Now PSP prices drop to $130

Seems like the people at Sony are going all out to make your gaming experience even more affordable. For those who did'nt read my last post about the expected price drop in the PS3, first go and read that(pun intended). Now the Sony PSP is available for as cheap as $130(approx Rs 6,500).

In India we get a PS2 for MRP. 5,999 and if this PSP is going to be available for Rs 6,500, who's going to buy a PS2 now ? This could mean two things, a price drop in the PS2 also or may be Sony could stop making new PS2's. Its been a while since the PS3 was released and it's got a pretty big library of game title's, so it would'nt do much harm if Sony discontinued the PS2.



Here is the press release by Sony -
PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) System Now Offers Unrivaled Entertainment Value for $129.99

Featuring a Robust Entertainment Offering, Expansive Software Library and Accessibility to PlayStation®Network, the PSP system Continues to Deliver Great Value to Consumers

FOSTER CITY, Calif., Feb. 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC (SCEA) today announced the PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system will be available for $129.99 (MSRP) starting February 27, 2011. Since launching in 2005, the PSP system has sold more than 23 million* units in North America and 67.8 million worldwide, offering more than 590 engaging titles in North America as well as access to a vast selection of downloadable content from PlayStation®Network. In addition to the new price point, 13 new games will be added to the PSP "Greatest Hits" and $9.99 "Favorites" software collections, further delivering upon the PSP system's incredible entertainment value.

"The PSP system set the standard for complete portable entertainment and continues to be the premiere destination for gamers on-the-go," said Tim Bender, Senior Vice President, Sales, SCEA. "Nearly six years after its initial launch, demand for the PSP remains strong. This new price point enables us to broaden the PSP platform to a larger group of consumers who are looking for best-in-class handheld entertainment."

As part of the PSP system's extensive software catalogue are its "Greatest Hits" and "Favorites" collections. Available for $19.99 (MSRP), Greatest Hits titles have surpassed an impressive sales threshold and represent the highest caliber of quality software available on the PSP system. With nearly 70 titles to date, two of the latest additions include Assassin's Creed® Bloodlines™ (Ubisoft), DISSIDIA® FINAL FANTASY® (Square Enix, Inc.), LittleBigPlanet (PSP®), METAL GEAR SOLID®: PEACE WALKER (Konami Digital Entertainment, Inc.), Ratchet & Clank®: Size Matters, Resistance: Retribution™, and Toy Story 3: The Video Game (Disney Interactive).

Favorites titles, valued at $9.99 (MSRP), offer some of the PSP system's most popular games at an incredible price. New PSP Favorites titles include CRISIS CORE® -FINAL FANTASY® VII- (Square Enix, Inc. ), Daxter®, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite™ (Capcom), Killzone®: Liberation, SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Fire Team Bravo, and Tomb Raider® Anniversary (Square Enix, Inc.).

Acclaimed for being the first truly integrated handheld entertainment system, the PSP system continues to deliver unparalleled gaming experiences only possible on the PSP platform while offering a wide variety of affordable entertainment options to consumers.

Sony's Play Station 3 headed for a Price Drop ?

The Sony PlayStation 3 that you had your eye on and could not afford, well this will be great news to you. We all knew that Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console surely needed a price drop but we were hoping to hear an announcement on that at E3.

This price drop may be becuase Nintendo is launching its new hand held gaming console '3DS' on the 25th of march in Europe. To give you an idea about the price drop, The Sony PS3 120 GB was retailing at 255GBP(approx Rs 19,999), well now you can get a 250 GB PS3 for that price.

Sony has not yet made any official announcement but retailers like Amazon, HMV and Blockbuster are retailing the lowest version of the PS3 at 164.99GBP(approx RS 12,000). Is'nt that amazing, usually European prices are followed in India and hence we can expext a similar fall in prices in India too.

Rs 12,000 would be an amazing price for the PS3. All of you who are going to buy your PS3, put your buy on hold untill you hear something official from Sony.

Apple iPad event on 2nd March - 1 rumour is settled

It seems like reports of Apple launching the new iPad 2 on 2nd of March may just be true. Apple has just started sending people invites for this very special event. A lot of rumours were going around abouth when Apple plans to launch the new iPad.

I just love the graphic that comes with the invitation. The graphic just clears out any doubts about the nature of the event and what's it going to be about. The double meaining of the number 2 is just amazing.

The actual text accompanying the image is -

'Please join us for an invitation-only event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco on March 2 at 10:00 a.m. Registration begins at 9:00 a.m. Please arrive early. RSVP to rsvp_media@apple.com.'

