Not sure if it was a coincident or not, but many people who has an iTunes Store US account had encountered the “Your credit card was declined. Please enter valid credit card information” issue shortly before the launch of iTunes 10. I personally encountered this problem several hours after I began using iTunes 10.

It began when I tried to upgrade an app within iTunes. I am presented with the following message in a dialog asking me to enter my iTunes Store credentials.

This issue appears to be affecting many iTunes Store US customers who has associated either a credit card or PayPal to their account as billing information.

I had called Apple iTunes support and their only suggestion is to send an email using the button at the iTunes Support page in the section: Get Customer Service -> iTunes Store Account and Billing -> Managing your Account. Click on the “Email Us” button and fill in the accompanied form.

I hope this issue is resolved soon. Since this is now preventing me from purchasing anything from the iTunes Store US or upgrade any of my apps.

[Updated: September 3, 2010, 12:21]
Thanks to a Twitter friend, @natesaint, he suggested that changing the payment option to “None” will at least allow the user with this issue to update the apps. Unfortunately, I had already reported my issue to Apple and received an email reply from them telling me that they’re working on my issue. I do not want to change anything in my payment details to effect their investigations.

BTW: So far this issue are mostly reported by users outside of the continent of USA. I had also checked that using proxy service does not resolve the issue.

[Updated: September 3, 2010, 13:34]
The proxy service (VPN) that I use is Hotspot. If anyone tried other VPN or found a solution please leave a comment below.

One of my reader found that waiting 24 hours resolved his credit card declined issue. Unfortunately, I will have to wait another 24 hours to see if that helps.

[Updated: September 3, 2010, 14:00]
Another Twitter friend, @elwoodchu said that HideIPVPN does not help either. This is very likely an Apple issue rather than an IP filtering or true credit card issue.

When I signed onto iTunes Ping this morning (HK time) I was able to connect my account to my Facebook account to locate my Facebook friends who are already on Ping.

As many of you know, Apple will be holding its annual invitation-only music event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on September 1st, 10:00 (US PST).

For the first time in a long while, Apple will be streaming this event live over the Internet using its “HTTP Live Streaming” (presumably “QuickTime Broadcaster”). Unfortunately, if you do not own one of Apple’s products you will not be able to watch it via the Internet.

Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com.

Sep 1, 18:00 London Time
Sep 1, 13:00 US Eastern Time
Sep 1, 12:00 US Central Time
Sep 1, 10:00 US Pacific Time
Sep 2, 01:00 Hong Kong Time
Sep 2, 03:00 Sydney Time

Apple Hong Kong online store

It appears that the prices of Apple products, more specifically iPad, in Hong Kong may be the reasons Apple HK online store are still showing estimate shipment time of “7 – 10 business days”. Where as all the other Asian Apple online stores: Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, which are officially selling iPads show estimate delivery time of “24 hours”. Could it be because the prices of iPads sold through Apple HK official channels are lower than all the other countries?

The inventory situation at the Apple Authorized Resellers in Hong Kong are even worst. None of the resellers can promise customers when they will receive more iPads for sale. In most cases the resellers don’t know the model(s) of iPad they will receive until the inventory arrives at the store.

Apple New Zealand online store

Apple Australia online store

Apple New Zealand online store

Apple Japan online store

A patent filing by Apple in February 2009 was made public last week. This patent is related to the “Systems and methods for identifying unauthorized users of an electronic device”.

In the patent it details how Apple’s technology is capable of identifying unauthorized users of an electronic device. This unauthorized user of the electronic device can be detected by identifying particular activities that may indicate suspicious behavior. It is rumored that this technology may appear on the iPad to allow for the feature of sharing a single iPad among different family members or in a classroom situation.

For security application of the technology, when an unauthorized user is detected, various safety measures can be taken. For example, information related to the identity of the unauthorized user (ie. photo, IP address, etc.), the unauthorized user’s operation of the electronic device, or the current location of the electronic device can be gathered. While functions of the electronic device can be restricted upon unauthorized used has been confirmed.

The owner of the electronic device can be notified of the unauthorized user by sending an alert notification through any suitable medium, such as, for example, a voice mail, e-mail, or text message.

On the positive side this technology may be Apple’s attempts to satisfy corporate users regarding security concerns and their ability to entrust sensitive corporate information on these iOS devices.

On the other hand, Apple can use this technology to potentially identify Jailbreakers as “unauthorized users”, the system will then notify Apple via one of the notification means described. We have to remember that when the US Copyrights Office rules that it is no longer illegal under the DMCA to jailbreak the iPhone, Apple’s response to the ruling is that “jailbreaking is a violation of the iPhone end-user license agreement“,

I continue to caution anyone who are considering jailbreaking their iOS devices. Please read blog post relating to local [Hong Kong] issues with jailbreaking.

After I published the Open Letter to Smartone-Vodafone in April, I thought Smartone-Vodafone (SMV) finally understands the needs of its subscribers when they released the new tariff plans for the iPad in July.

When the dust is finally settled I finds out SMV still doesn’t understand what subscriber needs.

SMV restricts the availability of micro-SIM cards to only certain tariff plans; plans that SMV believes iPad or iPhone 4 users should be using. Even though SMV now have large quantities of micro-SIM cards. SMV sales representatives say their back-office system explicitly restricts activations of certain tariff plans for micro-SIM and others with min-SIM.

Aside from the SIM type restrictions the tariff plans are also restricted to particular devices that SMV believes the tariff plans should be used with.

Just to compete with other Hong Kong mobile carriers SMV follows with its own pre-paid no contract roaming tariff plans, but these plans are restricted to Internet browsing and Email access.

Why is SMV still trying to dictate how we use the tariff plans we subscribe to? I can understand having these restrictions on limited tariff plans or if micro-SIM supplies are very low. For unlimited local data there should not be either of the above restrictions.

Speaking of “unlimited data…”, in many of the tariff plans designed for the iOS device, SMV explicitly restricts these so call “unlimited data” to Internet browsing and checking emails, and do not include traffic from apps on the iOS device. Do they know that majority of the people who uses the iPad spend majority of their times within Internet enabled apps rather than the browser (Mobile Safari) or email app (Mail)? So a warning to subscribers, you need to read the small print and choose the plans that is most suitable to your usage of the iPad or iPhone.

Of all the carriers in Hong Kong I thought SMV was the only one that is open minded enough to “think different” (think outside the box) but from these actions they appear not.

[Updated: August 18, 13:20]
As suggested by the reader, Art, I will clarify a few of the points in my post.

When I say, “restricts the availability of micro-SIM cards to only certain tariff plans…” I am referring to SMV not allowing certain tariff plans to be issued with a micro-SIM. These plans are the Mobile Broadband: Power 3, Power 8 and Power 28, subscribers are not allow to request the issue of micro-SIM cards with these plans.

When I say, “tariff plans are also restricted to particular devices…”, SMV is preventing the HKD198 iPad plan from being used on any other device other than the iPad.

Over the past years iPod and iPhone capacities have gotten larger and larger. Throughout these times I still advise friends to stay with the smallest size models in the iPod and iPhone lines.

You may say, “Isn’t larger the better?” Well in this case, that is not necessary true. Especially when people store mostly audio tracks: music and podcast, on these devices.

Some say, “I have a collection of several thousand tracks, how can I store them all on an iPod or iPhone with small capacities.” My question to that is, how many hours do you have in a day to listen to audio tracks? For most that is 8 – 10 hours during a normal day.

My suggestion to these people who I recommends to buy the samllest size iPod or iPhone, is to use the “Smart Playlist” feature within iTunes to help select a set of fresh music tracks to synchronize to the iPod or iPhone each day or however frequent.

The first filter is to choose the list of tracks that had not been played in the past day. You can increase these if you do not mind listening to the same track as the day before.

Next, among these tracks I choose only the ones that I had given a rating of more than 3 stars. How you use the rating system within iTunes is up to you. I personally use it to mark tracks that I really like to listen to or will want to appear on my iPhone.

The “Limit to” checkbox I set the total selection to fill 8 hours and these tracks are chosen randomly. I also checked the “Match only checked items” checkbox, because when I rip (import) a CD I normally rip the entire CD for archive purpose, but I may only like one or two tracks on the CD, so I only check the tracks that I like and leave the others unchecked.

The above Smart Album is only about 740MB in size which means that even for a 8GB iPod I still have a lot of room for customized playlists (ie. “work out”), podcasts and video files.

So if you depends on Jailbreakme or requires the SIM-unlock apps in Cydia store like Ultrasn0w, you will want to stay away from these until the developers of Jailbreakme release an update using another exploit they hinted to be available.

A few minutes ago the iPhone Dev Team released the iPhone unlocking software Ultrasn0w version 1.0-1. It is available through Cydia, so you will have to first jailbreak your iPhone; using something like Jailbreakme 2.0, before able to install it.

If you cannot find Ultrasn0w in Cyndia you can try added the repository: repo666.ultrasn0w.com

This software is able to unlock the following iPhone models:

• iPhone 4 with baseband 01.59.00
• iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS with basebands:
  • 04.26.08
  • 05.11.07
  • 05.12.01
  • 05.13.04

Since the first jailbreak of thee iPhone over 3 years ago, there are now much less reasons for people to jailbreak. Aside from Apple Hong Kong, there are now many more countries that sells officially SIM-unlocked iPhones.

For those who owns and live in countries that do not have official SIM-unlocked iPhones, there is really no reason for them to unlock unless they travel outside of their countries where prepaid GSM SIM cards are available.

While you making your decision about unlocking, you may also want to read my posts: Why You May Not Want to Jailbreak iPhone or iPad? and Protect Yourself by Jailbreaking Your iPhone?.

As always the final decision is all yours.

On Monday I reported the release of the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad jailbreak, plus post some questions for those who are considering jailbreaking to think about before they so.

I want to reiterate that jailbreaking your iPhone will potentially make your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad (iOS devices) unstable. Apple still insists that jailbreaking will void your iOS devices’ warrantees.

So, how is Jailbreakme 2.0 able to so easy apply its magic without requiring a connection to the computer? It is because @comex (main architect of the jailbreak) takes advantage of a PDF “flaw” to allow him to attach a payload (application) to a PDF file, by disguising it as a Compact Font Format (CFF) file. When MobileSafari (the default Apple browser on iOS devices) encounters this special PDF file the payload code is executed, allowing Jailbreakme code to perform its magic.

