Mehul's thoughts on stocks & technology
Nokia 5130: I and Nokia meet again! 05/30/2009
I used to be an avid Nokia fan till about 3 years back. I knew all the Nokia phones and model numbers by heart, and it was my favourite hobby to identify the phones whenever I saw them. Around that time I was using Nokia 6620, and I was absolutely in love with its design. But eventually, I got a feeling that Nokia had stopped innovating. They had started to come up with run of the mill phones with exact same software. I parted my way with Nokia, and eventually shifted to Sony Ericsson W810, Motorola Q, Treo, Blackberry and Samsung Instinct.  Nokia XpressMusic 5130 Here's what I really like about this phone: 1. It looks very elegant. It's hip and classy at the same time...if that's actually possible. 2. The music player is mind blowingly awesome. It is dead simple to use, and the in-built speakers are surprisingly good and LOUD. I don't think the walkman series phones like W810 stand any chance, atleast as far as speaker sound quality is concerned. The interface is a whole different story, and I am noti going there. 3. The screen resolution isn't the best ofcourse, but it's satisfactory. 4. I was impressed by the inbuilt Opera mini browser. Haven't used this phone for browsing much, but I have nothing but praise to shower upon the Opera browser! 5. Then some small things like ambient light sensor, bluetooth stereo are always nice to have. p.s. I am not comparing this phone to the Treos, Blackberries et all. All I am saying is , it's good to be back in Nokia's world! and this phone most definitely gives a good bang for the buck! For an exhaustive review, please check GSMArena.  I'll be travelling a lot for the next couple of days, so will be hopping in and out of here. I'll use any time that i can find to catch up with all the blogs, and may be post a thing or two here.  Mobile office. Image taken from http://www.iftelecom.com.au Microsoft has been investing heavily on its Surface product for some time now. Microsoft believes that the product will be embedded in all aspects of life, right from bedroom, kitchen and closet, to bars and restaurants. Right now the price is probably one of the main factors that's preventing Surface from telling what I can do with the flour (lol!, see the video below), but eventually the price is going to come down, or hopefully a lot of scaled down versions will hit the market. Though, I think talking to the kitchen part in the video above is very unnatural and somewhat creepy, the rest of the ideas are super cool. (Especially, extending the phone's desktop to Surface and pushing data to the Cloud) While, I can think of hundreds of uses and applications, I particularly like the idea of implementing Surface at the restaurants. Consider the scenarios... Once you get seated, you bring up the menu on Surface and browse through all the options. Selecting an item brings up pictures, ingredients, user rating/reviews and other useful information. To order, you just press the 'order button', and even enter special notes for the Chef. When the Iced Tea starts running low, the waiter automatically gets notified, and you don't have to wait for the waiter to look at you to get more drinks! Once you are done with the food, you could split the check with friends any way you want, and just tap the card on the table to make the payment... So much more efficient. I am sure this will be a big turnoff for a lot of people who prefer the personal touch, and the special treatment at nice cozy restaurants, but this doesn't necessarily have to be an 'either/or' thing. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a cool video still some more, so here's another one showing the implementation in restaurants. Like I said in the beginning, the price has to come down significantly before the main stream deployment even starts!  Palm: A stock that I missed? (NASDAQ: PALM) 05/16/2009
There’s no way to know and track the thousands of stocks that trade on Wall Street every day. However, every once in a while you come face to face with a stock that you have been watching from time to time, but it suddenly starts galloping and you are just left staring at it thinking it has already gone out of reach…  Palm Centro I first looked at Palm’s stock when Centro was selling like hot cakes in 2008. The phone was launched in 2007 exclusively with Sprint, and it had all the features of Treo and was only half as expensive. At that time, I really thought that the stock will go up (because of Centro’s success), but it turned out that Palm was cannibalizing its profit margin by selling the phone for dirt cheap. With dropping profit margins, aging OS, failed products (Foleo), and tough economic environment, Palm’s stocks rapid decline didn’t come as a surprise. After trading for as high as 17 dollars in October 2007, the stock hit a rock bottom of 1.14 within a year or so.  Palm Foleo At that time, 1.14 sounded very cheap, but Palm had too many problems so I decided to stay away from the stock. That is exactly when Palm took the world by surprise. At CES 2009, Palm announced the Palm Pre, a phone based on their brand new webOS featuring improved web 2.0 tools and social networking applications. It is very true that Palm had been trying to sell the next generation OS story to investors and media for quite some time, but after the Foleo debacle, investors didn’t really know how much to trust the company. Personally, I wasn’t expecting much from the company either. At the very maximum, I was expecting a tweaked OS with improved touch screen performance. It did not take Palm Pre (and the webOS) much time to become the new tech darling, and thanks to the more than positive first impressions, Investors handsomely rewarded Palm, and the stock price steadily climbed up from 2-3 dollars to more than 6-7 dollars. At that time, it felt like an opportunity missed. When a company from your ‘knowledge backyard’ that you have already written off manages to suddenly become a top contender to the throne, you are just left dumbfounded! Both Palm and Sprint have been managing the media rather well and keeping information under tight wraps. This combined with the apparent awesomeness of the product has helped push the stock prices to as high as 11.80 as of close of business today. If I had put in about five/six hundred dollars in the stock at that time, I would have been sitting on about five/six thousand dollars by now! That is some serious return on investment! The stock no doubt would have made a more than perfect short term investment. However, looking at long term, it’s still hard to predict if Palm’s stock will continue the upward climb. The company has some serious debt and liabilities and this is their do or die chance. While I am almost sure about Pre’s (and webOS’s) success, the competition is way too fierce, and a single mistake in the pricing/launching strategy could hamper company’s turnaround efforts. The next few months without doubt will be crucial for both Palm and even Sprint. PALM is a perfect lesson for me, and will probably keep me motivated to stay on a lookout for opportunities that lurk in the ‘backyard’! Happy Investing!! Most awaited phones 2009 (US) 05/13/2009
