Streaming games service launched

After seven years in stealth mode, a Silicon Valley start-up has launched a "revolutionary" video game service that offers new competition to consoles.

OnLive, which launched at the Game Developer Conference, promises to deliver on-demand video games via the cloud to the PC, Mac or TV.

The company said it could provide high quality gaming on low end machines.

"We think this moment, this day will be remembered as the beginning of a new era," said OnLive boss Steve Perlman.

"This is huge. This is transparent cloud computing. This is really really important for the industry.

"This will open up creativity, allow for new experiences and new kinds of expression that have never been available before," Mr Perlman told an audience of analysts, industry types and journalists at a ritzy unveiling of the product at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art.

The innovation behind OnLive rests in its video compression technology which instantly streams video via the internet so that it appears "effectively instantaneously".

"Perpetually, it appears the game is playing locally."

The reality is that all the heavy lifting is done by remote data centres that can be up to a thousand miles away while players use a simple PC or TV hooked up to a broadband connection.

This removes the need for paying hundreds of dollars for traditional disc-based consoles made by the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

"We're giving access to people who don't have access. We've moved hardware out of the equation," said Mr Perlman.

"Digital strategy"

For around an hour Mr Perlman and his chief operating officer Mike McGarvey put OnLive through some of its paces.

To various "oohs" and "aahs" from the audience, the two men played games ranging from Crysis Wars to Lego Batman from a cheap laptop and from a Mac notebook.

With the data being sent from servers just fifty miles away, the men boasted of being able to play with one-millisecond of lag.

Community tools like leaderboards and avatars along with the ability to share "'brag clips" which are short videos of your game highlights, are also part of the service. Users can also have multiplayer matches and watch other gamers play.

Users will need a high-speed broadband connection of at least 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps) for standard definition results or 5Mbps for high definition.

Players who want to use their television will have to purchase a small OnLive MicroConsole that connects the TV to the internet and is about the size of a pack of cards.

So far 10 publishers have signed up to provide titles for OnLive. They include familiar names like Atari Interactive, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive Software and Warner Bros.

"OnLive fits our digital strategy, which is to bring content to as many distribution points as possible," Scott Guthrie, vice president of software publishers THQ told the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Amazing"

In the run up to the Game Developer Conference, or GDC, the company has been giving demos of the service.

Sarju Shah of GameSpot has had a test run and said: "It seems pretty amazing. From this closed test it works really well. You can actually stream gameplay like Crysis, which is a struggle for most high end computers to do but in this scenario all you need is a little tiny box and an internet connection.

"If they can pull this off in the wild, given everyone's internet connection in the home, they will truly wreck stuff for everyone. This is the tip of the iceberg. If they can stream gameplay to anybody then basic stuff like streaming video, a joke. Music? A joke," stated Mr Shah.

Mr Perlman said he understood why some people might be wary of what they were selling but that he wanted people to question what OnLive could do.

"What we have is something that is absolutely incredible. You should be sceptical. My first thinking was this shouldn't work, but it does."

Analysts believe the success of OnLive could go one of two ways depending on pricing models.

"Depending on what business model these guys adopt, they could be wildly successful or a footnote in history," said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities.

Mr McGarvey was coy on the issue but did say it would be subscription based and that pricing "would be worked out in due course".

Over the next few days at the Game Developer Conference, attendees will get the chance to test out the service. The company is also inviting gamers to sign up for an external beta over the summer.

Mr Perlman ended his presentation with one plea to the audience and the wider gaming community. "This is thinking out of the box, help us make it out of the box.

8 hacks to make Firefox ridiculously fast

Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than ever.

But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations, all for about five minutes work and for the cost of precisely nothing at all. Here's what you need to do.

1. Enable pipelining

Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any responses are received, often reducing page download times. To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.

Keep in mind that some servers don't support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to false again if you have any problems.

2. Render quickly

Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn't want to keep you waiting, so by default will display what it's received so far every 0.12 seconds (the "content notify interval"). While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a longer content notify interval will improve performance.

Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter 500000 (that's five hundred thousand, not fifty thousand) and click OK again.

Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.

3. Faster loading

If you haven't moved your mouse or touched the keyboard for 0.75 seconds (the content switch threshold) then Firefox enters a low frequency interrupt mode, which means its interface becomes less responsive but your page loads more quickly. Reducing the content switch threshold can improve performance, then, and it only takes a moment.

Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter of a second) and click OK to finish.

4. No interruptions

You can take the last step even further by telling Firefox to ignore user interface events altogether until the current page has been downloaded. This is a little drastic as Firefox could remain unresponsive for quite some time, but try this and see how it works for you.

Type about:config, press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Boolean. Type content.interrupt.parsing, click OK, set the value to False and click OK.

5. Block Flash

Intrusive Flash animations are everywhere, popping up over the content you actually want to read and slowing down your browsing. Fortunately there's a very easy solution. Install the Flashblock extension (flashblock.mozdev.org) and it'll block all Flash applets from loading, so web pages will display much more quickly. And if you discover some Flash content that isn't entirely useless, just click its placeholder to download and view the applet as normal.

6. Increase the cache size

As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more), leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by increasing this cache size. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.

7. Enable TraceMonkey

TraceMonkey is a new Firefox feature that converts slow Javascript into super-speedy x86 code, and so lets it run some functions anything up to 20 times faster than the current version. It's still buggy so isn't available in the regular Firefox download yet, but if you're willing to risk the odd crash or two then there's an easy way to try it out.

Install the latest nightly build (ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/), launch it, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Type JIT in the filter box, then double-click javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true, and that's it - you're running the fastest Firefox Javascript engine ever.

8. Compress data

If you've a slow internet connection then it may feel like you'll never get Firefox to perform properly, but that's not necessarily true. Install toonel.net (toonel.net) and this clever Java applet will re-route your web traffic through its own server, compressing it at the same time, so there's much less to download. And it can even compress JPEGs by allowing you to reduce their quality. This all helps to cut your data transfer, useful if you're on a limited 1 GB-per-month account, and can at best double your browsing performance.

Google Chrome Is Fastest Browser in Site-Loading Tests

Last fall, Google claimed that its Chrome 2 Beta browser was “many times faster” than rival browsers at running JavaScript. In February, as it launched the beta of its new browser, Apple asserted that Safari 4 Beta was the world’s fastest browser. And this month, Microsoft started marketing Internet Explorer 8 with videos purporting to prove that it’s faster than its rivals. They can’t all be right, so PC World undertook detailed real-world tests to determine how quickly each of four browsers--the three mentioned above and Firefox 3.0.7--loaded a series of popular Web sites. The results: Google Chrome 2 Beta beat the field. Its average page load speed for our nine test sites was 1.3 seconds, half a second faster than runner-up IE 8. Safari and Firefox tied for last with an average loading time of 2.12 seconds for each of the test sites. Detailed test results for each browser appear in the accompanying table.

We saw the most significant difference in page load times with the English-language Wikipedia home page and the MySpace home page. Chrome 2 Beta completed the job of loading Wikipedia in a mere 1.12 seconds, easily outpacing the competition. Internet Explorer 8 chugged to a second-place finish, loading the page in 2.24 seconds on average. Firefox 3.0.7 and Safari 4 Beta lagged behind, however, with average load times of 3.31 seconds and 3.38 seconds, respectively. Chrome 2 also dusted the competition in loading the MySpace home page, getting it done in an average time of 1.43 seconds. Internet Explorer 8 loaded the page in 2.59 seconds, while Firefox took nearly 3 seconds on average, and Safari well over 4 seconds. Safari's overall results were disappointing, especially given Apple's claim that Safari is the fastest browser on the market. To its credit, though, Safari did load the Amazon home page faster than any of its three competitors.