The technical specs and other details abouth the iPad are still under wraps. I can assure you of one thing, if its Apple, there's going to be a hell lot of rumours that are going to do the rounds. Enjoy these rumours.

Full Version of Angry Birds For Android, Coming Soon

Angry Birds, that became the most downloaded game on the android market having more than 1 Million downloads is going to have a full version released very soon. The game has been a huge success for Rovio Mobiles, it was initially released on the Apple iOS platform and then made its debut on Google's Android Platform.

The version that is currently available for download on the Android Market is a free version which is supported by advertisments. Rovio Mobiles has decided to launch the full version of this game for the Android Market very soon.

According to a recent tweet from the developer's at Rovio Mobiles, we can expect the full version of this ver popular game to be available on The Android Marketplace in about a month.

The Xperia Play

About a week back, Sony finally unveiled the Xperia Play. The Xperia Play became the most 'leaked' device after so many of its details and even commercials were leaked. It was dubbed as 'The Playstation Phone' all this time before its release, well people at Sony are calling it 'PlayStation Certified'.

So lets get to the details, here's what you need to know -

# 4 inch display
# 480 x 854 resolution (FWVGA)
# 5.1 Megapixel Camera
# 8 GB microSD card included(upgradable to 32GB)
# Runs Android 2.3
# It’s packing a 1GHZ Qualcomm CPU and an Adreno 205 GPU
# 5.5 hours of battery life

The phone will come with one hit PS One title and six other game title's pre-installed. The six game title's are Crash Bandicoot, Asphalt 6, Bruce Lee, Star Battalion, The Sims 3 and Fifa 10. Sony has also tied up with developers to increase the game library for this device, some of these developers include EA, Glu, Digital Chocolate and Gameloft.

This device will be launched in US in march this year, we in India should expect this device to come to us by march next year. There has been no word on the price yet, but still how much would you pay for a flashy Android phone that just runs some extra games.

Some Stats From The Mobile World Congress 2011

The Mobile World Congress came to a close recently. There were so many new releases by most of the top companies, easily creating a lot of buzz on the net. We found this interesting infographic prepared by Webtrends on the products that created the most noise on the net.

This graphic will not tell you which device is the best. But instead it will tell you which device got maximum number of mentions on Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere. Thus you can clearly judge which device generated the maximum amount of interest amongst people.

Microsoft + Nokia = MicroKia :P

So, I believe most of you must have heard of the Microsoft and Nokia partnership by now. Since the announcement, comments have been coming in whether it is good or bad for the two companies. Some say that it is a win win situation for Windows, where as Nokia has nothing to win from this deal.

Microsoft had recently launched their new Windows Phone 7, replacing the aging previous Windows OS. While many people have found the Windows Phone 7 as a great launch by Microsoft and a giant leap for them, but they only partnered with just 2 handset makers, Samsung and HTC. While this move is questionable, that why only two, but then there is a lot of stuff about Microsoft that is questioable to say the least.

Now, talking about Nokia, well this is one company that has seen it all. The comapny is fast loosing market share to new entrants and its number 1 position is also under threat. Its Symbian OS has not aged well and I blame the developers at Nokia because I believe the Symbian platform, if handled properly would never had crumbled like this. All it needed was a change in UI.

Apart from Symbian, Nokia had earlier partnered with Intel and were working on a new platform called MeeGo. This platform was promising, but then you cant take eternity to release a stable and viable version. The fate of MeeGo is not very clear as of now, but we hope Nokia does not drop that.

What has really caused all of this panic. Well, the answer is a little obvious by now, Android. This new open source platform developed by Google and a few other companies is fast rising and is being touted as the next big thing. One big difference between Android and the rest of the competition is that Google offers this OS for free. Its open source and manufacturers can tweak it to suit their purpose. Also , most of the major handset makers have welcomed it with both hands open.

Nokia has opted to remain stubborn and not adopt the Android platform, but I doubt if they can mantain this stance for too long. Lets hope this new partnership between Microsoft and Nokia can turn their fortunes.

How to revert back to the old Facebook Photo Viewer?

Well If you are one of the many people who are searching for an answer to this question, then I can answer it for the time being. If you refresh your page, ou will automatically get back to the classic or the basic facebook photo viewer. To put it in more simpler words, just press god damn F5 and then you can see your pictures the way you are used too.

