Here is a random list of websites designed with wooden textures in their background.

Do suggest more websites to be included in the list.

Terminator Salvation

The war against machines is back on the screen. Anybody who isn’t in sync with the previous threequels will be left clueless. You will have to understand good and bad terminators, know who Kyle Reese is, understand judgement day and get used to the fact that Arnie is no more into acting. So in this movie, finally Judgement day has happened and the machines are out to wipe out the few remaining traces of the human race. John Connor is a leader of the Resistance  and the machines need to terminate him as he is a threat to the skynet. Cyberdyne experiments with a human body and creates an unique and powerful terminator, Marcus, and hurls him into the future where John Connor is fighting the Skynet. Marcus has a powerful and good heart. So he decides to switch sides and help John Connor. Christian Bale doesn’t fit into John Connor’s frame and most part of the movie he grunts and complains. Sam Worthington was aptly cast  as the good terminator. Arnold is totally missed out and when John Connor grunts “Ill be back”, I  wish that it never comes true. But the movie is a mindless action entertainer and is a good watch.The movie ends with all signs that there is more to come in this franchise.

gRate: 2.5/5

Pasanga

Its been since Mani Rathnam’s “Anjali” that the tamil cinema has come out with some thought provoking and good movie revolving around kids. I never expected Pasanga to be a such a good flick. Its about 2 kids, their school, their parents and all the fun and frolic they have. Jeeva is a spoilt brat and he is a gangster in his school. Anbu is a new kid on the block. He moves into Jeeva’s neighborhood and school. Anbu is a brilliant student who lives his dreams and loves his family. When these two opposite poles repel each other, there is a huge impact in the lives of their parents and friends. Director Pandiraj deserves all credits for such a brilliantly directly movie. A few scenes in the movie connects with me, my friends, my school and my family. My mom realized that after watching the trailer and all praises to her memory. This movie deserves a round of standing ovation.

gRate: 4.5/5

Land of the Lost

When you get to watch Will Ferrell’s movie, you must prepared for nonsense. But I saw the movie in the Top 10 charts and thought, this time Will Ferrell might have come out with something good. I couldn’t go wrong any further. This is a total crap movie and it’s bound to win the Razzi awards hands down. Will Ferrell, invents a time travel device and lands up in a parallel dimension filled with Dinosaurs, Lizzard men, Monkey men and what not… Time and energy wasted watching this movie.

gRate: 1/5

Thoranai

A bunch of movie makers got together, rented a hotel room, ordered some booze and purchased 20+ pirated tamil movie DVDs and spent the night watching all of it in random order. Tadaaaaa… Thorani was born. This is a total mashup of all the semi-hits that came out in the past 10 years of Tamil cinema. In Madurai, Vishal’s mother Geetha is a saddened soul cribbing about her lost fisrt son. So Vishal is set to find him in Chennai. Vishal falls for Shreya at first sight and then there is a very weak comedy track with Santhanam as well. He meddles up with 2 ruffians in Chennai and one of them turns out to be his brother… enough said… the remainder of the story can be easily predicted. Shreya tries too had to look sexy and Vishal exceeds her efforts to look macho. Don’t make the same mistake I did by watching this movie.

gRate: 1.5/5

The Hangover

Four buddies decide to spend a night at the Vegas for a bachelor party to commemorate the wedding of one of them. They spend a wild night doing wild things and end up forgetting the entire night. They wake up the next day to find themselves in total mess. Their buddy whose marriage in on the following day has gone missing. So its left to the 3 buddies to trace their memories and activities of the previous night to find their lost friend and take him to his wedding. The plot is a downhill slide with string of totally crazy events that no one could even dare to imagine. It was an enjoyable stretch of 2 hours. Don’t miss this one and don’t watch with your family or kids. They might start getting ideas on what you may be upto on your next boys-only-roadtrip.

gRate: 3.5/5

Thiruvanamalai

Total bullshit. I was a fan of Arjun until I watched this movie and I must thank the person who invited the “Forward” button. The entire movie was covered in record 15 minutes.

gRate: 0/5

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Today Micheal Jackson’s demise came in as a shell shocking news to the entire world. His departure has left a huge black hole in the Galaxy of western music. I grew up listening to Micheal Jackson’s music and he introduced western music to me and probably to many others. I still remember the Hitachi Music system and the MJ cassette tapes  my Dad got me from abroad when I was an year old. We used to listen to it all night together and fall asleep.

