January 2006 Archives

The wait is over, geeks! Our January-February 2006 issue has arrived hot from the press. There are several changes you may have noticed with the new look of the magazine. The most obvious is the revamping of our logo and tagline to give readers a better idea of what we do best. 'Tech to Go' is our new tagline - highlighting the best gadgets you can take with you at work or at play! The guys at HIP do listen to your feedback and we've come up with a creative way to keep m|ph from slouching from your display rack. Do grab a copy and we bet you'll grin when you see what we did to the inside (There's a clue on what exactly we did on the front page). m|ph, the most visible home-grown magazine on mobile technology starts the year with a fresh new look, giving readers a taste of what's new in the mobile tech scene for 2006. To celebrate a fresh start, m|ph goes vegan with the stunning Isabel Roces who graces the front cover. Isabel talks about her PETA advocacy, the gadgets she owns, and gives some words of advice on how to guard from gadget lust. This issue also contains reviews of the latest phones, namely the Nokia 6111 for the ladies, the shaver-shaped Nokia 6270 and the Sony Ericsson W550i Walkman phone. If you happen to own an iPod, the magazine also features a showdown of the best iPod-docking speakers available in town. Since gadgets are only as good as the people who use them, this issue features two mavens in their respective industries, the iconic Joey Alarilla of Hackenslash.net and Denise Albert, who sets the marketing and events industry on fire with her passionate words. m|ph, which stands for Mobile Philippines, is a monthly publication geared towards the Filipino who is always on the go. Faithful readers have always described the magazine as the most informative and engaging among all the technology magazines because it is smart, engaging and witty. m|ph is available at all news stands and technology hubs for just P80.00 per issue. It's fun to be a geek!

A few weeks ago I was reading a post about MobiRadio, and about how its being offered in most Smartphones, namely the ones made by Nokia. A few days ago, I was reading a post about MobiTV, and how it can change the way we watch video. On your Treo. On your Nokia. On the go. Just today, I was rereading a post made by Dickoy on how he can comfortably watch videos on the 2.5 inch screen of his video-capable iPod.

In fact if you hold the iPod several inches from your face, it’s the same as watching a show on a 14" tv around 5 to 7 feet away.

A Treo has a 2.5 inch screen. I'm trying to stop the urge to actually say, "I would like to watch videos on my PDA." But a service like MobiTV might make me actually want to. There are some instances where I would rather see the news than read it on an RSS feed. Imagine being out of town and still be able to watch the Pacquiao vs Morales fight. Of course, the main derailer is the cost. Even the Americans think this service is a bit too costly. I can only dream. But when the day comes that a cheap streaming video service becomes available from content providers, I might - just might retract what I said about watching videos on a tiny screen. Check it out here.

I'd like to call myself a "road warrior" -- as I often bring along my InCase Slingpack with me where my iBook and my other tech toys are stored. Within that slingpack is a smaller bag which I fondly call my "kikoy kit". The so-called Metrosexuals call theirs their "grooming kit" and it usually contains... *uhm* grooming paraphernalia and the girlie version of this is locally known as the "kikay kit". My kit, instead of holding grooming paraphernalia, has a lot of geeky stuff. Here's a list of what it has inside: 8-in-1 card reader flashdrive bluetooth dongle mini Swiss Army Knife Treo Hotsync cable Treo 650 charger Treo 650 wired headset Treo Bluetooth headset iPod Firewire cable spare stereo headphones USB extension cable All these makes it easy for me to use my other tech toys since it gives me a place to put them all together -- making it easy for me to get any of them should the need arise. What do *YOU* have on your "kikoy kit"? Shameless Self Promotion: This post was originally *ehem* posted at my personal blog at Talkin' Tech.