We are almost halfway through the year, and so far the year has been flooded with run of the mill touch screen phones (and smart phones). I am going to try and avoid writing about them, and instead I’ll try and focus on some of the phones I am looking forward to.  Palm Pre The wireless charging is truly revolutionary (Though it’s sad that Palm/Sprint might charge a premium for that), The phone is supposed to be a lot more social networking friendly, and is going to offer greatly improved LBS applications Apple Iphone (AT&T): Let’s just face it… Apple knows how to keep innovating! It manages to introduce both revolutionary and evolutionary devices year after year, and rest of the industry just stays busy catching up! I wish June 8th could be declared some sort of a national holiday! Actually, as of this morning, I am a bit disappointed since Steve Jobs won’t be presenting the keynote, but nevertheless, the event is going to be full of excitement.  Iphone While Apple already gave an early preview of what the OS 3.0 is going to look like, I am sure all the Apple diehard fans (including me) are hoping that Phil Schiller will bring his magic hat along and pull out a few surprises! I personally would settle for an OLED screen (it’s probably not happening this year), flash support, and apps that cook food for you, earn gazillions of dollars, and let you rule the world! (lol just kidding, maybe I am expecting a bit too much!) Lots of Android love (multiple carriers) While HTC won the race with G1 last year, multiple vendors including Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony have announced their plans to launch Android based devices by the end of this year. Last year, Sprint’s CEO said that Android needed a lot of work. Google actually has been working very hard to improve the OS and introduce a lot of new features. I am excited about Android, because I use Google for everything, and they just seem to know how to integrate their products to make everything extremely simple. So, expect a lot of love from Google this year!  Blackberry Storm 2 (Verizon?) RIM’s CEO has announced that a new Blackberry Storm will be available before the end of this year. While Blackberry has been releasing a lot of ‘regular’ devices (which are pretty good too by the way), their second attempt at touch screen phones should be interesting to watch! Garmin Nuvifone (Carrier unknown) Ok, to tell you the truth, I am not really excited about this one at all! I just wanted to mention it here because they have been working on it for so long now… I hope they release it while touch screen phones are still in fashion! When they announced the phone in 2008 (or was it 2007), it would have been a pretty cool device, but now it’ll just be another run of the mill touch screen phone. Well, it’ll have a solid GPS, but at this point it’s nothing new!  Garmin Nuvifone Apart from all these, there have been way too many rumors about Dell entering the smart phone market, and lately, even Microsoft’s Zune phone has been making some rounds (I just don’t see this one happening!) Windows 6.5 / 7 based phones didn’t make it to my most anticipated list. It’s an ok OS I guess, but I really don’t think it will have a lot of innovative features! (I didn’t really like their Honeycomb interface either) So let’s see which phones sell like hot cakes (or Cupcakes, eh?) and which phones fall short of expectations. For me, June 7th and 8th can’t come soon enough! Reviving newspapers @Amazon’s Kindle 05/11/2009
When Amazon launched a new model of Kindle last week, it created a lot of buzz on how it’ll revive the newspaper industry which is desperately seeking new areas of revenues. (See here) If Kindle can manage to offer this technology at an affordable price sometime soon, more readers might jump in the digital wagon feeling rewarded by a whole new level of experience that it might provide. Well, to put it another way, have you watched the movie Harry Potter and observed their newspaper, The Daily Prophet? Ever wished your newspaper had all those interesting animated/video clips? Well, thanks to devices like Amazon Kindle, it might just happen soon! Another FYI, If you were spread betting or investingin Amazon on the news regarding Kindle, you likely made out very well. T-mobile: Best customer service! 05/09/2009
Is it really a surprise that T-mobile wins best customer service awards, year after year? Oil Prices: Will the rally continue? 05/08/2009
Most of the things that happened last year in the financial markets will probably be remembered for quite some time to come. Apart from the housing crises and global economic meltdown, the fluctuations in the Oil prices will take quite a prominent position as well. After starting the year (2008) at around 80 dollars, oil prices maintained their steady climb to reach up to as high as 147 dollars, and consequently broke whatever vain attempts the economy made to recover midyear. The rebate that people received from the government mostly just vanished into thin air! That is when the economy threw in the towel, and the conditions deteriorated very rapidly! The unemployment numbers started skyrocketing, and people just couldn’t afford travelling as much with gas prices hovering around 4 dollars. As a result, the demand for oil suddenly went south, and the oil prices came down much faster than they had gone up, touching a low of about 30 dollars!  Graph taken from www.opec.org
Netbook war: Clash of the titans! 05/07/2009
Netbooks seem to be the hottest pie in the market, and all the major players are cringing to get a piece of the market share. Though it’s currently dominated by Windows and Linux, several new players have announced the plans to launch their own version of netbooks and the OS very soon.  The netbook market was born when Asus released the first netbook in 2007 and it was a huge success right out of the door selling more than 1 million units by the end of 2007. While the Asus netbooks were mainly Linux based and caught Microsoft off the guard, Microsoft strategized quickly, and thanks to their efforts, more than 90% of Netbooks now being sold operate on Windows! However, this might soon change too. Since, the rumor mill is working with full speed these days, and “people familiar with the matter” are slipping up a lot of information, please take all this with a pinch of salt. Which OS would you like to see in your netbook Reference: | Mehul JainFinancial market & technology enthusiast  CategoriesAll ArchivesJanuary 2010 Spread the word!
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