I always recollect one particular incident whenever I think of Micheal Jackson. I was about 12-13 years old and I was MJ tapes. I liked the music so much that I listened to it over and over. I walked into a music store and bought “Thriller” cassette. I was totally in love with the music and started saving pocket money for more cassettes. The next month I walked into the store and saw that I already own all MJ tapes and there is nothing new in the store. But I wanted more music. I asked the sales guy if there were any other similar cassettes or artists. He didn’t even bother to look at me and answered “No”. That’s the moment when I realized the greatness of MJ. Till now I haven’t come across no music or artist that even close to being similar to MJ’s.

I really don’t care about his personal life or character. Let the paparazzis worry about it. To me MJ is still the God of Pop to such an extent that I define a new genre called “MJ Pop”. He has left behind a great and immortal legend and he is survived by his fans across the globe.

Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009 ) [May his soul R.I.P.]

Never in the history of mobile phones was such a big-bang launch for any mobile model in the Indian market. The new Nokia N97 was announced, pre-launched, debated, previewed, and launched in Indian will all possible tricks in the marketing books. Is this mobile worth all the attention its gaining from the media? Lets have a detailed analysis of the mobile. I would like to thank Nokia India for sending the phone to my doorsteps for me to have a look at it.

The Retail pack

The Package

Nokia N97’s retail pack includes the handset, one battery, one stylus, mediocre headset with wired remote, charger with microUSB pin, charger pin adapter, Leather pouch (APAC Version), a soft cloth to clean the screen and the manuals with their supporting software CDs. I would have preferred to have an extra stylus like in the Nokia 5800 and a high end headset with can do some justice to the music quality of the handset. The leather pouch is not really leather and it feels cheap. The battery is 1500 mAh Lithium ion battery capable of going strong for 9 hours of talk time. The packing is eco-friendly. The Indian package is also touted to have the TV out cable.

micro USB charger

Build quality and Design

Once you take the mobile out of the pack,  you will be surprised by the size. Its not as big as it looks in the photos and promos. Its quite sleek and fits well in your palm. The touch screen is easy to operate with a single hand on the vertical mode. But the real surprise is when you slide it open. I was so amazed by the solid click you get when you slide open. Still the phone feels like a single piece. The bottom of the slider never touches any other part of the phone and you can be assured of a scratch-less slider, which was not the case with the N95 variants. The plastic used in body is quite solid and feels rich.

The physical keypad is quite small and cramped. I don’t understand the use of the navigation D-pad to be present where it is. They keys are too small, but they are easy to operate even for people with huge hands. My doubt is all about the hinge mechanism used and its robustness. The call attend and end keys below the screen are not physical button and they are touch responsive, which is a good thing. The menu button is a physical key. The top of the phone also holds the ambient light and proximity sensor. They adjust the screen brightness relative to the ambiance lighting and the screen display light is turned off if you have the phone close to your face while on a call. These are good to have battery saving features. Though the build quality is good, this phone is not made for rugged usage. Its for people who take extra care for their mobile and predominantly live in dust-free environments.

The screen lock

The phone is equipped with 3.5″ resistive touchscreen with a 360 x 640 resolution. Sunlight visibility is really good and I could vouch for it as I got to demo the phone in broad daylight. I liked the haptic feedback in the touchscreen and its intensity can be adjusted. The sensitivity of the screen is much better than 5800, but still you would have to press harder as its a resistive touchscreen. The screen is very responsive and I really liked it.

At the top, you will find the usual power button and the 3.5mm audio socket. The stereo speakers are found on the left sides and the microUSB port and the screen lock key are found in the middle. The screen lock key is a new feature and its very useful. The right side of the phone houses the volume buttons and the the photo click button. The photo click button is a 2 step button and its very conveniently located. The bottom of the phone has a perforation that lets you hang the stylus.

The back of the phone has the camera with its dual LED flash and an active shutter. I would have loved the phone instantly if only i had the N79’s xenon flash. The shutter invokes the camera application in the mobile, when its

Notice the scratched lens

opened and closes the application when its closed. I got to review a mobile that has been used for a few days. I noticed that the camera shutter is susceptible to screen the camera lens. This was shocking. Notice the image on right. I tried to capture the scratch as much as possible with the mid-end camera I had with me. The Nokia design team had failed to provide a robust solution for the camera. Dust particles have entered the space between the lens and shutter and they have scratched the lens badly. What good the camera would be if it had scratches inspite of the shutter.

Memory

The memory card is hot-swappable, but the slot is located beneath the battery cover. So you will have to remove the cover to change the memory card. Though the memory card can take in upto 16GB microSD card, will you ever need anything more than the 32 GB onboard memory? The phone has an internal memory of 128mb.

