About a year back a neighbor of mine reportedly told my father that TV is no more a necessity. She said she never watches TV anymore and browses net for news or for entertainment. My parents were, right from the start against going for cable TV and were never really glued to TV programs. This came as a god send and my father declared that we should invest in a laptop. So after saving from his pension for about two months he pulled out his never before used credit card and went shopping with me.
We never knew that most laptops come with TFT screens or that it was uncool to sport a laptop with a large screen. We settled for sony vaio black cover and brought home our prized possession very carefully. The laptop box now adores prominent place in our living room. The old TV has been unused since that time, parents happy about savings on the monthly cable bill. I am now showing them photos of my cousin’s children on facebook something they could not have done with a TV. They are yet to create a profile and are amazed to learn that most of our family members are on that site.
Something happened this may and the cost of a months’ 3G USB modem connection fell nearly 400%. With this we are able to use the internet daily at reasonable costs. I pay our house rent throu net banking now as well as recharge my mobile and pay my papa’s mobile bill. My friends are amazed to see me online at nights. I research on my PhD topic also. The best part of this laptop is it came with windows 7 Home Basic preinstalled but Office is pirated. We got Microsoft Security Essentials free as a bonus. It protects against viruses. I also have Ubuntu 11.10 running on another partition and I use it only for programming. Don’t know if this laptop will become outdated in a few years with newer OS from Microsoft.
My recommendation is for every salaried person to have a laptop or atleast a desktop with atleast 3G USB modem connection if not a DSL cable connection. Internet penetration in our country is now 10% with nearly 120 million internet users growing at 20% a year. Mobile is a new way of accessing internet. If net banking becomes prevalent in a mobile it would revolutionize e-commerce. I feel mobile banking is not going to catch on as much. The future is in smart phones with browsers. Tablets and E-Book readers would also be a good buy but I somehow don’t plan to buy them. I feel laptop is good enough for reading e-books.
Govt. plans of distributing aakaash tablets is stalled and we should see tablet or phablet prices crashing in a few months. The choice before a consumer is whether to go for a high end phone with large display or a tablet along with continuing using their mobiles the old fashioned way. Mobiles which scan fingerprints or iris prints of the eye are expected next year. There is talk of mobile phone replacing the cards. Our economy is cash heavy and when I wanted to make a fixed deposit recently my father advised me to withdraw all money I need to deposit from ATM and take the cash to the branch and make a deposit. I wonder in this age of net banking, e-commerce and m-commerce why do we still need to carry cash. Indians especially senior citizens are averse to using cards, mostly because they don’t know to use them or don’t trust them. Using cards is kids play but they don’t understand it. So our country will take atleast another decade or two to become a less cash economy.
