The Geek Afterglow

It's year-ending and businesses are drawing up budgets for the next financial. It's a hectic but nice time of year, when everyone is free to make plans without the constraints of shrinking pockets. I have also decided to take advantage of the season's expansiveness and put down my pick of gadgets and geek goodies - the things I would really like to buy this year. If my business does well, I will be picking up most (well actually, all) of these. It's an added bonus that some of them will necessitate a foreign trip because they are not available in India So, here goes: 1. The Basis Watch Source :  Basis Website It's the most advanced piece of health technology to come out this year, light years ahead of Nike Fuel, Jawbone Up, FitBit and other contenders. The Basis Watch synthesises data from various sensors - blood pressure, skin temperature, perspiration level, and movement - and collates them using sophisticated analytics tools to determine what activities

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at Croma checking out the new range of Win 8 laptops, ultrabooks and AIOs (All in One's). It was great to see that the price of Ultrabooks has dropped to levels where normal mortals can actually consider buying them - under Rs. 50,0000. And I was happy to see some international launches have reached our shores at reasonable prices - the Win RT Lenovo  Ideapad Yoga  at Rs.50,000 and the  Asus Vivobook  at just Rs.40,000. Both these devices have touch screens and physical keyboards to interact with Windows 8 in the way you prefer. I tried performing some basic tasks like creating a presentation, browsing or running a program and I came away with mixed feelings about the whole touch and type concept. When I got my first touchscreen phone, I complained (correctly) that my texting would reduce because it's a pain to type on the screen compared to a physical keyboard. It's true that I write less, and rely more on apps to do the work for me. But