Category: Technology

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

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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.

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PowerBook’s Dead!

My PowerBook’s harddisk crashed today. My electronic life has come to a grinding halt. Not only have I lost the documents that I had started writing more than 15 years ago on my old 486, I’ve also lost all of my precious photos which I had taken since a decade ago when I got my first digital camera.

Sure, I have some backup here and there. But nothing as comprehensive and complete as what I have stored in my trusty, or so I thought, PowerBook. It is indeed a very dark day for me today.

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What are you doing right now?

Imagine a website that publishes everything that you do, every second of everyday. Imagine that your information to this website can be gathered via the phone, web, instant messaging or e-mail. This is the premise of Twitter.com, a social networking/web 2.0 (pick your own favourite jargon) web service. I’ve created an account and so far I have submitted 9 entries- 2 via SMS to a UK Orange number.

It is a pretty easy setup with very low barrier of entry for any company that intends to replicate the same model. All one needs is a web journal publishing engine that is integrated to a content database. It is also quite easy to build the engines to obtain information from web forms, IM, e-mails and SMSes.

I first read about Twitter in Wired Magazine (in fact there are 2 articles- one on the creator of Twitter, Evan Williams and one on the phenomenon) and forgot about the name all together. I recalled it was “Tweet” or something like that. Anyway, I stumbled on it again today when I was googling away at work to find ways to increase international SMS traffic.

For the uninitiated, Evan Williams is the kajillionaire who created and later sold Blogger to Google. Seeing that the barrier of entry is relatively low, what is the business model for Twitter anyway? What does it hope to achieve? Don’t get me wrong, I love the service- it’s fun and addictive at the same time. It serves critics to know that Williams was probably laughed at on the on-set when he created a website to publish peoples web logs about themselves. Now, he’s probably laughing all the way to the bank- or not. Why don’t we head down to his twitter to find out?