The new iPhone 3G S was announced by Apple last June 8, 2009 boasting of improved performance, a 3.0 megapixel camera with video capability and voice control. It was officially released today in the US and Canada. The iPhone 3.0 OS software update was also announced last March 17, 2009 and was released for download last June 17, 2009. So, new iPhone, should we upgrade our handsets to the new 3G S?

Hardware speaking, the 3G S is almost identical with the 3G. No changes were made in the phone’s design. Majority of the changes were made in the inside. The 3.0 iPhone OS software update is said to have great features such as cut, copy and paste function in text, MMS, landscape keyboard, spotlight search, voice memos, internet tethering, and many more. But some features that are in the 3G S is not in the 3.0 update. The 3G S has video capability, voice controls, compass, and Nike + iPod support.

But personally, the said 3G S features not available in the 3.0 update for the previous iPhone models are not those to die for. I have a 3G and I don’t think I would give it up that easily for the 3G S. Some of the 3G S functions can be replaced by other apps now available for the 2G and 3G iPhones. For example video capability can be replaced by Cycorder, an app available for download in Cydia (if you have a jailbroken iPhone, you’ll have Cydia for sure); Nike + iPod support can be replaced by Runkeeper (which most reviews say is much better than Nike + iPod). Compass and Voice Control, I think I can live without.

The iPhone 3G S is an upgrade necessary for the most celebrated smartphone ever made, but it is not one to get for now, maybe in the next iPhone upgrade more features would be added, not only in the software, but more in its hardware (like a new design and a camera in front), maybe that’s time to upgrade. But for now, I think I would settle with my 3G and take in the 3.0 software update.

My cousin Mark came back from his vacation and at my request brought me back a copy of Pugad Baboy XX. Imagine that, my favorite pinoy comic strip is already 20 years old and still, whenever I read its previous books, I still roll on the floor laughing (ok, that’s an exagerration…). Back in the Philippines, I have my collection of Pugad Baboy Comic Books and I know this latest installment would not be different and would successfully put a smile in my face.

Finally was able to go to GITEX Shopper at the Dubai Airport Expo. It is the largest annual technology retail event here in Dubai. It offers the best in technology products in the market. When I arrived there I felt like I have to restrain myself in order not to buy so much. I missed last year’s GITEX due to my schedule at work that’s why I tried my best to make it this year. There was so much to buy that I was left drooling at all the gadgets all around me. I was just thankful that I have already done my electronics shopping before my vacation last year that I only went there to buy one gadget. I left my Sony Cybershot DSC T200 digicam in the Philippines so I was just left with my Canon EOS 400D SLR camera. Although it captures beautiful pictures it is still so big to carry around everyday. So I thought I needed another quick snapper. I decided to buy a Canon Digital Ixus 80 IS. Relying on my experience in using my Canon SLR, I opted to get another Canon, and I was not disappointed. Although the Ixus I got was not the top of the line of the Canon digicams, I could still say it produces high quality pics that would make other cameras running behind it.

See here for some of my pics taken at GITEX using my Canon snapper.

Just visited Apple’s site and found out that they have recently released their new line of MacBooks.

Gone is the 17-inch version, the new line now features a 13-inch MacBook and a 15-inch MacBook Pro. The easily noticeable change is the LED-backlit display which now has a glossy, black border. I think they got this inspiration from the iMac. Also,  new are the black buttons of the keyboard first introduced and seen in the MacBook Air. The Macbook is now also in an aluminum casing (goodbye to the Black and White versions!) just like the Pro but both got a little rounder at the bottom. Another upgrade is the NVIDIA GeForce graphics card which is now 5x faster than the previous version and the new smooth glass multi-touch trackpad that is bigger and is now also clickable (there’s no more button, it IS the button!).

These eye-dropping, drooling machines are now full packed with features but they are also heavy on the wallet. The MacBook starts at $1299 and MacBook Pro starts at $1999. Wow…

My MacBook Pro is not even a year old, and now this. Curse you Steve…

Apple has finally decided to sell unlocked iPhone 3Gs, in Hong Kong. This has given consumers there the freedom to choose whatever carrier they would like to use.

The decision was totally in contrast to the exclusivity policy practiced by Apple in many countries. We all know that unlocked iPhones are openly sold in every part of the world. But surprisingly, the Cupertino-based company didn’t even make a move to even stop it.

Being unlocked comes with a price, a hefty price that is. The 8GB version is available for about $695 (5,400 Hong Kong dollars), while the 16GB iPhone costs about $798 (6,200 HK dollars), according to Apple’s site.

The “iPhone 3G purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier,” the site states. “Simply insert the SIM from your current phone into iPhone 3G and connect to iTunes 8 to complete activation.”

I wish the same scenario happens here in the UAE. Since the government here and Etisalat, the national carrier, are against to so called anti-competitive practices (as if Etisalat has a competition here. Du, which is supposed to be a “competition”, turns out to be majority owned by Etisalat…) and does not agree to Apple’s one carrier policy.

