I resisted the call of the first iPad but finally succumbed to the lure of the iPad 2.

Rumours have it the iPad 3 will be announced next month so some will tell me I should have waited. And wait another year for it to come to Malaysia? No thanks.

You still can’t just walk into a store and buy an iPad 2 these days. The easiest option would have been to order it online and wait the 2 weeks or so for it to arrive. But Malaysian customs has been known to delay shipments and waiting around for the DHL dude to arrive? Not my thing.

Instead I resorted to buying one online from the Lowyat.net forum. Slightly more expensive than retail but I had my iPad delivered to me in person.

The main reason I needed one was because I was traveling to KK for a week and didn’t want to bring my laptop along. Also have been toying with idea of getting one for work as I already have a Bluetooth keyboard I can use with it and since I don’t drive, it is a bit of a pain to lug my laptop everywhere.

Though some advised me to get a netbook instead, the iPad made the better investment due to its higher resell value. Even first-gen iPads still fetch decent sums on the Internet so should I decide to sell the iPad I won’t have lost too much money.

I ended up buying an extra-long charging cable as well as the standard screen protector & case combo. When you buy pricey electronics it makes sense to invest in protection for said electronics, no?

So far I find writing on it not as much a hassle as I’ve been led to believe. I doubt I’ll be writing whole novels on one as my MacBook Pro is far more suited to the task but for blogging and filing stories, the iPad is perfectly competent but with a few tweaks of course.

Have also subscribed to Wired and Esquire magazine as they’re so much more affordable in digital versions. Have fallen in love with Flipboard and the way it displays my Facebook feeds in a magazine-like format.

The iPad for some people is more expensive toy than anything else but I hope it proves a useful work and travel companion. Here’s to a more mobile me (spot the Apple reference).

This isn’t my last post on the phone but just the full-on ‘proper’ review.

Will have a retrospective Day with the Desire log up soon but here’s a post written for the people who want to know the answer to the burning question: Should I get the damn phone?

Because most tech reviews are, seriously, bloody boring, I will do this review in the style of…Team Fortress 2.

If you haven’t heard of TF2, it’s only the most fun multiplayer shooter on the planet. I’ll do the review from the viewpoints of various classes in the game. So let’s bring it on!

DESIGN: Surveying the territory

“Well, first impression of the phone: SWEET! OK, you have to admit it kinda looks like the Nexus One. The Nexus seemed lighter, though and the Desire has dedicated physical buttons as compared to the Nexus’ and swaps out the girly ‘nipple’ for an optical trackpad.

That suede back makes the phone easier to grip and the front portion show some great design of real estate – dedicating most of it to the SWEET AMOLED 3.7-inch screen. Good placement of ports – volume controls on the side, headphone jack on top neatly spaced from the power button. microUSB port on the bottom for quick connecting of charging cable.

But man, that back cover. Hell on the nails, know what I”m saying? And not making it easy to hotswap your microSD cards out by having a side port is insane. I have to take out my battery and the back cover just to switch microSD cards? Only good if you’re scared of losing your data.

UI-wise, if you love the HTC Sense UI, you’ll love how polished your Android experience is compared to Motorola’s kit. The purists who want to run Froyo, well stick to the Nexus One. For those who would great eyecandy and super usability, the HTC UI makes sense even if it means getting the latest Android updates a bit later.

So after surveying the terrain, the HTC Desire ain’t sexy (though the screen is, hell yeah), it is a nicely made piece of kit. Slim, easy to carry but make sure you get a nice big microSD for the phone as replacing it is a fiddly, annoying endeavour.”

SPECS: Is the Desire packing enough ammo?

“Ain’t easy playing tank so I need all the firepower I can get and it had better be enough to kick the other team in the teeth. So does the Desire deliver? Well, the innards speak for themselves: 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 576MB of memory, 512MB internal storage, 5 MP camera, 1400mAh battery (up to 340 hours of standby time) and support for up to 32GB of microSD storage. That’s quite the arsenal if you ask me.

The bad: 512MB is hardly enough if you want to get your fill of apps. If the internal storage isn’t going to be much, then make it easy to upgrade your microSD card for chrissakes.

480 x 800 WVGA is pretty decent resolution for the screen but AMOLED makes it unusable outside in harsh sunlight. You’ll just be looking at your face reflected right back atcha.

But it’s a great multitasking taskhorse. Screens are zippy, loads fine, OS very much stable. With minimal usage (read: no surfing/gaming), it can go over 2-3 days without charging. But with heavy YouTube usage, Tweeting, surfing or IM, battery can go down to 6-7 hours. Hope HTC’s planning optional higher capacity batteries.

I say the Desire’s got the goods under the hood all right.”

FEATURES: Can the Desire prove a great workhorse?

