Ferrari Magic India Discovery Drive

Cars have always been a fantasy and I’m still a little kid. I’ll still go groggy eyed if there’s so much as some German automotive flying on the road. When I got the invite to attend Ferrari’s press conference for flagging off their Magic India Discovery tour, I thought it was some kind of a practical joke. But when I confirmed it, I couldn’t get over it. I didn’t sleep the night before the launch. ‘I’ll get to see Ferrari’s’, the little Tifosi in me thought.

The event was Ferrari’s Magic India Discovery which was an ambitious run in 2 specially painted Ferrari 612 Scagilietti’s across 15,200 kms of Indian roads. Ferrari had done such a similar event in China 2 years ago and succeeded in running the 2 cars over 15,000 miles. Back to India, now.

I went to the Taj(the venue for the event), bang on time, raced my ass upto the roof, collected my press kit and settled down for the press conference. Davide Kluzer, the PR man for Ferrari, presided over it and patiently answered all the questions we hapless Indian scribes asked.

I myself got to ask him 2 questions.

Me : When will Ferrari officially launch in India?

Davide Kluzer : We are looking at India very keenly. It does seem to be a very interesting market for us. Worldwide, Ferrari has a big waiting list for its cars. Thats not uncommon because we build the cars with a certain passion. All of our cars are hand built to customers’ specification, so that does take some time.

At Ferrari, we want to ensure that the relationship with the customer continues long after the car leaves the showroom. We want to offer the customer as much as we can in terms of service and support.

Like our boss Montezemelo said, Ferrari cars are like good women. They are rare to come by. It may be ‘tomorrow, next week, next month’ or whatever. But it will come and the wait will be worth the while.

Me : Any modifications done to the car, so that it handles the Indian roads?

Davide Kluzer : Not much really, we’ve just increased the ride height a bit. Apart from that, the Ferrari’s you shall see are exactly the same as anywhere in the world. They will offer the same level of driver involvement and will be similar to drive as any Ferrari, anywhere in the world.

Then the press were asked to eat, and I hogged on Taj’s brillaint cullinary. The desserts particularly kicked some butt and then we were led to the place where the cars would be cordoned off.

You see, I’d be the one you’d like to call “Shorty” and was hardly able to see over the tidal wave of photographers before me. So, I was looking for some chinks in the armour and spotted the Chamber room which was some sort of a bridge between 2 buildings and clicked some pictures from there. I got on to the parapet and got some neat shots. Sigh, the things I do, for you.  :twisted:

Ok, now the things I did not quite like.
1) Why werent the journos given a ride in the car?

2) The elephant logo they created for India looks like it hasn’t slept in the last 10 days and is staying awake on bucketloads of coffee.

3) The t-shirt they gave had the aformentioned sleepless elephant (and a big one), at the back. Woe is me..

4) A cap and key chain would have done just fine in the press kit

First 2 pictures, courtesy Ferrari and the rest by, Yours Truly.

Tags: ferrari, india

Nokia E65 review

Nokia had a pretty amusing definition of a business phone when they launched the Communicator series a long time back. Functionality apart, it was a potent weapon for personal scale destruction. It was so big, huge and stupid that you could threaten people with it, “One shot, Dilbert, and you’re toast”. It resembled a geometry case a kid would take to school and was good if you were an absolute show off; the kind who’d take a Louis Vuitton even to the loo.

But not any more. The new range of E series pitches its tent bang opposite to Sony Ericsson’s P series and the Blackberry’s of this world and today we’ll be taking a look at the E65. (The E61 and E51 will certainly follow. Its just that I haven’t had enough time with the other phones)

Looks, build quality and feel

Nokia seem to have finally got a slider design right. Their other sliders (6270, N80, N95 et al) were rather boring and boxy. I’ll also go so far as to call them phones meant for chimps and orangutans. But not this one.

It looks failry slick and you wont have a problem slipping it into your coat or your jeans pocket. Its nicely rounded off at all the right places and feels nice to hold. Its got just the right size, neither too fat nor so anorexic that it might snap if you so much as travel in public transport.

On the front you see the screen, the light sensor(more on this below) and the navigational keypad. Nokia have done a smart thing here by cramming all the keys here so that the only reason for you to slide the erm… slider will be to punch a number or a message, which has a fairly nice feel, by the way.