Our Speed-Test Methodology

In our browser speed comparison, we pitted a near-final build of Internet Explorer 8 against Firefox 3.0.7 (the current nonbeta version of Mozilla's browser), the beta version of Chrome 2, and the beta of Safari 4. We used a set of nine popular Web sites in our testing: Amazon, MySpace, Yahoo, PC World, YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Wikipedia's English-language home page. To ensure that we measured the page-loading times as accurately as possible, we recorded our testing sessions on video for review later on.

We performed all of our testing on a Gateway P-7811FX notebook running a clean installation of Windows Vista Service Pack 1; we reinstalled the operating system before testing each browser. For each browser, we cleared the browser's cache and then loaded each page in our test suite. We repeated the process ten times per site per browser to ensure accurate results, to factor out fluctuations in network traffic, and to build a sufficiently large sample size to identify trends. In addition, we threw out the two best and the two worst scores for each page load test to further reduce the influence of fluctuations and to produce more consistent results.

Some browsers will report that a page has finished loading even though parts of the page haven’t yet appeared. We didn’t base our determination of when a page was loaded on the browser's opinion. Instead, we relied on whether all visual elements of the page were loaded and ready to use. For example, on Apple's home page, we judged the page to be ready when all of its graphics and images were loaded, and when the custom search field was ready to use.

Faster, But Should You Care?

The ironic thing about browser makers’ speed claims is that many users probably won’t notice the difference between the fastest and slowest browsers in our tests. What with fast broadband connections and a bunch of pretty peppy browsers to choose from, few of us spend a lot of time waiting for pages to load. On the other hand, if you're stuck on a slow connection, not even the fastest browser in the world will help you.

Our conclusion: All four of the modern browsers we tested are fast enough that the key factor to consider in determining which one to use shouldn't be "Which one's fastest?" Rather, you should ask "Which one do I like most?" “Which has the features I need?” and "Which one is safest?" That said, it is encouraging to see browser vendors compete with each other, and aim to ship the fastest Web browsers they possibly can.

IBM Readies Monster Supercomputer

IBM is to build a hugely powerful supercomputer capable of performing at 20 petaflops per second, twenty times faster than the current record holder, namely the 1 petaflop Roadrunner machine it delivered back in June to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

IBM has been contracted by the US government to build the machine, dubbed Sequoia, and is still developing the technology needed. It has also been asked to build a smaller computer called Dawn. Both machines will be constructed at its Blue Gene facilities in Rochester, Minnesota.

According to Big Blue, Sequoia will have the power of 2 million laptops. Its closest rival, the world's first petaflop machine, Roadrunner, can only perform at speeds equivalent to 100,000 laptops combined.

Understandably, a machine of this nature will occupy a lot room, namely 3,422 square feet (or 318 square metres). That is roughly the size of a large house, and although IBM claims it will be highly energy-efficient for the job it does, machines of this nature consume tremendous amounts of electricity and it is expected to occupy 96 refrigerator-sized racks.

Inside the beast itself, Sequoia is expected to contain more than 1.6 million processors, thought to be IBM Power chips. The system is also reportedly to have 1.6TB of memory and will run Linux. The open source operating system commands approximately 85 percent market share in the high performance computing field. Windows meanwhile is relegated to less than five percent market share, according to industry estimates.

The smaller machine, Dawn, is expected to be a 500-teraflop computer. A teraflop equals a trillion floating points a second; a petaflop meanwhile is 1,000 trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second.

Sequoia will be used for simulating nuclear tests by the US Department of Energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Supercomputers are necessary for this task, as it allows scientists judge the safety and reliability of the US nuclear weapons stockpile without doing live tests.

That said, Sequoia should have peacetime applications as well, namely weather forecasting or oil exploration. And the ability to conduct multi-scale science simulations would also allow, say, the pharmaceutical industry to simulate the effect of drugs on the human body, or by Wall Street to simulate the impact of events on the stock market.

IBM has a rich history in the supercomputer sector, and has been building supercomputers for more than 50 years now. It dominates the Top 500 supercomputer rankings, and Big Blue believes that the 20-petaflop computing power of Sequoia will be so powerful, it will exceed the combined systems of every machine on the Top 500.

