sangsara.net

  • Macworld 2008 impressions

    Here’s what I thought of Macworld 2008:

    Firstly, I had a great time. Well, I always do because it’s hard not to get excited over what is essentially Christmas for tech and gadget lovers. It’s a big door opening just a little crack to show you the kind, and calibre, of announcements the coming year will bring. Last night’s big thing was the Macbook Air, which wasn’t as big as the iPhone announcement of course, but still one hell of a product. After following the keynote over Ars Technica’s IRC channel and photos from Gizmodo, I found a link to the video stream before it hit the apple.com front page, and watched the whole damned thing for another few hours, thankfully before everyone else overloaded it this morning.
    How much of it mattered, really?
    The part that came after the initial euphoria was a realization that most of last night meant nothing to most of us. For all the time Apple engineers spent on innovations like movie rentals, spreading rentals across devices, the new AppleTV software, and the iPod touch’s PAID UPGRADE, their international impact hardly corresponds. In the end it was just “Do you want the world’s thinnest notebook?” Yeah, I’d love one for working out at Starbucks, but that’s about it. I’m actually very intrigued by the Asus EEE PC right now and might pick up one of those in a few weeks for writing on the go.
    Now and then I hear people asking if the iTunes store is ever coming here. I’m going to go out on a limb and say No. I don’t think we’re getting one because the market here is small and unproven. How will that work out if the iPhone comes and users will need accounts to get new apps installed? I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine Apple letting the iPhone ecosystem be crippled in that way, akin to having it launch here without the Visual Voicemail support, and yet it may just happen because rollout across Asia’s many countries is going to be a lot more chaotic than it was in Europe. Maybe the plan was never to bring it past China, Japan and Australia at all. And we all know plans for China aren’t looking so good now. What chance does Singapore have?
    The iPod update as farce
    The iPod touch upgrade costing early adopters USD$20 is just Apple screwing its loyalists again. New iPods get it free, iPhones get their features free, and AppleTVs get a whole new level of functionality – free. Existing customers get the shaft, and only those in countries with iTunes stores get to pay for the privilege. That means all the iPod touches sold here since October are probably never going to get the new apps sold yesterday. And when the SDK release in February brings sanctioned 3rd-party apps, it’s most likely that they’ll be sold over iTunes as well.
    So last night my hand was forced, and I jailbroke my iPod touch. I’d been willing to hold out. Keep it kosher and trust Apple to do the right thing. I was happy not having add-ons and extra apps until they said it was time. Fuck that now, at anytime I choose, I can have Mail, Notes, Google Maps, Weather/Stocks widgets and any of a hundred other games and apps on my iPod for absolutely nothing. If Apple legally had to charge for new features, as they did with 802.11n wireless before, they could have made it $0.99. Asking twenty dollars is just the stupidest kind of greed.

  • A note from above

    To answer the brilliant nick hornby question of whether we listen to pop music because we’re sad or if we’re sad because we listen to pop music, my research indicates the latter. I’ve been pretty clean of the depressing stuff for a couple of years now (read: since i ‘grew up’), save for a little ryan adams, and have noticed being quite a bit more balanced, more than a little less broody.

    This comes to me as i sit outside of a coffee bean with a goddamned latte, listening to old songs while writing this post on my new nokia n82, which it does at the same time. In the background, i’ve got a browser window open with feeds from a bunch of design and consumerist blogs, and i don’t know whether i should be hating myself or enjoying all of this. It seems you can buy happiness after all, it’s just called an unlimited data plan.

  • Undocumented facts about the Nokia N82

    Edit: I’ve decided not to write a review because the guy at Gadgetnutz.com has done a really comprehensive job here. It’s got all of the points I wanted to make and far more insight into the tech. If you can hold out though, it seems Nokia will be releasing a touchscreen version of S60 in the first half of 2008. That might be one reason why Nokia made a candybar as appealing as the N82, with all the power of the flagship N95 and the first Xenon flash unit in the N-Series – it’s a swan song.
    Here are some annoyances I’m noticing about my new phone, the kind that nobody tells you about before you buy it. Updated as I go along.
    – As much as I love the idea of a WebKit-based browser on my mobile phone, Nokia’s built-in browser is a bit of a pain to use. The weak navikey/d-pad (see point below) doesn’t help either when you want to move the virtual mouse cursor around. Another glaring oversight is the lack of shortcut keys for page scrolling. I’ve installed Opera Mobile for S60 and the Opera Mini Java applet to make up for its inadequacies, and they are fantastic.
    – The screen isn’t very bright or sharp compared to the N95, or even my old SE K800. Needs some glass.
    – Camera shutter sound can’t be turned off.
    – No volume control over Java apps. Powerful speakers mean every game will be played too loud.
    – Once installed, you can’t move apps from the memory card to the phone or vice versa.
    – The PC Map Loader software doesn’t let you remove maps once installed on the phone. You may only add new maps, or wipe them all and start over. Every map has to be downloaded before it can be installed, even if you’ve downloaded it before. This deters you from frequently wiping and loading new maps.
    – The D-Pad is a little soft and fragile-feeling. Pressing to the right (if you’re right-handed) puts your thumb in a position to accidentally hit the Multimedia Menu button, which pauses what you’re doing.