This PDF “flaw” is not something new or broken by @comex, it is a loophole that exists in all versions of Safari released so far. It is very likely that other hackers already know about this loophole. The problem is that the ability to jailbreak an iPhone is a highly publicized news and so is how @comex accomplish this. As a result exposing this PDF “flaw” and classifying this exploit with a “zero-day” vulnerability status.

When an exploit is classified as a “zero-day” vulnerability, it means that there exist openly an exploit that takes advantage of the said vulnerability (ie. Jailbreakme 2.0). Although we can trust @comex and his team regarding Jailbreakme, we cannot say the same for others who may be taking advantage of this vulnerability.

Having the ability to trick the iOS device to execute code can be potentially very dangerous. Personal data may be stolen or worst.

It is expected that Apple will plug this vulnerability by iOS 4.1, but this version of iOS is not expected until some time this Fall.

In the mean time everyone who uses an iPhone is now susceptible to this vulnerability. They must be careful about which PDF to open. Although, if they remember my 4 Rules of Using the Internet I explains to users they should be doing this already.

To be safe, another “white hacker”, @cdevwill, has created a “PDF Loading Warner” iOS app that will present a warning dialog each time an iOS device attempts to open a PDF file. Installing this app on your device will serve as a further protection from this PDF exploit until Apple releases a fix.

Unfortunately, this “PDF Loading Warner” app is an Apple unauthorized app, so it is only available through the jailbroken Cydia app store. Your decisiion now is to whether to jailbreak your iPhone just to install the “PDF Loading Warner” app.

After the release of iOS 4 users of the iPhone had been waiting for the iPhone Dev Team to release their jailbreak software.

This morning @comex (who is not on the iPhone Dev Team) released a jailbreak for the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad right from within MobileSafari without using a computer (Windows or OS X computer). This jailbreak is for all bootrom and iOS versions accept for iOS 4.1 Beta.

Before I get into why you may not want to jailbreak, let me first explains the steps required to jailbreak your iOS devices.

1. Ensure you have the latest version of iTunes 9.1.2
2. Upgrade your iOS device to the latest iOS version using iTunes
3. Go to Safari on your iOS device and go to http://jailbreakme.com
4. Follow the instructions on the screen

Your jailbreak is complete. This is the second time Jailbreakme.com method has been used to jailbreak iOS device, and it is the simplest method.

Now that it is so easy to jailbreak, let me explain why you may not want to TRY.

Even though jailbreak is now legal in the United States, doing so may cause app instability. Since the ruling in the United States Apple released a press release to say that the action of jailbreaking will void the iPhone warrantee.

Prior to the ruling there was also rumors to say that iOS 4.1 has a “jailbreak watermark” in iOS 4.1. Although this rumor has since been dismissed and members of the iPhone Dev Team claim that if there is one they will be able to remove the “watermark”.

Now the courts rule that jailbreak is legal in the US, Apple may begin to step up their efforts to identify iPhones that has or had been jailbroken.

With the initial release of Jailbreakme 2.0 there is a bug that disabled MMS and FaceTime  (iPhone 4) on the iPhone. Hours later the bug was corrected but for the less technical you will need to restore your iPhone and reapply the Jailbreakme 2.0. This is just one example of the effects jailbreaking may have on the functionalities of the iPhone apps.

The most common reason to jailbreak the iPhone is to be able to install MyWi to configure the iPhone into a WiFi hotspot. There are now reports from several people that mobile carriers are showing signs that they are planning to distinguish these type of traffic and charge the customers at their tethering rates.

Aside from compatibility of Apple authorized apps there are still the compatibilities of the unauthorized apps from stores like Cydia. AppleiPhoneSchool blog has a list of unauthorized apps and their compatibility status.

As you can see the benefits of jailbreak may not be for everyone, so before you decide to jailbreak you should carefully consider your needs for a jailbroken iPhone.

There are several caveats, each person is only allow to purchase 2 iPhones, purchases must be delivered to a Hong Kong shipping address, and as predicted the White version is “currently unavailable for order”.

I had previously expected Apple HK to open up the online sale on Monday like they did with the iPad launch in HK, to capitalize on the hype the brick-and-mortar outlet crowds and line ups. But in comparison Apple HK opened it up only after 24 hours.

The catch is that the online “estimate shipment time” is “3 weeks” this is the highest level of periods Apple online store has for its products. This level means that supplies at brick-and-mortar retail outlets are no where to be found.

Apple’s Unofficial Inventory Status:

Yesterday I reported Smartone-Vodafone’s (SMV) tariff plans for the soon to release iPhone 4. Not long after my post was published the other competitors in Hong Kong also release their respective tariff plans for the iPhone 4.

With the help of @abc1230 (on Twitter) I have created an English version of the spreadsheet (http://bit.ly/iphone4hkplans) comparing the tariff plan offerings from these carriers in Hong Kong.

As we are only 2 days away from the official iPhone 4 release in Hong Kong. One of the three Apple mobile carrier partners, Smartone-Vodafone (SMV) released their contract prices for the iPhone 4.

Note that the only difference among iPhone 4 sold through mobile carrier partners, Apple authorized resellers and Apple HK store online is that the ones through the mobile carriers comes with a 24-month contract.

Since the HKD12.00 administration fee is the same for all mobile carriers in Hong Kong. The actual price for these contracts are:

Also none of the above plans includes the SMV’s X-Power service, this is a HKD36/month additional charge. So this can be the required VAS you add to your plan.

Although none of the plans states, according to SMV Customer Service, Tethering is included in all three plans. Of course the first two plans will have a data limit the subscriber keep an eye on.

[Updated: July 28, 2010, 15:05]
Smartone-Vodafone now informs us that thee prepaid amount for the iPhone 4 are as follows:
iPhone 4 16GB = HKD4480
iPhone 4 32GB = HKD5280

The differences between these prepaid amount and the “Upfront” amount mentioned above are rebated back to the customer through the terms of the 24-month contract.

[Updated: July 28, 2010, 20:00]
Thanks to abc1230 (aka A網誘) on Twitter for putting together a spreadsheet to outline the different iPhone 4 tariff plans from 5 of the Hong Kong mobile carriers.

I have translated this spreadsheet into English (http://bit.ly/iphone4hkplans), but due to my limited Chinese comprehension there are still some work to do in the translation. Please feel free to contact me if you want to help complete the translation and or help update the information on the spreadsheet.

Since Apple is currently listing 7 – 10 business days for delivery. So if anyone recently; the past 3 days, place their names on wait lists at Apple authorized resellers in Hong Kong, and if you had placed deposit. I suggest you get your deposit back and place your order through Apple HK store online.

Many people are tempted by the low cost of Apple products in Hong Kong compared to all other countries around the world, including USA. They are most attracted to the factory SIM-unlocked iPhones sold through official Apple resellers and Apple HK store online.

So they are tempted to purchase one or more of these products while they are travelling to Hong Kong. Making a purchasing decision like this should not be taken lightly. Aside from the cost, for any electronic product there should also be consideration of warrantee.

Fortunately, Apple had changed its warrantee last year for all its “portable” devices (ie. MacBook, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.) such that they have a worldwide warrantee coverage. But you need to read the (not so) small print in Apple’s warrantee documents. Apple has the rights to request any warrantee services to be performed in the purchased country. Of course, this is less likely if the country where the warrantee requester is in also officially sells the item in question.

In some cases, people who lives in Hong Kong may want to consider purchasing Apple products from other countries. One such example, is the current situation with the iPad, where they were sold out within one day and Apple Premier Resellers have stopped receiving pre-orders because they can no longer promise a date on which to fulfill the backorders. Fortunately, for people who lives in HK, by this Friday (July 30th) Apple HK will be officially selling every Apple released products. Therefore, the chances of Apple HK requesting purchasers to send the warranted item back to purchasing country for warrantee repairs is low. So if you have the means to purchase iPad or iPhone 4 from UK or France, and willing to pay the higher cost due to exchange rates, you can.

Please understand I am not suggesting you purchase from the gray-market sellers in Mong Kok or Wanchai. These resellers are charging approximately HKD1000.00 above List price for iPads and close to 200% more for the iPhone 4 (from UK or France), lower for the ones from USA.

Has Smartone-Vodafone (SMV) finally listened to my reader’s and my call in my Open Letter to Smartone-Vodafone?

Along with the different tariff plans SMV releases for the iPad they have also released a “Tag-On Micro-SIM for iPad” plan for existing SMV subscribers. For an additional HKD128/month use of any voice and data plans with unlimited data can share the data usage with their iPad. It also includes unlimited free access to WiFi hotspots in HK. For anyone without unlimited data plans they can add an additional HKD88/month for the privilege.

This is definitely a step in the right direction. Please keep it up.

[Updated: July 23, 2010, 16:59]
Well I may be a bit too hasty to compliment SMV. It has been confirmed via Smartone-Vodafone Facebook page that this new iPad plans do not include their X-Power service, which includes that ability to playback Flash and YouTube videos while the iPad is on the SMV 3G network. Not good!

[Updated: July 30, 2010, 11:59]
I just confirmed with SMV that X-Power cannot be added to any of the iPad tariff plans for $48/month as previously thought.

Over the past 4 years there had been many Twitter clients created for the iPhone, Blackberry, OS X and Windows platforms. With the arrival of the Apple iPad, a new class of Twitter clients arrived.

Some recycled what they had done on the iPhone; like TweetDeck, some simply recompiled their iPhone app to run on the iPad. Then there are ones like Infoxenter, a Hong Kong developer, who decides to rethink the iPad platform and tries to utilize the full dimension of the iPad’s 9.7″ touch screen display. Infoxenter released Twitepad [iTunes App Store link] as its attempt to create a Twitter client for the iPad. Was it successful? I will try to explain below.

Before I get in to the review of the app I want to separate the different types of Twitter users into two distinct groups:

• users with one Twitter account and;
• users with multiple Twitter accounts

The current version (v1.31) of Twitepad is really not designed for the latter type users, I will focus this review on the former type users.

The app starts off with two main areas: a column on the left showing the Twitter stream and a wider column on the right which serves as a built-in browser. Unfortunately, this layout is the same for both landscape and portrait orientation of the iPad. As you can imagine when the iPad is in portrait orientation the Browser column is way too narrow.

