Islam & Pakistan! Technology & Me!
Product Reviews
Money transfer via Mobile: Telenor Easy Paisa
112 years ago
Before I begin, allow me to speak of the success of Telenor Easy Paisa’s Utility Bill payment service. Listing down some quick facts about the bill payment service:
- More than 47000 bills paid across Pakistan
- Total amount of bills paid exceeds Rs. 58.8 million
It can be safely said that the Easy Paisa method of bill payment has been received well by consumers and people have started to rely on it. The usage stats are more than the bills paid at ATMs in Pakistan.
Now like it was expected, Telenor has started expanding the set of transactions offered over its ‘Easy Paisa’ service. After the success of utility bill payments, Telenor has launched its ‘money transfer’ transaction that makes it possible for absolutely ANY customer to send and receive money as the receiving and sending of money does not necessarily require a cell phone.
Telenor’s target market appears to be ‘Domestic Remittance’ users in Pakistan i.e. People residing in urban areas for work and sending money from one city to the other or to their native villages. It also aims to work as a replacement of ‘traveller cheques’.
Nokia N86 : 8MP camera phone from Nokia
52 years ago
Karachi 7th Aug, 2009: The highly anticipated Nokia N86 will soon be available to Pakistani consumers. Nokia N86 is the most advanced mobile phone camera ever. It comes with a powerful combination of wide-angle Carl Zeiss optics and an 8 megapixel sensor, resulting in performance comparable to a stand alone digital camera. The Nokia N86 8MP is designed to excel in both bright and low light conditions; and it’s optimized for both video and still imaging. Its high-speed connectivity ensures easy and convenient sharing. In essence, it let’s you capture more, capture quality and capture to share. (more…)
Urdu on the Web: Google Indic Transliteration
102 years ago
I have held the view that we need to promote Urdu computing and Urdu on the internet with extensive research and development and practical implementation with more and more content put online that is localised and based on Urdu. Here is Google Labs with a fantastic service called “Indic Transliteration“.
Google Indic Transliteration offers an option for converting Roman characters to the Urdu characters. This lets you type Urdu words phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation — it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other, not their meaning.
For example, typing “shukriya” transliterates into Urdu as:
Nokia 5800 touchscreen
43 years ago
Nokia rattled the market with the launch of its first proper touchscreen phone, the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music. The phone was first shown in the Hollywood blockbuster, “The Dark Knight”. Available in shades of Blue, Black and Red; the phone truly is lovely aesthetically.
I admit I have only seen it with a friend as yet, but I have gone through detailed reviews of the phone (pictorials, video’s and written reviews) and spoken to my friend about his experience with it.
One of the best features of this phone is Nokia’s experiment with SIM loading. Nope. It’s not under the battery anymore. You can conveniently load the SIM in a tab on the side, just like memory cards are loaded.
The phone has a big 3.2 inch screen with a 360 x 640 pixel resolution. So if you’re fingers are big (or small), Nokia has taken care of it. You can be sure you won’t run into trouble with using the touchscreen interface. The icons are bigger, better.
The Music features have been enhanced, you can slide the phone a notch upwards for the music controls, which makes the phone look even prettier. It has a new and improved Media player and it seems as if Nokia has not given up on its plans to dominate the music/media player market.
The phone is perfectly 3G compatible. Yes, we’re still waiting for these services in Pakistan but anyway. It’s a good plus if you’re a frequent traveller abroad. The Nokia 5800 Xpress music supports 3.6Mbps HSDPA (my final year project is on the deployment of HSDPA in Pakistan) with obvious GPRS and EDGE support for backward compatibility and for the fact that countries like Pakistan are still dependent on GPRS/EDGE. Bundled with Bluetooth and WLAN (Wi-Fi) services, the phone is a gem for data usage.
With the Nokia 5800 Xpress music, Nokia has also improvised its camera interface. You hit a button and you’re ready to play ith the view finder. A 3.2 mega pixel camera supported by a Carl Zeiss lense, I could’nt ask for more.
The phone is priced at around USD 600 and is not officially marketed and sold in Pakistan. It is available through what are known as ‘Grey Channels’ at varying prices from Rs. 36,000 to Rs. 41,000 without proper warranty support.
Hope to see it soon in Pakistan. If you are a user of the phone or have seen/used it or have read about is pro’s and cons. Do share.
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