Just 3 hours ago I was in Globe business center Binondo (spent almost half of my day for this) to apply for an additional postpaid line and phone. I need a new landline phone with a Globe Duo service. Luckily I found out that there is a Cloudfone Temptation that is an Android Phone with physical QWERTY keyboard and a touch sensitive screen offered by Globe. Glich’s Life said its a repackaged Huawei U8350, GSM Arena has its full specs.

Whats intriguing is that, if I will get a P299 basic plan plus an unli service I need to shell out for P1,220. Because of this confusing plan scheme I’ve gone straight to an unli Super Duo booster which is P599 a month (unlimited mobile to mobile and landline) and got the phone for free but locked my life to Globe’s “superb” service for 24 months. I have no choice since almost all of our clients is Globe including me, my family and friends.

Having a Samsung Galaxy Mini Android with Froyo I know that this phone can beat any mid-end Nokia or similar symbian based or maybe a windows phone in terms of App abilities. I have yet to play with it thoroughly to be able to conclude if its worth a “sulit” worth it cheap Android phone.

The phone looks like a Blackberry in size and design. It has a QWERTY keyboard which reminds me of my calculator looking Nokia e61i. Initial impressions are good, it doesn’t feel cheap nor looks like cheap. Surprisingly I like its screen than my Galaxy Mini, its sharper and vibrant. I’ll be setting-up this phone to be able to communicate thru internet apps like GTalk, Google+, push mail and etc so we can save SMS fees locally and abroad.

I will try to post a review after a week and lets see if it can work as our main landline and mobile communicating device.

For the meantime you can ask questions in the comment section if you are interested. Twitter or FB will do.

Finally got my Pinterest invite. The site is quite interesting but I feel that its more cluttered than The Fancy. I don’t know if which one has the most users, anyway I’m giving it a try. Hopefully in the future they’ll make an iPad app, thats going to be more interesting! Check out my boards tekgik – Pinterest.

Taking notes is one of the vital things to do by a multi-tasking human like me. Jotting notes, minutes of a meeting or just doodling for some ideas can be done on a traditional notepad paper. Every year I consume at least one steno note pad and a clutter of scratch papers for this purpose. For the longest time I’ve been planning to do this digitally all the way ever since I bought my first PDA the Casio PV-200. From that monochrome gadget to now the 9.7″ screen colored tablet I know theres a lot of differences and maybe it is time to really say goodbye.

Last night I saw my son doodling the free Wacom Bamboo Paper app with my el-cheapo stylus on the iPad. I never really had a serious chance to try this app until last night. To my surprise it was good and it virtually reproduced a notepad feel. But since its digital I thought of researching for a more powerful notepad  app, I was intrigued to the features like annotating photos and be able to actually paste an actual type on the page.

Enter Penulmate $0.99 and Noteshelf $4.99 – both are handwriting notepad apps that is more advanced than the Bamboo Paper. I first bought Penulmate (v3.3) because its $0.99 with lots of reviews in the US iTunes app store. While it has Dropbox and Evernote integrations I felt this app lacked advance features I’m looking for and the eye candy which most iOS apps have.

Coincidentally Macstories posted a review of a notepad application yesterday. It is Noteshelf, this app is a nice combination of the Bamboo Paper and Penulmate plus more. This $4.99 app is all worth it with more features like stamping an actual type, pen highlighter, emoticons, tagging and pasting photos on the page in any rotation I like. My style of noting is not the typical formal type and I’m so glad that I discovered a useful app that fits my needs (almost).

Noteshelf also have Dropbox and Evernote support and thats a bonus but there are small pieces that will make this app perfect like Handwriting Recognition or maybe OCR, Dropbox auto-backup and a matching iPhone and Mac App so I can seamlessly make and see my notes on an Apple computing device thats with me at a given time.

I like Noteshelf and its powerful features but if you need a simple notepad app you might be alright with the Bamboo Paper or the little more advance Penulmate. I’m hoping that Noteshelf will help me ditch my traditional paper Corona Prestige Notebook so I can somehow save the Earth and fulfill my longest desire, to have all my docs and notes all digital.