I agree that having a built-in browser is convenient for viewing links from tweets, but having it stuck in a particular column that the app does not automatically reveal is clumbersome. I am not suggesting Twitepad’s developer copy what other Twitter iPad clients (TweetDeck, Twitterific, Echofon, etc.) have done. Although, these other clients’ implementations for viewing link’s content within a tweet by displaying the web page in a new screen that automatically occupies the width of the iPad screen, along with options to view the said page in Safari on the iPad, share it, send it via email or save to Instapaper, is much more intuitive than Twitepad’s approach.

Speaking of the browser column, there are icons in the browser’s toolbar that are familiar to the users of mobile Safari. The Stop, Reload and “←” (“Back”) behaviours are as expected, but the behaviours of the remaining buttons on the toolbar are not.

Strangely there is a “←” (“Back”) button but there is no “→” (“Forward”) button. In Safari the “+” button is use to save the current web page to the browser’s bookmarks list, but in Twitepad clicking on the “+” button will set the current page as Home page.

On the browser toolbar there is a Tab/Browser icon, in Safari clicking on this button will bring the user to the list of opened tab/browser windows. But in Twitepad clicking on it reviews a thumbnail of a new browser window loaded with the current web page’s content. To make this function even more confusing there is an arrow icon in the footer of the browser window. When this arrow icon is clicked, it toggles between “up arrow” and “down arrow”. The former will reveals the list of thumbnails showing the opened browser windows, the latter will hide the list of thumbnails. Although, this sounds logical, in practice it results in an awkward UX.

In the browser toolbar next to the URL field is a blue Bookmark icon, clicking on this icon will review the browser Bookmarks, unfortunately this is separate from the iPad’s Safari Bookmarks.

The remainder icons in the browser’s Footer are the “Twitter” and “Instapaper” icons. The latter saves the current web page to your Instapaper account, but there are no progress indicator so if the network connection is slow or for whatever reason Instapaper did not immediately respond, the web page will be saved multiple times into the Instapaper account. The “Twitter” icon is for when the Browser column is scrolled all the way to the left of the screen as a result hiding all the Twitter Stream columns. Clicking on this icon will slide the Browser column to the right revealing the next left column of the Twitter stream.

There is a group of app settings in the iPad’s Settings app, and another group of settings can be found in the Options pane, accessible from any Twitter Stream column title’s right most icon.

The set of options available are a combination of settings for the app and the column. Hidden within one of the column setting, “Account”, are the settings for the Bit.ly and Instapaper credentials associated with each Twitter account.

Aside from these unusual UI decisions, the features of the Twitter Stream column are as functional as the other mentioned iPad Twitter clients above. It has the ability to Retweet tweets (both new and classic methods), replies to the tweet originator or all mentioned, DM the originator of the tweet, marks a tweet as Favorite, translates the tweet to English, and email the tweet.

Clicking on the Avatar image, the name of the tweet originator or any twitter accounts mentioned in a tweet, will bring up an information pane displaying the vital information about the tweeple who originated the tweet. Information like the tweeple’s Followers, Friends, Favorites and Tweets, his bio paragraph, whether the tweeple is following the user and if the user is following the tweeple.

In this information pane the user also have the ability to Follow, Unfollow or add the tweeple to a list. With the latter function it points out the app’s lack of consideration for multiple Twitter accounts. The user is only able to add the tweeple to a list from the Twitter account that is currently following the tweeple.

For each tweet that has the colorful Conversation icon, the user can click on it to bring up a pane showing the full conversation relating to the tweet in question.

The other icon you may see within a tweet is the blue “globe” icon (a better icon would be the pin, flag or Google’s geo location icon), this icon indicates the tweet is geo tagged. Clicking on this blue “globe” icon will bring up a Google Map showing the geo tagged information.

Clicking the New Tweet icon on the left hand side of the Twitter Stream column title will bring up a pane presenting the user with the options to create a new tweet or send a Direct Message. The only difference is that clicking on the Direct Message option the app will automatically places a “D ” at the beginning of the New Tweet pane.

In this New Tweet pane, the options are: add a photo from the iPad’s photo album, toggle the geo location for the tweet, add a “@” or “#” symbol to the tweet, delete the tweet, shorten the URL and change the sender of the tweet to a different Twitter account. The icons representing the latter two functions are a bit misleading, this is just one of the examples that this app still require polish and work. One very unintuitive button is the “Bird” icon which happens to be the “send” or “post” button for the New Tweet pane.

One of the app settings in the iPad’s Settings app is to set either to use one or two fingers to scroll the columns. Yes, Twitepad has the ability to have multiple Twitter Stream columns, similar to TweetDeck. Unfortunately the navigation and manipulation of the columns are not as intuitive and smooth as those used in TweetDeck. The more columns active the less efficient the app will run. Having 4 Twitter Stream and Browser columns running I found the app tend to crash frequently.

In conclusion, this is a good attempt to develop a Twitter client that is different from the others. Has it taken full advantage of the iPad screen real estate to present a great user experience, I cannot say it has. I hope the developer will now focus on deliver a great user experience for each Use Case rather than adding any more functionalities.

Lastly it has recently released a free version of the app called “Twitepad One” [iTunes App Store link] for users who only has one Twitter account. I hope that the developer will give more focus on multiple Twitter accounts after it has improve the UX for each of the existing Use Cases.

As the pending arrival of the iPhone 4 next week (July 30th) and the re-availability of iPhone 3GS 8GB in Hong Kong, the Apple mobile carrier partners, 3 HK and Smartone-Vodafone (SMV) have began to compete in tariff plans.

3 HK iPhone 3GS Tariff Plans

Smartone-Vodafone iPhone 3GS Tariff Plans

The only difference between the two plan; from an iPhone user point of view, is the extra 100 free inter-network voice minutes that 3 HK includes in their plans. Both have a 24 months contract commitment.

One very important note to be aware of, is SMV’s ability to transcode most Flash video to enable them to be playable on the iPhone while using SMV’s 3G network. Such capability is not available to other carriers in Hong Kong.

Note: as a reminder all iPhone sold through official channels are SIM-unlocked, meaning SIM cards from any GSM carrier can be used inside.

Several months ago a reader (Kit) told me about his ordeal with 3 HK; one of the 7 mobile carriers in Hong Kong.

From my non-scientific analysis, 3 HK is disliked by many of its subscribers, many of them are friends of mine. Some of them even created Facebook groups, 聲討 3HK iphone 服務奇差 !!!, 3HK PCCW 李氏大財團屈錢噤住黎搶申訴專區, and I love iPhone but I hate 3HK !! to share their dislikes for the company and its service.

Now let me share with you Kit’s experience with 3 HK. It started off with his purchase of the iPhone 3G in July 2008. He bought the subsidized iPhone 3G from 3 HK by subscribing to their most expensive tariff plan at HKD498/month, with a 24 months contract. This gave him a “free” ($0 payment up front) iPhone 3G.

When Apple released the iPhone 3GS in July 2009, he asked 3 HK to upgrade to the new model, 3 HK accommodated his request by asking him to extend his tariff plan contract for another 12 months for HKD398/month. Since his HKD498/month plan does not expire until July 2010 the new 12 months contract at HKD398/month does not start until then.

During this second year using the iPhone 3GS he experienced drop calls at his home (Hong Kong Island), at work (Kowloon tourist district) and during the MTR (subway) rides between the two locations. He complained to 3 HK about the drop calls issue over 5 times, each time 3 HK Customer Service’s response is that they will get back to him after their technical colleagues investigate his complains. Of course, each time there were no call back from 3 HK Customer Service.

Kit finally proposed to 3 HK to allow him to drop to the lower tariff plan to reflect his lack of use of the iPhone, due to connectivity issues. 3 HK refused his proposal so Kit asked to be removed from his commitment due to 3 HK’s failure to deliver the promised service. 3 HK again refuse but counter offer to discount his remaining months in his contract by HKD30/month. Kit did not agree with the counter proposal, but offered to pay the difference between the subsidized and non-subsidized prices of the iPhone 3GS so he can get out of the contract commitment, but 3 HK still rejected his request.

After being frustrated with the whole ordeal Kit decided to write a letter to Consumer Council for help. In the end with the assistance from Consumer Council, Kit was able to get out of his contract 12 months earlier by paying the difference between the subsidized and non-subsidized prices of the iPhone 3GS.

The lesson here is not to allow any corporation to push you around when you are not receiving the service or product promised. Be persistence in your search for a resolution and if needed seek Consumer Council for assistance.

Hong Kong mobile carriers are notorious for treating its customers poorly but among the 7 carriers there are a couple who have shown signs in the past several years to do better. I am sure by speaking to your friends you will know who these two carriers are.

There are now more development regarding the official Hong Kong release of the iPad.

As of this morning the Apple HK authorized reseller, Ultimate who released iPad HK prices last week, is no longer taking pre-order or any deposit for the iPad. They even claim that the flyer last week is fake.

Apparently it was Apple Hong Kong who stopped them from doing so. Since Apple HK was not ready to release any pricing to the public.

It has always been strange for Apple HK to officially release two brand new products (iPad and iPhone 4) in the same month. As we already know the iPhone 4 will officially arrive in Hong Kong through the three Apple carrier partners: 3 HK, Smartone-Vodafone and PCCW CSL, on July 30th and the other authorize resellers end of August.

[Updated: July 19, 2010, 20:40]
Apple just released a press release confirming that this Friday, July 23 five more countries: Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore, of the 17 in the second phrase iPad launch will be receiving iPads.

iPad Available in Nine More Countries This Friday

CUPERTINO, California—July 19, 2010—Apple® today announced that iPad™ will be available in Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore this Friday, July 23. iPad allows users to connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before. Users can browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch HD videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more, all using iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch™ user interface. iPad is 0.5 inches thin and weighs just 1.5 pounds—thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook—and delivers up to 10 hours of battery life.*

Beginning this Friday, customers can purchase all models of iPad through Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.

Pricing & Availability
All iPad models will be available in Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore this Friday, July 23.

iPad is currently available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US for a suggested retail price of $499 (US) for 16GB, $599 (US) for 32GB, and $699 (US) for 64GB for iPad Wi-Fi models and $629 (US) for 16GB, $729 (US) for 32GB and $829 (US) for 64GB for iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G models. iPad will roll out to many more countries later this year and Apple will announce availability and local pricing for these additional countries at a later date.

