new addition..

So this is a little delayed. been a little preoccupied with other things previously.

so anyways, on saturday 25th of July 2009, at 6:32pm, my sister gave birth to a baby girl. Its her first child, making it it the first grandchild for my parents and the first niece for me and my other sister. so everyone is pretty much excited. cool stuff :)

More pics on :

http://picasaweb.google.com/str4vag/Soochi

droid update

so, tomorrow will mark the first week i have been using the phone.

so far, all has been going well, except for yesterday's hard reset, more on that later.

apps/tools i have been using :

browser : i love it. fast and easy to use. love the multiple windows on that. really needs to have flash support.

music player : good. havent use it a lot yet. but a built in grabber for the album cover would be useful.

any cut : works flaslessly.

androzip : this is cool. unzips most archive formats. and able to create gzip, zip and tar. missing RAR create, but as long as i can unrar, its good enough.

backup for root user : dont think it works. had to hard reset due to an app messing up my notification tray. tried to restore but nothing happened.

appmanager : works, easy access to all apps.

astrid : works as well. good task management tool

firc chat : this is cool except for the fast that on portrait mode, the keyboard block the last few lines of chat. so you have to constantly minimise the keyboard to see what happening. otherwise a good irc app for the phone.

meebo im : works as advertised. but there was never really any doubt since it was developed by meedo. so good msn/ym intergration.

oi notepad + oi safe : oi notepad is just a normal note taking app. but coupled with oi safe (which is a password/credit card/sensitive info encrypter) it gets even better as you get the option of encrypting and decyrpting your notes.

places directory is cool. tried it once. it works. found the gas stations near where i was. will be playing around with it more to see intergration with google maps and navigation.

google map rocks! enough said

sky map is a little buggy so far. everytime i try to find the moon, it tells me to point the phone towards the floor. no idea what is the problem there.

youtube app is fast and easy. good to use.

intergration with picasa and youtube is nice. so far tried only the picasa intergration by uploading a picture there. fast!. you can ever create new albums from withing the upload dialog which is quite cool.

speed is good. downloaded a 44mb file via mediafire in less than 15 minutes. unrar-ing the file too longer for some reason. but hey, if i can get music anywhere anything like this, i am not complaining.

barcode scanner is fun to play with :)

shazam is fun. its a software that listens to songs and will retrieve info about it. handy for those moments of "eh, who sang that song ek?"

snaptell is an app that takes photos of books and CD and then it will match it to a database of products. when a match is found, it gives you link to online stores and direction to nearest stores (you need gps enables of course)

astro is an awesome file manager. but i wish it would recognise a folder when it sees one and put it up to a-la windows.

battery life on the phone these past few days is horrible ( well not really, but it is bad)

it can last from 8 am to only about 4pm. but to the phone's defence, i was on it most of the time browsing, playing games and such, so i consider it to be heavy usage. its 3.15pm now. seems like there is 40% more juice left. seems like its getting better with age. or maybe

the trick of draining the battery till it goes flat and then charging it works.

MAGIC!!!!

Finally got my HTC Magic on friday. Went straight to FreshGear at digital mall after work that day.

At first, it was a let down. apparently, HTC Malaysia decided to cripple the device by removing the google services (i was surprised as the HTC Magic is suppose to be a google experience phone). So there was no sync to gmail, to google contacts, google calender, no integration with picasa (photos) and youtube. so it was really a bummer. Worst still, there was no android market either, that makes getting apps into the phone a pain, with the provided SlideMe application manager only having less than 300 apps (compared to the at least 4000 app on android market).

So, on Saturday, after a lot of researching, reading and asking questions on xda-developers, i decided to re-flash the phone with a modified ROM. i went with Daldroid's HTC Magic ROM. It features the goodies that HTC supplied to their phones (quickoffice, pdf reader and MS Exchange support) and also the google goodies.

It was a tense 1 hour when i decided to flash the ROM. As if you did it wrongly, there is a chance that your phone will turn into a very expensive brick.

anyway, at the end, i managed to complete the process without any hiccups, and managed to get the ROM working and now i have root access as well.

I am loving the new interface. Been spending some time finding useful apps for the phone.

Thats all for now.

Android, dawn of a new era.

its has been decided!

i am going with the magic..now for the thing to be available..which is said to be after 19th july..

waiting is such a pain..

so many choices.........which to go for?

Dream?

Magic?

Hero?

hmmmmmm

Magic

That word has many relevance in these past few days.

1. Started playing Magic: The Gathering card game again

2. Orlando Magic beats the Boston Celtics in game 7 of the Conference Semifinals :(

3. HTC releasing the Magic to Asia without carrier support in June in Singapore.

the part that really gets me excited is the last one. HTC Magic is the 2nd Android phone from HTC. And if its true, when the phone gets released in singapore, it will also be oficially available in Malaysia as well. fun :). (link)

More info about HTC Magic

GSM Arena

HTC Official Site

juniper...

Juniper is a brand of networking products. Juniper is also the reason i am so bored at work.

last week, the IS department got their hands on a new Juniper Hardware Firewall, has been successful in blocking most of the internet out. so for the past 2 weeks, i have been sitting in front of my desk at work completely bored, and sleepy.

Up side to it is that i smoke more. yippee!

So anyways, what was once a great window to limitless knowledge, entertainment, trivial knowledge, the occasional porn, the stress relieving games and much much more has been reduced dramatically.

some of the victims of this crime includes the last knights (GASP!), facebook, xkcd(GASP!), imdb, warez-bb, chuck norris facts and many other websites deemed as an enemy to productivity.

so with that i am left hanging around at these 3 websites hoping to see if there are any new updates. phonedog, phandroid, gsmarena.

I WANT MY ANDROID PHONE!.