User Interface

Widgets

The phone UI is backed up by the robust and user-friendly Symbian version 5 with feature pack 2. I find a lot of improvement when I compare it with my N95 8GB. There a lot of application pre-installed in the mobile which is a very good sign and most of these applications are really useful in the Indian context as well. The icons are organized in a 3 x4 matrix similar to the 5800. Their location can be swapped intuitively. The default icons are not really attractive and they are pretty ordinary. But there are loads of themes available to download and install from the Internet. So I wouldn’t worry about the default icons. The highlight of N97 is its homescreen. The homescreen has 2 modes. The wallpaper mode and the widget mode. The wallpaper mode is self explanatory. Just a swipe across it will reveal the must talked about widgets screens.

Widgets are lightweight applications that can do pretty much anything. They can house your contacts, shortcuts to applications, phone features, RSS syndicates and also social network sites. In the factory setting you get the Facebook widget which is really cool. The status updates can be viewed it marques itself across the widget.

This mobile is a serious multi-tasker. It handles multiple applications with ease and its very easy to switch between the open applications. Its a smooth performer with good responsiveness.

Music and Movies

The audio quality of the mobile performs as good as the iPhone. But why is there no active visualization. This could have enhanced the music hearing experience. The

The movie player

music player is really good and is responsive. The headsets provided in the pack are suggested to be thrown away as you walk out of the showroom. The music experience is best enjoyed with some 3rd party high end headsets. The movie watching experience is not very different from the 5800. Though I would have loved to see some improvements, I dont complain either. The FM radio is pretty much the same as any other Nokia symbian device. The FM transmitter is weak but yet it serves the purpose. You would have to pump up the volume in the FM reciever to enjoy the real sound. The entire audio effects are not transmitted though.

Comfortable hold

Image Gallery

The image gallery is a let down. Nokia again chooses to mix up your videos and photos under one folder called as “Photos”. The gallery previews are fast and responsive. It allows iPhone like sweep gesture. Kinetic scrolling is absent and the photos shift between the landscape and the portrait mode based on the orientation you hold it. Zooming is quite slow, but browsing the pictures is really fast.

The bluetooth connection was pretty fast and it transferred images to my N95, much faster when compared to other symbian mobiles.

Camera

The camera interface is quite outdated and it has started to get boring with every Nokia release. Unlike the Samsung Omnia HD, the phone UI has nothing new to offer in the features department. The picture quality is quite decent for outdoor and macro photography. I didn’t get to check out the low light photography strengths. But my guess is, in the absence of a xenon flash, it would perform like any other Nokia camera mobile. The 5 mega pixel camera is a good to have feature, but its not essentially the strength of N97. The front camera is a VGA camera and its primarily of video conferencing over 3G networks.

I didn’t get a chance to check out the internet connectivity, browser, wifi, GPS or even the digital compass. But taking inputs from the video previews and other reviewers, they are very good experience in Nokia N97.

Final score: 3/5

N97 is a good phone and with this phone Nokia can be seen going in the right direction. Nokia must stop being stubborn and start listening to feedback from practical users. With my interaction with Axel Meyer, I can see that Nokia tests their products on users with prototypes and similar models. But the key is to listen to the feedback from ground zero. The phone will be available in the shelves by June 22nd and the white edition is expected to arrive in about 10 days after that.  Go ahead and get this mobile if you want a performance centric touch screen mobile and you have Rs 33,000 to spare. If you are looking for a robust mobile, hold on to ur steering and dont release those breaks until Nokia comes up with better improved versions of the mobile.

Some more photos…

Sample photos taken with the N97 5megapixel camera (outdoor)

Sample Video taken with the N97 (Vimeo id: 5202949)

Nokia N97 full specifications

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I have always liked the Nokia 5800 and its about to get a sister version. The new Nokia 5530 xPressmusic was announced by Nokia on June 15th (Today). 5530 gets a slightly smaller touchscreen display measuring 2.9 inch. Its not a 3G phone but its got EDGE data support. It comes with 4Gb memory card as opposed to the 8Gb memory card in 5800. I like the new in-ear earphones. I also suspect a Nokia N97 like widgets in the home screen plus a carousel of contact list, that lets you scroll thumbnails of 20 frequently contacted contacts. On the whole, this is another exciting product from Nokia. Oh ya! 5530 xPressmusic will be available by third quarter of 2009 for about 199 Euros (13k-14k INR).

Nokia Press Release

More Images at Engadget