Category: Technology

My take on some of the latest technology news and issues.

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New iPhone by June 2009

I know that I may sound biased but this is really not the right time to get a Maxis iPhone.

This is not because there are a lot of complaints coming from the blogs that the cost of ownership for a “legit” iPhone 3G in Malaysia is extremely prohibitive (which it is).

It is also not because the iPhone can’t do a lot of the things that we had taken for granted that even a low end phone can do like forwarding SMS, sending and receiveing MMS, doing video calls, copy and pasting.

Nope.

The reason why people should wait is because a newer, 3rd generation (not 3G which is the 2nd), iPhone is going to be launched by June this year.

First off, AT&T spilled the beans like a drolling cowboy in a campfire.

Secondly, geeks without a life painstakingly went through every line in the new Firmware 3.0 like ants on heat to reveal hidden references in the source codes to new phone models.

Thirdly, Paul (not-the-Steve-Jobs) Schiller, the senior VP of Product Marketing of The Apple over at the holy land of Cupertino illuminated the masses (via his chosen vessel, David Pogue of the New York Times) by explaining that June is the traditional cycle of iPhone product launches.

And finally, Apple has a WWDC on June 8-12, 2009. All of the pent up cool things that they are planning to announce could be climatically ejaculated during this time to the mass elation of Apple fan boys (and the gadget-lusting Christmas shoppers).

One can almost join all of the dots to savely conclude that the new iPhone is slated for June 2009 and it is going to be hot, hot, hot!

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Spotify on the iPhone?

I’ve been using Spotify for a couple of months now and I have to say that is one of the best music service out there, bar none. Of course, when I said bar none, I meant bar none if you happened to live in the UK.

Unfortunately, customers outside the UK can only select from a limited number of content due to licensing restrictions. This has severely impacted the user experience of the service. I created an account (don’t ask me how) and was presented with an impressive collection of songs. After a few days, the server prompted me that it detected that I was “roaming” and asked if I wanted to change my country in my Spotify user settings.

I did that and I came to regret it as it removed more than 3/4 of the songs that I had put in my playlist. Drats!!!!

But I digress because the reason I’m writing this is because of this:-

Could it really be that Spotify is coming to the iPhone? How about latency over EDGE? Will it work the same way as the desktop client (ie. download music file to local harddisk and then obtain DRM play key from server for every play)? So many questions, so little facts.

Wow…I really can’t wait (even with the limited content now)

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Upgrading to WordPress 2.7

I haven’t been blogging a lot lately simply because the web provider that my blog is hosted on is also hosting some malicious web codes (according to Google anyway if you use their Chrome web browser).

Anyway, I though that the problem could be with my website so I tried to upgrade my WordPress engine to the latest one. Lo and behold, I realized that I was really sitting in the docks while the versions rolled on by! The latest incarnation was the slick WordPress 2.7 while I was still running on a really arcane version.

Googling around, I found this very interesting site that will be very helpful in case of future upgrades. It contains a little plugin that you can access from your admin Dashboard that will automatically do the upgrade for you.

I filezilla’ed the small plug in over and the followed the steps. The upgrade was completed in less than 5 minutes.

Sweet 😉

What are you waiting for? Head on down to Luke Gedeon’s site

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iPhone blogging

Good things come in good packages. The maxim is definitely true when one thinks of products from Apple. Take an iMac for instance. It’s big but flat, smooth and all aluminium-ish. And it comes with a keyboard that is thinner than Michael Jackson’s nose.

Take also the iPod, for example. It is getting sexier and slenderer with every successive generation, a consistency that would make Oprah envious with jealousy.

But deep down, an iMac is nothing but a normal Intel computer. And an iPod is nothing more than an MP3 player. In the wrong company, these 2 products could go terribly wrong. Case in point: Any Windows PC and Microsoft Zune. In fact, everything that Microsoft does these days go terribly wrong.

Which brings me to the subject of my review: the iPhone.

I’ve been using an iPhone for a month now and I’m sad to say that I just wished that it has more phone in it. As ever, Apple has got the packaging right but for this product, they’ve got the phone part wrong. I can’t forward an SMS to another person, perform mass SMSing, MMS a picture or sound, send or receive vCards. Heck, I can’t even archive my SMSes! It is like living in a beautiful apartment with rooms that have windows that open up to brick walls, toilets that have non-standard sized toilet paper dispensers and a kitchen that is completely sealed shut from the dinning room.

But this is not to say that it is a bad phone. It really isn’t. The iPhone is absolutely one of the sexiest phones out there in the market. It’s sleek, slender and smooth. The interface is fast and responsive. I really like the flicking and pinching thingamagik where you can flick and pinch on the touch screen and things either go up and down or big and small. And oh, yes, it turns heads, especially if you are hanging out in the local Mac store because it isn’t officially sold here yet.

Making an iPhone work here was quite easy.

After ripping out the wrapper, I tried cracking the phone in the office. Apple’s exclusive (money grabbing) tie-ups with selected telcos (currently at&t in the US and O2 in the UK) means that these phones are SIM-locked and they won’t work with SIMs from other operators. Which means that technically, the iPhone, in its original form, is illegal here as per the regulations set by MCMC, our telecommunications industry government watchdog.

Seeing that this is the case, I’ve decided to set things in order. I’m gonna unlock my iPhone because I’m a patriot….right….

Unlocking the phone is easy. The site i used is hacktheiphone.com and instructions are very well laid out there. In fact I count myself lucky that i got the 1.1.1 version that came with a tiff bug in Safari (Hah! Cupertino, you missed one!). The latest iPhones version 1.1.2 is a little more harder to crack but it’s not impossible.

Even with all the imperfections, the iPhone is still a spectacular phone. Nokia definitely has a lot of catching up to do. Functionally, Nokia phones work beautifully. Packaging wise, the N-series is now beginning to look more and more like Microsoft Windows 1.0 as compared to the original Macintosh OS. And while like Microsoft, Nokia can take comfort in the fact that they will still sell more phones than Apple, we all know which phones the good guys will be using in the future seasons of the TV series 24.

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Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Unlike the previous Mac OS X releases, I didn’t have think of getting a copy of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard because I only have non Intel-based older Macs (a PowerMac G4 933MHz and a PowerBook G4 1.33GHz). However, there was something in the ad campaign yesterday that just attracted me enough to push me to get a copy today. The short of the matter is that it is a good release but not necessarily the best. Initial testing (I’ve only got enough time to install on my PowerBook) reveals that it is fast and zippy…but there are small irritating things like transparent Finder menu bar (Hello? Why copy this from Vista?) which is distracting and frivolous. I wasn’t too impressed with the Cover Flow feature when I first saw it in Steve Job’s keynote but I must say, after trying it myself on my PowerBook, that this is one of the better features of this release. It really opens up a different way of interacting with your folder and files.As for the much touted Time Machine, I really wouldn’t know yet because one would need to have a system with more than one hard disk drive to enable this feature.Overall, I’m happy with Leopard as I think that it looks more polished, more aesthetically pleasing. But honestly,  I could have lived without the graphical bells and whistles and just remain with Tiger.

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New Hard Disk for PowerBook

Thanks to the PC Fair in KLCC last week, my PowerBook G4 had gotten a new 160GB hard disk. I’m installing all of the stuff into the machine now improvements in hard disk technology had made my PowerBook to load up faster, reacts more zippily, operate more silently with less heat.

I’ve also doubled the existing size of the hard disk. However, I haven’t been able to recover any of my old data yet. This reminds me of the importance of backing up. Even though I can now surf in the toilet again, I’m heart-sick that all of my precious data is still lost.