The Sequoia machine is slated for delivery sometime in 2011.

How to install Portable Linux in USB?

At one time or another, you would surely have felt the need for a portable Operating System that you could carry around with you and to help troubleshoot and backup your friends’ crashed PCs or just carry your complete Office with you. There are several Live CD based Linux Distributions(distros) where you just boot from it and enjoy the new OS. But what if you need your Data and settings to be remembered. A good alternative is to use a “LIVE USB” based OS.

Three things should be considered first.

* Size of USB drive
* Type of Distribution
* Usage

Distros like Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux will perform well in 256MB drives. Some OS’es section off a portion of your computer’s memory[RAM] and use that as a drive, in addition to the flash drive.

We will use an application called UNetbootin to install the Linux into the flash drive. We can let the program download a distro or select the image file(.iso) of an already downloaded distro. Download UNetbootin here: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ and install it.

‘m using the Boxpup version of Puppy Linux as my distro.Get it from the official site here: http://www.puppylinux.org/ . Download for Boxpup version: http://www.puppylinux.org/downloads/puplets/boxpup

The downloaded file will be an .ISO file. The important thing to note here is to make sure that you have downloaded the file correctly. Thats why we’re going to verify the authenticity of the downloaded iso.So get the MD5 hash from the place you downloaded.it will be listed in the download page itself. Select the whole MD5 hash and copy it using ctrl-c.

Now install this MD5 hash checker called HashTab from here: http://beeblebrox.org/hashtab/. After you finish installing HashTab, right click the downloaded iso file, select properties.

MD5 checkers

You’ll see a tab called file hashes. Select the tab and wait for it to calculate the file hashes. Select MD5 and paste the MD5 hash, that you copied earlier, into the box that reads “Hash Comparison”. If your downloaded file in not tampered, you will see a green tick mark in the hash comparison box. If the downloaded iso file is tampered with or has been incorrectly downloaded, you will see a red cross. You should then attempt to re-download the file from another source.

As your iso file has been verified, it’s time to install the OS . Open UNetbootin and select the Diskimage Radio button and select the downloaded iso file. Please make sure the correct drive letter for your USB drive is selected below.
*It is very important to re-check this because a mistake will format one of the partitions in your hard disk.*

Select Ok and let the program work for some time. After a few minutes you’ll see a dialog box asking to reboot. Click No. Save all your work, eject the USB drive but leave it in the USB port and restart the computer.

Now when your system is restarted, just boot your system with USB(change boot order frm BIOS). You’ll see the UNetbootin menu. Select Puppy.You’ll be asked a one-time set of questions to determine the setup of your computer.Thats it,you can customize your Linux as you want!

Carbon Nanotube Avalanche Process Nearly Doubles Current

By pushing carbon nanotubes close to their breaking point, researchers at the University of Illinois have demonstrated a remarkable increase in the current-carrying capacity of the nanotubes, well beyond what was previously thought possible.

The researchers drove semiconducting carbon nanotubes into an avalanche process that carries more electrons down more paths, similar to the way a multilane highway carries more traffic than a one-lane road.

"Single-wall carbon nanotubes are already known to carry current densities up to 100 times higher than the best metals like copper," said Eric Pop, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the U. of I. "We now show that semiconducting nanotubes can carry nearly twice as much current as previously thought."

As reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers found that at high electric fields (10 volts per micron), energetic electrons and holes can create additional electron-hole pairs, leading to an avalanche effect where the free carriers multiply and the current rapidly increases until the nanotube breaks down.

The sharp increase in current, Pop said, is due to the onset of avalanche impact ionization, a phenomenon observed in certain semiconductor diodes and transistors at high electric fields, but not previously seen in nanotubes.

While the maximum current carrying capacity for metallic nanotubes has been measured at about 25 microamps, the maximum current carrying capacity for semiconducting nanotubes is less established. Previous theoretical predictions suggested a similar limit for single-band conduction in semiconducting nanotubes.

