As we near the official launch of the highly anticipated Samsung S3, the two telco giants vies for the hearts of prospective upgraders and switchers through their plans. Now before you get too excited and sign up for any of these telcos, let’s take a closer look at their offerings and see which one fits your lifestyle and usage pattern.
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RIM and Globe Telecom held a party last night at the Prive Luxury Club in Bonifacio Global City to launch two of their latest socially-inclined smartphones, namely, the BlackBerry Curve 9320 and BlackBerry Curve 9220.
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We know that this may be out-dated by all standards but we never really had the chance to do a full review of the dual-core smartphone from Cherry Mobile locally known as the Magnum 2X. Now that we have a review unit from the Philippine-based cellphone manufacturer, we thought to give it a fair airtime.
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We’ve finally got our hands on the mid-range offspring of the Nokia-Microsoft partnership, the Lumia 710. The Windows Phone powered smartphone just sits perfectly in between its entry-level sibling Lumia 610 and its high-end counterpart Lumia 800. Check out our full review after the break.
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Globe Telecom hosted the Apple iPhone 4S launch at midnight at the Ayala Museum where the postpaid plans were revealed on the night itself with the first Globe iPhone 4S subscriber being The Philippine President himself.
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Apple’s newest iteration of the iPhone was greeted with mixed reactions from the market. A lot has been said, both praises and disappointments, about what it should have been in the first place. Since the local launch of the iPhone 4S with Globe and Smart is just a couple of days away, let me share with you what I think of this phone. Check out our iPhone 4S review after the jump.
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We featured this HSPA+ capable mobile hotspot from ZTE a few weeks ago and we’ve finally gotten a review unit to test. Like many other pocket WiFi (MiFi) devices before it, the ZTE MF60 is one pretty kick-ass unit. If only it were more affordable.
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For the past 5 days I have been actively testing Smart’s new Always On plans that offer bucket-pricing which charges by the volume of bandwidth consumed. Here’s my personal observation of that test.
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A recent speed test conducted by an independent professional engineering service, NESIC, showed that Smart Bro got better results, over-all. See some of the findings of the tests below.
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When Research-in-Motion (makers of BlackBerry) tried making a touchscreen phone the first time with the BlackBerry Storm, it was plagued with lots of complaints from people. The OS was slow, the execution of the touchscreen was half hearted and the entire experience was crappy. Will their latest attempt with the touchscreen phone, the BB Torch 9800, be any better?
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Globe Telecom lent us their new toy — the mobile 3G router they call Globe MyFi. I’d like to share 10 things about the MyFi so you’re better informed about it before deciding to go and get one.
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When I first got the news about Globe’s Super Surf on BlackBerry Max, I was a bit confused since there’s already Super Surf for BlackBerry for some time now, just like on any other handset.
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Nokia has just announced it is now offering Ovi Maps with turn-by-turn navigation to all users globally. Best of all, it’s also available for the Philippines for free.
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I’d like to give a shout out to this month’s sponsors on YugaTech.
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Now that the Bill of Quantities (BoQ) of the controversial ZTE National Broadband Network Project by the Philippine government has been released, I was asked to take a look and see what I make out of it. Here are my findings so far.
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Drew points us to a brewing discussion at Slashdot over a possible new Asian Data Center being planned by Google. Rumor is that it’s going to be Malaysia though reports indicate Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, India and Vietnam to be ideal candidates as well. Wait, why isn’t the Philippines even in the picture?
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Ka Edong mentioned about his friend who was able to extend his laptop battery life up to 9 freakin’s hours!
In the last 7 days that I’ve been spending most of my time at coffee shops and wifi hotspots to do some work, I found it very uncomfortable to work because of the restrictions on my laptop’s battery life. Two and a half hours on full charge can’t do you much really.
So, I’m eager to learn how Ka Edong’s friend tweaked his laptop to last that long and I’m glad he posted the power-saving settings just a couple of hours ago.
Here are some additional tips I found online:
- Rechargeable batteries will give you their longest charge when you’ve fully discharged and recharged them several times in a row. It may be a pain, but a day or so before your trip, let your laptop run until the system shuts down. Then recharge it and, if you have time, discharge and recharge it a second time, preferably overnight.
- Save power by turning off wireless networking, removing PC cards and floppy or CD drives when you are not using them.
- Tunr monitor brightness to a comfortable low level and set it to turn off when not in use after 5 minutes.
- Use your laptop’s Hibernate feature instead of shutting down. Standby and Hibernate both save you from having to log off and shut down to save power when you quit using your PC for a few minutes, a few hours, or longer. Many PC users don’t understand the difference between Standby and Hibernate, and when to use each of them. Typically, if you plan to be away from your computer for a short while during your workday, put your computer on Standby, which places your entire system in a low-power state. Hibernate puts PCs into an even deeper sleep than Standby mode. Put your computer in Hibernate when you will be away from the computer for an extended time or overnight.
