PCD Venture (Virgin Mobile)

The PCD Venture ($99.99) is aptly named, as it is something of a venture in and of itself. You may find yourself drawn in by the promise of an inexpensive, keyboarded Android smartphone?with Virgin Mobile's excellent plan pricing, but proceed with caution. This phone has a cramped keyboard, a disappointing camera, short battery life, and generally low-end performance. If you see this phone on the display rack, you'll almost certainly make a better choice if you venture elsewhere.

Design, Call Quality, and Plans
The Venture measures 4.6 by 2.3 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.3 ounces. It's nice and compact for a keyboarded smartphone, and feels relatively solid. It's made of matte gray plastic, with a plastic silver band outlining the face of the phone. It feels pretty classy?until you turn it on. PCD manages to fit in a 2.8-inch display, but at just 320-by-240 pixels, it looks dim and grainy. Even when held over a foot away from my face text looks jagged. There are four physical function keys right beneath the display, which sit on top of the phone's four-row QWERTY keyboard.

Although they are made of a nice, grippy plastic, the keyboard's keys are cramped and tiny. I found it difficult to type without accidentally mashing my finger into other keys, so typing long messages is no simple feat. Keyboarded phones are usually built for texting, but in this case you'd almost be better off with a touch-screen-only phone.

The Venture is a dual-band EV-DO Rev. A (850/1900 MHz) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. Reception is average (Virgin uses Sprint's network), but call quality is middling at best. Voices sound fine in the phone's earpiece, but have a tendency to clip in and out. Calls made with the phone sound fuzzy and computerized, with poor noise cancellation. The speakerphone sounds extremely muffled, and is not loud enough for outdoor use. Calls sounded fine through a?Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars), and voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth without training. Battery life is poor at just 4 hours and 10 minutes of talk time.

As is the case with many phones from Virgin, the biggest selling point here is the carrier's inexpensive pricing plans. You can sign up for an unlimited data, text, and Web plan for as little as $35 per month with 300 voice minutes. 1200 minutes costs $45, and unlimited voice calling brings the price to $55 per month. If you're more of a message and data user than a talker, that $35 plan is hard to beat?especially considering that a data plan alone will cost you $30 on a carrier like Verizon Wireless, and for that price you're limited to 2GB of data per month! There's no tethering or hotspot mode, so you can't use a laptop with this connection. And Virgin does have one downside for heavy data users: Although you get unlimited data, your speeds will be significantly throttled after 2.5GB of usage per month.

OS and Performance
The Venture is running Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread). There's no word on an update to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), but I wouldn't count on it. PCD has modified the standard Android lock screen and added Mobile ID, but that's about it. There are five home screens you can swipe between that come preloaded with some useful apps and widgets, like a battery saver app. There's also some bloatware, but thankfully, almost all of it can be deleted. Mobile ID lets you customize your device with downloadable theme packs from Virgin that include applications, ringtones, wallpapers, and widgets.

The phone is powered by a severely outdated 600MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 MSM7627 processor. Even a year ago this was a low-end part, and it really shows. The Venture turned in some of the slowest benchmarks we've seen in recent memory; you can definitely count this phone out for high-end gaming. Even swiping between home screens can feel too taxing. You should be able to use most of the 400,000+ apps in the Google Play store, but they may not always run well.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The Venture comes with 144MB of free internal storage. There's also a microSD card slot beneath the phone's back cover with a preloaded 2 GB card; my 32 and 64GB cards worked fine as well. Music tracks sounded fine through both wired headphones as well as Altec Lansing Backbeat?Bluetooth headphones ($99.99, 3.5 stars). I was able to play AAC, MP3, OGG, and WAV test files, but not FLAC or WMA. Standalone video support is spotty. The Venture plays MP4 and H.264 test files at resolutions up to 800-by-480, but not AVI or XviD files.

The 2-megapixel camera comes equipped with an LED flash, but performance is poor. There's a long, 1.4 second shutter delay, and no matter the lighting, photos show average color but are generally soft and lacking in detail. The camcorder follows suit; it records small, grainy videos at a low-resolution 352-by-288-pixels. In both cases, you'd be much better served by a cheap digital camera.

While the PCD Venture gets you all the trappings of a smartphone at an inexpensive price, it just doesn't do anything particularly well. The Samsung Replenish?($99.99, 3 stars) over on Boost gets you the same keyboarded form factor and similarly inexpensive plan pricing, but has better voice quality, a more usable keyboard, and boasts an eco-friendly build. The LG Optimus Slider?($199.99, 3.5 stars), meanwhile, costs $100 more, but gets you a larger, sharper display, and a roomy, slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It's worth it.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 10 minutes

More Cell Phone Reviews:
??? PCD Venture (Virgin Mobile)
??? HTC One S (T-Mobile)
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Sins Of The Cloud

Editor?s Note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip. In the beginning there was the cloud. And it was good. But over time it can also be surprisingly expensive. If you?ve ever said ?Oh my god,? at the end of your billing cycle, you?re may be starting to think about putting boundaries on this virtual Eden. Yet you?ll quickly find that public cloud vice is hard to stamp out. It?s ingrained into human nature and finds its expression through self-service IaaS delivery and opaque billing processes. Here are a few of the sins we?ve seen.

