My name is Naveed Babar, an Independent IT Expert and researcher. I received my Masters Degree an IT. I live in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Buzzwords in my world include: Info tech, Systems, Networks, public/private, identity, context, youth culture, social network sites, social media. I use this blog to express random thoughts about whatever I am thinking.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Nokia Announces 12 MegaPixeled N8

Nokia N8 small Nokia Announces 12 MegaPixeled N8
The Nokia announced today its latest smartphone N8 in an event. The first device to be powered by the brand new Symbian^3 platform, the Nokia N8 will launch with an ability to capture photos and video to rival dedicated point and shoot cameras.
The biggest feature on the Nokia N8 is its 12-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash. It features a substantially larger sensor than any ever used in any other Nokia device – even bigger than many found in dedicated cameras.
The Nokia N8 introduces the ability to record high definition (HD) videos and edit them with a smart built-in editing suite on the device.
There’s also a HDMI connector allowing you to hook the smartphone to your HD TV and share your media with friends and family in superb quality.
The Nokia N8 doubles as a portable entertainment centre. Watch HD quality video with Dolby Digital Plus surround sound and hook into a dedicated Web TV application for access to news and entertainment on the move.
It’s not just its 12-megapixel camera and HD video skills with HDMI support that set the Nokia N8 apart from the crowd. Packing more memory than most, the Nokia N8 has 16GB of built-in storage and is expandable up to 48GB with a micro SD card.
Joining the social messaging fold with the likes of the latest Eseries and Cseries devices, the N8 enters the fray with live Twitter and Facebook updates direct to your homescreen. Comment, read and send messages, update your status and share your location and photos with one touch.
Embracing location based services, the N8 is location-savvy and comes with free global Ovi Maps walk and drive navigation with support in more than 70 countries worldwide.
Powering the Nokia N8 is the all-new Symbian^3 platform. This latest incarnation introduces major new advances including multi-touch and support for gestures such as pinch-to-zoom.

Real social network would you please stand up?


