Much has been said about the new iPad — stating with the “new” name, the same old design, the slightly beefed profile and the underwhelming specs. Only one thing remains and that’s the hyped up, beyond-HD display. Check out our full review of the new iPad after the break.
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A new telco is coming to town and its name is Vodafone. Arguably the largest telecoms company in the world (based on revenues) and the 2nd largest in terms of subscriber base, Vodafone Philippines has started putting up their accounts for the Philippines in preparation for the official launch.
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During a press briefing with one of the local telcos last week, the question of minimum speed was again raised by one of the members of the media. NTC has also released a memorandum circular to that effect but I think the issue will continue to linger.
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Been in the boondocks for about a week now on a semi-vacation mode (and semi-retreat kind of way) so I’m not able to regularly publish new entries here. With a thousand miles away from mega Manila and a couple hundred more miles from the nearest city, my mountain resort hide-away is almost devoid of any internet coverage.
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I’ve been asking engineers around for reasons why ISPs around the world have been implementing bandwidth caps and got several possible scenarios to consider. Here are the top 5 most probable reasons behind the issue of bandwidth caps.
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Huawei has announced that they’ll be shipping the new E5 “Pocket MiFi” to the Philippines this month. E5 is the next gen of Globe’s MyFi (only that it’s open-line). They have the same weight and size but the main difference is that the E5 now has a screen to show the signal strength, if you’re connected and the battery meter.
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Lenovo sent us this ThinkPad Edge 13 a few weeks ago and it’s actually the most intriguing laptop we’ve had to review for sometime now. Check our full review of this thin & light Core i5 notebook.
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New telco player, Wi-Tribe, has finally addressed their bandwidth strategy by offering some sort of pay-per-use.
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South Korea has been on the top of the list for having the fastest broadband internet in the world for the longest time. So, the very first thing I did when I got here was test their internet connection.
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As we come close to the end of 2009, I look back at the number of technological advances and innovations, more specifically in the Philippines. There are so many of them that I thought we’d do a poll and pick out which one stands out from the rest and made huge impact to a lot of people.
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Consumer Electronics Live! (CEL Manila 2009) starts today until Sunday at the World Trade Center, Pasay City. I will be speaking at a panel tomorrow afternoon so drop by if you can.
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A couple of days ago, I attended a WiMax forum hosted by Intel Philippines. They are helping push the use of WiMax in emerging markets where there are very low but fast growing PC users. Why?
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As the year 2008 is ending, I dug up into my Google Analytics to see which stories in tech made a lot of buzz here on YugaTech. We’re heavy on gadgets and gizmo’s so here are the top 20 gadgets and top 10 stories published here this 2008.
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Before you continue reading this, please read my review of the Nokia E71 first so you’d get a better perspective of where I am coming from and so I don’t have to repeat the sections where the Nokia E63 is similar to the E71.
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The news the other day is a little welcome surprise — San Miguel Corp. is entering the broadband internet and mobile telecoms market.
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On Friday, the Consumer Electronics Live! 2008 will be doing a week-end long exhibit featuring top tech brands in the Philippines. You can get free passes to this event — just follow instructions after the jump.
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One of the primary reasons why we don’t have a comprehensive 3G offering from the big telcos is because of the problem of 3G network congestion. It’s an undeniable truth that P2P is killing 3G in the Philippines.
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Been receiving a couple of emails lately (mostly from OFWs but there’s one from a Chinese/Taiwanese company) asking if there’s still some good business to be made with internet cafes in the Philippines. From accounts of friends and people who’ve been into the net cafe business as well as what we’re seeing in every mall and street alley, there’s some mixed reaction.
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Yup. That’s right, sixty percent (60%). I was informed by a reliable source that almost 60% of the internet bandwidth consumed in the Philippines are coming from peer-to-peer and torrents.
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In a recent report released by Speed Matters, Japan topped the list of countries with the highest median internet download speeds at 61 megabits per second. The United States fell far behind with only 1.9 megabits per second:
Between September 2006 to May 2007, nearly 80,000 people in all 50 states and the District of Columbia (nearly all of them with broadband connections) have gone to the Speedmatters.org site to take an Internet speed test and measure how fast their computers can upload and download data. This is the first national survey of actual Internet speeds, and the results showed just how the US continues to lag behind other countries.
The chart below shows Japan’s internet speed is about 30 times faster than the US, with a few other countries in between:

South Korea: 45Mbps, Finland: 21Mbps, Sweden 18Mbps, Canada 7.6Mbps
You can download the full report in PDF format here. The report does not show results from the Philippines but basing form our recent discussion on the state of DSL in the country, I guess it’s way down there in the charts.
I checked with DSLReports and there’s some data there of 28 independent test for PLDT shows an average 706 Kbps download and 235 Kbps upload speeds.