Canon EOS 60D from kakaku.com

Finally it was delivered yesterday.

I ordered my first Digital SLR last week from kakaku.com. After much deliberation, research, comparisons and reading many reviews, I settled for Canon EOS 60D. In my opinion this particular model is a very good mix of close to professional features and ease of operations needed by beginners for a reasonable cost.



This was my first purchase through kakaku.com and for those who can read Japanese or get help, I suggest that kakaku.com is a great site which can save you around 20% to 30% on most of the items. For those who would rather touch and feel the purchase they are making, you still have an option of going to any big electronics shop like Yodobashi Camera or Biccamera and see the gadget there. Then you can come back to kakaku and choose the best deal. I have seen some foreigner painstakingly noting down prices of things they want at Akihabara but this site will save you a lot of time for sure.

I found that some of the nice features of kakaku.com are ease of use (if you know Japanese of course), wide range of products (almost any consumer goods) and wide range of dealers (from amazon to your local electronic shop). You can compare the products easily and can navigate to the purchase form right there.

Paying is easy too, most of the shops have online order forms and have option of Cash on Delivery. Although the dealer may charge nominal fees (somewhere around 1% of the purchase) if you choose COD.

By the way, this is the first photo I took!

My first experiment with panning. Not too great and had to take almost 15 shots to get that one right, but I found some of the points I need to improve already!

Look forward to some armature clicks.

You know you are here for long time...

I was going through my old stuff  as a part of year-end routine of massive house cleaning ritual in Japan and found these. Wow! I thought. It really made me feel the flow of time.

My first mobile in Japan.
J-Phone(later transformed to vodafone) sanyo model:

My second phone by Sharp.
Larger screens and 3-4 Mbps mobile camera were in vogue; The name 'J-Phone' is history but Vodafone is still hanging in.

Next similar, but more powerful from Toshiba.
Softbank has taken over and Vodafone is out of Japan. Looking at this now, I wonder why I carried such monsters.

Shifted to iPhone 3G; One Button Revolution!!
Proud to be among first users of iPhone in Japan. Thanks Mr. Son and Steve!

And my current phone is iPhone 4S. I find no reason to run away from Apple. Just that looking back, I feel how mobile users have come long way...

Galaxy S with Android - Part 1

NTT Docomo started offering Samsung Galaxy S with Android 2.3 from this October in Japan. I recently got mine as a company phone. Here are some of the features to make a decision on this phone.

Design: 3.5 out of 5
First impression you get is that of bigger screen. You may feel little awkward if your previous phone is smaller, but soon will get used to it.

Galaxy S - Front

Galaxy S - Back

Galaxy S - Side

Speed: 4.5 out of 5
I was quite satisfied with the speed. Mails, application, response of the touch screen is quite smooth.

Battery: 1 out of 5
It was the real disappointment. Many times, the phone would run out of battery and shut off. Charging time is too high but discharge is quite fast too. There are few tips and tricks to extend your battery up time but why does a end user of a smartphone has to think about his own power usage plan? I hope Samsung comes up with something smart on this.

Common features: 3.5 out of 5

• Outlook : For outlook mails, there is nothing much to offer than usual.
• Keyboard : Compared to other smart phones, keyboard switching (especially between multilingual) is time consuming and you need to tap many keys before you can find the exact sign or special characters you want to type. It took me a while to figure out how can I enter an exclamation into password field.
• Camera : It scores good in my opinion.5 megapixels and fast even for higher resolution with sufficient features.
• Wireless : Scores good where the connection is strong. But when I compared this with my iPhone 3G S, I observed that it takes lot of time to connect where signal is weaker.
• Default audio and video players: Are primitive at best. No further comments. You better get third party applications.

Touch Screen input: 4 out of 5
It's very fast that I must admit. Sometimes way to fast. Especially while writing mails, it will sense the touch even if your finger is still few mm away from the screen.
All in all, for all the default functions offered there is nothing eye-catching.

File Management : --
Its completely your responsibility how you manage your photos, songs, movies, documents etc. There is no baseline. That is why I won't rate this. Which in my opinion get's out of hand soon if you don't have some discipline to start with.

Call usability : 4 out of 5
It adds a new record to the call log unnecessary each time you call; even if call the same person again and again. If you own an iPhone, you will know what I mean. Frequent caller list feature is a good utility.

So overall, for basic functions I would rate this phone not more than 3.5 out of 5

Look forward to my next post on same subject (more on usability).