Autoblog has reviewed the Lightweight goodness from British automotive company Lotus. Lotus Exige S 260 is a car which follows the companies policy to use the loopholes of the physics.

Lotus Exige

Lotus Engineering has a policy to make cars which are very light weight making even the car producing decent 200+ bhp car to compete with large hearted machines.

Lets come back to the specs of Exige S 260:

• 1.8-liter Toyota-sourced four-cylinder engine
• 257 horsepower
• 174 pound-feet torque
• Weighs 935kg
• 20 mpg in the city
• 26 mpg on the highway
• Y-Type 8-spoke lightweight alloy wheels in black F: 6.5Jx16 & R: 7.5Jx17
• Yokohama Advan A048 LTS F: 195/50 R16 & R: 225/45 R17
• Servo-assisted, track tuned 4-channel Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) with Lotus/AP-Racing twin-piston fixed aluminium alloy front brake calipers. Brembo single-piston sliding rear calipers and 288 mm diameter, 26 mm thick front and rear cast-iron ventilated & cross-drilled discs.
• 0-100 km/h – 4.7 seconds

Lotus Exige Rear

Lotus Exige Rear

“”"Lotus manages to achieve such a low mass (while meeting modern regulatory standards) by using a novel architecture built from a collection of aluminum extrusions riveted and glued together. The issue of ingress and egress stems from this: the chassis was originally designed for a convertible. The side beams are large enough to support most of the structure, meaning they’re both tall and wide. In an Elise sans roof, no big deal. You just step over the sill and plop your backside into the seat. With the roof bolted in place, the experience is closer to sliding through the window of a race car or, more appropriately, down the barrel of a cannon.”"”

“”"Once you’ve wiggled your way inside (helpful hint: place your right foot in the well, sit on the sill, grab the wheel and tug yourself through), you’re ensconced in a carbon fiber shell with a minimal amount of padding. The driver’s seat moves fore and aft (the passenger seat is fixed) and both thrones benefit from cut-outs to accommodate a five-point racing harness and HANS device. As the seats are solid pieces of carbon fiber, there’s no lateral give, so you’ll want to start shopping for diet books on Amazon… yesterday.”"”

“”"Climbing up the Exige’s graduated tachometer towards 9,000 RPM, you’ll notice there’s no marked redline. Instead, a series of three red LEDs illuminate on the dash when it’s time to shift. When the engine is cold, the indicators come on between 5,000 and 6,000 RPM. Once the coolant and oil are up to temperature, you can throttle down, spin the 2ZZ past 4,000 RPM – where the VVTi kicks in – all the way to its 8,500 RPM redline and enjoy the mechanical duet of the engine and supercharger ricocheting around the undampened cabin.

With the engine rocketing towards redline, the Exige’s gearbox is ready to deliver six perfectly spaced ratios to keep the supercharged four in its meaty sweet spot. The aluminum shift lever benefits from short throws, although the linkage on our (likely abused) press car could have been slightly more precise. The narrow footwell – a minor annoyance earlier – became an asset, with closely spaced pedals that made heel-and-toe action a breeze.”"”

“”"It’s no wonder automakers around the world tap Lotus Engineering to sort out their suspensions – the Exige is the perfect case study. Simply put, the roads in southeast Michigan suck. They’re loaded with bumps, cracks and heaves. But even though the Exige is clearly not tuned for comfort, the suspension does a remarkable job of dealing with Michigan’s worst. “”

””‘Another benefit of the Exige’s small engine and featherweight design is decent fuel economy. The EPA rates the Exige S260 at 20/26 mpg city and highway and we averaged 19 mpg on two fill ups of the 10.6 gallon tank. The Exige and its carbon fiber doesn’t come cheap though. The S 260 adds $9,000 to the starting price of the S240 and the out-the-door tab affixed to our example came to $77,115. That’s more than $30,000 less than a Tesla Roadster, which shares its lineage with the Lotus Elise. Given that most drivers of either this or the Tesla are likely to put on far fewer miles than on an average car, we’d opt for the 2-3 minute fill ups of the Lotus if it were our own money – assuming, of course, that we wedge ourselves inside.”"”