*Battery life depends on device settings, usage and other factors. Actual results vary.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork, and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple is reinventing the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

[Updated: July 19, 2010, 22:15]
It appears that the local authorized reseller, Ultimate has upset Apple Hong Kong. Apple HK’s web page for where to purchase iPad’s in HK has omitted Ultimate as one of their resellers in HK. One good thing for us consumers, is that if Apple HK is upset, this means that the leaked prices from Ultimate last week is most likely the actual prices for the iPad’s to be sold in HK.

Before I begin I want to review what happened last night (HK time).

Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs held a press conference about the iPhone 4 antenna issue at Cupertino, California.

He claims that the iPhone 4 antenna issue is common to all modern day mobile phones and showed videos of the fact.

Having said that Apple will give out free cases to all iPhone 4 owners. For any users who had purchased Apple Bumpers Apple will refund these users. But Apple is not able to make enough Bumpers so they will source other cases, and make all these cases available for iPhone 4 customers to apply for on Apple.com starting next week. Apple will evaluate the situation on September 30th and assess if this program needs to be extended.

During the press conference Jobs also confirmed that the iPhone 4 second phrase launch is on schedule and will happen on July 30, 2010. Many of you already know about this from my previous report, but now we have an exact date. One thing changed in the iPhone 4 second phrase launch is the omission of South Korea from the list of original 18 countries:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• Denmark
• Finland
• Hong Kong
• Ireland
• Italy
• Luxembourg
• Netherlands
• Norway
• New Zealand
• Singapore
• South Korea
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland

I still recommend you wait for the general availability of the iPhone 4 in late August and purchase from Apple store online or from one of its authorized resellers in Hong Kong. The only differences for purchasing from non-mobile carriers are, you will have to wait about a month more to get your iPhone 4, and most importantly you do not have to commit to a 2 year contract.

If you choose my recommended method of purchasing your iPhone 4, you will need to know that none of the mobile carriers: Smartone-Vodafone (SMV), 3 HK and PCCW, that offer micro-SIM cards are giving them out to customers who do not own an iPhone 4. So there is no way for you to get a micro-SIM before the massive influx of customers demanding them, nor to get these micro-SIM ahead of the delivery of your iPhone 4.

I think these decisions of the mobile carriers are wrong, but I think it is due to the limited quantities the carriers have in their inventory at the moment. Hopefully these practices will change later when supplies become more prevalent.

Another reason to wait before you buy an iPhone 4, is due to Apple setting a deadline for iPhone 4 customers to receive free Bumpers. I speculate that the September 30, 2010 deadline may be the date they gave themselves to come out with a design modification to the iPhone 4.

In either case Hong Kong is still the best place to purchase an iPhone 4. This is because Hong Kong is the least expensive place in the world to purchase any Apple products, as proven again by the list prices of the official HK iPad. It is expected that the iPhone 4 (non-subsidized) prices from Apple store online and its authorized resellers will also be around those non-subsidized prices from UK, France and Canada; the three other locations also selling SIM-unlocked iPhone 4.

Along with the minor iOS 4.0.1 update for the iPhone 3G/3GS/4 that Apple made available last night, Apple has also released the iOS 3.2.1 update for the iPad.

This update should appear in iTunes when you plug in your iPad; whether it is a WiFi or WiFi+3G version.

If you do not see the update in iTunes you can click on the Update button in the Summary pane with your iPad plugged in. Still having problems getting this massive 456.9MB payload from Apple? You can try getting it directly from Apple Support page.

If you opt for the manual method, with the iPad connected to your computer, go to iTunes’s Summary pane for the iPad hold down the Option key (OS X) or Shift key (Windows), then click on the Update button while the iPad is connected to the computer.

Unfortunately, this is also a minor iOS update for the iPad, we will have to wait until the Fall 2010 to see the iOS 4.x update for the iPad. I hope Apple will align the iOS versions on the iDevices this Fall. The last thing Apple wants to do is eliminate their wall-garden advantage over Android OS’s disparate hardware and manufacture.

News regarding the Hong Kong release of the iPad is heating up, since July is suppose to be the month it official arrives in Hong Kong from Apple Hong Kong.

The expected date of availability is July 19th as I reported two weeks ago, and then last Saturday comes news of an Apple announcement on July 15th (today).

Yesterday Smartone-Vodafone released a press release stating it they will announce their tariff plans for the iPad WiFi+3G, without providing any dates on which they will do so.

Hong Kong, 14 July 2010 – SmarTone-Vodafone today announced that it will offer dedicated iPad price plans for iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G in the coming weeks. iPad allows users to connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before. Users can browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch HD videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more, all using iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch user interface. For more information about iPad please visit www.apple.com/ipad/.

A few hours ago Ultimate (tip from Chris and Sean), one of the larger Apple authorized reseller in Hong Kong, announced their pricing for the iPad WiFi and iPad WiFi+3G models.

These prices are approximately the same as the Apple US list prices after USD to HKD conversion and rounding to match typical HK pricing. Again proving my point that Hong Kong is the least expensive place to purchase any Apple products. Ultimate are currently taking pre-orders with a HKD1000.00 deposit, the expected delivery date is in 2 – 3 weeks.

A long with the iPad prices they also release prices for various official Apple accessories.

	Apple iPad Keyboard Dock	HKD548
	Apple iPad Case	HKD298
	Apple iPad Dock	HKD228
	Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit	HKD228
	Apple iPad 10W USB Power Adapter	HKD228
	Apple iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter	HKD228

So far there are no pricing from the other major Apple resellers in Hong Kong.

A quick update on the status of Apple’s official release of the iPad in Hong Kong.

I had previously reported that the iPad will officially be available in Hong Kong on July 19th. My source still insist on the date as being accurate. Although the prices have yet to be available. Many of you had bugged me about the lateness of the pricing, but Apple is very tight lip about the whole thing. I apologize for that.

We do expect the price to be not far from the HKD conversion of the Apple US prices before tax and rounded to the closes $10.00. So I don’t know why Apple is keeping these information so close to its chest. Could there be a possibility that Apple will lower the prices of the iPad (worldwide)? So soon after the US release? Apple has done it before with the iPhone 3G, anything may happen. If so, that will explain the secrecy.

There is now a possible Apple Hong Kong event on July 15th, so the prices for the Hong Kong versions of the iPad may not be announced until then.

In either case we may know in 5 days how Apple will position the iPad for Hong Kong.

View Larger Map
For many years the sidewalk near O’Brien Road and Thomson Road has had a problem with the drug addicts hanging out around the clock in the area. The exact spot is the area in front of the Wanchai pedestrian walkway stair case. This is because a drug addiction center is situated right next to the location.

The drug addicts would leave chairs to sit. Some of them bring their unleashed dogs, which are dirty and looks as if they are diseased. Many of them also have various personal items stashed or hung in the fences of the MTR exit. All this caused a major hygiene problem, several of them also lay drunk along the sidewalks, shooting up near the MTR exit flower beds, or sell drugs openly.

This area is a major tourist area, of the easy access to Wanchai Computer City and with the walkway to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. The area also has heavy local pedestrian traffic, because the pedestrian walkway connects many government offices: Immigration Tower, Inland Revenue, Traffic Department, other private offices and hotels to the Wanchai MTR entrances. It is also area where many of the cross harbour buses unload their passengers returning to their apartments in Wanchai mid-levels.

During the municipal election, I once mentioned to a candidate about the problem at the location, a few weeks later the city Health & Hygiene department, ambulance and police all worked together to clean up the area. Unfortunately, this cleanup lasted only a few days and the drug addicts took over the area again.

After numerous complaints to the city and City Council, something was finally done on June 19th. The area was cleaned again by the city’s Health & Hygiene department, all the chairs and personal items were removed and the police made some arrests. This time it kind of worked. The drug addicts left the area and was afraid to return, but instead they moved a few meters down and now hangs out in front of the 7-11′s air conditioned doorway. As you can see from the photo, some of them just lay around sleeping along with their belonging.

Of course the only solution is to move the Drug Addiction Center some where else. The problem is where? I do not want this in my neighbourhood, but who would.

If you think the iPhone camera is not up to par, you may want to think again.

Lee of FStoppers.com decided to proof that you can take very beautiful fashion shoot style photos with any camera, even the one from his iPhone 3GS. So he recruited a few friends.

by Lee Morris

by Lee Morris

by Lee Morris

by Lee Morris

You can check out the before/after versions of the above photos on their Flickr page.

Lee and friends also documented the photo shoot in a video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOoGjtSy7xY[/youtube]

If this is the kind of results a group of professionals can do with an iPhone 3GS, imagine what they can do with an iPhone 4.

HTML5 has long been promoted by Apple, Google, Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, etc. as the future for the web. Apple even went as far as not supporting Flash on its mobile platforms (iOS) to further promotes the use of HTML5 in web site development.

Apple’s decision caused a major war of words between Adobe and Apple, plus all sort of underhanded tactics from both companies in an attempt to cripple the other’s technology/platform. Adobe recently released a new version of its mobile Flash, but it done so for almost all mobile platforms except for iOS. This is often seen as a retaliation of Apple’s modifications to its iOS Developers’ Terms of Use, to exclude tools like the one found in the latest Adobe’s Flash development environment.

While Google openly supports and promotes the use of HTML5, it also supports Flash on its latest Android platform. Now that users have experienced Flash on the latest Android OS (v2.2), they have found Flash app/movies to run slowly and cause their Android enabled mobile devices to drain their batteries quickly.

On the other hand both Google and Apple have published respective technology demonstration pages to show off the capabilities of HTML5. Google even made a HTML5 version of their popular online video site, YouTube.

Last week the adult film studio Digital Playground announced that it will convert all its mobile sites to use HTML5 and its native supports for video embedding instead of using Flash videos. This is so that their sites will be compatible with the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices.

In the past technology formats have won over their respective competing formats when the porn industry throw its supports behind it. Case in point is the VHS video tape format over the BETA video tape format; even though experts believes BETA is a superior format, simply because the porn industry decided to release videos only in VHS format.

I believe this support by a major porn video production company will exaggerate the adoption of the W3C HTML5 standard as in VHS over BETA.