Steve Jobs is notorious for his attention to detail. And now his attention would be diverted to Mickey Mouse. Because, by virtue of Disney's purchase of Pixar, Steve is now the biggest shareholder in the Walt Disney Company. The bad news: This may distract the Jobs, taking away the full attention that he seems to have been giving Apple over the past few months, and which led to a number of breakthrough products such as the iPod nano. The wave of bold announcements over at Apple may now be at a recess. The good news: This may become the definitive year of portable video, as an Apple-Mickey tandem (a.k.a. "Pixney") leads to a greater integration of content and hardware, led primarily by Apple's iTunes service. TV shows such as Lost and Desperate Housewives, both under the Disney belt, are already doing well over iTunes. Coming soon: Monsters Inc. for download? And note that iTunes has been the industry bellwether. Anything that they do, others follow. So if popular full-length Disney movies are offered, expect all the other movie studios to follow suit as well. With Jobs being the biggest Disney owner, this is almost sure to happen real soon. The other good news is this: With Pixar in its fold, Disney is more likely to recapture its former glory. Let's face it, Pixar has been out-Disney'ing Disney the past several years. All full-length Pixar releases, from Toy Story to The Incredibles, have been runaway successes, thanks in particular to John Lasseter, who is the true heir to the Disney Way. Meanwhile, Disney's own animated efforts have been lackluster and, dare we say it, have strayed from the Disney path. Having Pixar will hopefully stop Disney from coming out with any more bombs such as Treasure Planet. Which means more movies worth downloading in the future. Which means more reasons for getting portable video devices such as Apple's iPod 5G-and-beyond. Which also means that, sooner or later, if video becomes the main growth thrust of Apple's strategy, then iTunes has to eventually become more international-friendly. Perhaps we'll soon see local Apple dealers selling prepaid cards for downloading media from iTunes. Amazing to think that all of this can come out of the influence of just one man. But that's Steve Jobs for you. Steve Jobs is Apple. Without Steve, Apple would still be meandering right now. And now Steve Jobs is Disney. Hmmm. Reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode where this grumpy man dons a Santa suit and ends up actually transforming into Santa...

The elusive pink Motorola RAZR is here. Let's pause a bit to reflect on this. The RAZR singlehandedly transformed the Motorola brand from a floundering has-been to a lifestyle icon that truly mattered. The RAZR V3 BLK was last year's top pick for many mobile observers (including mph), and has been a runaway bestseller. And it gave street cred to the other phones in Motorola's lineup. Forget for a moment the fact that it is a memory-starved device and that its much-vaunted 3D graphics engine, MPEG-4 video and MP3 playback are all next to inutile because you don't even have memory expansion to play with. The simple fact is that people buy this because it just looks so darn good. And now it's in pink. Really, that's the only thing that's new about it. No added memory, no memory expansion, no new gizmos or thingamajigs. And yet, it's a testament to the RAZR's incredibly catchy design that a simple change of color can be this newsworthy. Now all the women who have been bowled over by the original V3 will want this so that it can go with their fuschia handbags. It's currently sighted at Wellcom stores, going for PhP16,700 and change. (Should we call it the RAZR V3 PNK?) So now we have silver, black, gold and pink. What's next? Zebra stripes? Polka dots? Personally I'd love to see the RAZR in camouflage. :D