To study current behavior, Pop, graduate student Albert Liao and undergraduate student Yang Zhao first grew single-wall carbon nanotubes by chemical vapor deposition from a patterned iron catalyst. Palladium contacts were used for measurement purposes. The researchers then pushed the nanotubes close to their breaking point in an oxygen-free environment.

"We found that the current first plateaus near 25 microamps, and then sharply increases at higher electric fields," said Pop, who also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at the U. of I. "We performed repeated measurements, obtaining currents of up to 40 microamps, nearly twice those of previous reports."

By inducing very high electric fields in the nanotubes, the researchers drove some of the charge carriers into nearby subbands, as part of the avalanche process. Instead of being in just one "lane," the electrons and holes could occupy several available lanes, resulting in much greater current.

The avalanche process (which cannot be observed in metallic carbon nanotubes because an energy gap is required for electron-hole multiplication) offers additional functionality to semiconducting nanotubes, Pop said. "Our results suggest that avalanche-driven devices with highly nonlinear turn-on characteristics can be fashioned from semiconducting single wall nanotubes."

Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology through the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative.

Samsung introduces OmniaHD i8910 S60 High Definition video phone

Samsung took the S60 world by storm with its OmniaHD, also known as the i8910, unveiled today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The OmniaHD's 8 megapixel autofocus camera is also capable of recording HD (720p) video.

The Samsung OmniaHD features an oversized 3.7-inch touchscreen AMOLED display, at QHD (360x640 pixels) resolution, which is backed by Nokia's S60 5th Edition user interface. The OmniaHD also features dual-stereo speakers and Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP support for stereo headsets.

The OmniaHD features quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz) support, with tri-band UMTS (900/1900/2100MHz) and HSPA for high-speed data. WiFi is also on board, so that you can make use of hotspots for even faster data connections.

Pricing or availability details for the Samsung OmniaHD (i8910) were not announced yet.

Specifications for the Samsung OmniaHD (i8910)
Operating System		:S60 5th Edition
Data		:GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA/HSPA/WiFi
Size		:123mm x 58mm x 12.9mm (4.8in x 2.3in x .5in)
Weight		:Unknown
Battery		:1500mAh
Battery Life		:Unknown standby time
		:Unknown talk time
Main Display		:3.7" 16m color QHD (360x640 pixels) touchscreen AM OLED
Camera		:8 megapixel autofocus with LED flash
Video		:HD Record/Playback
Messaging		:SMS/MMS/IM
Email		:POP3/IMAP/SMTP
Bluetooth		:Yes with A2DP
Memory		:8GB/16GB internal, microSD card slot
Availability		:Not released
Other		:Speakerphone, Built-in GPS receiver, built-in compass

Universal Phone Charger

Instead of each manufacturer having its own charger, companies agree on a universal charger by 2012.

You know the scenario – you get a new cell phone, and it comes with a charger that will only work with that brand. So you add that older charger to the tangle of other old chargers in a kitchen drawer.

Well, that’s going to change. By 2012 the vast majority of handsets will support a micro USB universal charger, one that will use 50% less energy on standby.

Michael O'Hara, marketing director for the GSM Association, said:

"This is a broad agreement that will move the industry to a single, energy-efficient charger for all mobile phones."

Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Orange, 3, AT&T and Vodafone are all backing the plan, the BBC stated.

In a statement, Mitti Storckovius, director of environment, devices at Nokia said:

"By supporting this industry initiative on common charging solutions, and enabling consumers to choose if they need a charger with every new device or can re-use existing ones, we can contribute further in improving the industry's environmental footprint."

Currently there are 30 different types of charger in use across Europe, and the EU has been putting manufacturers under pressure to come up with a universal solution.

Bluetooth 3.0

The Bluetooth 3.0 buzz is building. According to several industry blogs, the short-range wireless standard Bluetooth 3.0 will get its official launch on April 21. However, the developers of the standard, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, aren't officially saying anything. According to blog DVice, it has received a press release from the Bluetooth SIG that the latest Bluetooth standard will debut April 21 when specifications will be unveiled.

