Toyota Etios Came!

Here comes another good child from the reliable family of Toyota.  Toyota Kirloskar Motor has launched the Etios sedan in India. The base version starts at Rs 4.96 lakh. The mid-level G-variant will cost Rs 5.46 lakh and the same version with the safety pack including airbags will cost Rs 5.96 lakh. The higher end V-variant will retail for Rs 6.41 lakh, while the fully loaded VX version will go for Rs 6.86 lakh.

The car now comes with a 1.5-litre petrol engine which makes 90bhp of power and a torque of 132Nm. The car is fitted  with a 5-speed manual gearbox. For now, both the engine and the transmission will be imported, but the remainder of the car, amounting to 70 percent of the parts, has been localized.

The Etios concept duo was first shown at the 2010 Auto Expo in New Delhi earlier this year. The car has been brought out offering a tough fight to other entry level sedans.  With this pricing, the car is expected to take the fight straight to the Maruti Suzuki Swift DZire, the current leader of the segment which is popular enough to demand long waiting periods. Also in the crosshair of the Etios will be the likes of the Tata Indigo Manza and the Mahindra Logan. 

Toyota also revealed that Etios hatchback will be launched in April 2011, and will be called the Etios Liva. For now, Toyota's plans are to make 70,000 units of the Etios in 2011. 

687.71 million mobile connections in India!!!

You have mobile phone with you, haven’t you? Each and every person you met on the road hold one, aren’t they? Did you ever think how many mobile connectios are there in our country? Its an amazing statistics, hard to believe!

The number of mobile connections in India reached 687.71 million according to recent report. 17.10 million subscribers newly  entered in September only! According to the Telecom RegulatoryAuthority of India, the wireless phone user base grew 2.55 percent to 687.71 million in September, from 670.60 million in the previous month. With this, the total telephone subscriber base in the country, both wireless and wireline connections combined, touched 723.28 million. The total telephone density reached 60.99 percent. The growth in India’s wireless phone category was led by state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited. According to the data, the broadband subscriber base grew 2.08 percent from 10.08 million in August to 10.29 million in September 2010. 

However, the wireline segment declined further from 35.77 million in August-2010 to 35.57 million at the end of September 2010.

A Laptop with two screens!!!

Have you ever seen a laptop with two screens? Don’t worry, such one is ready! Acer has launched the Iconia, a laptop-cum-tablet computer with two touch screens. The new dual-screen laptop has two 14 inch displays, including one in place of a traditional keyboard.

The Iconia, features two touch screens protected by ultra-tough Gorilla Glass. Reports say that the device can be used like a traditional laptop, with the second screen doubling up as a virtual keyboard, or can serve as a tablet-style computer. A tablet computer is a portable computer equipped with a touch screen as a primary input device. Users can spread the desktop across both screens, or use one to watch a video or surf the web, and the other to write an email or edit photos.

The device features palm sensors to detect the position of the user’s hands, and automatically launch the virtual keyboard when needed. The Iconia will come to open market towards next January and will cost around 1 lakh. The device uses Intel Core i5 processors, and a minimum of 4GB RAM and up to 750GB hard drive.

Samuel T. Cohen, Father of Neutron Bomb, passes away

Samuel T. Cohen died who  invented one of history’s most controversial weapons, the neutron bomb.  It was in 1958 that Cohen designed the tactical nuclear weapon intended to kill people but do minimal damage to cities. Cohen studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and helped build the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

According to him,  the inspiration for the neutron bomb was a 1951 visit to Seoul, which had been largely destroyed in the Korean War. In his memoir, he wrote: “If we are going to go on fighting these damned fool wars in the future, shelling and bombing cities to smithereens and wrecking the lives of their inhabitants, might there be some kind of nuclear weapon that could avoid all this?”  But none of the U.S. presidents in the 1960s or 70s were interested in developing Cohen’s weapon, partly out of fear it could violate the test-ban treaty and encourage further weapons proliferation.

In 1981, however, President Reagan ordered 700 neutron warheads built to oppose the massive Soviet tank force that had been strategically positioned in Eastern Europe. He viewed the bomb as the only tactical weapon that could effectively stop the tanks without also destroying much of the continent. The weapons were later dismantled in the face of widespread protests and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. France, China, Russia and Israel are also thought to have produced neutron weapons, but it is not known if they still have any. 


Neutron Bomb