Last year twitter has stopped the SMS tweeting service in India and no mobile users from India could receive updates and tweet from their mobile via SMS. Now Airtel & Twitter have come back again with a tie up for SMS  tweeting. This service is exclusively for Airtel subscribers only. If you are new to twitter, it is a popular social networking and micro blogging service.

If you are an existing twitter user and have your airtel mobile number updated  on your twitter account then no changes required  for you. You will start receiving tweets via SMS to which you are already subscribed and you can tweet via SMS.  If you already have twitter account and want to update your Airtel mobile number, just  send “Start” to 5300. If you new to twitter and want to get started, send “signup” to 5300 from your airtel number.

Although this encourages the tweeting habit by making the things easier, this service is bit expensive. Airtel charges Rs 1 for this Value Added Service. Alternatively you can just go to the twitter.com directly and update your mobile device details after logging in to your account. Anyway receiving SMS updates should be free of cost and you can make use of it.

Is your PC slower than the first time you used it? booting slowly? Are you frustrated of the virus and other malwares? Wait for a new PC experience till the middle of 2010. Google has just announced a new light weighted, fast & secured operating system called Google Chrome Operating System.  After the massive success of innovative browser Google chrome this new operating system is named after that. Here are the few reasons why this Google Chrome OS will be very different among the existing ones and the killer of Microsoft windows.

Branding:

People are now ready to trust anything if it is branded by Google. Inspite of the trustworthiness and reliability Google can reach wide audience easily.

Cost:

Google Chrome operating system is 100% open source and it is free to use. No more license fee, genuine software validity or os update problem. So it is direct competition to Microsoft windows operating system. Who will ignore a quality product that too offered for free.

Speed:

It is a well known pain of a  windows user who should wait for minutes and minutes to get their system running up. Also a windows OS system will always perform slower than at the time of purchase. More the usage period, more the system slows. Since the failure of windows vista, people really need a good OS to replace the widely used windows XP. It is said/noticed that the upcoming Microsoft OS  Windows 7 (shortly launched – around october 2009) is light weighted and loads faster than vista. But Google challenged that this new OS will just boot in seconds not in minutes. So people will no more need to wait to start working on the system when they switch it on. Especially for notebook/netbook users it will be a WOW factor since it can save lot of battery power.

Compatibility:

Drivers support is the main problem in an operating system. Windows XP users experienced lot of issues at the initial stage and also Vista users was frustrated for the same at the beginning. The main reason for less linux users is also the same. Linux platforms does not support most of the hardwares and also required more time/knowledge to configure and run the OS. But Google said that with this Google chrome OS “Users don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.”

Security:
Google says that it will redesign the architecture of the OS where there should be no word for virus, malwares or spywares. Since security is the big concern of the operating system Google takes this very seriously. Windows users will definitely turn into this OS if this happens as they already know the impact of the losses due to virus attacks.

Web Applications:

It is really unnoticed that all the local applications are gone to web and we started using every thing online. Google Docs for Microsoft office.  Online players for windows media player. Gmail for outlook and many. So Google focuses on running web applications on operating system level instead of from browsers. This could be a revolution after 2010 since most user experience happens in web than local. So definitely this announcement of new OS architecture will push Microsoft to start thinking about WINDOWS 8 or so by now itself…. Let us keep our fingers crossed until the beta release of this chrome….

UPDATE: We also should not forget about the Flops and Failures of Google before we start celebrating this announcement.

Firefox 3.5 next generation  web browser which is available to download as release candidate at this stage. There are many exciting features comes on this version. You can view videos without installing flash players, speed web page rendering and more.. Best of all it is available in many languages including Indian languages like tamil, telugu….

Before the release of the stable version here is the official video of the features of the firefox 3.5

ICICI Bank announced that any one can now book the Tata Nano directly from them. You no need to go any where, no need stay in queue and also no more paper works. ICICI Bank made the process simpler and easier so even non ICICI Bank customer can take advantage of it. One can book the Tata Nano from online for just Rs 2999.. But you need to carefully read the scheme before you book. Click here for more details.

I remember around four years back, Airtel Tamilnadu was offering free unlimited gprs with the service name  ”Net On Phone” (NOP). It was said that airtel allowed free GPRS only to make awareness of GPRS among the subscribers and try it. The idea was to get more customers for GPRS service and monetize it after sometime. Later when the GPRS usage grown as expected, they stopped the free ”Net On Phone” GPRS connection and started selling the ”Airtel Mobile Office” service.

Although Airtel started charging for mobile internet, still it did not lose the GPRS customers. Rather kept growing.  This was because Airtel allowed unlimited bandwidth plan for all the packages they offered. It was quite popular among the customers because other competitors like Vodofone (Formerly Hutch) was charging their customers with  pay per internet usage and with additional monthly rent for the service. Airtel was standing alone to offer unlimited internet for cheap prices with out any fixed rent.

The Airtel GPRS package in the Tamilnadu circle was(Yes it ”was”) as follows,

• Daily Pack – Rs 20/Day/Unlimited
• Weekly Pack – Rs 75/Week/Unlimited
• Monthly Pack – Rs 375/Month/Unlimited

Today I received a SMS from Airtel that it withdraws the unlimited GPRS packs. Below is that SMS.

Pl note, Unlimited GPRS packs will be withdrawn effective 06-April. Enjoy GPRS service with the pay as you use facility only @30p/50KB browsing charges. Call 17134.

So there is no more unlimited GPRS internet stuff where slowly & slowly the word ”Unlimited” will vanish from Indian mobile and internet industry very soon. Already airtel started to cap their unlimited broadband usage under fair usage policy where customers internet speed will be reduced drastically after reaching certain bandwidth for the month.

So now what should we do due to this unlimited GPRS withdrawal by Airtel?

1. Since Airtel GPRS pack comes with zero rental, it may be activated by default on the all sim which  already using GPRS. You should deactivate GPRS to avoid the data usage charges. OR
2. There are few mobile applications like Email, Google latitude, messengers which will automatically attempt tomake GPRS connection when ever required. So you may need to change the settings on the apps or be ready to pay the additional data usage charges.