I now received confirmation that the iPad will officially be available in Hong Kong from Apple on July 19th.

Both WiFi and WiFi+3G versions will be sold through the Apple online store and authorized resellers in Hong Kong.

The local prices will be announced later today, but it will not be too far from Apple’s US prices before tax.

The iPhone 4 will be officially available in Hong Kong through the two Apple mobile carrier partners, 3 HK and Smartone-Vodafone (SMV), late July and the rest of the authorized resellers late August. Exact dates have yet to be confirmed, but both black and white versions will be sold at the same time.

Local prices for any of the iPhone 4 models are not yet available.

My Rating:

This afternoon I saw the movie Knight and Day at AMC Cinemas, Pacific Place, Admiralty, Hong Kong. One of the movies from my Must See Movies list.

The leads in this movie are Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz who had one of their best performances of both careers.

Cruise had matured as an actor and this time he did not play an amateur spy role as he did in the Mission Impossible franchises. Although Diaz still plays her cute girl next door character as she did in the Charlie Angels franchises, this time she has a much more mature role. This may be due to both actors being older than when both stared in the respective franchises.

The stunts were impressive, fresh and believable. The plot is not that original and is like most spy movies, with reasonable amount of twists and suspense to keep the audience engaged. Additional entertainment factor was the results of the chemistry that Cruise and Diaz portrayed which also served to give the movie the comedy aspect that made this movie fun.

If you are looking for a light romance suspenseful comedy, then this is the movie for you.

Rating Legend:
	Not to be missed
	Wait for the DVD
	Buy from iTunes Store
	Rent it on iTunes
	Waste your time elsewhere

Not sure why SMV did not ask similar questions, since these information will give the carrier a much better idea of the different models of iPhone 4 to stock. It could also be the experience of 3 HK as Apple Carrier Partner for the past 3 years, but SMV had also became an Apple Carrier Partner in Hong Kong since earlier this year. Another reason SMV did not ask specific questions from its potential customers may be the limited supply of iPhone 4 Apple HK has prepared for the initial launch in Hong Kong. Given the high demands in the 5 initial launch countries and the number of countries (9) in the second phrase launch.

For either carriers there are no commitment on the part of the registerer to purchase the iPhone 4, so in anticipation of the high demand will people register with both carriers?

Remember all iPhones sold through official retailers in Hong Kong are SIM-unlocked. The iPhone 4 is expected to be the same, along with the iPhone 4 sold in Canada, France and UK.

Recently you may have just purchased one of Apple’s latest gadgets, the iPad WiFi+3G, from the 9 countries officially selling them, or plans to get one of the iPhone 4 from either Canada, France and UK. This is because all iPad WiFi+3G (except the ones sold in Japan) and iPhone 4 sold in Canada, France, UK and Hong Kong are SIM-unlocked. Meaning they will not be locked to a particular GSM carrier, therefore users can choose to put GSM SIM cards from any carriers into these devices and they will work.

That’s true with a small exception, these GSM SIM must be the micro-SIM format rather than the more commonly used “mini-SIM” among GSM carriers around the world.

At the moment micro-SIM cards are only available from 3 HK, but these cards are for data access only and does not include voice capabilities. For Smartone-Vodafone (SMV) and PCCW they both offer micro-SIM cards but only for customers who have subscribed to their data tariff plans and without voice capabilities.

So if you’re looking for a micro-SIM to put inside your iPhone 4 from one of the Hong Kong carriers, you will have to wait until the official launch of the iPhone 4 in Hong Kong. Fortunately Hong Kong is one of the 9 countries in the second phrase iPhone launch initially planned for July 2010, but recent sales and high demands in the 4 initial launch countries may cause the second phrase to be delayed.

I had contacted SMV and PCCW and they both tells me that they have no availability date for micro-SIM card, only that both will have micro-SIM cards when the iPhone 4 is officially available for sale in Hong Kong.

If you cannot wait, the alternative is to convert your existing mini-SIM to a micro-SIM card. It turns out the contacts for these two types of SIM are the same. The only different being the dimensions of these cards 15mm x 25mm (mini-SIM) compared to 12mm x 15mm (micro-SIM).

The following step by step instructions are from iHackintosh.com and they are provided here for your convenient. There are no guarantee by iHackintosh.com or myself (Vinko.Com). Also note that most carriers charges a fee for replacement SIM cards.

What you you will need are: mini-SIM, marker pen, ruler, sharp cutter and filing tool (Nail File).

1. Get a GSM mini-SIM card. Your existing GSM SIM card will do.
2. Mark the mini-SIM with the dimensions of the micro-SIM card (12mm x 15mm).
   
3. Make initial cuts along marked lines with a cuter, bend along the cuts and then finish with a scissors.
4. Use the file to file down the conners and edges.

If you ever want to use this newly created micro-SIM card in a device that only accept mini-SIM cards like the original iPhone, iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS. You can purchase a micro-SIM Adapter from Vinko’s Treasures for USD5.15 including worldwide shipping.

As many of you already heard Phase 1 of Apple’s iPhone 4 launch is planned for June 24th, and the initial demand at the phase 1 countries: France, Germany, Japan and USA, were higher than expected. So much so that AT&T and other resellers in USA had stopped receiving pre-orders.

Hong Kong falling in the Phase 2 of the launch countries:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• Denmark
• Finland
• Hong Kong
• Ireland
• Italy
• Luxembourg
• Netherlands
• Norway
• New Zealand
• Singapore
• South Korea
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland

Apple has yet to announce an exact date for the Hong Kong release except July 2010, but Smartone-Vodafone is not waiting for the date to be announced. An hour ago it began accepting “registration” for an iPhone 4.

In this registration page there is no promise of receiving an iPhone 4 on any specific date, it does not contain any details of the available tariff plans, it does not contain any pricing for the iPhone, nor does it contain any details of the models and colours available for purchase.

Even though this is the case, I am sure SMV will receive many registrations as there is also no commitment on the part of the registerer. Not sure what SMV is expecting to accomplish with this exercise.

Apple has sold out of the iPhone 4 during the initial 24 hours of pre-ordering in the 5 initial launch countries: France, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom and USA.

We learn from the iPad launch in the US, when the US launch has higher than expect demands, this pushes the launch date for the 9 countries in the 2nd phase back a month later. Will this recent delays in delivery dates for the iPhone 4, does it mean that the 2nd phase of the iPhone 4 launch will also delay?

At the moment the 2nd phase of the iPhone 4 launch expects to be in July for the 18 countries:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• Denmark
• Finland
• Hong Kong
• Ireland
• Italy
• Luxembourg
• Netherlands
• Norway
• New Zealand
• Singapore
• South Korea
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland

Now that the ship dates for the pre-orders from the initial 5 countries have been delayed until July 14th, it is unlikely that the release date for the 18 countries in the 2nd phase will be any sooner than July 14th.

None of the carriers in Hong Kong have made any announcements regarding dates for pre-orderring, nor do we have any official statement from Apple to say that the launch in the 2nd phase countries has been delayed.

Given the official release of the iPad in Hong Kong is also expected to be in July, I expects if there is any delay in the 2nd phase launch of the iPhone 4 it will be in August. Let’s just hope that it is not too much later.

[Updated: July 17, 2010, 23:24]
A reader informs me that he was still able to pre-order an iPhone 4 from SoftBank (Japan’s official Apple carrier partner) today and the carrier tells him to expect deliver of his iPhone 4 on June 24th. I appreciate this reader’s information, but am surprise to hear that Japan’s (SoftBank’s) delivery date had not been pushed back like France, UK and USA. Given now US’ AT&T customers are told to expect delivery of their iPhone 4 on July 14th for any new pre-orders, it is expected that inventory destined for Japan and Germany will be diverted to cover the demand in these 3 countries: France, UK and USA.

The only explanation is that for Germany and Japan the iPhones are not fully SIM-unlocked by Apple, therefore the initial allotments are pre-ordered by the respective carriers. So unless the carriers’ estimations are incorrect the ship date for Germany and Japan will remain June 24th.

We already know that iPhone 4s sold in UK and France are fully SIM-unlocked by Apple. If any readers can comment on whether the pre-ordered iPhone 4s in Germany are also SIM-unlocked that will be great.

I don’t suppose the versions sold in USA or Japan are, since Apple appear to have an iron clad contract with AT&T and SoftBank. For the latter it is reported that iPad WiFi+3G sold through SoftBank are SIM-locked to SoftBank, which implies so are the iPhone 4s.

Unless you are using iTunes on Windows platform or that you have an iOS supported device running iOS 4, there is no rush to update your iTunes to this version. For the former type users there are 3 security issues that this version of iTunes fixes as documented in the Knowledge Base article, About the security content of iTunes 9.2.

There are two Knowledge Base articles to describe what have changed in this latest OS X release. The first is “About the Mac OS X v10.6.4 Update” and the other is an “About the security content of Security Update 2010-004 / Mac OS X v10.6.4“.

As with all other OS X updates I recommend that you download the Combo Update and then apply it to your Mac.

I called SMV Customer Service and they say the issue has to do with a system upgrade which failed to honor the flag, “Disable IOM Toolbar”.

This has to be the third time such issue occurred. I don’t think any iPhone users will ever want the SMV IOM Toolbar occupying the valuable Safari browser space. So the correct way to disable the IOM Toolbar is to check the browser’s User Agent rather than some flag in a customer’s profile.

I agree that the IOM Toolbar may be useful for traditional mobile phones which do not have a full browser, but even phones using the Opera mobile browser will not need the IOM Toolbar.

For all “smart phone” users the IOM Toolbar should be opt-in rather than opt-out.

Last night Hong Kong time (10:00 US PST) Apple announced the next generation iPhone, the “iPhone 4″, and renamed its OS from “iPhone OS” to “iOS 4″, during Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at their WWDC ’10.

During the keynote Jobs highlighted 8 of the new features in iPhone 4. These are:

• FaceTime
• Retina Display
• Multitasking
• HD Video Recording
• iMovie for iPhone
• iBooks
• Gyroscope
• 5-Megapixel Camera with LED Flash

Aside from these 8 features mentioned there are a few more that worth mentioning.

• External antenna
• Front facing camera
• 7 hours of talk time on 3G

I will leave the summary of these features to Apple’s excellent web pages for the iPhone, what I will do instead is explain how these features should or should not affect your purchasing decision of the iPhone 4.