While organizing my files in my newly purchased My Book external hard disk, I found some old pictures of movie bloopers I downloaded I think 3 years ago. The one above shows a scene in a martial arts movie. As you can see, a walkie-talkie was left, maybe by a staff, on the ground just below the feet of the male character. It’s funny how this blunders happen in movie sets, or I even don’t know if this were just edited pictures and are not true. But if this were, it just justifies the saying “Shit happens.”

Projections can be as large as 30-inch with a resolution of 640×480 pixels for up to 2-hours before the battery dies out on you. {via } Oh, did we say this is probably the world’s first cellphone projector?

No other details on the actual phone available but it might be a nice addition to some geeky sales or marketing people.

A little over 24 hours have passed since I bought this thing yesterday, so I think I have a sufficient amount of experience with it to put together some first-impression-type feedback.

To say that the iPhone is a thing of beauty is largely stating the obvious, but I figure I’m allowed one small gush: this thing is marvelously engineered. Its face is bevelled black glass and a single Home button, while the back is a matte, brushed stainless steel surface. The software is mostly identical to the iPod Touch, except for the fact that the iPhone has more applications (Safari, YouTube, Photos and the standard PIM apps are all you get in the iPod Touch), and of course it has telephony functions. The multi-touch interface is a real wonder too after you’ve gotten used to the idea that everything on the screen will respond to your finger tips, it becomes second-nature.

Using it was, as always, crazy simple: Without bothering to read any documentation, I pulled the iPhone out of its padded box (all black in there, as well) and pressed the Home button. It does not need to be connected to iTunes to be activated because the iPhone I bought has already been pre-activated and is the hacked, unlocked and jailbroken version that will allow me to install third party applications and for it to be used here in the UAE with an Etisalat SIM card. I just popped its USB cable in and started setting up the various sync processes.

The main thing that you have to keep in mind with the iPhone is that they’ve got fairly tiny storage: just 8gb and 16gb available. This immediately ruled out syncing my whole collection across, as I have about 60gb of music stored in 3 separate devices. So setting up proper synchronization rules was going to be key: after a bit of thought I decided that I’d create a smart-playlist. (A smart-playlist is a dynamic playlist that responds to criteria set by the user. In my case, I wanted a playlist that contained only the songs that I had added within the last 90 days, any songs that were rated 4 or 5 stars, and any podcasts that hadn’t been listened to yet.) Once the list was setup, it was just a matter of pointing the iPod at it so that it would automatically sync whatever happened to be in the playlist at a given moment.

The other consideration was how to handle videos. I watch a lot of TV shows, but they’re usually in formats that the iPhone can’t handle (XviD isn’t a particularly mainstream codec), so if I wanted to watch anything on the iPhone, I’d have to convert the videos before copying them over. Unfortunately, this was not as easy as I thought, the main challenge being the fact that converting movies take time, and I couldn’t figure out how to properly automate the process. (My definition of automation: any video files in my “TV Shows” folder is converted to MP4, added to my iTunes library and then deleted from the folder. I found an Automator script that looked like it might solve the problem, but I honestly didn’t have time to test it out.)

The video converter I’m currently using is Visual Hub, an app that takes about 9-10 minutes to convert an XviD-encoded 45-minute episode to an iPod- and iPhone-ready MP4. (For now, I’m manually doing the conversion; my only other option would be getting all my shows from Podtropolis or ipodnova, which isn’t all that appealing.)

Actually watching the video on the iPhone proved to be a real joy: the screen isn’t the best I’ve seen, but the frame-rate is flawless and the player is very responsive when you’re seeking. Like iTunes itself, the iPhone remembers where you left off for each video in its library, so you can pause-and-resume your viewing at will. If you’ve ever watched a video on Quicktime or from within iTunes, there’ll be zero-learning curve here, as the controls are nearly identical.

Of course, this being a review of a mobile phone which is also a portable music device, I should probably mention that the audio quality is pretty good as well. The included stereo earphones with built-in microphone are an updated version of the slightly chunkier white-boxed Sennheisers that came with my 4th-gen model, but the quality seems about the same. With it, you can listen to music, videos, and phone calls. Use the built-in microphone to talk. Click the mic button to answer or end a call. When listening to iPod, click the button once to play or pause a song, or click twice quickly to skip to the next track. Generally speaking, the sonic fidelity you experience is largely dependent on the kind of headphones you’re using, and the included earbuds are average at best. If you’re a mobile audiophile, replacing these with a decent pair of in-ear phones would be your first priority.

Coverflow works great and the interface for browsing through your collection of “CDs” is just friggin’ brilliant. I did run into a small annoyance here though: Coverflow on the iPhone (and I assume, in any of the new iPods) can’t make guesses about album-art in the same way that iTunes on the desktop can. For example: I have 11 tracks from Eraserheads’ Ultraelectromagneticpop! album and only one track has the cover-art embedded in it. Desktop iTunes would know that these 11 tracks belong to the same album and displays the correct cover-art even when you’re playing a track that doesn’t have it. iPhone Coverflow doesn’t seem to be capable of this logical leap, and so you end up with a ton of tracks with no album art, which can be especially annoying when you’re listening in Shuffle mode. (If you’re wondering why I’m making such a big deal about the album-art, well, let’s just say that being able to flip through album covers with my fingertips was one of the main reasons why I wanted this thing so badly.)