An infographic from Buzzfeed to understand it in a snap. (via americancensorship.org)

Will it affect us Filipinos? Yes! Facebooker’s, Youtuber’s and Twitterer’s who post infringing content and media will be blocked, banned or worst sanctioned. And not only that there are many many other services that will be affected. I suggest you read on below or Google SOPA.

An excerpt from Wikipedia:

Proponents of the bill say it protects the intellectual property market and corresponding industry, jobs and revenue, and is necessary to bolster enforcement of copyright laws especially against foreign websites.They cite examples such as Google’s $500 million settlement with the Department of Justice for its role in a scheme to target U.S. consumers with ads to buy illegal prescription drugs from Canadian pharmacies. Opponents say that it violates the First Amendment, is Internet censorship, will cripple the Internet,and will threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech.

SOPA on Wikepedia

Can you relate? If yes you are either one. Me? I’m a Gik

Via memeburn

With no signal and no internet  connection in Manila made me shoot the Black Nazarene procession yesterday. Quiapo church is just a few stones away from my studio but since communications were cut, I got bored and thought of shooting nearby the church. But one man said “Nasa Planetarium pa” which is probably a kilometer away, I headed there without hesitation. Armed with the Fuji x10 camera only, I didn’t hesitate the chaotic crowd and proceeded to the long walk.

The procession is a sight to see, I couldn’t help myself but wonder if its really about the faith? I can understand the procession practice but the wrestling, jumping and punching one another seems to be surreal. These are  just my observations and I hope no one get offended. I’m a Catholic, I believe in God.

In a techie kind of way, I’ve experienced that the Fuji x10 seems to be a slow focusing camera for this type of shoot most probably because of contrast detect limitations. Long story but I will just include it in my Fuji x10 review on PiPho.

iTunes Store US is the main online store of Apple’s digital distribution business with millions of music and videos available. While we have our own Philippine iTunes Store the sad reality is the Philippine store is limited to iOS and Mac OS Apps only. I’ve read it somewhere that this is due to copyright (ehem piracy) reasons. Don’t be sad because this is not a Philippine only restriction. Many of the south east asian countries have the same fate. I have a post here about the “Five reasons why you might need a US iTunes account”.

There are already a handful of options buying an iTunes Gift Card in the Philippines. But whats different here is that, with this method you’ll be able to get it the same price as the card. A US$50 card will cost you the same no extra “tubo” mark-up.

You have two options to do this:

1. Bestbuy.com – Best Buy accepts Philippine issued credit card. Make an account first and make your billing address a US address, say a Starbucks in San Francisco.
2. Walmart.com - An alternative method but you need a US issued credit card. They also sell it at a discount, last December they sell a $50 card for $40 only.

The above links are specific to to a $50 Gift Card. You can search for a $10, $15 and $25 denominations just make sure its an email delivery card. As I hinted these are all digital delivery, the codes will be emailed to you after few minutes so make sure your email is valid.

The Golden Marina Bay Sands by Regie Fernando

Surprise! Even supermarkets provide free Internet connection, thats how competitive this business is now. I think Internet has become a necessity and this is specially useful to tech-savvy shoppers who wants to save on 3G and socialize or use their scanning apps like Red Laser while shopping. We are getting there and maybe in the coming years Philippines will be a WiFi’ed country. Dream on since “Its More Fun In The Philippines” (pun intended or fun intended).

The Philippine iTunes Store is limited to buying iOS apps only. Many of the prime features are not available due to copyright reasons. Here are the five reasons why you might need a US iTunes account.