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US Republicans eye health plan should court overturn reform (reuters)

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Outsourcing To Outbound Call Center Makes A Good Business Sense

Communication is the best part of any customer-oriented business. More you interact, better you learn, so you implement the same on your business to make it acceptable widely. Yes, most of the big and small concern, in whatever form they flourish in, aim to interact more with the targeted customers to make them aware of the their business, make them interested in their products and the services and finally making them buy the products and the services. This whole process of lead generation and bringing it to a qualified sales close is much a challenge, takes most of the companies valuable time and money. Therefore, if you get somebody to meet the ends on your behalf, what can be most rewarding!

The outbound call centers are the best resort and knows your requirements and the needs best. They satisfy you and your customers and build a rapport between the customers and the clients.

They have the special techniques to handle the new products, the services, and the new prospects as well. The outbound call center outsourcing really makes a good business sense as they have some special benefits. The below enlisted are the key factors making the outbound call centre a more desired process to venture your business in.

1.They are easy to setup and saves the company from the expenditure of building in-house call center infrastructure. They have the ideal technical support and know the best of the customer services that will increase the lead generation. Moreover, the outbound process has the most modern and the refined answering services that make the callers reach out to a wider section of the customers.

2.They render round the clock services.

The agents or the callers that make the calls render round the clock service to the customers. They are ready to solve the issues of the customer at whatever time it may be. Therefore, the instant responses of the customers make a good impression and increase the level of customer satisfaction.

3.The call center outbound process is quite cost effective. The companies get the most out of them at a very affordable cost. The services or the outbound calls maintain quality to get successful results in return. They have the right application to maintain the call center database and the flood of calls that re to be made to qualify the sale.

4.The experts or the callers are well trained. They are skilled enough to render any service to the customers and work on the plans and the goals of the clients. They make sure to motivate the customers and make them buy the products and the services.

5.The outbound call centers cater to the global and the offshore clients and customers thus they know multilingual languages that help them to communicate with both the regional and global customers.

6.They are the best resort to plan for clients new product launches. The bespoke campaigns and the surveys undertaken by the outbound call centers are trustworthy and they aim at inciting the growth of the company by earning more profits. The services as provided them vouch to be at par with international call center services.

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Practical Self Improvement Suggestions | Official Health Article

Competition for jobs has risen because of the increasing unemployment throughout the world. Moreover, as chances decline, monetary success is also becoming harder to achieve. This condition of the world explains why numerous people are looking to better themselves.

If you are also a person who thinks that he needs to improve himself in order to be happy in life then you should know that it is not too hard to achieve your aims. The following are some ideas that could help you.

The reason why being responsible is imperative

The media and some Hollywood celebrities would have you believe that being responsible is not cool. Still, if you want to succeed, you need to be responsible in life. Being responsible just implies caring about your aims a lot.

For instance, if you are responsible about your family then you will do everything in your power to take care of them. Financial and emotional support are both included in this. On the other hand, if you were a generally irresponsible individual then you would never consider the consequences of you leaving a job or taking off with your friends in the middle of the day for a drink.

Question your motives often.

Most individuals go through their life not even knowing why they do certain things. For instance, an individual driving fast when questioned would almost always say he drives fast because he can. This is being unaware. It is just an ambiguous response that shows that the man is drifting through life. As stated before, most individuals have this mindset in life.

A proper answer would make the person either become a professional racer or give up his rash driving ways. You would find out what is significant just by questioning your own motives.

Figuring out your purpose of existence is crucial

As soon as questioning your own motives becomes easy for you, you would question where you are heading in life. As a result, you would think about your own purpose of existence. Different people have different purposes of existence. Some want money while others want company.

You should understand your own purpose of existence. Do you want companionship or solitude? The answer will decide your next step in life. Additionally, knowing your purpose of existence would help you attain your objectives easily.

Realizing your own limitations will spur you on further

Successful people would tell you that they know their limits and try to overcome them every day. Knowing your own limits would allow you to predict where you may falter in the future. Therefore, you would make sure of your own success.

As a matter of fact, by knowing your own limits, you can work towards countering them from now on. For example, you may be quick to anger. Anger has the possibility to ruin both your personal and professional lives. Just being conscious of your issue or meditation can help you stay calm. Waking up late can be seen as another limitation. You can counter this by using many alarm clocks for the next few days. Soon, this problem would get resolved fast.

See the new life coaching phenomena from a very known motivational speaker, David Cameron Gikandi. Known as ?The Merlin School of Mind Power?, it contains great materials on goal setting, inspirational wallpapers, real life legends interviews, articles, motivational videos and motivational quotes analyzed. Truly change your life to a much better experience.

Tags: meditation, motivation, purpose of existence, self improvement

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2012 at 7:51 am and is filed under Meditation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Why Did Missing Children Start Showing Up on Milk Cartons?

These days we think of milk cartons as the sole product that displayed missing children, but dairies were far from alone in their advocacy. Missing children appeared on pizza boxes, grocery bags, and junk mail envelopes alongside the question, ?Have you seen me?? The milk carton campaign was probably the most visible aspect of the movement?by 1985, 700 of the nation?s 1,800 independent dairies had adopted the practice. Though a few informants told police they recognized a child from a gallon of milk, there is no data on how many children were saved by the milk cartons.

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When Will Rick Santorum Endorse Mitt Romney? (Atlantic Politics Channel)

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