more here and here

Sony has announced three new entry-level DSLRs. The A230, A330 and A380 replace the Alpha 200, 300 and 350. The restyled cameras offer new ergonomics and easy-to-use interfaces, but retain the underlying specification of the predecessor models. As before, the basic model is a 10MP DSLR, the intermediate model adds Sony’s fast live view system and the range-topping model gets a 14.2MP sensor. The new Alpha DSLRs are better differentiated from one another, with individual color schemes and grip finishes helping to distingush between the models.

you will be able to download the native Skype iPhone client and install it on your iPhones and iPod Touch devices. And when you do, you’ll be able to replicate almost all of Skype’s functions. The reason I say almost is because the iPhone version of the app doesn’t support video.

When I got my hands on an early version of the app a few hours ago, I simply installed it on a borrowed iPhone, signed in using my existing Skype username and password, and I was able to start using it within seconds. It’s an attractive and almost perfect adaptation of the desktop version of Skype; the user interface is intuitive, simple and easy to navigate. And it offers a number of pleasant surprises, such as the ability to attach photos to your contacts by way of the iPhone’s built-in camera. You can also toggle between all your contacts and just those online, and adding new contacts is pretty simple.

Verdict: For those of you that use Skype on a daily basis and own an iPhone, this could very quickly become the simplest way to make long-distance calls. And I’m predicting a big upsurge in Skype as an “IM client” with this release.

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How do you determine the global market share of a browser?

It’s hard to give a proper answer to this – there are so many factors that go in to determining an exact global market share. How do you track users? If you’re tracking web sites, which web sites do you track? No matter how you look at it, it’s hard to pin these down.

The Mozilla Metrics team has been blogging recently, discussing different ways in which market share can be evaluated. In a recent post breaking down the various metric services they looked at some of the most popular ones, analyzing their quality of data.

One of the services that we make a lot of use of to get a decent global view of browser market share is Net Applications. Their data comes from a wide selection of sources and tracks over 160 million users.

[Read More]

tata nano

The much anticipated Nano has been launched by Tata. Following is the information you might want to know

Booking starts on April 9th 2009. Deliveries will start in July.

There have been many reviews already of the cars from many magazines and forums.

These are the highlight of the car

• It is definitely a car
• It looks cool
• Its a real wheel driven car.
• Better than Maruti 800 in many areas which is priced more than a lakh above Nano
• It has a huge interior rivalling bigger hatches like i10 and santro
• It has somewhat loud engine
• It has very good peppy engine for the city
• Its mileage should be above 20 kmpl
• It scores its point in drivability
• It has ok gearbox which is of cable type
• Ride is bumpy
• Good Handling and better stability in higher speed
• Performance is Good for its price
• 0-60 in 8 seconds (claimed), in 9.1 second achieved by autocar

Performance numbers:

• 0-60 – 9.1seconds
• 0-100 – 29.7seconds 
• Top speed – 106kph 
• 20-80 (3rd gear) – 20.45 seconds 
• 40-100 (4th gear) – 46.38seconds 
• Braking (80-0) – 33.66m 3.07seconds

More here, here and here

Three midrange Sony SLRs now are included in DxO Labs’ measurements of image sensor performance, and the Alpha A700 proves to be reasonably competitive.

The A700, which costs about $1,100 with an 18-70mm lens, has a score of 66.3 on the test, which calculates how well the sensor handles color, a range brightness and darkness, and low-light shooting. That puts it behind the top-scoring camera with a comparably sized sensor, the Nikon D90, almost ties it with the Pentax K10D and Nikon D300, and gives it a a few points’ lead over Canon’s 40D and 50D

DxO Labs, a French company, makes a business of measuring camera image quality, developing technology for image-processing hardware and software, and selling software to convert the raw files produced by higher-end cameras into less flexible but more convenient formats such as JPEG. The DxOMark score measures sensor performance based on the raw file, a foundation for overall image quality but only a facet of a camera’s overall performance.