Sunday, July 20, 2008

Moviemart.in - Online DVD rental in India - My Initial impressions

I finally decided to start with an online service for DVD rental. The neighborhood DVD rental store was too expensive with very limited collections. So just reviewed the internet for some options in India and shortlisted to the following options

BigFlix
SeventyMM
MovieMart.in

As expected with BigFlix being a Reliance company poor customer service was the de-facto standard, and the same was confirmed by the reviews which i read online. I guess BigFlix with the kind of investment being put into it may become the cheapest option, but definitely not the best in terms of Customer Service.

Regarding SeventyMM i got mixed response for the same both from my friends and the reviews posted online. I was getting a good corporate deal with seventy mm, but still getting not a too positive feedback didn't help.

Finally came moviemart.in probably the oldest DVD rental company in India (looks like a couple of years old) and not the biggest (they are based out of Delhi but i guess serve in most of the country via TNT courier).  The reviews looked positive almost all over the net so I finally decided to give it a shot. I opted for the weekend plan (Currently available in NCR only) i.e. @Rs 249 i get to see eight DVD's a month and am able to borow 2 DVD's at a time making the cost at around Rs 31.25 per DVD, definitely not the cheapest but not too sky rocketing also. MY account was activated in an hour and the DVD's were delivered on that day itself.

So based on my two days experience with moviemart.in i really found their customer service to be worldclass (quite unlike any Indian company out there). in addition you can always expect prompt responses from their end and they always look eager to help the customer out. In addition they do have a decent collection of movies which definitely would keep me hooked on for the next few months.

Though it would be too early to make a judgement based on just 2 days with moviemart.in but it definitely has been a great start. Great Job moviemart.in for that. Keep it up . Would post my experience after about a month of movie watching with moviemart.in. Hopefully they would be maintaining their standards.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Finally Managed to upgrade my ipod Touch to iphone 2.0 Firmware

After 24 hours of struggle finally managed to upgrade my first generation Ipod Touch to iphone 2.0 firmware which made my waller lighter by $9.95.

With this upgrade came the Januray upgrade to ipod touch free (for which ipod touch users had to shell out $ 19.95). Some of the great enhancements coming up with formware 2.0 support in addiion to the normail January Upgrade (i.e. Stocks, Notes, Email, Google Maps) is

  • Cisco VPN support
  • Support for Microsoft Exchange Server
  • Support for Apps (around 25 % of 500 odd applications available at this time are free. The rest start from 0.95 $ and range upto $40)
  • Out of the host of free Apps availbale on the ipod store the remote seems to be really cool. You can actually control your itunes/Apple TV etc. using the ipod touch over the wireless network. No more reaching for the computer everytime you got to change the track/playlist playing on the itunes.
All in all $ 9.95 are well spent it though the iphone users would be getting this firmware upgrade for free.

Friday, July 11, 2008

itunes Store finally accessible from India using Indian Credit Card/Billing Address

Just checked out the itunes store.. Its finally been launched for India. This is really awesome. It Rocks. You can now use an Indian Credit Card with an Indian billing address to finally buy the apps from the App Store (though music/movies etc. still don't seem to be available to Indian users).

The App store is up for itunes Store India. :-)

Though Apple App Store is Up.. 2.0 Firmware for Ipod Touch/Iphone Still not out. Unless we upgrade our existing ipod touch /iphone to firmware 2.0 we would be unable to launch/install the applications from the App Store in our ipod touch/iPhone.

At this point through to use the App Store first of all we need to upgrade to itunes 7.7 and then as we download any applications they get installed into the itunes. Just waiting for the firmware update so that we may actually be able to install the applications on the ipod touch/iphone.

Would update the blog as soon as I am able to update my ipod touch to the latest firmware (from the current 1.1.4).

Cheers.. and Enjoy

Monday, July 07, 2008

Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na Movie Review - It Rocks...

There are meaningful movies and then there are those dull senseless movies. But there are movies in a third category which though not being meaningful do entertain a lot and that's what movies are meant for. Right ?

Jaane Tu Y a Jaane Na is a movie about six yongsters with the leads played by Jai(Imran) and Aditi (Genelia D Souza) and their friends . Everyone including their friends, Aditi's Parents (Anuradha Patel , Jayant Kirpralkar) , Jai's Mother (Ratna Pathak Shah) know Aditi and Jai are in love, but probably Aditi and Jai do not. To make things better or worse Jai and Aditi plan to find a perfact match for each other to prove that they don't actually love each other.

Jai finds Meghna as her love angle and Aditi is enganged with Sushant. But finally following a typical Hindi movie formula Jai and Aditi find that they are actually in love with the climax at the airport (now how many times have we actually seen that :-) )

Now inspite of having a typical Bollywood story and some sterotyped characters Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na still works for the fresh way in which the debutant director (Abbas Tyrewala) has presented the same. All the actors have put in a brilliant performance and Imran Khan is definitely a kid to watch out for. Actually he inherits quite a few of his Mamu's (Aamir Khan) talent. Some of the dialogues are really young and cool and make you split into laughter. The cameo of Naseruudin Shah as a dead person speaking from the frame of a picture (Similar to what happens in Hum Paanch) also adds to the humor element of the movie.

The strongest point of the movie though seems to be an astounding score by A.R. Rahman. Though a couple of songs (Jaana tu Jaana.. and JTYJN title song) have been left out of the movie partially but still the songs alongwith the adds to the overall mood the movie.

Finally full credit to Abbas Tyrelwala for churning out such a great enternainer though the storyline is cliched and the screenplay could have been a bit tighter. Go watch this movie. This one is surely not to be missed.

Rating 3.5/5