“Well, the Heavy’s got a great summary of the power the HTC Desire packs. Like the Scout says, the Sense UI is pretty sweet. Customising screens is a dream compared to the iPhone’s fiddlyness. You can pick and choose as many icons as you want. There’s so much more flexibility at your fingertips.

The camera? Eh. It takes great pictures outside, but it’s not going to be the ideal replacement for your pocket camera. Video could be better – someone figure out how to hack the Desire to shoot HD too, please? They managed it on the Nexus One after all.

You have to say Google’s Market does the job where apps are concerned. Not as informative or as fun as Apple’s App Store but definitely pwns Nokia’s pathetic Ovi Store.

Music player is rather boring, iTunes does it better. The headset that comes with it isn’t particularly stellar and the speakers? They’re loud, I’ll give you that.

But as a multimedia machine, I have to say watching video on it is great, with a decent set of headphones, sound is decent and browsing on it? Sure beats Safari on the iPhone or any Nokia browser. Though I like the native YouTube app, the syncing is a little off. Hope they fix that in an update.

If you, like everyone else on the planet, have Google accounts, this syncs perfectly with your contacts and Gmail. The iPhone doesn’t come close to doing mail as well as HTC’s Android does – IMAP, POP, native Gmail accounts – this is top-notch stuff.

As a regular phone, reception’s all right and a tad better than the HTC Legend (what the heck persuaded them to put the antenna in the bottom rubber attachment? Morons). Call quality is clear and not as wonky as the Nexus and its dual mics.

I have to say the specs make the touchscreen probably one of the most responsive ones I’ve used. The touchscreen keypad is very usable though you’d probably want to turn the autocorrect feature off. Damnably annoying.  Texting and making calls with it has a slight learning curve but practise makes perfect. Give it half an hour or so.”

CONCLUSION: Is it worth it?

“You bet your pansy ass it is! If you gave up on Nokia, don’t want to be associated with the iPhone fanboys, find Sony Ericsson
etc etc boring and want a real Android phone…the HTC Desire is the IT-phone.

Sure, it could do better but the niggles are tiny. It’s very usable, has a hell of a great UI, can beat any phone to the multitask crown (I’m looking at you, N900) and you can’t call it mediocre in any aspect. This is probably the best Android phone on the market, period.

Granted, this isn’t for the pussies who can’t be bothered to learn how to stretch battery life or really master using this sweet piece of kit (sorry, Scout) (wait, I’m not sorry) then you don’t want an Android phone. But out of the box, it works great.

You want a good phone? YOU WANT A GOOD PHONE? This is a good phone. “

 (Disclaimer: Team Fortress 2 is the property of Valve and is just being abused by me for the sake of not boring myself to death. KTHKSBAI)

 

 

After years of resisting Apple’s computers, I finally swapped my self-assembled desktop Windows PC for a 13.3 inch MacBook Pro.
“Finally!” “I’m so proud of you!” Of course, my Mac fanboy friends just had to comment.
Truthfully, I’d never been enamored with Apple’s PC hardware. The pricing usually made my eyes bug out especially considering you could probably get a pretty decent desktop for half the price of an Apple iMac. Being in the tech mag industry, I’d tried and tested notebooks of all sizes and shapes from every existing manufacturer in the market. I knew what I wanted. I knew what I could get with my money. Apple’s proposition was just too hard to beat.
If you want value for money in the desktop arena, I’d still say get a non-Mac PC instead. The new MacBook Pro range, however, is a whole different story. I wanted something that was light without skimping on the screen size. It had to have a great keyboard. It should have good enough specs to handle basic image editing, the odd video processing, a game or two, and good battery life. The MacBook Pro had it all.
I chose the lower end model 13.3 inch MacBook Pro which set me back a cool RM4.5k. Not cheap. My more frugal friends would have argued for non-Mac laptops. Yes, they’re cheaper. But they didn’t come with Mac OS X, iLife ’09 and funky touch commands. They didn’t have a lovely backlit keyboard that’s even better to type on than the ThinkPad range’s. Then there’s the nearly seven hours of battery life.
To top it all off, it’s a stunningly beautiful machine. It is. It’s the supermodel of ultraportables. Not as skinny as the MacBook Air, but at least it makes up for it with its specs.
With BootCamp, I can have my Windows gaming cake and eat it too. Since I’ve left the MMO world, the only game I have on the Windows partition is the Company of Heroes anthology. Three of my favourite males cajoled me into it so WWII RTS-ing I go. And you know what? It installs and runs like a dream on the MBP.
It’s a great laptop, which just happens to be a Mac. But you know what makes it better than 90 percent of the ultraportables out there? It doesn’t come with unnecessary vendor bloatware. Dudes, you make great machines but your vendor software? It sucks. OS X, fortunately, doesn’t. Next up – waiting for the Snow Leopard upgrade which only cost me RM39. Yes, I love my Mac and I probably ain’t going back.

