#YugaTen: YugaTech turns 10!

This month marks the 10 years that YugaTech has been a full-fledged tech website. While I actually started the site in 2000 under the free hosting of Hypermart.net and bought the domain in 2002, the site was mostly a portfolio page with a little section for my journal entries. It was sometime in December 2005 that I decided to leave the corporate world and ventured into what then was a promising new prospect that is the Internet.

Taught myself web design, downloaded and printed 500+ pages of the PHP manual and studied web programming during my daily commute from Ortigas to Bacoor. I also forced myself to update the “online journal” every single day to teach myself how to write (flunked English subjects in high school and college). I said turn your weakness into a strength.

They say that when you love what you are doing, you will not feel it is work and time flies very fast. Indeed, the last 10 years seemed to breeze thru. We formed the editorial team in 2012 and we’re a now strong 7-man team who are as passionate as I am with tech.

Our key ingredient is passion. We love to discover, tinker around and share what we learn with people who we think have the same interest and passion for tech.

And, to celebrate the 10 years, we’ll be doing a give-away that we’ve never done before (stay tuned for that!). We will also be hosting a party with friends, industry partners and regular readers that later turned out to be great friends. We will also be making a contribution to an organization that promotes entrepreneurship or online education among out of school youth.

We thank you for the last 10 years and we hope you’ll stick with us for the next 10!

Happy Holidays!

– Yuga

The post #YugaTen: YugaTech turns 10! appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines News & Tech Reviews.

#YugaTen: YugaTech turns 10!

This month marks the 10 years that YugaTech has been a full-fledged tech website. While I actually started the site in 2000 under the free hosting of Hypermart.net and bought the domain in 2002, the site was mostly a portfolio page with a little section for my journal entries. It was sometime in December 2005 that I decided to leave the corporate world and ventured into what then was a promising new prospect that is the Internet.

Taught myself web design, downloaded and printed 500+ pages of the PHP manual and studied web programming during my daily commute from Ortigas to Bacoor. I also forced myself to update the “online journal” every single day to teach myself how to write (flunked English subjects in high school and college). I said turn your weakness into a strength.

They say that when you love what you are doing, you will not feel it is work and time flies very fast. Indeed, the last 10 years seemed to breeze thru. We formed the editorial team in 2012 and we’re a now strong 7-man team who are as passionate as I am with tech.

Our key ingredient is passion. We love to discover, tinker around and share what we learn with people who we think have the same interest and passion for tech.

And, to celebrate the 10 years, we’ll be doing a give-away that we’ve never done before (stay tuned for that!). We will also be hosting a party with friends, industry partners and regular readers that later turned out to be great friends. We will also be making a contribution to an organization that promotes entrepreneurship or online education among out of school youth.

We thank you for the last 10 years and we hope you’ll stick with us for the next 10!

Happy Holidays!

– Yuga

The post #YugaTen: YugaTech turns 10! appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines News & Tech Reviews.

Fresh New Look

This has long been overdue but we’ve finally managed to move to our new site design after over a year of planning and coordination.

This includes a slight change in the logo with a flat two-color theme (which we’ve actually been using for over a year in calling cards and several collaterals).

The layout is not yet completely finished so there will be a bit of changes in the coming days as we iron out the kinks and optimize the layout. You should also see a more streamlined mobile version. Some links in the navigation are not yet working but we should be 95% complete by this week-end.

The post Fresh New Look appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.

Last Month: 10 Hottest Stories in October

We review last month’s stories and pick the top ones that made the biggest impact to our readers. We track these stories by the number of shares, retweets and total traffic. The month of October are mostly all about phones.

Last month’s top stories was dominated by ZTE with their botched up sale and the rest are mostly about smartphones.

ZTE Grand X2 L Sale. ZTE made a lot of noise when it announced a super-sale of the ZTE Grand X2 L, dropping the price to just Php1,999 from over Php11,000. While the smartphone has been around since 2013, the price drop got a lot of people lining up as ZTE says they have enough stocks. Over 45,000 views on that announcement alone.

Complete List of Smartphones Getting Android 5.0 Lollipop. With the formal announcement of Android 5.0, smartphone users are now eager to have their devices updated to Lollipop. Here’s our updated list so far.

Top 10 Smartphones Above Php15,000. As prices of flagship smartphones start to drop, Filipinos are becoming more and more price-sensitive. We published a round-up of potentially good handsets in the Php15k and above range here.