All too frequently, someone makes a comment about how a large number of Facebook Friends must mean a high degree of social capital. Or how we can determine who is closest to who by measuring their email messages. Or that the Dunbar number can explain the average number of Facebook friends. These are just three examples of how people mistakenly assume that 1) any social network that can be boiled down to a graph can be compared and 2) any theory of social networks is transitive to any graph representing connections between people. Such mistaken views result in broad misinterpretations of social networks and social network sites. Yet, time and time again, I hear problematic assumptions so let me start with some claims:
  1. Not all social networks are the same.
  2. You cannot assume network transitivity.
  3. You cannot assume that properties that hold for one network apply to other networks.
To address this, I want to begin by mapping out three distinct ways of modeling a social network. These are not the only ways of modeling a social network, but they are three common ways that are often collapsed in public discourse.
Sociological “personal” networks. Sociologists have been working hard to measure people’s personal networks and much of the theory of social networks stems from analysis done on these networks. Different scholars have taken different approaches to measuring personal networks, but, most stereotypically, this takes the form of a clipboard and pencil as a young grad student queries an individual to recall who they talked to yesterday and indicate who they would lend money to or call when they are having an emotional breakdown. On classic measurement survey is an appendix in the back of Claude Fischer’s “To Dwell Among Friends.”
Most sociological theory stems from analyses of these personal networks. Social capital, weak ties, homophily, … all of those theories you’ve heard about are based on personal networks. Given that these are typically measured by eliciting people’s understandings of certain categories (e.g., “friend”), there’s a strong overlap between everyday language around social networks and the categories being measured.
If you’re a sociologist talking to anyone other than sociologists, you would probably speak of personal networks as the golden standard, the baseline truth. Of course, if you were being honest with yourself or your colleagues, you will note that these measurements have their methodological flaws and biases which is why the scales for measuring personal networks haven’t stabilized and why scholars still struggle with the best ways to elicit meaningful information from people being surveyed.
Behavioral social networks. Behavioral social networks are the networks derived from encounters between individuals. In their efforts to measure personal networks, sociologists have often tried to get people to manually document encounters with others through diary studies. With new technologies in place, folks have gone on to generate behavioral social networks through the traces people leave behind. For example, a record of someone’s email exchanges provides a handy accounting of that individual’s behavioral network. New technologies introduces new opportunities for measuring behavioral networks. Many genres of social media let us see who communicates with who. GPS technologies let us see who shares physical space.
Behavioral social networks provide valuable insight into people’s practices and interactions, but they do not confer meaning. This is not to say that they don’t have value. I would love to find the strangers that I regularly share space with as I traverse Boston. But we cannot assume that these are my friends or acquaintances. Yet, there seems to be a tendency (especially among geeks of all stripes) to overlay meaning-laden terms on top of these networks, to assume that high connectivity means friendship. This is where trouble often arises. Just because I spend a lot of time with my physical therapist does not mean that she is more important than other people in my network who I see less frequently.
The other difficulty in measuring behavioral social networks is that, at least to date, we measure distinct channels of connection. This complicates our ability to do meaningful comparison across people. If I use AIM as my primary way of keeping in touch with Person A and email as my primary way of keeping in touch with Person B and you only look at one medium, you get a distorted picture of who I communicate with. As communication channels proliferate, this only gets messier. So even when we talk about behavioral social networks, we have to talk about them in across a particular channel.
Publicly articulated social networks. Articulated social networks are the social networks that you intentionally list. In some senses, this is what sociologists are eliciting, but people also articulate their social networks for other purposes. Address books and buddy lists are articulated social networks. So too are invitation lists. Most recently, this practice took a twist with the rise of social network sites that invite you to PUBLICLY articulate your social network.
At this point, I would hope that most of us would realize that Friends != friends. In other words, who you connect to on Facebook or MySpace or Twitter is not the same list of people that you would say constitute your closest and dearest. The practice of publicly articulating one’s social network can be quite fraught because there are social costs to the process of public articulation. Issues of reciprocity emerge and people find themselves doing a lot of face-work to navigate the sticky nature of having to account for their social relations in a publicly accountable way. Thus, the list of who you might list as a Friend is often a mix of friends, acquaintances, family members, people from your past, fans, professional colleagues, familiar strangers, and people you don’t particularly like but don’t want to offend. Oh and the occasional celebrity you think is interesting.
Relating Different Social Networks
These networks are NOT the same. Your mother may play a significant role in your personal network but, behaviorally, your strongest tie might be the person who works in the cube next to you. And neither of these folks might be links on your Facebook for any number of reasons.
Our instinct then is to ask: which is the “real” social network? Frankly, it depends on who you ask. Your mother may be cranky that you don’t talk to her as often as your colleague and she may resent your refusal to Friend her on Facebook, but this doesn’t mean you love her any less. Of course, this doesn’t stop her from thinking you don’t love her. If we’re trying to understand emotional affinity, the behavioral and publicly articulated social networks aren’t particularly helpful. But if you’re mother thinks that time is not only a proxy for emotional depth but a proof of it, your behavioral social network might really upset her. (Note: behavioral social networks have gotten people into trouble in the past. See Cobot.)
The truth of the matter is that there is no “real” social network. It all depends on what you’re trying to measure, what you’re trying to do with those measurements.
There are also many opportunities for new research when we tease out different types of social networks. What if we overlay the different types of social networks? Can we get a better sense of how someone manages their social network? Can we see new structural properties that give us new insights into how people connect, share information, gather support, etc.? So many possibilities!
I’m super excited that so many people from so many fields are getting interested in social networks, but I’m also scared that there are a lot of assumptions flying around that make it difficult to make sense of people’s contributions to this emergent field. Increasingly, I see sociologists and computer scientists and mathematician and economists outright dismiss work outside of their field as “wrong.” I think that part of the problem is that we’re each failing to account for what we can and cannot say based on the types of analysis we’re doing. And I think that we often talk past one another because we’re all talking about social networks but we’re talking about different social networks. In accounting for three types of social networks here, I’m not trying to be all-inclusive, but I am trying to point out that there are differences and that we cannot assume transitivity either in terms of structure or theory. If we can find a way to better identify what kinds of social networks we’re talking about and when and where what theories apply, I think that we’ll go a long way in bridging different intellectual discourses.
We do ourselves an intellectual disservice when we assume that these different types of networks are interchangeable or that studying one automatically tells us about another. Most scholars get this, even when they’re quoted out of context by journalists to suggest otherwise (see Cameron Marlow). But I get the sense that a lot of journalists, marketers, advertisers, politicians, and everyday folks don’t. This is a problem.
Those who treat different social networks interchangeably project properties onto the network they’re analyzing that don’t hold. People aren’t inherently cool or connectors because they have a lot of Friends on a social network site. Bus drivers and waitresses are much more likely to encounter more new people on a daily basis than executives, but this doesn’t mean that they have more social capital. People who email regularly do not necessarily have strong tie strength.
This is not to say that structural information in behavioral social networks or publicly articulated social networks may not work as a proxy for personal networks. Perhaps the networks derived from a particular social media tool or through a particular channel of communication do actually provide insight into a person’s personal network. There are great ways to empirically test this hypothesis involving the combination of structural analysis and interviewing. But you cannot simply assume that they are meaningful proxies just because they are both social networks.



Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Nokia E72 Hits


nokia e72 Nokia E72 Hits Stores, Priced at Rs. 44,000
The highly-anticipated Nokia E72, a device tailor-made for business and personal messaging is now available in stores.
To coincide with the arrival of the Nokia E72, Nokia has also released research revealing that more people rely on email than on traditional phone calls or text messaging when sending and responding to critical information.
Speaking about the research results, Nokia vice president Ukko Lappalainen said, “The research shows that people are spending an average of five full days per year – equivalent to a full work week – responding to emails. Half of us (46 percent) choose email over voice or text to send and receive important information. The Nokia E72 was designed exactly with this kind of person in mind – it allows the owner to be more responsive and communicate how they want, whenever they want and wherever they are.”
The Nokia E72 builds on the formula from Nokia’s most successful full QWERTY keyboard device, the Nokia E71, and adds important new functionality such as desktop-like email and chat experiences. Moreover, the latest version of Ovi Maps with A-GPS navigation and compass, an optical navi key and 5 megapixel camera are all packed into the sleek, beautifully-designed handset.
The Nokia E72 also comes with Nokia’s push consumer email service, Nokia Messaging, and now for the first time people can set up instant messaging (IM) directly from the homescreen, accessing communities such as Windows Live(TM) Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk and Ovi Chat. Just like chatting via the desktop, people can respond to friends and colleagues across multiple.
The Nokia E72 can also accommodate multiple work and personal email accounts and, with separate profiles for work and play, allows people to be flexible when it comes to choosing how, when, where and who to respond to. While work emails rank as the most important messages to receive, they are not necessarily the most urgent messages to respond to. According to Nokia’s research, half of respondents (49 percent) prioritise their partners ahead of their bosses or managers (29 percent), colleagues (23 percent) and even customers (31 percent).
The Nokia responsiveness research was commissioned to examine the various factors that influence how people respond to various issues and situations. In addition to the research, an online campaign at http://www.nokia.com/responsiveness invites people around the world to respond to various issues and comments from TED Fellows.

Samsung Omnia


Samsung OMNIA (i900) that is powered by Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional and comes with Microsoft Office has been launched in Pakistan through Mobile Zone. Omnia Means “Everything” in Latin, and I feel that Samsung has tried to compile this handset to do everything…! We are not sure about the pricing yet, as the gadget is going to hit stores in a week’s time.
A look at Samsung Omnia’s videos revealed that the device is a 100% touch screen, but still Samsung included an optical mouse for ease of navigation – the optical mouse is similar to what you’d find on laptops.
Samsung Omnia brings together high performance business content, high-end design mixed with a full bag of dynamic multimedia rich experience.
5 MegaPixel Camera, WLAN, 3G, Music Player, Media Player and much more is there that this Samsung made mobile phone offers.
samsung omnia Samsung Omnia Launched in Pakistan
Let’s peek at Samsung Omnia’s Specifications:
Size
112 x 56.9 x 12.5 mm
Weight
122 g
Display
TFT touchscreen, 256K colors (65K
effective) + Handwriting recognition + Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
Memory
8 GB/16 GB internal memory + microSD (TransFlash),
up to 8GB + 128 MB RAM, 256 MB ROM
Processor
624MHz Marvell PXA312 processor
Connectivity
GPRS + 3G + WLAN + Bluetooth + USB
OS
Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
Camera
5 MP, 2592х1944 pixels, autofocus, image
stabiliser, video, flash; secondary videocall camera
Additional Features
Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS support +
Pocket Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, PDF viewer) + MP3/AAC/AAC+/WMA/OGG/AMR
player + DivX/XviD/WMV/MP4 player + TV Out + Voice memo
Battery
Standby: Up to 500 h + 
Up to 5 h 50 min 