Feature Benefits

Before we understand how these features should effect your purchasing decision, we should understand how these iPhone 4 features will benefit you.

FaceTime

This is simply video chat on the iPhone. Unfortunately, it currently works only between iPhone 4′s and only if these iPhones are connected via WiFi to the Internet.

Fortunately, FaceTime is based on open standards: SIP, h.264, AAC, STUN, TURN, ICE, RTP and SRTP. Apple will submit FaceTime to the standards body to get it accepted as a standard, like they did with QuickTime for MPEG-4.

The important point to note here is the SIP standard used in FaceTime. This means that other SIP video chat service can potentially work with FaceTime. One such service is Gizmo5, now a Google property, but Google has yet to integrate it with Google Voice or shut the service down. One popular video chat/VoIP service that FaceTime will not work with is Skype, because Skype uses proprietary technology to establish connections between users.

Due to the current limitations of FaceTime, this feature should not have much value in your decisions to purchase an iPhone 4. Also in the near future, if you do not know anyone who has an iPhone 4 and is significant enough to want to video chat with, this definitely will be one feature you will not use.

The Camera

In the new iPhone 4 there are two. A 5-Megapixels camera with 5X digital zoom on the back with built-in LED flash, and a VGA quality front-facing camera on the front. Both of these cameras are capable of capturing still photos and videos up to 30 fps. The former is capable of also capturing HD videos at 720p.

You may notice these capabilities do not appear to be new for smartphones, and you will be right. Apple isn’t always the first to implement a particular technology, but they usually do it better than most competitors. In the case of the 5-Megapixels back side camera, unlike other manufactures, Apple achieved this megapixels not by reducing the size of the pixel, therefore the captured image is a true 5-Megapixel image.

If you are the type that always like to have a high resolution camera with you this feature will be great. Or if you are a parent with a young child this will be perfect for those special moments you like to capture for prosperity.

Retina Display

This brand new LCD display technology has 4 times as many pixels compared to previous iPhone models, paceked inside the same 3.5″ LED-backlit display, hence producing a display of 960 x 640 pixels display with 326 ppi pixel density.

Again Apple did not do what it’s competitors have done, they invented a new way to fuse the LCD to the Multi-Touch screen, therefore removing any possibility of air leaking into the gap between the two layers. This produced an effect as if the pixels are painted directly on the glass surface, with a superb viewing angle. This display also has the same IPS technology used in the Apple LED Cinema displays and iPad, as a result the screen has a 800:1 contrast ratio, producing the darkest darks and whitest whites.

If you read a lot of documents or images this Retina display will be perfect for that. Almost like looking at real printed paper or glossy printed photos.

External Antennas

The iPhone 4 has strips of stainless steel which make up the edges surrounding the phone, aside from serving as structural rigidity and mount points for internal components, they are also part of the GSM/UMTS and Bluetooth/WiFi/GPS.

This new design produces a very thin phone and better reception compared to the previous iPhone models.

The iPhone 4 also has 802.11n WiFi support at 2.4 GHz only, but this will also improve the speed of WiFi connectivity when 802.11n access point is available. Although, due to the lack of 5 GHz support this will not improve the WiFi range of the iPhone 4.

Gyroscope

The iPhone 4 has a built in 3-axis gyroscope, along with the accelerometer it will provide a 6-axis motion sensing.

This addition sensor will help application developers produce even more imaginative applications. During the keynote game control was demonstrated using these 6-axis motion sensors, but I believe there will be many usage in the area of augment reality applications.

Last Friday Read Write Web reported that Google may release Google Goggles iPhone app. With the additional sensor it will greatly improve the accuracy and user interface of Google Goggle.

Conclusion

Now you have some ideas how these new features in the iPhone 4 can be use, I will begin to help you with the decision of choosing the right iPhone. What I will not do is get into the discussion of whether to get an iPhone. I will assume you have already made the decision to do so.

First I need to separate the readers into two groups: ones who already own a model of iPhone, and ones who do not own iPhones.

Do Not Yet Own an iPhone

Your decision right now should be whether to choose the new iPhone 4 or an iPhone 3GS.

This decision should not include the iPhone 3G; even if you can find a store that still carries it. Therefore, second handed iPhone 3G and first generation iPhone (aka. iPhone 2G), should also be avoided.

The main reason for this is because Apple has discontinued future OS supports for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 2G models. The last iOS that fully supports these iPhone models is iOS 3.1.3. So these models will not be able to take full advantage¹ of the features and enhancements from iOS 4 onwards.

I will assume you are not the type that wants the latest greatest gadgets, since it took you over 3 years before you decide to purchase an iPhone. Also because doing so with any technology is an endless uphill battle. Having said that, I believe a new or used iPhone 3GS can be a good choice for you. Especially when Apple has lowererd its price.

You Already Own an iPhone

Among these users there are three types:

• iPhone 2G (first generation iPhone) users: it is definitely time for you to upgrade to iPhone 4. You had waited 2 years and you had been missing many of the modern features of the iPhone. While your iPhone may still worth something in the 2nd hand market, you should sell your iPhone.

• iPhone 3G users: like the iPhone 2G Apple has discontinued future OS support for this model, and you may have notice your iPhone is a bit slower than your friends using the iPhone 3GS. You may have correctly thought that the iPhone 3GS was a minor upgrade to your iPhone 3G. You did not care about the faster processor, better battery life and digital compass back then. This time the iPhone 4 will be a much better upgrade in the same three areas.

• iPhone 3GS users: for you you may want to hold off on upgrading to the iPhone 4. Yes the new features may be nice, but will you be able to fully utilize it? Plus iOS 4 will give you many of the same features, which you can upgrade your iPhone 3GS to when it becomes available. So I will recommend you upgrade the iOS on your iPhone to iOS 4, use it for a while and see if the iPhone 4′s additional features are worth the upgrade. Remember though, the longer you wait the less your iPhone 3GS will be worth in the 2nd hand market.

In the above analysis I mentioned the 2nd hand iPhone market. At the moment, the largest market for iPhones is mainland China, but the “officially” sold iPhones do not have WiFi support. Therefore, gray market iPhones from around Asia; particularly Hong Kong due to its officially fully unlocked versions, and 2nd hand iPhones are still in great demand. This should always be a consideration when you are planing to upgrade to a newer model of iPhone.

A few days ago Smartone-Vodafone (SMV) upgraded/changed their system; not sure it was hardware or software. This action brought down all 3G data connectivity on their network.

Customers were able to make voice calls but any attempts to use their 3G data connection failed. This happened to all SMV users, without prejudice of phone models or brands.

In the aftermath I noticed an issue with the iPhone Safari browser. No matter which web site I attempted to go to there was a message displayed in the browser window, “You are not authenticated to…”. This was resolved after the iPhone in question was restarted. As most of you know iPhone users rarely turn their iPhones off. I am now curious as to what exactly did SMV change.

The key is the word “authenticated” in the error message displayed during the issue period. Is SMV attempting to identify or certifying clients to their 3G data connection? You may ask why are they doing this? One reason may be to certify authorized client applications for access to their 3G data network. As you may know from reading other posts I have, At the moment SMV cannot tell the difference between regular 3G data traffic and ones from tethering the Mac to the iPhone via USB. Nor traffic from using the iPhone as a WiFi Access Point.

How will SMV achieve this distinction so that it is future proof? We all know mobile phone models and OS’s change almost monthly, especially in Hong Kong. One possible way is for them to install a piece of code onto the phone, but doing so among the different mobile phone OS’s and versions will be a real nightmare.

Additionally the following questions needs to be answered:

• Do Apple carrier partners have special software they can install at their exchange to identify signed clients?
• All iPhone apps approved through the iTunes App Store are signed, all others are not, can this fact be use?
• Does the iPhone OS SDK have a token which the network toolkit passes to the mobile carrier when it access the 3G network? It will be great if any developers can comment on this.

iPhone apps like MyWi will not be signed nor is it using regular method of accessing the 3G data connection on the iPhone. So if any of the above are true MyWi may not work in the future.

If my hypothesis is correct this will be real bad news for iPad WiFi users in Hong Kong. I will try to keep everyone posted on this. If any readers have confirmed detail information of what SMV or any of the other Hong Kong carriers are planning please leave a comment here.

Apple has sold over 2 millions of their tablet/Pad device, “iPad”, and it is available officially in 10 countries around the world.

In a conversation with a friend today, it reminded me that things techie take for granted may not be so obvious to others.

He asked me a simple question, which thousands of iPad users in Hong Kong and around the world must be asking themselves also.

How do I use my iPhone as a WiFi access point for my iPad WiFi?

This may sounds like a simple question to us techies but for most of Apple’s target audiences for the iPad this is not so simple. Therefore, I decide to supplement my previous post, WiFi iPad Tethered to iPhone on Smartone-Vodafone 3G, with a more detailed version.

I will attempt to lay out the steps below, so everyone can do what most techies with an iPad WiFi and iPhone had done for over a month.

Note: The following requires the iPhone to be jailbroken. Only the iPhone not the iPad. If you do not feel right about jailbreaking the iPhone please stop.

If you do not know what “jailbreak” means you can quickly look at my post, 10 Things a Layman Should Know About Hong Kong iPhone 3G (point #8).

Also the method below is only for iPhone that are either:

• Officially unlocked by Apple’s (all iPhones sold though Apple authorized channels in Hong Kong), or
• Unlocked by Apple’s carrier partners, or
• It is connected to one of Apple’s official carrier partners.

Here we go:

1. At the time of this writing Spirit is the easiest, quickest and most versatile jailbreaking software for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. As with all hacking software, it is best to only download the software from a trusted source. There is no better place than the author’s web site for the software.
2. [Skip this step if you had not jailbroken your iPhone before] Whether you’re using a Mac, Windows or Linux computer you should ensure your iPhone is at its unhacked state. Meaning it had not been previously hacked using any other jailbreaking software. If you had hacked it previously, you simply have to use iTunes, connect your iPhone to it and click on the Restore button in the Summary pane.

   Note: Restoring your iPhone will erase everything on your iPhone. So before doing so you should synchronized your iPhone with iTunes.

