Still remember the iPod Mini?

If you’ve been a long-time Apple fan, I am sure you still remember the iPod Mini. This was way back nine years ago when Apple was just starting to enter the music player market and iTunes was just introduced to Windows.

Apple’s iTunes used to be exclusive for Mac OS and then later on introduced to Windows users (2003). During the announcement of the iPod Mini, it was already available for Windows users thereby expanding Apple’s potential market reach.

The iPod Mini was supposed to be a smaller, lighter and more affordable version of the classic iPod (back in the days, a 30GB iPod would sell over Php30k a pop). The iPod Mini had smaller storage and uses a microdrive (CompactFlash II) in 4GB and 6GB sizes.

The one we found here just recently is an old 4GB silver iPod Mini and it’s actually still in good working condition.

This device is almost 9 years old already and the microdrive survived all these years. Anybody out there has an old, but still working, Apple iPod?

The post Still remember the iPod Mini? appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.

Looting the Marcos loot

Just because the Presidential Commission on Good Government would be abolished, it doesn’t mean that the hunt for the people’s money looted by the Marcoses and hidden in bank accounts abroad or in properties under the name of some friends, should also end.

As PCGG Chair Andres Bautista said, the job could be continued by the Department of Justice. The reasons he gave, one of which as that Marcos- loot- hunting by the 200-man agency is no longer cost effective, makes sense.

So far, in its 27-year existence the PCGG has recovered $4 billion (P164 billion), only a tiny fraction of what was estimated to be a $10 billion loot in 1986. Just imagine how much the unrecovered would be worth by now including the interests.

The executive order creating the PCGG was the first issued by President Cory Aquino on Feb. 28, 1986, three days after the Marcos fled early evening of Feb. 25, 1986 as millions of Filipinos rose in a bloodless revolution called People Power.

The PCGG was supposed to prevent the Marcos from spiriting money and other forms of wealth they had stashed during the more than 20 years that they were in power. The creation of the PCGG was the basis by the Swiss Federal Court to freeze some of the accounts identified to belong to the Marcoses.

The PCGG may have lost its luster by now, the fault of abuses and incompetence not only by its personnel but also by a number of the people who when placed in power post-Marcos turned out to be as greedy and corrupt.

One of the stories I remember was, as the Marcoses were rushing out of the Malacañang to the waiting helicopter parked at the Pangarap House grounds that would bring them to Clark Air Base where a C-130 was waiting that would bring them to Guam and to Hawaii, some of the documents and pearls fell on the floor while they were hastily stuffed in luggage. Two of those documents later turned out to be the “smoking gun” evidence that led to the recovery of the four buildings in New York worth $350 million.

The documents were the declarations of trust handwritten by Joseph E. Bernstein on a Manila Peninsula letterhead. The first declaration of trust dated April 4, 1982 stated that Bernstein, a New York real estate broker, would act as trustee for former president Marcos with respect to Lastura Corp. N.V., a corporation registered in Netherlands Antilles.

The second declaration of trust, dated April 5, 1982 stated that Bernstein was the trustee of Beneficio Investment Inc., a corporation registered in Panama which in turn owned Lastura Corp.

With the smoking gun evidence, the Bernstein brothers, Joseph and Ralph, admitted having fronted for the Marcoses in the purchase of the New York buildings.

But there were also accounts of looting of the loot in Malacañang of some members of the so-called yellow group.

One of the intriguing testimonies of Dr. Teresita Reyes, dermatologist of Margarita “Tingting” Cojuangco, wife of Jose “Peping” Cojuangco, brother of Cory Aquino, during the 1991 trial in New York of the racketeering case against former First Lady Imelda Marcos, was about several Louis Vuitton valises containing jewelry that they took out from the bedroom of Imelda.

The valises were loaded into vans that drove to Reyes’ house in Dasmariñas Village in Makati.
Some members of the Reformed the Armed Forces Movement who saw the loading of the valises in the van reported to then Defense Minister Juan Ponce-Enrile, who led with Philippine Constabulary Chief Fidel Ramos,the coup de’etat against Marcos.

Enrile reportedly went to the Dasmariñas destination of the valises and saw the society matrons excitedly, like kids, trying Imelda’s jewelry.