Here's What We Know About Bluetooth 3.0

The Bluetooth 3.0 standard is expected to deliver even faster short-range wireless speeds (up to 480 Mbit/s), improvements to reduce chances of device disconnections when syncing, and the addition of Generic Alternate MAC/PHY (AMP) technology that will reportedly allow Bluetooth 3.0 devices to transfer data at speed on par with Wi-Fi.

What's unique about Bluetooth is its low cost and low power consumption, allowing it to be used in devices such as cell phones where cost and power consumption are huge concerns for developers. However, Bluetooth technology has struggled in its efforts to be adopted widely.

What the blogs are saying

The Bluetooth SIG claims Bluetooth 3.0 can wirelessly transfer "an entire music library, a complete DVD [or] a vacation's worth of photos, all within seconds," according to the blog DVice. In addition to pumped-up speed, Bluetooth 3.0 could also feature "Enhanced Power Control," which reduces those annoying headset disconnects caused by putting your phone in your pocket or purse.

There are no details at the moment about Bluetooth 3.0-ready devices, but most Bluetooth watchers expect the Bluetooth SIG to release a list of manufacturers that have products ready to go at the Bluetooth 3.0 launch on April 21.

What Bluetooth SIG Representatives Are Saying

The news that Bluetooth 3.0 will launch on April 21 comes from two blogs: DVice and PhoneScoop. However, I spoke with several Bluetooth representatives and none of them could confirm a Bluetooth 3.0 announcement on April 21.

I did learn there will be an "all-hands meeting" in Japan for Bluetooth SIG personnel on April 21, but no one I talked to had any knowledge of an official announcement scheduled for that date. I also learned that while Bluetooth 3.0 is widely expected to be the official name for the next Bluetooth standard, codenamed Seattle, it has not become the official name just yet.

Bluetooth in the smart phone age

The new Bluetooth standard comes as smart phones are growing way beyond e-mail and voice calling into full-fledged mini-computers. For some time now, cell phone users have turned to Bluetooth for wireless headsets and to sync calendar and contact information. Now that many people are listening to music and watching movies on their mobile devices, Bluetooth needed to get faster to remain an effective solution for wireless syncing.

In the meantime, Bluetooth technology will have to compete with the Wireless USB standard that is going in popularity and influence.

TATA Nano - Cheapest Car

Tata Motors today announced the commercial launch of the Tata Nano, keenly awaited across India since its unveiling on January 10, 2008. The Tata Nano is BS-III* compliant and comes with an all-new 2-cylinder aluminium MPFI 624 cc petrol engine mated to a four-speed gear box and will be available in three variants. The cars will be on display across the country at Tata Motors Passenger Car dealerships and other select authorised outlets from April 1st.

Speaking at a Press Conference, the Chairman of Tata Sons and Tata Motors, Mr. Ratan N. Tata, said, “The Nano represents the spirit of breaking conventional barriers. From the drawing board to its commercial launch, the concept, development and productionisation of the car has overcome several challenges. It is to the credit of the team at Tata Motors that a car once thought impossible by the world is now a reality. I hope it will provide safe, affordable, four-wheel transportation to families who till now have not been able to own a car. We are delighted in presenting the Tata Nano to India and the world.”

The Tata Nano is currently being manufactured at the company’s Pantnagar plant in Uttarakhand in limited numbers. The new dedicated plant, at Sanand in Gujarat, will be ready in 2010 with an annualised capacity of 350,000 cars.

THE THREE VARIANTS:

The Tata Nano offers an incredibly spacious passenger compartment which can comfortably seat four adults. With a length of just 3.1 metres, width of 1.5 metres and height of 1.6 metres, the Tata Nano has the smallest exterior footprint for a car in India but is 21% more spacious than the smallest car available today. A high seating position makes ingress and egress easy. Its small size coupled with a turning radius of just 4 metres, makes it extremely manoeuvrable in the smallest of parking slots.

