Blue Screen Of Duds

At least that’s what a report in The Hindu Business Line claims. Strangely, the body of the story does not say much, other than what is already known: the T-Online Venture Fund infusion and Intel Capital’s involvement in Jajah. In fact, the story in itself reads like a rehashed PR pitch and it is kind of crappy that you can lead with a grand headline (which is kosher is you are a blogger though!) and not follow it up in the body.

Any kind of telephony over IP is a major minefield in India and it will be chased down tooth-and-nail by both the regulators and the existing regular telephony players. The legal side of matters is also quite confusing in this regard. But this should be an interesting one to watch, since various parties have for long been trying to get even voice chat in popular instant messaging platforms shut down. The Jajah website does identify users by the originating country’s IP address and for now for unregistered users the service is available only in the landline-to-landline combo.

The recently-launched AOL India has to be one of the greatest letdowns in terms of new online launches in India. The production quality is so mediocre that it looks like someone took the US version of the portal and made a cheap Indianised version of it — more like a fake Tommy or a D&G. It kind of, sort of looks the same, but that’s where the similarity ends. It looks like in their rush to release the product, AOL has made the error of bringing out a half-baked product, which is almost an insult to the users.

From the early announcements and noises coming from their Bangalore office, the product was to have a lot of videos, especially its Cartoon Network content, aimed at locking in the future market of today’s kids, and leveraging it to work around the problem of otherwise not having compelling-enough content. There IS video and multimedia on the site, but it is so subdued and run-of-the-mill that it is not even worth commenting on it.

The webmail is nothing but AOL’s international email with a bit of Indian branding and I can only assume that the case won’t be very different with the messenger either. Search is hooked up to Google, an extension of the deal that AOL already has with the search giant, so there’s nothing special there either. They do have a short code ‘51515′ and the content and services are powered by Onmobile India.

I was left looking and searching that there should be something more. But that is it, nothing more on the portal, nada, zilch. It is a very simple word — disappointing.

I had a really weird problem while on the road for most of the past five days, that using GPRS on the E50 through Dial Up Networking (DUN) just would not work. Other than a severe lack of time that prevented me from investigating the issue, I also wanted to wait till I got back to Delhi to see if everything was okay with the phone and it connects well from here.

The entire problem was really bizarre. I have used GPRS on roaming before, while I still had the Moto Razr V3i and it would connect and work well enabling me to use my laptop without any problems. Moreover, in Bombay, where I could not get a decent Airtel signal it would easily switch me to another provider. Of course, GPRS would not function on either the phone or the laptop when you are on another provider, but that’s to be expected.

On the E50, I could not register on any other network this time. Thankfully, I could find an Airtel signal everywhere, but I just could not get the phone to work as an USB modem and dial out to the interweb. Strangely, GPRS within the phone worked flawlessly. I could use the internal browser, check mail, use the Google Mail client and also do everything else that I used to do earlier.

This is really weird behaviour and I’d tried making every possible change to the DUN settings to try and make it work, but to no avail. Has anyone else experienced this before?