3. To ensure you have a smooth process, you should ensure iTunes had quit and the iTunes Helper application is not running. This will prevent iTunes from automatically starting when your iPhone mount and remounts.
4. Leave the iPhone connected to your computer via USB cable. Run/execute the Spirit application you had downloaded in Step 1. Follow the instruction in the Spirit application. It will take Spirit almost no time to finish its work.

Congratulation you have jailbroken your iPhone. If you ever want to restore your iPhone to its original condition, you can easily do so by following the instructions in Step 2.

In some cases, after the iPhone has been jailbroken it may behave a bit different. Thus far after over a month of use, I had not have major problems with this latest jailbreak method. The only issue I sometimes encounter is the lost of WiFi network connectivity on my iPhone.

In the above steps you will notice a new app installed on your iPhone called “Cydia”. This is like the iTunes App Store, but instead it is a portal into the “alternate” App Store that contains all the apps that did not receive any approvals from Apple. Having said that, you should be very cautious as to what type of applications you install from Cydia.

I realize most of these apps are free so you may be tempted to try them. As mentioned above and due to the nature of the Cydia App Store, it is expected that the Apple App Store level of scrutiny was NOT applied to these apps. Also most of them are hacks so your iPhone may be unstable after installing, especially when several of them are installed at the same time.

Now for turning the iPhone into a WiFi Access Point (hotspot):

1. Go into the Cydia app, locate the “MyWi” app. This is a paid app, but it offers a 14 days free trial. Follow the instructions to installed it on your iPhone.
2. Go back to your iPhone’s Home screen and start the MyWi app. Follow the instructions to set up the WiFi Access Point. Note that it only has WEP encryption, which is the lowest form of security. You may or may not use this but if there are hackers within WiFi distance to your iPhone they will be able to get into your network within seconds.
3. Click on the “On” switch for “WiFi Tethering”. The app will do some auto setup and then you should see the top portion of your iPhone screen has a coloured background like when the iPhone is in tethered mode. The only difference is that this colour is Blue instead of Green.

You’ve now turned your iPhone into a WiFi Access Point using your 3G data connection on the iPhone. It will allow a maximum of 5 WiFi enabled devices to concurrently connect to your iPhone to utilize its 3G data connection.

Note: the iPhone will NOT go to sleep when MyWi is enabled, therefore you may notice your iPhone becomes hot and the battery will drain faster than normal. You can turn off the screen by clicking on the Power button to reduce the heat generated and power use. Therefore it is very important to disable MyWi when you no longer need the iPhone as a WiFi Access Point.

Thus far, at least the mobile carriers in Hong Kong, cannot tell the difference between regular iPhone data traffic and data traffic through the use of MyWi. I spoke to Smartone-Vodafone (SMV) technical and marketing teams and they tell me they have no intentions to do so.

Remember to record the times and days you used MyWi, keep an eye on your mobile carrier’s bill each month, and check to see if your mobile carrier distinguish the MyWi traffic. Share you findings in the form of a comment here for the other carriers around the world.

My Rating:

This evening I saw the movie Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time at UA Cinema, Times Square, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. One of the movies from my Must See Movies list.

The video game Prince of Persia was created by Jordan Mechner for Brøderbund in 1989, and ever since it has been refined and republished by different game companies over the years, with Ubisoft being the last to do so. Now in 2010 a movie had been released staring Jake Gyllenhaal of Brokeback Mountain fame. Aside from Ben Kingsley the rest of the casts are mostly unknowns.

Being an action movie, it contains many fighting sequences between with the hero, Dastan (Prince of Persia played by Gyllenhaal) and his enemies, executing parkour and mix martial arts (MMA) techniques to overcome his enemies, this use of parkour gives the movie an acrobatic dance and light hearted feel.

Adding to the light hearted feel are humorous scenes between the hero and heroine, Tamina (played by Gemma Arterton). Underneath all these is a sound and fairly believable plot with the usual twists and turns to keep the audience guessing, but simple enough to allow the audience to enjoy the action and sceneries of the movie.

Although it has been a while (2005) since Gyllenhaal has a hit he did a good job here. If you’re looking for an entertaining evening out, this movie should be top on your list.

Rating Legend:
	Not to be missed
	Wait for the DVD
	Buy from iTunes Store
	Rent it on iTunes
	Waste your time elsewhere

With the pending iPad official release by Apple Hong Kong some time in July, mobile carriers in Hong Kong have begin to release tariff plans designed specifically to target iPad owners.

Among them only 3 HK currently has a data plan that comes with either a regular mini-SIM or the new micro-SIM. The rest of the carriers are offering data only 3G tariff plans that includes a free USB 3G modem. All of the plans also come with free WiFi network.

Below I am only focusing on the respective 7.2Mbps unlimited “local data” plans from each carriers. Each of the tariff plans requires commitments between 18 months to 24 months.

* I was not able to confirm with 3 HK the downlink/uplink speeds of their HKD188 Easyplus data plan.

I absolutely do not recommend using either of the CSL brands: 1010 or One2Free. Their web sites specify that their 3G networks support only UMTS 900MHz, which is not one of the 3G bands (UMTS/HSDPA: 850, 1900, 2100 MHz) that the iPad supports. Using 3G data plans from either of these two carriers will force the iPad to drop down to GPRS (2G) or EDGE (2.5G).

[Updated: June 23, 2010, 20:00]
Thanks to the reader, Peter, for pointing out that CSL had upgraded their 3G network to support 900Mhz, 1800Mhz, 2100Mhz and 2600Mhz. Therefore iPad on the CSL network will not drop down to GPRS (2G) or EDGE (2.5G) network as I had previously said. Instead it will utilize the 2100Mhz frequency.

I tried to confirm this 3G band information on the CSL 3G networks, but there is absolutely no way for me to get any information from either of the CSL Customer Services hotlines: 1010 and One2Free. After connecting to both of them, and placed on hold for extended periods multiple times, the CS representatives hang up on me each time without answering my question. This recent experience further justify why I left One2Free 6 years ago after being on their network for over 6 years, and why I do not recommend them to anyone in HK.

The rest of the carriers: China Mobile and China Unicom, in Hong Kong do not have 3G networks. Therefore, if you must get a data plan for your iPad WiFi+3G your choice is obvious, Smartone-Vodafone is the one to go with, but you will have to cut the mini-SIM down in size to a micro-SIM form factor for it to fit in the iPad SIM slot.

[Updated: May 25, 2010, 15:53]
As point out by @ThomasHK, 3 HK has non-contractual prepaid (“pay-as-you-go”) SIM cards with 3G data for HKD28/day or HKD338/month also.

[Updated: June 23, 2010, 20:00]
From a Twitter friend @jesschg who pointed out that since the writing of my post SMV had released their Tablet Micro-SIM Data Plan. I have since updated the table above to reflect this change.

I to have some concerns with SMV’s marketing for this new tariff plan.

Enhances Facebook apps to enable them to display videos on Facebook

This is already a built-in function of the Facebook app 3.1.3 and later. Redirecting Flash video to SMV servers so they can transcode it to show on the iPhone is nothing new for SMV. This feature had been with their IOM (“Internet on Mobile”) service for years.

• Auto-detects & alerts you to RSS/Podcast content, for instant enjoyment
• Helps you share webpages with others on Facebook or via email
• Stores your bookmarks & 30-day browsing history online, for quick search & retrieval anytime, even if you lose or change device

Any users of “Tablets” with true browsers will not need help with any of the above 4 points, particularly iPad users.

What they did not specify prominently is the theoretical maximum speeds of this service, which they only sate in the small prints under Remarks

2-6Mbps download/500kbps-3.5Mbps upload

Although this is not the fastest speed available from SMV, iPad users will not care as the iPad will not be capable of taking advantage of speeds greater than 7Mbps downlink.

I expects other carriers will have updates to their tariff plans as we get closer to the official release of the iPad in Hong Kong.

The iPhone has always been a great platform for developers to innovate and invent new uses for the device. Recently L5 Technology did just that with their L5 Remote hardware dongle + iPhone app [iTunes App Store link].

The L5 Remote is an universal remote control. It comes in two parts: a hardware IR dongle attached to the iPhone (3G/3GS)/iPod Touch Dock Connector, and an iPhone app. The hardware dongle cost USD49.95 + shipping and the L5 Remote iPhone app is free from the iPhone App Store.

When you first starts the app you are presented with a blank slate and a row of controls at the bottom of the screen. You can either drag preset controls to the workspace or drag one control at a time to the workspace to design your remote.

One of the controls is the macro control, it can be programed to invoke a series of existing controls to produce a sequence of events upon pressing just one key. For example, turning on the TV, AV receiver and cable box with just a click of one button on the L5 Remote app.

Each set of controls can be grouped into individual panels. These panels can be labeled whatever the user wants. The user can add an unlimited number of controls to each remote workspaces. The remote workspaces can also be labeled by the user.

Most of the controls can be label and these labels are resized to fit the controls by automatically reducing the font size of the label; with a minimum font size of approximately 8 point. The height and width of these controls can also be adjusted as necessary.

After the remote is designed, the user can click on the Assign button in the toolbar to switch the app into learning mode. Of course this learning mode is only functional when the hardware IR dongle is connected. When the hardware dongle is connected the app will automatically rotates 180 degrees; making the bottom of the iPhone/iPod Touch the top so the hardware dongle is oriented upwards.

The controls are assigned by pointing the original device remote to the front of hardware dongle, select the control on the L5 Remote to assign, then pressing the button on the original device remote to copy from. Releasing and repressing the button at appropriate times by following the on screen instructions on the L5 Remote app.

The assignment (learning) process is fairly fast and accurate. The speed in which a control is assigned depends on the original device remote. It works best for remotes which emit IR signal continuously when a button is pressed, rather than those which only emit a signal burst each time a button is pressed no matter how long the button is held.

List of remotes can be chosen either by using the swipe left-right gesture on the screen or by clicking on the Remotes button in the middle of the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

Using the remote is self explanatory, especially if you have reproduced the labels for each controls from the original device remote. Each time a control on the L5 Remote is clicked a sound will emit and the Remotes button in the toolbar will light up for a fraction of a second. Both of these serve as a UI feedback for correctly pressing on a control.

After using it for a week I found the IR signal from the hardware dongle to be quite directional, and it comes out at a very narrow angle from the end of the dongle. Therefore to use the L5 Remote effectively, one must aim the hardware dongle directly at the device’s IR receiver for the signal to be received. This makes the use a bit cumbersome especially when.

