ArJ.uNo

It’s Diwali here, one of the most important festival in India. And guess what I am studying Custom Duty because I have my Indirect Tax exam after couple of days.
I have been found of Apple product (very much, just ask my friends to confirm) coz I like there technology and innovation, but there ‘too pricey’ tags worries me a lot (and many other Indians) merely due to reason that Apple products are undoubtedly most expensive in India. Means you can buy an iPhone for (not just, but lucrative) $650 in America and at similar prices in other nations but in India you pay 45,500 for an iPhone 5. After looking at this price tag you will prima facea feel as if why would someone buy a phone (so expensive) which is available for Rs. 33,800 ($650×52=Rs33,800) in America and 45,500 in India.
After imparting my knowledge on Excise, VAT and Custom Duties, now I can explain you how. Needless to mention its still now enough to clear my examination and I am blogging instead of studying, god know my result very well.
When an item reaches the custom boundaries before it is cleared for sale in India, the government has made sure that the items are not cheap as compared to home-grown products. So a simple and profitable way is ‘Taxation’. A product before it is ready for sale needs some modification in pricing. The importer has to first pay a 10% custom duty (the rates are variable I am just taking the ideal one).
Hmmm… Well that make it of only $65 expensive, making the iPhone for Rs. 37,180 [($650+$65)*52]. What about the rest?
Wait for it.. an additional Excise Duty (called CVD) of 12% means Rs. 4,417… What about the rest?
Wait for it.. an additional Educational Cess and SAH which is 3% of the total tax, means (3,380+4,417)*3%=Rs. 234… What about the rest?
Wait for it.. (Hey! the Government is probably inspired from Barney) an additional Sales Tax (called Special CVD) of 4% if the total amount, i.e. (37,180+4,417+234)*4%=Rs. 1,673.
The total now comes out to Rs. 43,504. Which is around 28.85%.
The balance amount is for Apple’s franchise in India iWorld.

I got inspired to write this post coz I read many blogs in which users were pretty much disappointed because of Apple selling there products in India with the most inflated price tag on the planet.
Maybe next time, you won’t blame Apple so much. Because a major amount of price that you pay goes to the Government. I would call this ‘Protectionism’. I yes, the don’t even blame the Government, they are correct here, coz that are protecting the Indian Industry. I just hope that they do something good for us from the money they receive (which is very unlikely).

This post was written with my iPhone, so typos are common. So please inform me about the mis-spells here and yes also write a feedback below 🙂

The 12th October Apple released Windows download that iCloud control panel is provided for the integration of PC-iCloud service, not just the balance is on your contact, schedule and calendar data is essential. But the major problem is that it’s only compatible with Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7, leaving  many Windows XP users from outside the service.

Here it’s worthwhile to look at the bottom of the instructions I got from stored ifun.de reader Benjamin.

This explains in six steps, methods to install the Control Panel iCloud. This also shows how a slight modification, can also install iCloud on Windows XP. I have not tested the XP installation itself, but the small hack that I found is worth mentioning. Benjamin writes:

The following programs are required:
iTunes 5.10
A Enpackprogramm e.g. 7-Zip or WinRar
Orca MSI editor (download it and install)
The iCloud setup

• first Download icloud setup
• second open the iCloudSetup.exe with WinRar or 7-Zip extract
• third find the file iCloud.msi or iCloud64.msi (for 64bit sytems) and open it with Orca MSI editor
• fourth look at the left table for “after launch” condition.

Then

• in the right table change VersionNT> = 600 on VersionNT> = 200 then Save and Exit
• fifth open iCloud.msi file for installation …
• sixth run icloud (from the control panel) and log

 

If you found this post helpful or have some query, feel free to comment.

Well I am one of those people who are still keeping the 3 year old technology in their pockets. Probably because we all are waiting for the next iPhone to get launched in the market. Well the next-generation iPhone could be a revolutionary iPhone 5 or evolutionary iPhone 4S (or both), donno and we are not going to discuss about that today. But for the purpose of a mild hint we should expect it to be in the market somewhere around October (still it’s too far).

So our iPhone 3G has to survive till then (which is indeed a tedious job due to its very slow processing capability). You can’t imagine how slow this phone is, means it opens the Message App in 10 sec and even after that sending and receiving SMS is soo slow that I have planned to stop sending/receiving messages to my near ones (forget about other apps, using them is a nightmare for me).

While a vast majority of iPhone users are enjoying the new features and performance improvement in the latest iOS, some iPhone 3G users have reported that iOS 4 has slowed down their iPhone, which has forced some of them to downgrade to iPhone OS 3.1.3 (which is feature less for me now).

So after a small search over the internet I found a way to increase the speed of the phone and I am discussing it above.

Here, I would like to introduce a nice and a simple “tweek” that you can use to bump up the speed of your phone.

I started surfing over the internet and found in ModMyI forum that:

Phone 3G apparently has trouble keeping up with indexing, ever since 3.x. Two days ago, I turned off Spotlight search (Settings-General-Home Button-Spotlight search-switch off all you don’t use) because I rarely, if ever, used it.

Up to this day, my poor old 3G with iOS is way snappier than it was before, and I wouldn’t hesitate to say it’s as snappy as with 3.1.3.

So I tried disabling all the spotlight search feature in Settings>General>Home Button>Spotlight search, and now I believe that my phone is little bit faster. Although doing this will stop spotlight from searching any part of your phone but still this tweek make sense to me as I don’t use spotlight at all.

Update: In order to increase your phone’s speed you may also try the following methods:

1) Make sure that your phone have atleast 1GB free space at times, this will help your phone to make full use of the virtual memory.

2) Install SBSettings and stop processes like Safari, iPod and Mail as they run in background and slow your phone.