The mobile Safari browser is the feature I’ve spent the least amount of time with, but I did visit AJAX-enabled sites like Gmail and basecamp, and couldn’t spot any show-stoppers in either of them. I also watched movie trailers on the Apple Quicktime site and was impressed to find that it plays the videos in fullscreen automatically. I also spent sometime configuring a personal start page at mockdock, which lets you collect mobile-enabled sites into a single iPhone-like interface. Fun stuff.

Entering text such as urls or login names was a little difficult at first, as expected. The software buttons on the iPhone are as large or larger than the hardware buttons on most QWERTY-enabled mobiles, so it shouldn’t take me that much longer to get used to it. At a glance, the browsing experience is easily the best I’ve ever used on a palm-sized device (and I’ve had quite a few devices over the past 4 years to compare it to, believe me). It’s startling how quickly you can get used to the squeeze-and-spread gesture for zooming in and out of pages quickly; when I had to use mobile Opera on my smartphone afterwards, it was downright painful. If Apple has revolutionized anything with the iPhone and its variants, it’s definitely the mobile-browsing paradigm, and when they get around to building the multi-touch interface technology into their full-sized computers, it’ll totally change the way we use those machines as well. I’m still waiting for the time when our workstations will essentially be nothing more than one very large screen that sits in front of us at an angle like an architect’s drafting table, and has a pressure-sensitive, textured surface that’ll impart real tactile feedback; it makes me smile just thinking about it.)

Overall, I’m quite happy with the iPhone. I know that it does make sense to a lot of people to buy it rather than an iPod Touch because of its cost and the fact that you could buy an unlocked and hacked iPhone anywhere nowadays at the same price.

The build quality is great, and considering that it’s mostly glass, it feels very solid and light. Apart from those niggling user-interface issues mentioned above, I rather like the iPhone.

After all the obstacles I have gone through (searching and inquiring at mobile phone stores, walking from Bur Dubai to Deira with my very good Ugandan friend Francis & riding the “Abra” at Dubai Creek), I finally got the iPhone (unlocked model) yesterday at a store in Deira. The 8gb model (the only one they had in stock) cost Dhs 2,900.00 (Php 34,800.00). I haven’t bought a very pricy mobile phone purely for entertainment purposes since my Sony Ericsson P910i back in 2005, so this has made me particularly happy. I’ve only been playing with the iPhone for less than a day as I write this, but will write a more thorough review once I’ve had a chance to put it through its paces.

(Transformers certainly looks very sexy on its 3.5″ screen though.)

“Jesus Christ, that is one cute, black laptop.”

So I got the Macbook yesterday, and that bit above is exactly the first thought that popped into my head upon seeing it. Sure, I’m probably just biased from working exclusively on a PC for the past 2 months, but seriously, this is one cute, black laptop.

So although it’s a few pixels shorter than a standard 15.4″ laptop, it’s also significantly wider. That means that you have enough space for a bigger keyboard.

Unfortunately, I have yet to actually put the machine through its paces (I spent all of yesterday in an installation frenzy). The most I’ve done is maintain a couple of YM conversations while playing music, downloading some torrents and installing Office for Mac and iWork. I might as well have been working the Calculator for all the stress that put on the system. Over the weekend I’ll probably try doing some 3D games or something along those lines, if I can get around to it.

Although my experience overall has been pretty favorable, I do have a few quick gripes.

1. YM for OSX is supreme suckage, both in its older, stabler version, and in the new beta. I’ll probably uninstall it and switch to Adium pretty soon. (Google Talk doesn’t work either.)

2. Transmission, the de facto Mac bittorrent handler, is pretty so-so. It’s decent enough, and if I didn’t know that it was possible to have twice as many features in one-fourth of the file size and memory footprint *cough* uTorrent *cough* I’d actually think it was above average.

On the flip side, there’s a crapload of things that are far easier and quicker to do on a Mac than on a PC. Quicksilver alone is unbelievably efficient (on my old desktop, I was using a combination of Launchy and Google Desktop to accomplish the same thing), and little things like installing Applications or Fonts are really easy.

The other utility I’ve found to be really cute/ridiculous is Lilt, an app that takes advantage of the ambient light sensors on the Macbook to detect hand gestures. So, theoretically, you could wave your hands to the left or right to, say, switch to the previous or next track on iTunes. I say “theoretically” because I could just barely get it working when I tried it (the left sensor is unfortunately a lot more sensitive than the right one, so the results are not very consistent).

Lilt also reads the tilt of your laptop and can assign actions to say, the laptop tilting forwards, or leftwards, or whatever. I’ve yet to think of a use for this other than perhaps when I happen to be at a rave party with my Macbook (and I could thus swing it over my head and have it quickly scroll through a series of Flickr photos or something equally silly).

More stuff as I discover them.

Update: I have given my Black MacBook to my sister as a gift on her 18th Birthday. I bought myself a MacBook Pro as a replacement. All I can say is that it rocks!