For those of you who drive, admit it. You text while driving. And you've had a couple of close shaves at one time or another as your attention was distracted by the novel-sized SMS message that you were composing on your phone. No surprise that texting-while-driving road accidents have been fodder for news stories over the past few years. There are two ways of approaching this problem -- one, treat text-drivers as criminals and penalize them, hopefully making them too scared to reply to text messages while they're on the road. But doing so goes against the role of technology as an enabler. I would therefore prefer to take the tech route -- namely, mobile phone companies should come up with a way for us to easily send text messages without us having to take our eyes off the road. Predictive vs. Multitap I've never been completely comfortable with predictive text messaging technologies, such as T9 (found in most mobile phones) and iTAP (found in Motorola units). Especially when driving. And the reason is that predictive texting does not give you full control over what's being typed out. You're typing CARD and you have to change the T9-generated word seven times (CARE, CASE, BASE, ACRE, BARD, BARE, CAPE...) before you hit it. More to the point, you have to be staring at your phone to find the proper word. In the case of iTAP it can get even trickier as iTAP constantly changes its word menu based on your usage. So you can't just, say, remember that the second word for the 2-2-7-3 keypad sequence is CASE. You don't want to be staring at your phone while you text and drive. You'd want an interface that allows you to text without having to look at your phone. Which is why I normally prefer Multitap mode. Multitap is the dumb text mode, where you punch the number 5 three times to get the letter L, for instance. It takes much longer to type sentences using Multitap, but you have full control over your compositions because the phone is not making any decisions for you. In short, so long as you've memorized your phone's letter placements, you know exactly what you're typing and you can basically punch out an entire novella without once having to look at your phone. Bigger buttons please I used to be the king of multitapping. With my ancient Nokia 5110, I could compose text messages at lightning speed even with the phone behind my back. But that was because the 5110 had large and distinct buttons that you could navigate by feel. The problem with most phones today is that, with size becoming paramount in design, keypads have been sacrificed. Individual keys have been jammed tightly together so that you can't tell one key from another, preventing you from typing out messages by feel. Worse, most keypads are now practically flat surfaces (witness the Motorola RAZR) so that touch-typing is becoming a thing of the past. And at the extreme end would be PDA-phones that have no keys at all and which demand that you compose messages via a stylus. Well, maybe this is a safety feature because nobody in his right mind should try scripting a message into a PDA while driving. Solutions Here's where technology should be helping us by giving us phones that can actually be used for texting while driving, without forcing us to take our eyes off the road. I'd like to see bigger, more distinct buttons on phones. If only so that I can get back to the good old days when I multitapped my messages with brute force. On the other hand, for predictive-text equipped phones, perhaps future models should come equipped with voice readouts so your phone would tell you what word is being predicted at any point. In the future, your phone would probably be more tightly wedded to your car via Bluetooth. In which case we'd be seeing heads-up displays similar to those seen in fighter jets, with your text messages being displayed right there on your windshield so that you don't have to take your eyes off the road anymore. Of course, this would make life hell if you were actually texting embarrasing love notes while your gang was riding with you. Sooner or later, mobile phone manufacturers are bound to address the Great Philippine Tech Dilemma of texting while driving. After all, that's what technology is for. In the meantime, if all else fails... heck, just take a cab.

A few months back I was presented a sweetheart of a deal on a brand spanking new 5th Gen iPod. The one with video in case you're not familiar with iPod models. It was a tempting deal and I couldn't pass it up. A few days after getting my iPod I was surprised by a friend who came back from the States. She gave me an iTunes pre-paid card as "pasalubong". Perfect! I thought to myself "I can check out what the iTunes music/video store hype is all about". Armed with 25 dollars worth of credit I then proceeded to scout around for stuff I can buy. I initially bought a few songs so I could just try out the "buying experience" on iTunes. I decided to get "Clarity" by John Mayer. I love John Mayer so his song was naturally my first download. Several songs after I was addicted... I was done with songs.... Now to try the videos on iTunes... Believe it or not it took me a few days to decide on what to get. I didn't want to waste my precious credits on something that I really didn't like all too much. I eventually decided to get the Battlestar Galactica Miniseries. It wasn't an easy decision. The miniseries wasn't sold by pieces. I had to buy the whole thing. After much thought I decided to get it. The price? A whopping $15.99. What the heck, I really wanted to see the darn miniseries. So I bit the bullet and bought it. Around 2 hours after, I had the miniseries transferred to my video iPod. I really didn't think that I could stand to watch the whole thing on the iPod but it I did. In part because of the story and in part because watching it on the iPod ain't half as bad as I thought it would be. It's actually quite bearable. The 2.5" LCD screen of the iPod is quite bright and clear. Supporting a resolution of 320x240 at 30 fps, watching a show on the iPod is the same as watching it on a regular tv. In fact if you hold the iPod several inches from your face, it's the same as watching a show on a 14" tv around 5 to 7 feet away. Sure there are other video players out there that can rival if not beat the video quality of the iPod but coupled with the iTunes store, the whole "video experience" it can provide is quite amazing. I can easily find videos for the iPod on bit torrent and it wouldn't cost me a thing. However having experienced buying videos on the iTunes store, I can say that for shows that I really like, I'm willing to cough up the $1.99 price for regular shows. Apple has made the whole experience seamless. From the ease of buying a video, to the speed you can download the video, all the way to how easy it is to move it to the iPod makes the price worth it. Case in point.. I now have all the episodes of Battlestar Galactica on my iPod. Sure.. I had to buy extra pre-paid cards but I feel it's worth it. I'd love to hear your comments. Fire away!

