The Flipkart.com folks sent across a survey form to be filled up. The one pattern I noticed was that the questions asked for comparative analysis ie. "best amongst", "easiest amongst" and so forth. This has an amusing downside - if an user hasn't actually ended up using competitor sites they may be tempted to give it a shot. And, additionally, it somewhat dilutes the brand/unique-ness of Flipkart as a business site.

A random selection from the survey questions are as follows:

• At Flipkart.com it is the easiest to search for products, compared to other online shopping sites
• Flipkart.com offers the widest range of payment options, when compared to other online shopping sites.
• Flipkart.com provides the best delivery AND after sales customer service, among all online shopping sites

with the options for responses ranging from "Disagree Strongly" to "Strongly Agree".

The same survey could perhaps be re-designed to ask the users the following questions with a numerical rating (1 to 5) or, even the existing rating

• You find it easy to use the search engine on the site to receive accurate and relevant product results
• You find it easy to Order and Checkout using the options provided for payment
• You will recommend the site to others based on delivery and after sales customer service performance

Was my hack the most optimal ? Surely not. But it does avoid the comparative behavior while trying to self promote.

Flipkart is finally listing Bengali books. However, going through the listings I was forced to be disgusted. It looks shoddily done and, without a proper care of reviewing the entries. There are:

• Titles which are wrongly typed. Even phonetically they don't come close
• Author names which show wide variation
• Wrong listings too

In short it means that unless I chance upon that book it would be impossible to search by either Title or, Author Name. And, for an online bookstore that just takes away the interest in clicking through a number of books/pages to arrive at the book. Which is where another thing bothers me. In this day and age, why can I not set a preference about how many books I want listed once I login ? Or, for example, choose to see an infinite scroll ? There ought to be a way to handle that.

I am happy that I can (if I try hard enough) actually buy Bengali books off Flipkart. I am disappointed at the fact that they did not put as much care as they did for their English language books.

I've been using a LG P500 for a while now. The phone is a couple of firsts for me - a first time shift from being a longtime user of Symbian phones, a first time user of a touch phone and, a first time user of an Android device (this comes with Android 2.2)

The phone specifications can be read at this page and it would be obvious at a first glance that it isn't beefy. I would agree. Games aren't the strong point of the phone. I'm not too particularly fond of games but I gave them a shot just to check how the hardware behaves. There are a few other bits too - the tiny power/screen lock button on the top, the lack of a flash, the latency of the camera between clicking to shoot and actually storing the picture and, the slightly cluttered up application screen. However, these are more than made up for by the balance of the phone. How an instrument feels on the hand is very important to me - this one is snug and evenly balanced and, even though I shifted from the all metal feel of an e71, this one doesn't feel tackily plasticky. I like the interface and, although it took me a while to figure out how to prevent applications running in the background from slurping up data on a GPRS data connection, I blame the sparse manual for that rather than the phone UI. Having heard horror stories about the Android battery life, I was prepared to be disappointed. However, so far, squeezing out 20+ hours on a single charge and full day usage hasn't been too tough. Either I am a lucky sort or, the battery is performing better in the initial stages. 

Which brings us to the thing that bothers the hell out of me. I've always maintained that the Ovi Store was a misery. Well, the Android marketplace seems to be a misery of a different sort - too many applications and not enough information about the ratings and what they mean. And, the AppAdvisor provided by LG is equally flawed when suggesting any applications. For the record, the current lot of extra applications I've downloaded and used frequently include the Status.Net application, Amazon Kindle Application (which is much nicer than what I expected and allows me to get ahead with me reading by handling reflows nicely), Evernote, Google Finance, Google Translate, Skype, Opera Mini, Foursquare, TED Mobile (clunky but functional), A Good Reader (I'm not too overjoyed with this but it serves the purpose) and, Mundu IM (a shout-out to the Mundu IM team here - they helped me re-use the same license I had for the Symbian phone). Oh yeah ! I used the Barcode Scanner application for a bit. It is a fun app - doesn't work for everything but works nicely when it does. Google Goggles was fun too (for a day or, so). Coming back, it needs some explanation as how the ratings work and, what it means for the functionality of the application. A quick example could be that SMS Backup works nicely but SMS Backup+ failed to get going. And, the latter is fairly highly rated on the marketplace.

The synchronization with the Google Account(s) is both a plus and a downside. While it allows authentication to be quickly used, the fact that the phone call-in system cannot re-use the Google Contacts to display incoming caller identification and details is a bit of a bore. This has meant that I've had to do away with my workflow of not picking up the call of anyone whose number isn't on my call log and, thereafter keep adding the details in. Either there is some setting I'm missing or, it is supposed to act in this quirky and annoying fashion. The manual doesn't help too.

In two of my recent device purchases I've been tickled funny with the main set of keys - the slider switch in the Kindle (which I still think is the single weakest point of the design) and, the Home/Back keys on the LG-P500. Set on a single sliver of metal, the key has this feeling of running the risk of coming unstuck.

All I need now is the availability of the RSA Soft Token for Android and together with Touchdown I might be able to get more use out of the phone. Bottom-line, it is a decent phone with no big surprises or, achievements. The UI looks more like the stock Android and, it might actually be a good value for money purchase. On a side note, I quite like the keyboard functionality especially when used with XT9 enabled. It learns pretty quickly and suggests fairly accurately. No Indic rendering on the stock browser. Which is a bit of a let-down.