Tag: mobile

Until April 2013, XL Axiata had a perfectly fine working mobile site which is meant to be used for mobile users to access their mobile accounts, check up on their usage quota, find out card expiry date and validity period, top up their credits, and purchase various data, voice, and text packages.

Sometime in the last week or so they changed the site to something that is not only downright unusable, useless, rubbish, a complete and utter mess, it is also entirely mobile hostile. Accessing this from Chrome on Android, which is among the best mobile browsers available, and is on a significant share of smartphones in this country, produces the above brilliant pieces of horse manure.

Don’t they test these sites on all the major mobile browsers before they go live?

So here are the six Oppo Find 5 photos that didn’t get uploaded yesterday. There’s a bunch of annoyances on the software side which takes points off from an otherwise great device.

Oh, and the camera isn’t impressive. Red tint galore when in relatively low light and the sensor produces photos inferior to the Galaxy SIII, which makes it even far more inferior than the Lumia 920. Although I think the SIII may have had a camera software upgrade over the past year. Photos from the SIII never looked so sharp before. Btw those photos of the Find 5 were taken using iPad mini.

Unboxing Oddo… I mean Oppo Find 5

I haven’t seen a packaging this well done and this stylish in a long time. Oppo might be considered a rookie in this space but the company certainly knows how to make a first impression. Haven’t played with the phone much but it does feel pretty decent to hold. Still, I can’t get over the fact that it’s just big. I mean it is a 5” phone. Huge. Taller but thinner and feels lighter than my Lumia 920. Good placement of the power and volume buttons. Not keen on the custom icons and theme though.

Will write a review in the next several days.

[update] I have no idea why the other six photos failed to upload.

I want iOS to be modernized a bit more

The lack of gesture support on the iPod touch and iPhone makes for an awkward moment when you’re far more used to using the iPad which has a greater range of gesture recognition.

Not being able to do things like switching between apps simply by swiping from the side edges of the screen as opposed to a four finger swipe on the iPad or closing the app by pushing up from the bottom of the screen makes these tall screen devices feel rather quaint and underdeveloped.

I realize that Apple can be both revolutionary and conservative with regards to introducing interface features but after more than five and a half years of iOS, it needs a little more of the modern abilities not just to compete with offerings from other platform providers but also as a milestone in its own software development roadmap.

As it stands, the iPhone remains a safe bet for consumers who don’t want to have to learn too many new things as its comes with arguably the easiest and simplest mobile OS to learn and use.

I’ve got high hopes for Jony Ive to reboot iOS. – Read on Path.

About BlackBerry data usage

A Telkomsel executive said BlackBerry users typically use 200MB of data per month thanks to the data compression in use by BlackBerry Internet Service. If they pay Rp 5000/day, that’s 150k/month. If I pay 150k per month, I expect to get more than 5GB of data allowance per month since I currently pay 100k/month for 3.6GB for my general mobile data usage.

Same executive also said he expects BlackBerry data usage to grow to an average of 600MB per subscriber beginning with the Z10. And current BlackBerry users worry that they’re gonna have to pay more for data per month if they switch to BlackBerry 10?

Really. – Read on Path.

Samsung’s Galaxy poses a threat to Android

The fact that Samsung does not mention Google or Android in any of its promotional material for its mobile devices should tell you something. Its Galaxy branding is so powerful, by the time Tizen is ready to roll out carrying tens of thousands of apps on Samsung Apps, people might care less that it doesn’t run Google’s Android because they have a Galaxy device. – Read on Path.

Thought via Path

Forgot I have iA Writer on the Mac. The lack of an always connected iPad kind of added to that problem. This mini is probably going to let me be more productive since I won’t have to worry about lack of connection but more importantly, it’s so much lighter and smaller than that old first generation iPad that I can type a lot faster and more comfortably.

I can’t understand why Apple doesn’t have TextEdit for the iPad which would let people switch between the Mac and the iPad or iPhone a lot more seamlessly. For those who want more complex layout, collaboration, and formatting ability, there’s Pages, but those who just need to hammer out words, we need a simpler cloud-based app. iA Writer is the perfect app for that.

Apple probably squandered an opportunity there, but then it would have taken sales away from Pages. – Read on Path.

Thought via Path

In terms of hardware Nokia is arguably in its most innovative period since it went in to the phone business but people simply don’t trust Windows Phone enough to make it a viable option. Today’s announcements would have had consumers raving if Nokia were still a big player. It’s low end phones are even more amazing. – Read on Path.

Got the Lumia updated last night. It was the much talked about and long awaited Portico update. Rather disappointed at how it went. See, when it said Step 1 of 4 I was expecting for there to be steps 2-4 so I planned for a photo collage of the steps and caption it “step by step”. I figured, if step one was data migration, I’d document the process to note what the steps would involve.

Instead, as soon as it hit 100% it got super excited, saying Update complete four times!! I’ve never seen a gadget get so excited about completing an update. But it had lied to me. There were no steps 2-4. It lied. And it was happy. But I was not. – View on Path.

There’s something about these phones…