Now our fellow geeks from Cebu can enjoy the excellent gadget lust and customer service from Mobile1! The store is located at the second floor of building C in SM City Cebu. Shown in the pic are members of MaPalad.org Cebu chapter enjoying the grand opening perks. Check it out here.

Hi! My name is Juan "Dickoy" Magdaraog. I'll be your guest blogger for... well.. for the time being. Until the editors of m|ph are fed up me with I guess. Hehe. Kidding aside, I'm really happy to be a guest blogger. I write from time to time for the magazine and now it's my chance to write in via blog medium. Here's a little something about myself. I'm the Creative Director for a small start-up called Sparkplug Studios. We basically do web, graphic and print design. I love technology and I'm very grateful to have been exposed to it years back. It's given me a chance to do a lot of things, meet great people, etc.. You see, I suffer from a rare disorder called Pompe Disease which gave me a disability. Through technology I was able to transcend my disability and improve my productivity. To find out more about Pompe and how I live with it, visit my blog at www.fightpompe.com I hope that in the coming days, I'll be able to share with you what I think would be newsworthy mobile/tech stuff. If you want to reach me for comments and/or suggestions, I can be contacted through juan@sparkplug-studios.com. See you and let the blogging begin!

One of the latest phenomenon that swept the 'net in the past few months is a website called digg.com. From its own f.a.q., digg is:

"... a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

I actually enjoy reading posts at digg.com since it gives me a heads up on things that I may have missed out on if I was simply surfing "solo". After a couple of months in existense, digg.com attracted millions of dollars in venture capital from some big names in the industry, allowing it to upgrade its servers and. A few weeks after this an enterprising Pinoy started a copycat similar site called oks.ph. According to the oks.ph website:

oks.ph is a people-powered news and links site for everything that you find interesting online.

" As of this writing, oks.ph does not have the traffic nor the clout to match the current status of digg.com but depending on how the filipino internet habitues respond to it, who knows?

SMART calls it the "Next 3iG Thing." And they are correct - 3G is the next big leap in telco services that will catapult the Philippines thousands of miles ahead into the wireless information industry. 3G has a lot of benefits including streaming multimedia content wirelessly at high speeds and being able to video conference with your loved ones via 3G enabled phones, most of which have been available for quite some time from Nokia. The thing is, it's too early to predict what will happen. First you have to consider the cost to actually use 3G versus the actual benefit - a lot of people don't really need to see who they are talking to, nor be able to watch the news on the way home from work. So your guess is as good as ours. We've created a poll located on the right bar and we're wondering what our readers think about the new technology that will soon make its mark in local soil commerically. Vote away!

What would you do with an 8.0 megapixel camera? It's a valid question considering that even just 3.2 megapixels can already give you decent archive-quality photos. Well, megapixel-rich cameras like the Olympus Mju DIGITAL 800 (reviewed in our upcoming issue of m|ph) have one potential killer application: Document capture mode. It allows you to take a picture of a full page of a document with sufficient detail to actually make it readable when viewed on a monitor or printed out later on. Truth be told, even a 3.2 megapixel camera does a fair job of capturing a regular 8.5x11" document, provided that it contains font sizes of 12 and up. Font size 10 is tolerable. But at font size 9, the punctuations start becoming difficult to make out. And at font size 7, you start having to guess what some of the characters are. But with a large enough resolution and a fast shutter speed, capturing even the fine print on legal documents should be a breeze. Students can then use their cameras to reproduce pages from books, or even to quickly copy their classmates' notes. It would be great to have a camera-phone with an 8-megapixel "document scanner" mode, but that's probably still a couple of years away.

Agh! CD-R King does it again. The same company that brought you the P150 optical mouse, the P350 all-in-one card reader and the P300 USB 2.0 hub now brings you the P550 USB Bluetooth dongle! You heard it right, just P550, whereas your typical generic-looking Bluetooth dongle would range from a thousand to two thousand pesos at the computer stands! And considering that I just gave a Bluetooth dongle as a Christmas gift to a good friend of mine, I'm banging my head... not because I could have given a cheaper dongle, but because the appearance of a P550 dongle now somewhat dilutes the value of all Bluetooth dongles in general! Ah well, that's progress for you. So what's next, CD-R King? A ninehundred-peso Bluetooth headset perhaps? A thousand-peso Wi-Fi router? A fifty-peso SmartWrap?