1. Music – Filipinos love music no doubt about it, and with 20 million + songs in the US iTunes store (with some OPM ones) it is nice  to support the Artists that made the songs that you really like. The average price is US$0.99 – 1.99 per song only and its very easy to make a purchase on the iPhone and iPad. Also as of 2009 all songs downloaded from the iTunes store are now DRM free! Meaning you can use it on any device that you own like music players and including playing it with USB sticks.
2. Movies and TV Shows – Apple is the first successful digital music distribution store and the #1 out there in terms of sales right now. Since they are the forefather and leader in the digital music distribution business, they’ve entered the Movies and TV show distribution too. Unfortunately, production and film companies are allergic distributing their products to the rest of the world. The US iTunes Store is one of the best online store to get your rental and digital purchases and again if you are Apple devices “stock holder” like me, you can play all of these seamlessly on all your iDevices specially on the Apple TV.
3. iTunes Match – This is part of the iCloud, Lion OS and iOS 5 powerhouse and Apple just turned the switch last November. iTunes Match is a cloud based service where it magically check your songs to match it in their existing online library so you don’t have to upload every songs from your computer.  Whats more interesting is that your long time crappy 128kbps bit rate songs can now be downloaded as 256kbps. I’ve just subscribed this week and interestingly almost all of my OPM songs were matched by the service.
4. Apps – For some reason there are apps that are only available in the US iTunes App store. Examples are Shazam, FB Messenger and Google+ on its launch to name a few. Kindly note that this also apply in the Mac OS App store.
5. FREE Music and Videos – Yes while the US iTunes Store is a paid service, Apple regularly publish free tracks and videos weekly and occasionally. I’ve downloaded a whole Starbucks Album and Christmas Songs last last year during a promo post on their Facebook page.

There you have it, I will try a follow up post on how to create a US iTunes account even if you are in the Philippines. My problem right now is that the rainy weather is so good that my eyes are falling. Have a good sunday.

Wall of Video provides an easy way playing thru a wall of movie and TV posters. It’s a clever idea because many times we remember the poster art work than the movie titles. Obviously Wall of Video library comes from Apple because when you click on the download button it directs you to the iTunes Store.

This app is available on both iPhone and iPad as a universal app.

UPDATE: Not all of the videos comes from Apple

Heres my couz Mr. Soundz in Sedona an dubstep / electro artist and producer based in UK. Check out his music at Soundcloud

Sometimes its a burden publishing your photos to your favorite online photo website, in this case on 500px. Enter 500px‘s plug-in a nifty Lightroom plug-in to solve that chore inside the app. I’ll give it a try now and will give you feedback.

What is 500px? Heres the sites About Us

500px is a photographic community powered by creative people from all over the world that lets you share and discover inspiring photographs.

Indeed I can attest to the above description, it is the new Flickr but more stunning uploads with simple but great site interface. The main difference of 500px from Flickr is, you don’t need to publish all your photos it is a showcase of your best work, a site for your portfolio. There are very few Filipinos on 500px, maybe we are just too busy uploading our “awesome” pictures on Facebook. I’m actually campaigning it to photog friends to join in now. Its been over 6 months now since I joined and it simply inspires me just checking out the photos specially the popular gallery. Add me on 500px.com/tekgik I’ll do more uploads soon. A word of caution: if you are the type that don’t wanna see artistic nudes oftenly then 500px might not be for you. But there is a nude filter so you can safely browse with kids at your back.

It looks like Fujifilm is reserving its big announcement of this interchangeable camera dubbed the X-Pro 1. A banking site accidentally leaked it yesterday. It got some identical resemblance of the current serious compact the x10. We will know next week if this is just an imagination or a reality. I think its legit and I want one.

via Slashgear

Fujifilm (yes still not digital) announced their 27 cameras for 2012 from the compact JZ100 to the more expensive bridge camera the HS30EXR. Nothing to get excited about since the rumored interchangeable APS-C x100-like design is nowhere to be found. Their press release.

The only interesting camera among the lot is the FinePix XP150 and XP100 because of its abuse-proof and GPS features.

Photo above: FinePix XP150 and XP100

I always wonder how a Nikon performs? Since I started using a DSLR I haven’t owned anything beside Canon. Specs wise, this is truly a beast that matches the Canon 1Dx. A 16MP sensor with up to 12fps speed and 51 points AF system, it is certainly the best speced Nikon camera ever made. One of my target this year is to own a Nikon but certainly not this wallet draining camera. Linky for the full info about this at Nikon’s website.