But let me tell you, Facebook knows how to impose even bad changes. I for once still dont like these new Facebook profile's, but then the people at Facebook made everyone change to these new profiles forcibly and i believe they will do so in this case too.

This new photo viewer looks more like a childs beta photo viewer made for some school project, how could Facebook even release this thing to 500 million odd users. They seriously take us for granted.

Obamas Dinner Meeting With Silicon Valley CEO's

The White House has just released 2 pictures of US President Barack Obama’s meeting with top people from Silicon Valley. The meeting which was held at Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr’s home had the who’s who from the tech world in it.

Seeing this picture we can make out that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Genentech Chairman Art Levinson; Google CEO Eric Schmidt; former state controller and venture capitalist Steve Westly Doerr, and Stanford University President John Hennessy were among the esteemed and honoured guests.

Even though no one knows what this meeting was about, speculations are on. As usual some jokes (some really funny) have started to come up on the topic. I’ll post one really good one at the end of this post. However what strikes me is that the people at White House choose to release one picture where in President Obama is engaged in a deep conversation with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I wonder how the rest of the people who were left out from this meeting would be feeling right now. I don’t see any representation from either Microsoft or even for that matter IBM. Bill Gates should have been the first person to be invited according to me, but what the heck, atleast Im not running a failed government (:p).

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got the best seats besides the president. Mark my word, this seating order would definitely become one hot topic of discussion in the coming days. After seeing Steve Jobs at this meeting, it puts to rest all those rumours about only six weeks being left for him to live.

Ohh ya, so that joke which I told you about. Ok here it goes, it’s a rather long one, but worth reading.

Transcript of Obama tech meeting in Silicon Valley February 17, 2011
John Doerr: Hi everybody, thanks for coming. I just wanted to start out and remind everybody here that you all work for me.
All: Understood
Obama: Thanks John, we all know who’s in charge, but I need you folks to do something for me. I’ve got to figure out how to turn this economy around by 2012. Or you’re all going to be listening to stories about Moose hunting the next time you want to meet with the President.
John Chambers: Don’t look at me. I voted for the old guy last time. Didn’t think it would turn out this way.
Steve Westly: But I want to tell you about my approach to business, based upon my eBay experience
Doerr: Yes Steve, we all know it’s better to be lucky than good, but that’s not going to turn the economy around by 2012
Eric Schmidt: Look, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about. What we need to do is open source government. Instead of hiring case workers to manage welfare and unemployment offices, let’s just ask users to submit ideas about how these underutilized resources can be used better. For example, let’s sell advertising on the backs of shirts of welfare moms and the unemployed, and then have them pick up trash on the freeways.
Obama: Hmm, I don’t know Eric…
Dick Costolo: @Woodside mansion. Pasta delicious!
Schmidt: OK. Another idea. Instead trying to figure this out ourselves, let’s get on an advisory board of a country that’s working well, say, like Sweden. We listen to their ideas, copy them, and then give the ideas away for free. And we sell advertising on the backs of shirts of government workers.
Steve Jobs: Yes, Schmitty, I know that’s how it works for you. But I think we really need to revolutionize the way this country works. Like what if we combine the prescription drug program, FEMA, and the National Endowment for the Arts, into one thing. We’ll call it the iPFArt. Yes, that’s it…
Carol Bartz: $#@! You boys always think you know the answer. What the country needs is tough love. Let’s cut, cut, cut back the federal employees until we have one thing left that works. Who says we need to grow the economy anyhow? This whole growth thing is over-rated. Why, while I was CEO of Autodesk, for the first 10 years, I turned it from a billion dollar company into a billion dollar company. Nobody complained. They just learned to accept the status quo. That’s what this country needs. To just accept it!
Dick Costolo: cant believe i missed the office 2nite. steve carrell ROCKS!
Larry Ellison: Barack. The problem is you are measuring the economy with someone else’s numbers. Instead you should be thinking like Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru. If you don’t like the rules of the game, the change the rules. Instead of publishing numbers about GDP, you need to be measuring the economy with different metrics—how many new jobs there are in bankruptcy law, increases in yacht sales, whatever!
Reed Hastings: I think we need to make army uniforms bright red. It must be hard for you to find all those soldiers. Why not make them wear red so we know what side they are on.
Mark Zuckerberg: Seriously, you guys are wasting my time. I’m sitting here listening to you, while back at the Facebook offices, my colleagues are inventing things that no one in this room will ever be capable of. Look, Barack, if you want to cut the deficit, run all the government’s IT through Facebook. All your employees are spending a couple of hours per day at work using Facebook already, why not transfer all the government functions into Facebook apps, so that that government workers can be more efficient doing whatever it is they do, instead of having to hit the “boss” button to hide Facebook every time they hear footsteps.
And if you don’t like my idea, %*@! It. Look, Tunisia and Egypt were just beta for us at Facebook. We can overthrow your government in a few days. All I have to do is push a button and I’ve got 5 million people protesting on the Mall by Saturday.
Obama: Right, got it. All government functions on Facebook. But only if you can get Russia to do the same.
Zuckerberg. Don’t be silly. I Skyped with Putin this morning. It’s a done deal.