Display and Camera

The E65 features a 16M color screen with a native resolution of 240×320 which is pretty readable in any kind of light thanks to the aforementioned image sensor. What this does is, sense the ambient light and automatically change the brightness of the screen to whatever it deems fit. You can control the intensity of this, but be sure to go easy on it, it loves to drink battery juice.

 

 

The camera is a 2MP unit and is strictly average. The images produced are fairly noisy and color reproduction is not up to mark. Which makes it good only for casual clicking.

Here are some pictures

Business features

The E series is a business phone and does justice to the tag. It features all sorts of organizing tools despite having Quick Office wherein, sadly, you can only view, not edit, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files.

It also has the all the eMail solutions possible like BlackBerry Connect, IntelliSync Wireless mail and a VPN client to access your corporate mail. Another E series exclusive feature is the Nokia Team suite. This allows you create groups of your employees and co-workers. This can be particularly useful to some team leader.

Connectivity

Nokia have left no stone unturned on this front and I’ll just assault your senses with a bevy of 3-4 letter mumbo-jumbo sounding abbrevations. The phone has 3G, UMTS and quadband, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, VoIP over WLAN, GPRS, EDGE, USB, Infrared and Bluetooth 1.2. They should have considered providing Bluetooth 2.0, but then no phone has everything I want, so, boo.

You also have the option of adding a GPS receiver and use the inbuilt maps application in case you get lost ‘finding that-hottie-in-HR’ on the other wing.

Entertainment

The phone isn’t really meant to handle all this, but it manages to do the job fairly well. It can play MP3’s, AAC, Real Audio, MPEG4 and 3GP videos. The sound through the inbuilt speakers is average.

Performance and battery

This phone is one of those few Nokia phones I have seen which don’t give copious amounts of lag time at everything you do. That can be attributed to the ARM9 processor which runs at 222MHz and eats almost everything you throw at it.

The battery too is stellar and will easily run 2 days without a charge under normal usage. Which is like a hour of talking, a bit of bluetooth socializing, some Wi-fi browsing and a sprinkling of camera usage.

Whats Good

• Good design
• Well built
• Fast enough
• Good battery life
• Lots of connectivity options
• Quadband

Whats Bad

• No Bluetooth 2.0 and A2DP
• No editing documents
• Average camera
• No 2nd video cam for video calls
• Mono headset

Whats in the box?

Handset, charger, mono headset, carrying pouch, user manual, PC Suite

Conclusion: The E series successfully puts up a worthy fight to the other business phones in its price range and while at it, it looks good too.

Price

• India 14,500 to 15,500
• USA $350 to $450

SatishSays dot Com rating 7/10

Tags: E series, nokia

Vantage Point Review

President assassination stories make for interesting viewing, thats what the movie-maker probably thought. They sure as hell cant make for good bedtime stories, simply because the movie is PG 13 and kiddies just love violence. Bang, bang, kapow, bang, you’re toast, yummy!

The movie plot instantly reminds you of an old movie by the name of ‘The Day of the Jackal’ which starred Edward Fox which dealt with the assassination of the then President, Charles de Gaulle. There are differences of course. The 1973 movie was flawless and this one’s quite the opposite.

 

The problem is the storyline. It revolves only around the assassination and its as if the writer frantically looks at as many factors as possible to overwhelm and confuse the living daylights out of the audience. As the tag line suggests, the story unfolds through the eyes of 8 people, so you have just as many flashbacks. And I just hate god-damned flashbacks.

At some points, I actually found myself groaning “Have mercy”, “for heavens’ sake” and other such sympathy garnering lines to what I thought would be an edge-of-the-seat thriller. The plot at times feels amazingly predictable and loosens off at many places after the rather tight start.

 

But for the worst part, the movie seems well-researched because the portrayal of the security protocol was pretty authentic. The performances by Dennis Quaid (Thomas Barnes, secret service chief to the President of US) and Eduardo Noriega (Enrique, undercover Spanish cop) are pretty moving and so is the action. Other performances are not really worth a mention and are average.

It should do well to satisfy pyrotechnic loving action fans because there are loads of explosions (and you can see them over and over again), some brilliantly shot car-chase sequences and those aforementioned ‘bang-bang-you’re toast!’ scenes. I almost jumped out of my seat once or twice, the direction is that good.

Verdict :- The plot isn’t half as good as the execution and it feels rather pointless and draggy at times. But nevertheless, it might just make for a good one time watch.

SatishSays dot Com rating 5/10

A big Thank You to JAM magazine for sending me for the press preview. You rock!

Tags: movie review, thriller