The three trim levels and their key features available at launch are:
Tata Nano Standard (BSII* and BSIII*): The standard version, in three colour options, single-tone seats, and fold-down rear seat;

Tata Nano CX (BSII* and BSIII*): In five colour options, with heating and air-conditioning (HVAC), two-tone seats, parcel shelf, booster-assisted brakes, fold-down rear seat with nap rest;

Tata Nano LX (BSIII*): With the features of CX plus complete fabric seats, central locking, front power windows, body coloured exteriors in three premium colours, fog lamps, electronic trip meter, cup holder in front console, mobile charger point, and rear spoiler. Many of these features are not available on current entry-level small cars in the country.

PERFORMANCE & SPECIFICATIONS:

Performance: The 2-cylinder engine – delivering 35 PS @ 5250 rpm and a torque of 48 Nm @ 3000 rpm – enables the car to have a top speed of 105 kmph and negotiate inclines with a gradeability of 30%.

Fuel efficiency: 23.6 km/litre, certified by the Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI) under mandated test conditions, which is the highest for any petrol car in India.

Emission: The high fuel efficiency, coupled with a low kerb weight of 600 kg, ensures that the Tata Nano – at 101 gm / km – has the lowest CO2 emission amongst cars in India. The Tata Nano is BS-III* compliant and is BS-IV* ready. It is also available in BS-II* norms.

Safety: The Tata Nano’s safety performance exceeds current regulatory requirements – it passes the roll-over test and offset impact, which are not regulated in India. It has an all sheet-metal body, reinforced passenger compartment, crumple zones, intrusion-resistant doors, besides mandatory seat belts and complies fully with existing Indian safety standards. Tubeless tyres – among which the rear ones are wider endowing extra stability – enhance safety.

Warranty: 18 months or 24,000 km, whichever is earlier.

THE BOOKING PROCESS:

In view of the expected significant demand and limited production capacity initially until the Sanand plant is fully ramped up to capacity, the Tata Nano will be available through a booking mode.

Tata Motors has entered into an exclusive agreement with the State Bank of India to manage the booking process.

The sale of application forms and acceptance of booking will start from April 9th 2009 till the end of day April 25th 2009. The application forms will be available at a price of Rs. 300, with a range of offers from select associate Tata Group companies. The application forms will be available at over 30,000 locations in about 1,000 cities through Tata Motors Passenger Car dealerships, State Bank of India and its branches, its subsidiaries and associates, other preferred financiers, and outlets of Westside, Croma, ‘World of Titan’ and Tata Indicom exclusive stores.

After collecting the forms, customers have two options. They can either pay the entire booking amount themselves or seek financing of the booking amount.

For those who seek financing, Tata Motors has entered into agreements with 15 preferred banks/NBFCs for the Tata Nano booking loan product. The booking product offered by these banks will enable a Tata Nano to be booked by paying an amount starting Rs. 2999/- only. Their chosen financier will directly submit their application forms to the State Bank of India on their behalf.

Those, who choose to themselves pay their entire booking amount, can submit their application forms to State Bank of India through 1,350 notified branches in 850 cites, and also at Tata Motors Passenger Car dealerships, Westside and Croma outlets. Option to submit bookings online is available at its website tatanano.com.

Within 60 days of the closure of bookings, Tata Motors will process and announce the allotment of 100,000 cars in the first phase of deliveries, through a computerised random selection procedure. These 100,000 allotments will be price protected for the launch prices till delivery of the cars but the booking amounts will not bear any interest for the customers. Deliveries will commence from July 2009.

Applicants have the option to retain their booking deposit, even if they do not get allotment in the first phase. Those who choose this option will be eligible for interest on their deposit, effective from the date of announcement of allotment of the second phase, at a rate of 8.5% for retention period between one year to two year and 8.75% for a retention period of more than 2 years. Allotment of retainees will be simultaneously communicated, along with the allotment of the first 100,000 cars.