Top Smartphones under Php10,000. If budget is a concern, then we also published a separate article on how much your Php10,000 can go. The list we posted here in actually pretty interesting.

Chaos ensues over ZTE Sale. It wasn’t a surprise when we got reports form many customers and readers that the ZTE sale went awry. Lack of organization, manpower and low inventory were the main culprits. What is puzzling is that the distributor, MSI-ECS, has been known to do huge but well-organized warehouse sale every year. They sent out an apology later but the fiasco was already all over the news.

Memory Matters: All the Smartphones with 2GB of RAM. With quad-core processors and octa-cores becoming the norm for most smartphones, the focus of consumers has shifted to internal memory. As per request by our readers, we published the affordable smartphones with 2GB of RAM here.

Smartphones Under Php5,000. This price category used to be the territory of feature phones. Now Android and Windows Phones have invaded their competitive segment in the battle for bigger marketshare.

LTE Smartphones under Php10,000. Despite the erratic signal and limited LTE coverage, LTE remains to be one of the biggest factors consumers consider when purchasing a smartphone.

OpenSignal Compares LTE of Globe and Smart. That perpetual question on who has the fastest LTE network is supposedly answered in this report by OpenSignal. We still question the methodology and parameters but, aside from Ookla and Akamai, OpenSignal seems to be one of the very few who has a large-enough data set to make the intelligent guesstimate.

No New iPods. Our hopes of a new iPod have been crushed in the latest announcement of Apple. No new iPod Touch, no Nano and they even removed the iPod Classic. What is surprising is that Apple’s response to slow sales is phasing out an iconic product instead of innovating it. Have they totally given up on the iPod? According to Tim Cook, they no longer have the parts.

The post Last Month: 10 Hottest Stories in October appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.

Last Month: 10 Hottest Stories in October

We review last month’s stories and pick the top ones that made the biggest impact to our readers. We track these stories by the number of shares, retweets and total traffic. The month of October are mostly all about phones.

Last month’s top stories was dominated by ZTE with their botched up sale and the rest are mostly about smartphones.

ZTE Grand X2 L Sale. ZTE made a lot of noise when it announced a super-sale of the ZTE Grand X2 L, dropping the price to just Php1,999 from over Php11,000. While the smartphone has been around since 2013, the price drop got a lot of people lining up as ZTE says they have enough stocks. Over 45,000 views on that announcement alone.

Complete List of Smartphones Getting Android 5.0 Lollipop. With the formal announcement of Android 5.0, smartphone users are now eager to have their devices updated to Lollipop. Here’s our updated list so far.

Top 10 Smartphones Above Php15,000. As prices of flagship smartphones start to drop, Filipinos are becoming more and more price-sensitive. We published a round-up of potentially good handsets in the Php15k and above range here.

Top Smartphones under Php10,000. If budget is a concern, then we also published a separate article on how much your Php10,000 can go. The list we posted here in actually pretty interesting.

Chaos ensues over ZTE Sale. It wasn’t a surprise when we got reports form many customers and readers that the ZTE sale went awry. Lack of organization, manpower and low inventory were the main culprits. What is puzzling is that the distributor, MSI-ECS, has been known to do huge but well-organized warehouse sale every year. They sent out an apology later but the fiasco was already all over the news.

Memory Matters: All the Smartphones with 2GB of RAM. With quad-core processors and octa-cores becoming the norm for most smartphones, the focus of consumers has shifted to internal memory. As per request by our readers, we published the affordable smartphones with 2GB of RAM here.

Smartphones Under Php5,000. This price category used to be the territory of feature phones. Now Android and Windows Phones have invaded their competitive segment in the battle for bigger marketshare.

LTE Smartphones under Php10,000. Despite the erratic signal and limited LTE coverage, LTE remains to be one of the biggest factors consumers consider when purchasing a smartphone.

OpenSignal Compares LTE of Globe and Smart. That perpetual question on who has the fastest LTE network is supposedly answered in this report by OpenSignal. We still question the methodology and parameters but, aside from Ookla and Akamai, OpenSignal seems to be one of the very few who has a large-enough data set to make the intelligent guesstimate.

No New iPods. Our hopes of a new iPod have been crushed in the latest announcement of Apple. No new iPod Touch, no Nano and they even removed the iPod Classic. What is surprising is that Apple’s response to slow sales is phasing out an iconic product instead of innovating it. Have they totally given up on the iPod? According to Tim Cook, they no longer have the parts.

The post Last Month: 10 Hottest Stories in October appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.