technologies like Ajax, Rich Internet Applications, blogs, Wikipedia, and social networks to foster productive, advantageous behavior among employees, customers, partners, etc.

What this obviously means is that you can expect a shift in how employees communicate in office. Life is moving beyond basic emails and instant messaging, and social networking is bringing in a new era of communication. So expect souped up corporate directories, internal discussion forums, and more interactive technical support systems to become routine in most corporate networks.
It has also been predicted that the biggest adopters of social networking will be large companies where one cannot just stroll over to the HR or IT folks for a little face time, and where instituting collaborative tools from 37 Signals or Zoho could speed things up when not everyone's based in the same building. But that doesn't mean that mid-sized enterprises or even the smaller companies would not be impacted by the social networking phenomenon. They would use a mix of public and private social networking tools, while others might even opt for the Open Source social networking tools like Elgg. You can read more about it at http://ld2.in/pl, or in the May 2009 issue of PCQuest.

Trend 2:

Collaborative tools are incorporating social networking features. The vendors who've been selling collaboration software have received a shot in the arm due to social networking technologies. Most of them have incorporated social networking capabilities in their collaboration software. IBM for instance, has incorporated social networking features in its Lotus software range. There's Lotus Connections, which allows community building, Wikis, file sharing, mobile access, and even micro-blogging. Similarly, the cloud based LotusLive from IBM has also incorporated several social networking features.

Likewise, Salesforce has come up with 'Chatter', a new type of collaboration tool. Unlike traditional collaboration tools that make you do all the work, Chatter brings everything you need to do your job to you-in real time, so you'll know the second anything changes. At first glance, Chatter looks similar to Facebook. It includes many features of Facebook and Twitter, like status updates and being able to follow people and comment on their posts. But yes, it is private and more secure. In addition to following people, one can follow documents-think product catalogs, pricelists, slide decks, or spreadsheets. Or follow records from Salesforce CRM, including accounts, opportunities, and cases. One can even follow records from other applications, such as project status in a custom-built project management app or the invoice status in a back-end financial application such as SAP. Recently the online CRM provider also introduced Chatter Mobile for iPad, iPhone and the new iPod Touch, Google Android and RIM BlackBerry. With Chatter Mobile, users will be able to monitor their Chatter feeds, including posts from colleagues and alerts from apps, as well as post status updates and comment on relevant conversations � all from their mobile device.
Similarly, Microsoft is also building social networking features in its own products. The Outlook Social Connector for instance, allows you to connect to your Facebook account and get the latest updates about your friends and read the recent posts. You can read more about it here http://ld2.in/pm.

Trend 3:

Open Source Social Networking Solutions on the rise. If you don't want to join an existing public social networking site or pay for a commercial collaboration solution with social networking features? Then you have a range of Open Source social networking solutions to choose from. A simple search for the words 'social networking' turned up more than 8,000 results on sourceforge.net, the most popular site for downloading Open Source software. All of this isn't of course social networking software for community building, so you'll have to scan through and find the right one for your needs.

Trend 4:

Micro-Blogging for businessWe've all heard of using using Twitter for doing business, and quite a few organizations are in fact doing so. But how about moving out of the publicly available micro-blogging site and using your own private micro-blogging site? There are several companies working on introducing this capability for enterprises. Recently a USA based company, Yammer announced a new platform and applications for enterprise social networking, which is supposed to act as an application platform that will transform its enterprise microblogging solution into a full-fledged enterprise social network. Employees in a company can sign up for free, and you can build your own private networks in it and choose whose messages you'll receive by following people and joining groups.

Similarly, another Denmark based company, Podio recently came out of stealth mode. Podio is not a 'Twitter for business'. Instead, it calls it self a 'social work platform', wherein you can build your own applications, which would work the way you want to. It will let you do everything from brainstorming new ideas to managing activities, tasks, customers, decisions, meetings, and even a team blog. The service is currently in an invite-only private beta.

Computers start learning; doomsday approaches

The New York Times posted an interesting piece on computers getting smarter, and that got us to thinking. Is "Skynet" really that close?

There were two parts to that thought. First was Skynet, a fictional AI from the Terminator films that on becoming self-aware decides that the only course of action for its survival is to end the human race. The second was whether such a thing was really that close.
Then we spent 10 minutes on the internet. We realized that any artificial intelligence that spends more that 5 minutes on the internet and doesn't realize that human beings are perfectly capable of their own doom is really not that intelligent. A paradox emerged. In the end we came to the conclusion that artificial intelligence wasn't going to cut it. Only a computer programmed in great detail with the latest updates on human stupidity would want to destroy the human race, with nuclear weapons nonetheless — which are harmful to technology as well.
Somehow the first thing that pops up in every one's mind when they think of super-intelligent computers is Skynet, the end of the world, Armageddon. Yet the virtues associated with highly intelligent humans is usually peace and calm. Are machines really that malevolent?

The New York Times article talks of an AI program called NELL that is capable of learning by itself with little human guidance. A marvellous achievement indeed. The program scans the internet building semantic relationships, and can categorize objects based on how they are used online. Still it is not perfect. The articles goes on to give an example of how the program thought "Internet cookies" were baked goods! Take over the world, right... The most harm this program could do would be to bomb Hungary thinking it would end world hunger...

One thing we must remember that intelligence is not an absolute quantity. The intelligence of ants is different from the intelligence of dogs, which is different from the intelligence of humans. When we talk of intelligent computers, we must not measure their intelligence on our terms, in the flawed ways we think. Intelligent computers are entities of their own; they need not understand poetry, or appreciate art, to be deemed intelligent.

We are sure that as computers become more intelligent they will not suddenly want to take over the world, that would only be the outcome if we go to great lengths to program human stupidity into them. Intelligent computers will be capable of learning and adapting, and much more than they already do. The Bayesian spam filter in your email client is capable of learning, from your actions, which emails are spam and which are not, yet your email application will never profess it's love for you — not because you're unlovable, we're sure you are — because it simply can’t.

So is doomsday approaching as we develop better AIs? Nope, just better spam filters.