PREFERRED FINANCIERS:

Tata Motors has entered into agreements with 15 preferred banks/NBFCs for the Tata Nano booking loan product. The preferred financial institutions are: State Bank of India, Tata Motor Finance, State Bank of Patiala, ICICI Bank, State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Indore, Axis Bank, Punjab National Bank, Federal Bank, Corporation Bank, Indian Bank, and the Central Bank of India.

MERCHANDISE AND ACCESSORIES:

The Tata Nano comes with an attractive range of accessories and merchandise. The range of merchandise includes a Nano phone, Nano watch, T-Shirts, etc. and will be made available online at its website tatanano.com as well at all Tata Motors Passenger Car dealerships, Westside & Croma outlets. Tata Indicom will also market the Nano phone and Titan the Nano watch.

Accessories include alloy wheels, body kits, decals etc., to customise the Tata Nano to individual tastes.

NVIDIA GTX 275 Graphics Card: 35% Faster Than HD 4890?

Today, NVIDIA officially announced the GeForce GTX 275 mid-range video card, the latest addition to its performance GPU lineup. With the goal of being the best bang for your buck graphics card on the market, the GTX 275 offers a combination of performance, physics, and GPU computing power for budget conscious consumers. Interested? Check out a few highlights:

* 633 MHz GPU Clock
* 1404 MHz Shader Clock
* 1134 MHz Memory Clock
* 240 Processor Cores
* 80 Texture Processing Units
* 448-bit Memory Interface
* 896 MB GDDR3 memory

Physically, the video card is 10.5" in length, requires two 6-pin power connectors, and sports a dual slot heat sink. In addition, it uses a PCI Express 2.0 x16 interface while providing two DVI outputs.

The GTX 275 is set to battle the HD 4890 and, according to NVIDIA, claims a 10-35% performance edge over ATI's offering in various benchmarks and tests. As more reviews and comparisons are published, we'll find out how accurate that statement is. For now, you will have to wait a couple of weeks to purchase this product. Expect wide availability by April 14, 2009 at a price of $249.

Hands On: Motorola Evoke QA4

Many of the new handsets announced at CTIA this year are targeted toward customers who want advanced features, but don't need all of the functionality of a smartphone. One of these new phones is the Motorola Evoke QA4. With a 2.8-inch full touchscreen, widget-based user interface and full HTML browser, the Evoke has some impressive specs for a non-smartphone.

Some mid- to low-range touchscreen phones I've used in the past had sluggish UIs didn't have the ease-of-use of a smartphone. Fortunately, this isn't the case with the Motorola Evoke.

The Evoke's touch screen is quite responsive and I didn't have to swipe or tap multiple times to get something to work. The Evoke also has haptic feedback, which sends a light vibration to your fingertip when you tap an on-screen key. Haptic feedback especially enhances the Evoke's landscape QWERTY keyboard, which was surprisingly comfortable and easy to use.

The Evoke comes preloaded with seven widgets: MySpace Mobile, Follow Me Weather, Google Quicksearch, Google Picasa, RSS Reader, USA Today Mobile, and YouTube. Each widget has its own panel and you can flip through them with a swipe of the finger. The silky interface reminded me a little of the Palm Pre's "deck of cards" model for managing apps. While the Evoke has a few smartphone-like features, it also has some limitations. The full HTML browser doesn't compare to what you'd find on a more advanced handset. And while instant access to apps is a nifty feature, you're restricted to only the seven preloaded widgets. Another downside: Motorola says that they don't have any current plans to add more.

The Evoke's rounded corners and smooth encasing feels very nice in hand. The slide-out numeric pad is sturdy and the flat keys are easy to press. And while some Motorola handsets can look a bit chintzy, the Evoke is quite eye-catching and the build looks high quality.

The Motorola Evoke QA4 also sports aGPS, quad-band CDMA connectivity and a 2-megapixel camera. Motorola has not announced carrier, availability or pricing of the Evoke QA4.