- Use standby when not actively using your laptop (like talking on the phone or going to the CR). Standby does not automatically save your data like Hibernation before powering down your PC. You should save your documents before putting the computer on Standby. From a user’s point of view, Standby can be compared to a screensaver that starts after 5 minutes or so. The difference is that screensavers don’t reduce noise or save energy. A screensaver doesn’t extend battery life on your laptop—Standby does.
- Turn off the speaker volume or avoid listening to music directly from your laptop. Use your iPod if you have one.
- Avoid connecting other accessories into your laptop like a wirelessmouse, an iPod, USB light, etc.
The next best thing I would like to do is get a secondary laptop battery or maybe one of those cool 8-hour battery extender.
Now is the best time to explore an IT career with the FBI.
That’s what the slogan says for FBI’s new IT hiring campaign and you could land the job. 
* Enterprise Architecture
* I.T. Strategic Planning/Policy and Planning
* Portfolio Management/Investment Management
* Information Assurance/Information Security
* Project Assurance
* Systems Development/Systems Analysis
* Application Software
* Operating Systems/Network Services
* Data Management
* Internet
* Systems Administration/Customer Support
Salary offers range from $35,452 to $135,136 annually. Apply now! hehehe
P.S. Aw, they forgot to add an opening for bloggers.
After recovering from the backup disaster last week and after switching into a new blogging platform from Expression Engine (EE) to WordPress (WP), I realized ti would be nice to share some of the things we learned from that migration process.
So here’s my 10 Tips when changing Blog Platforms:
- Double check if the new blog platform you are migrating to has the features you actually need or wanted. If you are still unsure which one to use or if you want a second opinion, go check the Blog Comparison Chart here. It lists down some of the more popular platforms you might want to consider – TypePad, MovableType, Blogger, Blogware, WordPress and Expression Engine. For a more comprehensive list of blogging platforms, check out the Google Directory for Blog Publishing Tools.
- How much are you willing to shell out for your new blog software? While most of them are free (like WP, TP, Drupal) others require you to shell out as much as $149 for Expression Engine and $99.95 for MT’s personal unlimited license. I recommend you go for WordPress.
- Make sure your new blog platform has an import utility tool that supports the old platform. WordPress has several built-in import utility tools for b2, MovableType, Blogger, Greymatter, LiveJournal, TextPattern and RSS feeds. Otherwise, you may be forced to write your own import scripts, hire someone to code it for you, or worse, manually copy and paste all your blog entries.
- Backup your blog before migration. There are half a dozen ways to do this. Your cPanel has one, use it and download a full copy. If you know your way around phpMyAdmin, export all the databases into a zip file and keep a copy in your local PC. This is a good method if you have other scripts installed, like a photo gallery or WordPress hacks and plugins that use the database. Install a WordPress DB backup plugin (if you are running WP). This way you can download a backup everyday with little or no effort at all. (see related entry on How to Survive a Blog Crash)
- Compatible permalink structure. Check if the new blog platform is able to duplicate the permalink structure of your old blog. You don’t want to loose all that traffic from search engine do you? If you are using MovableType or TypePad with their static and truncated pages, WordPress might not be able to duplicate it since it’s using standard/custom URLs. Expression Engine, TextPattern, WordPress and Drupal seems to be compatible with each other on this aspect.
- Seek professional help if possible or at least ask someone more experienced to assist you just in case you screw things up in between migration. That’s self-explanatory.
- Check out the support forums for both the old platform and the new one. Look for other bloggers who have gone thru the same process before you. They could provide valuable first-hand tips and information that you’ll need. You could also get feedback if the stock import utility you are planning to use runs perfectly well or still has some bugs that needs fixing. That should tip you off for a possible work-around.
- Schedule your migration well. By checking your monthly stats, you will have a good idea which day of the week and what time it is best to do the migration. Map a timeline from the start of your export to the time of your import and make an estimate on how long it will take you to do the whole process.
- Make sure you have reliable and fast internet connection. While broadband is widely available, there are still a lot of people connected thru dial-up. It would be agonizing to do the migration when you’re on dial-up so go get some broadband first or ask a friend if you can visit them one day and use his PC & DSL line.
- Inform your host about the migration. The migration process could shoot up the server’s load especially during cPanel backup/restore. This way, they are aware of it and could even give you some slack or an extra hand. Some web hosting providers put a cap on how much load you can put on their shared servers (somewhere between 10-20% if the CPU resources)
and they could suspend your account if that happens.
Always have a Plan B. If the migration fails, you can always restore back from your backup, review your process and see where you got it wrong, and do it some other day. This is to minimize your blog’s downtime which could cost you more in lost of revenue.