Those jewelry (no one’s sure if everything was accounted for) are now with the Central Bank and referred to as the Malacañang collection. The Philippine government has been negotiation with the U.S. auction house, Christie’s.

Last November, there was a story in the New York Times about Imelda’s former aide, Vilma Bautista, accused of art theft. She was caught trying to sell off painting by the masters that used to be in the building occupied by Imelda Marcos. One of the painting she was able to sell was “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas” (1899) by Claude Monet to a London gallery for $32 million in September 2010.

A lot of those unrecovered Marcos ill-gotten wealth are out there, if not in banks, in the hands of some people. They cannot stay hidden forever.

We hope they would surface and returned to the Filipino people in our lifetime.

Open source for the win

ON Christmas Eve, I cobbled together a network-attached storage (NAS) at home to enable everyone in our house to have a shared directory for school, work and personal files. This shared directory is also accessible from outside the house – like a rudimentary personal “cloud” for our family.

It wasn’t complicated — you can go to my blog for the article on the process — because the setup was a matter of connecting an old portable USB drive to a cheap CD-R King wireless router and setting things up using a visual interface.

The magic sauce in the setup is the Tomato firmware that runs on the router. Tomato is a Linux-based router firmware that allows you to manage your device on such things as filtering and setting quality of service rules for certain types of connections so that people browsing websites don’t experience crawling connection when someone downloads using a torrent.

The Tomato firmware that comes with the CD-R King router that I use, a CW-5356U model, simplifies the setting up of a NAS by allowing you to plug a portable drive into the router’s USB port. You can set the system to auto-mount any drive that you plug into it and make it shareable in your network. You can also designate a password for your shared drive so that not everyone who connects to your Wi-Fi can access it.

The system also assists you in setting up an FTP (file transfer protocol) server that will allow you to access that drive outside of your network. You can, with the setup, access your home files from the office or even on the go.

Promise of open source

What’s even more fun is that you can view movies stored on your portable drive over your iPhone or iPad.

The router also has a facility that will allow you to connect a printer to its USB port to turn it into a network printer. It also allows you to set up complex rules that can, for example, bar your children from accessing Facebook during class days but allow you to continue using the social network.

For just P1,280, the wireless router trumps the features of branded and more expensive models.

I think the CD-R King router illustrates the promise of open source software.

Tomato firmware is open source, meaning it is released under a license that encourages sharing the software and collaborating to make it better. Any wireless router manufacturer can use the Tomato firmware for its product. By using Tomato, the manufacturer no longer has to spend to develop and maintain its own firmware. Instead, it can just concentrate on the manufacturing side of the business.

By using Tomato, CD-R King is able to manufacture a router that’s really top-class for such a low price.

But if there’s an open source project that’s really making such a huge impact, it’s Android. There are phones in the market today that are powerful and advanced and yet cost less than P10,000. Cherry Mobile’s Flare, for example, costs just P3,999 but comes with formidable specs: Android ICS, 1.2 Ghz dual-core processor, five-megapixel camera and dual-SIM capability. It was such a hot item during the holidays that stocks were wiped out.

The post Open source for the win appeared first on Leon Kilat : The Tech Experiments.

Samsung Korea details Jelly Bean update for Galaxy S2

The Samsung Galaxy S2, is yet to receive its much awaited Android Jelly Bean update but Samsung Korea has already released some details on what the 2011 Android flagship is going to get from the upgrade.

Listed below are the major changes after the 4.1.2 Jelly Bean software upgrade.

1. Platform upgrade from Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean
- improved Home screens and improved scrolling performance (thanks to Project Butter)
- Improved usability for some applications

2. Preloaded applications
- Add Help
- Add Google+
- Add +Talk
- Add Play Book
- Add Play Movie

3. Newly added/improved functions
- Add Easy mode, Block mode
- Improved Camera functions: function like Pause while recording and more
- Add Smart Stay
- New functions like Pop-up play and more
- Improved some functions & applications usability

The features mentioned above will surely put some smiles on the faces of Galaxy S2 owners. The downside though is that the update will reduce the device’s internal storage from 12GB to 11GB (probably for the 16GB version) and will consume more RAM due to a new system partition. But that’s a small price to pay, right?

Samsung didn’t give any details when they’re going to rollout the update but it’s going to be available via Kies (no OTA) once it arrives.