Talk Time

HTC Desire, Features and Availability


HTC is very well known for quality handsets or rather in some cases I would call them premium quality handsets. Over here in Pakistan owning a smartphone for some might be a no brainer in many cases but for all those tech geeks out there, the HTC Desire is a smartphone worth giving a shot to.
HTC-Desire-1
HTC Desire is an Android powered smartphone with specs which you would typically expect from a phone from HTC, high end of course. Let’s go through the features/specs in detail first:
Weight
  • 4.76 ounces (135 grams) with battery
Display
  • Type: Touch-sensitive screen with pinch-to-zoom capability
  • Size: 3.7 inches
  • Resolution: 480 X 800 WVGA
CPU Processing Speed
1 GHz Snapdragon Processor
Storage
ROM: 512 MB
RAM: 576 MB
Expansion slot
  • microSD™ memory card (SD 2.0 compatible)
  • Supports up to 32 GB
Connectors
  • 3.5 mm stereo audio jack
  • Standard micro-USB (5-pin micro-USB 2.0)
Sensors
  • G-Sensor
  • Digital compass
  • Proximity sensor
  • Ambient light sensor
HTC Widgets
  • Bookmarks, Calendar, Clock, Footprints, Friend Stream, Mail, Messages, Music, News, People, Photo Album, Photo Frame, Search, Settings, Stocks, Twitter™, Weather
  • Downloadable widgets
Multimedia
  • Photos application for viewing photos and videos
  • Music
  • FM Radio
Battery type
  • Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery
Capacity
  • 1400 mAh
Talk time
  • WCDMA: Up to 390 mins
  • GSM: Up to 400 mins
Standby time
  • WCDMA: Up to 360 hours
  • GSM: Up to 340 hours
Network
Europe
  • HSPA/WCDMA: 900/2100 MHz
  • GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
Asia Pacific
  • HSPA/WCDMA: 900/2100 MHz
  • GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
Platform
Android™ 2.1 (Éclair) with HTC Sense™
Camera
  • 5 megapixel color camera
  • Face detection capability
  • Auto focus and flash
  • Widescreen photo capture
  • Geotagging
Internet
3G
  • Up to 7.2 Mbps download speed
  • Up to 2 Mbps upload speed
GPRS
  • Up to 114 kbps downloading
EDGE
  • Up to 560 kbps downloading
Wi-Fi
  • IEEE 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth
  • Bluetooth® 2.1 with Enhanced Data Rate
  • A2DP for wireless stereo headsets
  • FTP and OPP (object push) for file transfer
  • Other supported profiles: AVRCP, GAP, GOEP, HFP, HSP, PBAP, SPP, Service Discovery Application Profile
Social Networking
  • Facebook integration
  • Friend Stream
  • Photo sharing on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter
  • Video sharing on YouTube™
  • HTC Peep for twittering
Special Features
  • Automatically lowers the ringer volume as soon as the phone is picked up
  • Mutes the ringer when the phone is flipped face down
  • Backs up certain data and settings to the microSD card automatically, such as SMS/MMS messages, bookmarks, Wi-Fi™ passwords, and more
Location
  • Internal GPS antenna
  • Google Maps
  • HTC Footprints
Tethering
  • Internet sharing through USB
Video Demos and Features



Please don’t consider the 3G aspects of the phone since all networks here in Pakistan are based on 2.5G/EDGE. However, networks here may shift to 3G anytime soon, but it should be considered a far off unconfirmed rumor for now.
From the specs of the HTC Desire you can safely say that this is in deed a tech savvy person’s heaven! From a high resolution AMOLED Display to Google’s very own Andorid OS to fully customizable homescreens and widgets with complete social network integration, it’s a match made in heaven.
But the downside of this phone is that if you want to use it to it’s full potential, you should have a good internet plan for the month, the HTC Desire is data hungry if you’re using all it’s features like Facebook integration, Twitter or syncing your E-mail inboxes regularly.
Our best bet is that you stick with Zong, they have really convenient and very economical internet packages for everyone, prepaid and postpaid both.
Or you can stick to Telenor’s Persona Postpaid package, their nationwide EDGE/GPRS connectivity is phenomenal.
HTC handsets are hard to come by if you’re just looking for them in regular shops, and none of them offer warranty for HTC phones even if they carry it by any chance, but here’s the best way to get an HTC Desire with warranty; head over to Brightex’s website by clicking this link,  who are the official HTC handset distributors in Pakistan, they have the HTC Desire for a fair price of RS. 49,000.
Why did I say fair price? Because it comes with a complete one year warranty! If something does go wrong with the phone, at least you’ll have someone to go to.
Or the second option is that you head over to HomeShopping.pk and buy the HTC Desire for a price of RS. 44,990. You’ll save some money but at the same time you will only get software warranty, it’s totally up to you to decide where do you wanna head over to for your brand new HTC Desire.
There is so much to choose from that you end up buying something which might not completely suit your needs, but the HTC Desire is a complete powerhouse and represents what a smartphone should be, staying connected with your social networks and your friends and family members doesn’t get easier than what the HTC Desire has to offer.
Its a highly recommend device if you’re a person who wants each and every bit of his digital life in his pocket. For more information on the HTC Desire, go to HTC’s website by clicking this link.

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