So it’s 1.30am and on a whim I decided to update my LinkedIn profile. It’s weird that though I got the hang of the new Facebook interface (quit whining about it already, people), LinkedIn befuddles me.

The thing about LinkedIn is that you only really ‘get it’ once you’ve filled in your profile and tweaked with things such as your public profile. I like the ability to include apps on your profile such as blog feeds. Right, now I can distract myself by reading blogfeeds within LinkedIn too!

I’m surprised so many people I know are not only on LinkedIn, but have fairly recently updated profiles. Is it a sign of job insecurities? People just preparing or looking out for the next gig, just in case this one falls through?

Why then am I updating my LinkedIn? It’s just one more thing I need to do to manage my ‘online identity’. When you’re on the Web as much as I am, managing the way people perceive me online matters. I have a website, yes. And a Twitter account. Plurk too. Facebook – do you really need to ask? A MySpace somewhere and all this adds up to quite a lot of stuff you can find when you Google my name. No, I don’t Google my name. That’s what Google Alerts are for.

Since I’m now making a career of public relations, it would be patently unwise to be unmindful of my own online fingerprints. At The Agency, I’ve had a client read my blog entries to see what sort of inappropriate content I should desist from writing from then on. It’s a reminder that yes, the Internet is a place where employers will do research on you. So those drunken MySpace pictures? Take them down. Embarrassingly bad high school poetry? Well, that’s what a lot of new pop songs sound like so that won’t matter much. Unless you’re applying to teach poetry at a college or university. Then, hide the evidence of your own amateur ramblings.

LinkedIn, I think, is trying to be the grown up, business minded person’s Facebook. No Zombie apps here, thanks very much. Instead you can share more enlightening things like slide presentations and your professional/corporate blog. I have to admit, though, that I’m only on LinkedIn because, like Facebook, I just caved to end the constant stream of invites.

I just wonder if LinkedIn has proved a valuable tool in career search  or headhunting. Have not heard any “Oh, I got an interview offer from LinkedIn stories!” What would be nice is if LinkedIn and Facebook hooked up. So you’d have a public profile for employers and a private, personal section for friends and family. Should something like that emerge, there had better not be any Zombie/Werewolves/Leprechaun crap. 

So a month ago, I got in on a super-sekrit website beta program. It was called Project Greenfields, and proved an ambitious undertaking to create a buy/sell site to rival the likes of eBay and the current ruling site – Mudah.com.my.

Well, the embargo is off and I can now talk my mouth off about MySimplifieds.com and the beta program. It’s definitely something that could be a candidate for next year’s Technology Campaign of the year, just saying.

It was ambitious – take a pool of bloggers, consummate online sellers and give them carte blanche to pick apart a website and say what makes it tick. Online networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter were used to get feedback on the site, but it was probably the Facebook group that got the most participation.

There were plenty of posts with suggestions for tweaks as well as new features. What amused me was the general consensus that the original logo just didn’t cut it, which led the developers back to the drawing board. We beta testers then got to vote for our favourite – which of course is now prominently used on the site.

And the result? A cleaner, more user-friendly site that I find far more intuitive than what the current competition has to offer. Personalised profiles, Facebook and favourites options are neat, but right now I’m happiest with the site’s stability and decent loading times. My experience with Mudah.com.my wasn’t exactly awesome, to tell you the truth. Selling stuff on Lowyat.net was far easier than trying to navigate the headache which is Mudah.

And eBay Malaysia? Hear my loud raucous laughter. Punctuated with a snort of extreme derision.

It was a unique experiment which was fun for the participants involved, giving us plenty of incentive to say our piece on what would make MySimplifieds.com an effective online marketplace.

Moral of the story:

1. Extensive user testing is always the way to go. Otherwise, just do it the lazy Google way and just slap ‘Beta’ on it.

2. Beer smoothens all things.

3. Text 100 still wins the Most Able To Connect With Bloggers without sounding like jackasses Award.

There’s a contest running for best/most creative Classifieds Ad. Unfortunately, I have nothing left to sell after divesting most of my crap. But hey, perhaps you could win yourself a snazzy new phone or PSP or one of those delectable goodies up for grabs.

Of course, right now I’m more distracted by the pre-order of the Nokia 5800. Yes, Nokia is finally having pre-orders for phones online in Malaysia. On MySimplifieds.com!

If I could marry a phone, I’d be Mrs.Nokia Music Xpress 5800. Yes, I am that besotted with it.

So if you have anything to sell or are looking for bargain gifts for the coming Christmas celebration, then head on over to MySimplifieds.com. And order me the damn phone while you’re at it.