Category: Technology

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

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Astro B.yond HD

Astro compared the launch of B.yond, its HDTV service in Malaysia, to the arrival of color television broadcasting. That’s quite a claim. And as much as I hate to admit it, I’m old enough to remember the day RTM first switched to color. I recall the excitement—curious neighbors cramming into the living room, eyes glued to the rare color TV set, gasping in awe at every vibrant hue. We didn’t care what was on—we religiously tuned in to any program that aired in color, even if it was just a news anchor talking about rubber exports.

Astro B.yond, on the other hand, while delivering on its HD promise, isn’t nearly as revolutionary.

High-definition content is nothing new. If your PC runs at a resolution higher than 1280 x 720 pixels, congratulations—you’ve been enjoying 720p HD for years. If your puny 2-megapixel camera takes images at 1600 x 1200 pixels, you already have more height resolution than 1080p, the current gold standard for HD. Blu-ray discs (and before them, HD-DVD), gaming consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360—they’ve all been HD for ages.

So unlike the color TV era, Astro B.yond doesn’t have a major novelty factor. It’s hard to imagine your neighbors barging into your living room just to witness the breathtaking detail of David Letterman’s forehead wrinkles.

The Hardware & Channel Lineup

At launch, B.yond offers just four HD channels—NatGeo HD, History HD, HBO HD, and Astro Supersport HD—with ESPN HD “coming soon.” To access them, Astro requires you to replace almost everything: the dish, decoder, smart card, and even the remote control. The new Set-Top Box (STB) is smaller and sleeker, with a redesigned on-screen menu system. It also has a front-facing USB port, possibly for future TiVo-like features—if Astro ever decides to roll those out.

Originally, I had stripped my Astro subscription down to the bare minimum, partly as a protest against their ever-increasing prices. This left me with mostly documentary channels, so my TV diet consisted of Mega Disasters, Ice Road Truckers, and Mega Movers. What I quickly discovered is that the HD versions of NatGeo and History don’t just offer higher resolution; they actually have different programming schedules from their SD counterparts. HBO HD, on the other hand, is just HBO SD with a 60-minute delay, while Supersport HD is essentially Supersport 2 in HD.

The Good: Jaw-Dropping Documentaries

The documentary channels look phenomenal. The colors are richer, and the level of detail is incredible—you can read tiny background text, spot imperfections in ancient artifacts, or count the number of wrinkles on the expert’s forehead as they discuss the fall of the Roman Empire.

Feeling optimistic, I upgraded to the movie package to check out HBO HD.

The Not-So-Good: HBO HD’s Disappointing Quality

That’s when my excitement took a hit. Unlike the razor-sharp clarity of the documentaries, HBO HD looked… soft. The compression Astro uses for this channel seems aggressive—action scenes suffer from blocky artifacts, making them resemble poorly compressed pirated DVDs. Some sequences are downright unwatchable, especially when there’s a lot of movement on screen.

The Ugly: Audio Issues That’ll Drive You Crazy

Astro B.yond boasts Dolby Digital sound, but in practice, it’s a hot mess. The audio channels are often encoded incorrectly. The most common issue? Voices don’t just come from the center speaker—they’re also leaking into the left and right speakers. And to make matters worse, the vocal track isn’t even properly synchronized across the channels, creating a weird out-of-phase effect that makes dialogue sound echoey and unnatural. It’s like listening to an interview inside a tin can.

The Road Ahead: Can Astro Fix This?

For Astro to succeed, they need to fine-tune this service. With just four HD channels at launch, it’s unlikely they’ll attract the masses—except maybe during World Cup 2010, when all matches will be broadcast in HD. Right now, early adopters like me are willing to pay the extra RM20 a month for the technology, but for mass adoption, they need to:

  1. Fix the compression issues, especially on movie channels.
  2. Sort out the audio disasters.
  3. Rapidly expand the HD channel lineup.

Because after watching HD, one thing becomes painfully clear—Astro’s standard-definition channels look really, really bad.

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New iPhone by June 2009

I know I might sound biased, but now is really not the best time to get a Maxis iPhone.

And no, it’s not just because the blogosphere is buzzing with complaints about how absurdly expensive it is to legally own an iPhone 3G in Malaysia (which, to be fair, it absolutely is).

Nor is it because the iPhone still lacks basic features that even the cheapest dumbphones have had for years—like forwarding SMS, sending and receiving MMS, making video calls, or the almighty copy and paste.

Nope.

The real reason to hold off? A newer, third-generation iPhone (not to be confused with “3G,” which was actually the second generation) is almost certainly dropping this June.

The Evidence: Why June 2009 is iPhone Season

  • AT&T spilled the beans—like an overenthusiastic cowboy at a campfire, they let slip that something big is coming.
  • The code detectives—geeks with way too much time on their hands have meticulously dissected every line of iPhone Firmware 3.0, unearthing hidden references to new phone models lurking in the source code.
  • Paul Schiller’s divine revelation—Apple’s Senior VP of Product Marketing (a.k.a. not Steve Jobs) hinted via his chosen prophet, David Pogue of The New York Times, that June is traditionally when Apple unveils new iPhones.
  • WWDC 2009 is set for June 8-12—Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is the perfect stage for them to unleash all the pent-up coolness they’ve been secretly working on, sending Apple fanboys into a collective frenzy.

Put all the clues together, and it’s almost certain that a brand-new iPhone is dropping in June 2009. And if history tells us anything, it’s going to be hot, hot, HOT.

So unless you enjoy buyer’s remorse, wait a few months. Your patience will be rewarded.

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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.