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The post Samsung Korea details Jelly Bean update for Galaxy S2 appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.

HTC Windows Phone 8X Review

Last month we’ve given you a brief primer of the HTC Windows Phone 8x and we’ve recently posted the full review of its more affordable brother, the HTC Windows Phone 8s. Now let’s see if this taller handset is worth your extra cash in our full review after the break.

Before we get into the actual review, we’d like to point out that the handset in focus is actually an engineering unit as confirmed by the gentleman from HTC who handed us the device. With this mind, the actual results of benchmark tests and/or battery life might be different from the real thing.

Also, it’ll be beneficial if you skim through our full review of the HTC Windows Phone 8S, as well as our first impression of this device (assuming that you haven’t already) to get a get a better feel of the 8x in terms of design and construction. Why so? Well, both of these HTC handsets have a lot in common aesthetically making our 8S review a good starting point.

Display

Alright! Now that we have that squared away, let’s look in to the first noticeable difference between the Windows Phone handset – the display.

In addition to the slight difference in screen size (4” vs 4.3”), the HTC 8X also gets a minor bump on the display resolution pegging at 1280 x 720 pixels. Currently, there are only three WP8 handsets that are fortunate enough to be equipped with such resolution – HTC 8X, Lumia 920 and Samsung ATIV S – which by the way are all flagship WP devices.

It’s not, in any chance, something to be all excited about considering that other phones already come in with a FHD display. But let’s not forget that this it’s actually a first for Windows Phone handsets, as the previous iteration of the OS only allows 480 x 800 screen resolution. But even if the platform allows a higher resolution, we don’t think it’s rational to put a 1080p resolution on a 4.3-inch handset.

With pixel density reaching to 342ppi, the HTC 8X’s HD display should be enough to provide pleasurable viewing experience. As a bonus, it also offers a decent viewing angles and good outdoor legibility which is a plus for those who’re often out in the open.

Audio

As with any recent note-worthy HTC handset, the 8X is also equipped with, you guessed it, Beats Audio enhancement. Love it or hate it, it’s part of what you paid for when you got their smartphones. So it’s either you manually turn of the “enhancement” (which by the way makes the sound quality really terrible) or live with the fact that most of your tracks will tend to be a little bass-y. It’s your call, but if you have to choose between the two, we suggest taking the lesser evil.

Call Quality

Now here’s something interesting. We’ve experienced quite a number of calls being disconnected when we’re using the phone. And at times when the connection is not being cut off, the conversation gets a bit garbled, sometimes to a point that it’s no longer audible.

This is either caused by the fact that phone was an engineering unit or that my network is not living up to its ENJOYable promise which has been the case since I moved to a new a place. To test if this is a network-related concern, we tried using a SIM from a different telco. But even after doing so, we still suffered the same fate suggesting that the phone is the culprit. It’s kinda nice to know that my network isn’t causing this call mishap, all we (Louie and I) need to figure out now is when we’ll get a fast and reliable internet connection out of our current UnliSurf plans.

Performance

May be the most significant difference between the 8X and its meeker sibling is the configuration inside their colorful and deceivingly thin body. At the heart of the 8X is a 1.5GHz dual-core S4 Plus processor with a gigabyte of RAM in tow. It may not sound much, but this duo packs a punch and is more than enough to satisfy your basic smartphone needs.

Based on the benchmarking test, the 8X actually did quite well tallying a perfect score in the Benchmark Free and also got a pretty decent score (10,604) on Antutu Benchmark. WP Bench gave the phone an average score of 39.5 (the highest being 40). Now if you’re curious to see how the 8X stacks up against other WP devices, here’s the current ranking courtesy of WP Bench.

This handset sits at the 31st spot with an average score of 231.67. The Samsung ATIV S only bested HTC’s flagship device by a hair which got an average score of 231.69. But before you get all jumpy about its lackluster place in the ranking, we’d like to point out that the chart is dominated (and filled with) by Lumia 820s from different countries. If we were to combine all of this 820s into a single entry, then the 8X (as well as the ATIV S) should be in the top 5 spot.

The HTC 8X’s remarkable benchmark results extends to real life usage. It was snappy and stayed responsive all throughout its stay. It virtually breezed through anything that we’ve thrown at it. We experienced minor hiccups along the way with the device, but having used a non-engineering unit, we can definitely say that the issue is isolated with our review unit.