Google Social Search

Google social search is one of the many new services provided by Google which people hardly take note of. With Google Social Search, one can find relevant content from your social connections. For the layman this means that if you’re logged into your Gmail account and then you search for something on Google, you will get results that will highlight relevant content by people from your social connections.

Lets say you search for a review on that latest cell phone you intend to buy and you of course would Google it, and you find that there’s a review by your dear friend on that same phone that you want to buy. Now this would be really helpful as nothing is better than the experience of someone you know.

I strongly believe if Google pursues with this so called experimental service, it will prove to be a great prospect for them in the future. Just to clarify, Social connections mean some one from your contacts attached to your Gmail id or someone from social sites like Twitter. You can also change who is part of your social settings.

New and Improved Facebook Photos (Finally :p)

It looks like the people at Facebook have finally realised the need to enhance the way we use photos on facebook. In September last year, Facebook announced that it would gradually roll out three big improvements to photos on Facebook.

The first of these was providing for higher resolution pictures. By providing support for better picture quality, without any charges unlike some other providers, Facebook clearly gaines some extra brownie points. Facebook increased the size of photos from a mere 720 pixels to 2048 pixels on the largest edge. The high resolution pics are a treat for the eyes.

The more recently released update of the new and improved photo viewer is again a good step by facebook. The problem earlier was pretty simple(but seriously frustrating to say the least ) that when we clicked on some photos, then we had to hit the back button on our browser again and again, hence loosing track of where we were(frequent users of facebook would know what im talking about). With this new image viewer, images are now opened in the same window in which u click on the pic. Not only this, the images now load much faster than earlier.

The last update was the easier tagging and uploading feature. Now we can tag multiple people easily. You can tag a single persom in many photos pretty easily now. The uploader too has been rebuilt from scratch and is now much more stable and reliable. So it will now be easier to upload, tag and view your pictures on Facebook.

Backup Your important Content Using Dropbox

How do you feel when your laptop breaks down, you take it to the service centre and the repair guy tells you that all your data will be formatted? I bet its a very pathetic feeling. At that time you would wish that somehow you could save that very important file you would need in the future.

Now, what can you do to prevent such a situation and save youself from the agony and dissapointment. One possible solution is that you could save your very important files on a pen drive or a flash drive. You may get yourself a 2gb or a 4gb pen drive which will cost you around 250-500 Rupees.

One other solution is that you could save you files using a external hard drive. A 500 gb external hard drive is available for approx 3,000 Rupees in the grey market(even less if you know the art of bargaining :p ).500 gb is enough space to nearly back up everything you have on your on board hard drive.

The problem with both these options of backing up your files using external memory is that you will have too loosen your pocket and get ready to shell out some cash. With time the external hard disk may stop working, hence this may not be a fool proof method.

So what is the way to get out of this fix. Well, why not use the power of the internet to save your files. There are a host of online hosting services available on the net which back up your content on their servers.

One such very popular web based file hosting service is Dropbox. Dropbox is a free and paid serice with different plans for different storage sizes. Recently the company launched Dropbox 1.0 two years after releasing the first beta Dropbox. Dropbox is a cross platform service supporting Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and all popular mobile device platforms.

Dropbox provides 2 gb of free storage sapce(what you would get in a normal pen drive). As the name suggests, the service allows users to simply drop their files in the Dropbox folder on their machine. The files that are dropped in the Dropbox folder automatically get uploaded onto the cloud. The functionality is further enhanced as people can have Dropbox folders on more than one machine and can hence share any file without having to send it as an attachment.

Hence Dropbox is a potential life saver for those who are crippled without crucial files or folders. You can manage the free 2 gp of space provided wisely. upload all your bookmarks onto the cloud through Dropbox and enjoy using them on any internet enabled machine on earth.

You can download Dropbox at www.dropbox.com and enjoy a hopefully more tension free life when your laptop breaks down next time.