Month: June 2013

During my college days, my friends used to often call me Mr. Gadget. That’s because the desk in my hostel room always used to be covered in electronics, black wires, all jumbled up, and from within it, I used to draw devices like a Palm PDA, a CDMA USB dongle (this was 2005, so it was all red-hot-new!), and dazzle them all.

Years have passed, and so the gadgets have changed. But I have become more productive with them, and my relationship with them has become more meaningful than ‘the latest available, just out of curiosity’.

So here’s my top 5 gadget list that I’m using as of now.

1. The MacBook Pro
I had always been a PC user. Half of the time I was forced to use Windows. The other half I used different flavours of Linux, for some time Red Hat, some time Ubuntu, and most of the time OpenSuSE.

Well, that changed in the middle of 2011, when I finally decided to buy a MacBook. It’s a 13″ MacBook Pro, now souped up with 6GB RAM and an additional 120GB Intel SSD, which make it all the more fast and a pleasure to work with.

2. The Phones
At present I’m using a Karbonn A9+, which was a distress purchase from Croma, because my 4 year old Nexus One had refused to charge that day, and I needed a phone.

Before this, I was using a Motorola Defy+. An awesomely rugged phone, which did not fear water, dust, or any such thing specified in its manual. Too bad it had to go to the repair shop, because one night I dropped it from four feet and it landed face-down and its glass panel cracked. Gave an effect of an awesome psychedelic wallpaper though.

3. The Battery Pack
In this age of smartphones, where screen sizes are getting bigger and processors are getting faster, battery capacity is hardly able to keep up. Most smartphones die within 12 hours of charging them full.

This gave rise to a new category of mobile electronics – the USB battery pack. You charge it at home when you charge your phone. When you leave home, you carry it along with you, and when your phone’s battery is about to die, you plug it in the battery pack and turn the pack on. Voila! Instant charging without being tied to a wall. It’s like carrying an extra bottle of charge along for when your Camelbak runs out of charge.

Mine is a CoolerMaster Choiix Power Fort 5.5Wh. Why did I buy this one? Because it’s tiny enough to fit in my pockets along with the phone, and it came in my budget.

4. The iPod
This was my first ever Apple device. And I bought it only because it offered me the largest capacity to store my entire music collection, and was still the best on the price/GB scale. Moreover, its battery has lasted me well, though it shows fatigue nowadays (This iPod Classic 120GB is 4 years old).

5. The Camera
I own a Nikon D90. In its time it was a game changer. And it’s not a bad performer now either. This isn’t a device I use daily, but it’s important enough for me to make the list.

Now, out of these 5, I have bought at least 3 (4 if you ignore the Karbonn and consider the Motorola) online – the laptop, the camera and the battery pack. In addition, I have bought innumerable memory cards, for the camera and for the phones, cables, chargers, flashguns, flash controllers, studio equipment, old lenses, new lenses, all online.

Yes, online. I believe that retail has matured enough in India for us to buy even high value things such as these, online. Except for maybe clothes, shoes etc. (where you would like to hold and feel the product, and maybe try it for fit), I think everything else can be bought online, what with trusted platforms like Flipkart, eBay, SmartShoppers ensuring that we get value for our product, get it in time, and any complaints we might have are resolved. Even though I haven’t yet, but people have been buying even clothes and shoes online, now that Jabong and Myntra are here.

There’s another reason I bought these things online. It’s cheaper. Yes, most of the time it’s cheaper than buying from a brick-and-mortar store. I’m not talking about the convenience of comparing and ordering, or about the opportunity cost of driving down to a store. I actually got these products for lesser rates than I would have gotten them offline. Many a times it’s because the vendor passes on some savings to us, but quite often it’s because I come across a deal. For example, the now almost famous laptop sale period on eBay, where I bought my MacBook and where I send my friends to buy their MacBooks from, or Flipkart’s birthday music giveaway.

There are three ways I find such deals:

1. Mailers: eBay regularly sends out mailers with coupons for specific discounts on specific categories. I just try to time my purchases with the validity of these coupons.
2. Sites: This is another way I get coupons and deals for my purchases: by looking for them online. There are quite a few coupon & deal aggregators online, like Cuponation.in, and a few others, where I look for deals for the product I’m looking for at the shop I’m looking to buy it at.
3. Phone recharge: Vodafone and Reliance (that’s all I know of) often give out coupons of eBay and other shopping portals when you recharge your phone connection from their site. It’s quite handy when you have to buy something in the range of Rs. 300 to say Rs. 2000, because the discount is not a percentage, but it’s often a flat Rs. 100 discount.