Camera

The list of spot-the-difference between the HTC 8-siblings continues on, this time with the camera. The larger of the two is equipped with a far more superior snapper, and we’re not just talking about the difference in megapixel count on the sensors here nor the fact that 8S doesn’t have a secondary camera.

One of the major improvements that the WP8 over prior versions is that it allows manufacturers to be a bit more creative with their handset’s camera. With this new found versatility in the OS, companies are now able to incorporate their own imaging technology in to their device, PureView for Nokia and ImageSense processor for HTC.

Let’s take a step back and reflect a bit on the HTC ImageSense processor. This technology made its debut last year and the first handsets that were outfitted with such technology were the One Series smartphones. This, along with the camera’s bright f2.0 lens and backside illuminated sensor allows the phone’s camera to perform well even in low-light conditions. It’s kinda like the case for the 8X, minus the other cool features such continuous shooting.

Although still lagging behind the Lumia 920 in terms of imaging prowess, the HTC 8X’s camera has a pretty respectable performance to it as shown in these images. The camera app offers a handful of customizations should you wish to be more creative with your snaps. You can see some sample images we took using the HTC 8X here.

As you would’ve guessed, the 8X’s impressive camera performance also extends to its video recording capabilities. The camera is capable of recording full HD clips even in dim situations with only a tolerable amount of distortion.
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Unlike the 8S, the 8X has a front-facing camera, and not just an ordinary one if we may add. As if outfitting their flagship WP8 handset with a 2.1MP secondary snapper wasn’t enough, HTC has also thrown in a wide-angle lens in the mix as well as the capability to record 1080p clips. Just to show give you an idea of just how wide the coverage of the 8X’s FF camera, here’s an image that shows the HTC 8X (above) and the O+ phone (below).

Battery

We didn’t get quite a long mileage with the HTC 8X that was handed to us. It only lasted a quarter of a day with moderate to heavy usage. This includes leaving the cellular data switched on with Twitter, Facebook and email running on the background, roughly two hours of internet browsing and we watched a couple of movies with it.

Since the handset was an engineering unit, we can probably expect a longer battery life, approximately 2-3 hours or even more, with the real thing. Nothing to be too excited about, it’s just the typical mileage we’ve grown to be accustomed to from a handset that has an under 2KmAh power source.

HTC Windows Phone 8X specs:
4.3-inch S-LCD2 HD display @ 1280×720 pixels, 342ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass 2
Snapdragon S4 Krait (MSM8960) 1.5GHz dual-core
Adreno 225 GPU
1GB RAM
16GB internal storage
3G/HSDPA
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 3.1
GPS with aGPS support, GLONASS
8MP autofocus camera w/ flash, 2.1MP secondary camera
1080p video @ 30fps
1800mAh Li-Po battery
Windows Phone 8
Dimension: 132.4 x 66.2 x 10.1 mm
Weight: 130g

Conclusion

The HTC Titan was the first handset that I had the luxury of reviewing last year. I never thought that ten months later I’d be fortunate enough to review its successor – the HTC Windows Phone 8X. To be honest, there isn’t much of a difference in terms of how the platform works. It still has the same simple yet colorful Live Tiles that users have grown accustomed to. Microsoft has added a few improvements to it, but it retains the same old feel that fascinated me since the beginning.

It comes in a smaller package compared to its ancestor, but packs a more solid punch thanks to some minor enhancements in the hardware components. Unfortunately though, some of the gripes that I had with the Titan such as the lack of SD card slot and noteworthy apps are still present on this young blood. It does, however, compensate some of its weaknesses with an impressive camera (both main and secondary) and a not-too-shabby design with hip paint job.

Is it worth the extra dough? Well, in our opinion, not so much. For almost twice the price as its more modestly-spec’d counterpart, you’ll only get a better processor with twice the RAM, an improved and slightly larger display and a pair of bad ass snappers. It’s still a bit pricey at Php26,550, but may be if HTC slashes a few grands off its SRP then it’s definitely a worthy handset to consider.

Editor’s Note: This handset is an engineering unit and, as such, was still not fit for commercial use. Some parts of the hardware and firmware were not up to specification. – Yuga

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