  • Nokia’s N82 – Might not be shit

    On New Year’s Eve, I blew a load of cash and got myself a Nokia N-Series device just two days after first thinking about it. Sure, I’d seen it around before, but I’d never paid much attention to the N82 because a) it’s kinda ugly, and b) I had a terrible experience with Nokia’s Symbian S60 UI once. You can read a little about why I hated the E65 here.

    I don’t know whether I fell for the marketing again, or if Nokia has just finally built a solid, modern phone. It’s been 2 days, and I suspect the latter.
    The feature-set is the most impressive of any candybar I’ve ever seen, Japanese models included. Sure it may not be much to look at, and it still uses the same Symbian OS I hated on the E65 (with some small tweaks in a new FeaturePack 1 update), but it’s hard to hate a phone that essentially packs all the power and features of the new N95-8GB into a slimmer, narrower form factor. The N82 has the same 128MB of operating RAM as the N95-8GB (twice that of th regular N95), which makes using the phone much less of a pain. Things happen snappily enough, and there’s little lag when switching between applications. It’s stupid that it took Nokia engineers this long to finally make an N-Series phone feel good in actual use.
    I still don’t believe that it’s a phone for everybody, as some of the menus go quite deep and are thick with options. But for someone determined to have GPS, locally-stored maps, WiFi and HSDPA data connections, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (whoohoo!), and the best damned 5-megapixel camera I’ve seen on any phone, even besting Sony-Ericsson’s new K850, then this is it in one package.
    I must stress that as far as I know, the only two Nokia N-Series devices worth buying are the N95-8GB and the N82. The former has a larger, brighter screen, and the latter has a very bright xenon flash unit. The N95 is fat, and the N82 is acceptably sized. Everything else performs like junk. Have a look at what Om Malik thought of the N81 while you’re at it.
    First impressions have been good, and so unless I fall out of love with it, I should be writing a proper review after a week or so.

  • Nintendo Wii in Sony Playstation Booth

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    Nintendo Wii in Sony Playstation Booth, originally uploaded by sangsara.

    Saw this at Ngee Ann City the other day. Sony has so lost the game.

  • Travel warning

    To the one person who thought I’d be a better travel partner on Facebook’s “Compare People” application, I don’t know who my competition was but I propose that you are terribly mistaken. I am awful. I whine a lot, am in constant discomfort, and am paranoid about being judged as a stupid tourist by the locals. Unless we’re going to Japan. Then, I am only an annoying shopper who wants to go into every store, eat everything in sight, and who is paranoid about being judged as a stupid tourist by the locals. Yes, I see your point about some of that behavior contributing to the problem.

  • DealExtreme.com – ultimate online store for geeks


    Last night, I discovered DealExtreme.com, one of the most amazing online shopping experiences I’ve had in recent memory. Like Play-Asia.com, it offers free worldwide shipping on every item bought. Even for tiny little $1.99 impulse buys.

    But while Play-Asia only sells videogames, DVDs, and miscellaneous Japanese toys and food items, DealExtreme sells all manner of electronic gadgetry, at rock bottom prices. You can get everything from a laser pointer at USD$1.89, a bullhorn/loudhailer for USD$11, green laser pens from USD$17 (careful now), to a crossbow with a 100m range for USD$160 (barring customs checks and a jail sentence).
    The site is loaded with cool little toys, including a $2 gadget section, as I found out last night over a 3 hour raiding session. Here’s a short list of things you might be interested in, many under $10:
    • Wii accessories
    • Electric shock practical joke items (like a ballpoint pen)
    • Butane lighters & torches
    • Keychain breathalyzers
    • FM transmitters (great for iPods in cars)
    • Universal remote controls
    • R/C cars and helicopters
    • LED flashlights
    • Spy cameras and bugs
    • Lightsticks/Glowsticks
    • And even household items like salt & pepper shakers that look like two hugging people!
    They have a program where you get points on any order, and collecting points lets you redeem products as a reward. If you use my link above and buy anything in that session, I’ll get some points too. I’m happy to recommend this site whether you decide to help me out or not, it’s just that awesome.

  • blast! 2.0

    In line with the changes here, my award-winning blast! tumblelog has also received a makeover tonight. I tried giving it a full-on swatch of “red fruit”, but in the end this understated look won out. The page is much wider now, all the better to display landscape photos… which brings us to the 2nd major change: more fashion & photography content. I’ll be using it to compile a library of images for future art direction reference.
    Thanks for making it such a ridiculous success, I hope you enjoy blast! 2.0!