The company tells me that in an upcoming release designed remotes can be backed up and/or transferred to other iPhone or iPod Touch. This features is very important especially a number of original device remotes was reproduced on the L5 Remote. I hope in the future L5 Technology will publish predefined remotes with learnt controls like Logitech does for its Harmony Remotes.

If you are in the market for an universal remote, I think the USd49.95 that L5 Technology is asking for is quite worth the money.

My Rating:

This afternoon I saw the movie Robin Hood (2010) at JP Theater, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. One of the movies from my Must See Movies

Before I begin, I need to set the mindsets of all potential movie goers for this movie. It is not a “Robin Hood” movie of the traditional sense, but what they refer to as a prequel to the Robin Hood saga. This movie describes the background of the person who will eventually be known as “Robin Hood”. In this movie this character is played by Russell Crowe.

Some may argue that Crowe was the wrong choice to play the Robin Hood character. As Robin’s in the past had been agile, thin and fit. How else will he and his marry men fit in those tights? Crowe had lost some weight for this movie and is not as heavy as he was when he stared in State of Play as Cal McAffrey. I personally felt Crowe did a good job playing the professional archer freelancing along his trusted friends to fight for the King of England. Any further discussion of the plot will give it away. Overall I feel the casting was well done. Especially choosing Mark Addy as Friar Tuck, and Kevin Durand as Little John.

If you’re looking to see yet another Robin Hood movie you will be greatly disappointed, but if you go in with an open mind and let the movie guide you through the story, you will be well rewarded with a sufficient background to the Robin Hood character. This is a movie that even someone who has no idea who Robin Hood is will enjoy.

Rating Legend:
	Not to be missed
	Wait for the DVD
	Buy from iTunes Store
	Rent it on iTunes
	Waste your time elsewhere

A bit over a month ago Twitter (the site/service) purchased the popular iPhone app “Tweetie”. During the announcement Twitter also announces that they will rename the app to “Twitter for iPhone” and reduce the price to free. The name is not that original but that was intentional, because Twitter wants people to find their client of the same name when they perform a search in the iTunes App Store.

Since the acquisition the Twitter 3rd party client development community has been shaken up. The thinking from analysts is why would any user pays for a 3rd party client when there is a free official client from Twitter.

With the name change Twitter also changed the icon of the app. I think they have chosen a great icon, because it is the same as the default avatar icon in the Twitter service.

Even prior to the purchase Tweetie 2 users had already have a great deal of anticipation for the next update, Tweetie 3, so they are glad that the newly released app is basically Tweetie 3 with a name change. In this new version of Tweetie (aka “Twitter for iPhone”) there are several speed improvements and bug fixes, the most noticeable are:

• The ability to view tweet Trends without logging into the app. Perfect for the people who only consumes Twitter as a news feed.
• Supports for corporate Twitter accounts that has their own server.
• Supports for Bit.ly’s new J.mp URL shortener.
• Supports for customized URL shortener like ones at your own domain.
• Supports 3rd party image and video hosting sites that are not in the default lists.

After logging in with your Twitter account for the first time. The application presents the recommended list of “featured” people to follow in various different categories.

Aside from these new additions, the basic UI of Tweetie had not change too much in this rebranded version of Tweetie.

Like the previous versions it supports multiple Twitter accounts, but it still does not offer the option to view these tweets from different accounts together in the same stream like CoTweet does.

The previously available set of 3rd party sites and services for URL Shorteners, Image and Video hostings are still there. As mentioned there is now a change in the Bit.ly support to instead use the service’s new URL shortener J.mp.

There is a strange UI element in the Accounts Details screen, where an “Accounts & Settings” button is placed at the bottom of the screen after the Lists for the account. The reason this is strange is because users can go to the same part of the app simply by clicking on the Accounts button at the top of the screen.

Aside from this strange UI element allows the user access the account’s Profiles, saved Favorites and Draft tweets.

The old favorites are still there including:

• Swipe to the right on a tweet to quickly bring up the Reply, Retweet, Favorite, Profile, Act on a Link and Quote/Post/Mail/Translate a tweet.
• Saved Searches

Strangely this newest Twitter client still does not have Push Notification like SimplyTweet has for several versions already.

Although at the price of FREE, Twitter has definitely set a high bar for all other 3rd party Twitter clients out there. I hope developers will not give up with Twitter’s entry into the client market and continue to innovate.

I just receive the following email from a company who claims to represent the “Department of Registration Service in China”.

It appears that the email was sent to individuals who owns domains and is attempt to scam the user into spending outrages prices for similar domains under different TLDs.

We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on May. 17, 2010, One company which self-styled “Mintor(Japan)Venture Capital Co.,Ltd” are applying to register(vinko) as internet brand name and domain names as below (vinko.cn vinko.com.cn vinko.net.cn vinko.mobi  vinko.asia  vinko.in  vinko.hk vinko.tw etc.).

After our initial checking, we found the internet brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company’s, so we need to get the confirmation from your company. If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please DO NOT reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have no any relationship with this company, please contact us within 15 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application  submitted by “Mintor(Japan)Venture Capital Co.,Ltd” unconditionally.

Please forward the email to your decision maker,and let them contact me in time,so that we can handle this in reasonable,Look forwarding to hearing from you.

Best Regards,

Kevin Wu
Senior Director
TEL: +86 21 69929440
Fax:  +86 21 69929447
Website:http://www.qp-world.org.cn

Address:Room 902,8th,nong 1518,Jinyuan 1st Road,Jiading District, Shanghai city.

Whatever you do, DO NOT click on any of the links, reply to the email, visit the company’s web site or act on this email in any way. It is a scam to try to get you to purchase more domain names.

Last year I had an in depth review of SimplyTweet 2.3 and later 2.5.

With the release of SimplyTweet 3 [iTunes App Store link] MotionObj has improved on a Twitter client that is already amazing. As mentioned in my review last year, many of the features in SimplyTweet 2 were later adapted in Tweetie 2, it is surprising why Twitter did not purchase SimplyTweet instead of Tweetie.

In this latest update, the developer has made some bug fixes but also added the following features/enhancements:

• Improved offline caching.
• Faster application startup.
• Improved Twitter List access.
• Added new style RT to swipe menu.
• Added support for tweeting current song (with #nowplaying).
• Added support for TwitLonger.

I had tried many Twitter clients on the iPhone: TweetDeck for iPhone, Tweetie, TwitBird Pro for Twitter and Twitterrific, but had to go back to SimplyTweet mainly for the following reasons:

1. First and foremost is its built in Push Notification. Yes, I understand BoxCar is a common solution for applications that do not have built in Push Notifications, but for whatever reasons I never have too good of an experience with it.
2. Link shortening seem to be the only one that works correctly for me. This is one of the most important feature to me as I share many links among my followers.
3. Since I manage my Twitter stream using Twitter Lists, SimplyTweet’s ability to customize the icons at the bottom is invaluable to me. Although it is a bit limited with only 4 spots, but TweetDeck’s implementation is a bit hard to manage also. I hope the developer will improve this UI behaviour.

For more screen shots of the application please see my previous review of SimplyTweet.

I spoke with the developer about the future of SimplyTweet given Twitter’s recent purchase of Tweetie and the pending release of an official free Twitter client. The developer tells me that he is still examining the situation.

This sort of thing happens often in the software development community, where independent software developers create applications that link with a service/platform, and the service or platform owners decide to release their own applications. Often this actions eliminate all 3rd party applications for the service/platform, but in many case these 3rd party software developers is challenged to differentiate their application from the official application from the service or platform owners. One such example is BusyCal from BusyMac. It is an excellent replacement for Apple’s iCal, calendar application. There are many more examples like this on the Mac OS X platform.

I wish the developer of SimplyTweet luck and hope he can afford to stay on this excellent client. If you too agrees with me, please do spend the USD4.99 that the developer is asking for in the iTunes App Store.

[Updated: May 17, 2010, 17:45]
In a moment of excitement I incorrectly named this post as “WiFi iPad Tethered to iPad on Samrtone-Vodafone 3G”. I sincerely apologize to all who was mislead by this title. I assure you it was an honest mistake.

It has been a while since I received the WiFi version of the iPad and I have wanted to tether it to my iPhone to share the Smartone-Vodafone (SMV) 3G network ever since.

For regular readers, they will be familiar with my opinions on jailbreaking and jailbreaking the iPhone. I have not jailbroke my iPhone since the first version (aka “iPhone 2G”), that was only because I had to if I wanted to use the iPhone on HK networks. Since the iPhone 3G and then 3GS I have kept up with the news and development of jailbreaking techniques but stop short of jailbreaking my official Apple HK version iPhone.

In the past the only application available in the jailbroken iPhone community that I wanted was the MyWi (USD9.99) iPhone app, and it was the only application that can make me jailbreak my iPhone.

Given that my bill date for SMV is on the 13th, I decided to give MyWi a try with the iPad. I use the Spirit jailbreaking method on my Mac, which was extreme simple and fast. It literally took 3 minutes to jailbreak my iPhone including rebooting it.

Today I checked my SMV bill during the period when I started using MyWi and see that all the related traffic has been logged along with the rest of my “Internet Browsing Data Usage”. This is great news for all SMV 3G customers. At the moment the best tariff plan deal from SMV is their HKD238/month plan.

Up to now there had been no ill affect on the operations of my iPhone nor for any of the application after using the Spirit jailbreaking method.

A pair of iPhone app from Omar Rabbolini, an Italian application developer currently resides in UK.

These pair of iPhone apps: CantoNotes and Hanzi Lookup, will help Cantonese speaking users not familiar with writing Chinese; like myself, learn to write Chinese characters.

CantoNotes will allow users to enter Chinese characters using the LSHK (Linguistic Society of Hong Kong) JyutPing standard phonemes input method and CantoNotes will respond with the corresponding Chinese character. Characters displayed can be copy and paste into the built in Hanzi Lookup screen. Rather than using the built in copy & paste feature of iPhone OS, the app use its own Copy and Paste buttons. Although the iPhone OS built in copy & paste feature also works. After pasting the desired Chinese characters into the Hanzi Lookup screen, it will display the Chinese character in a medium size font, along with the Cantonese pronunciation beneath it one character at a time.

Not sure what the built in Hanzi Lookup screen is for, as the shown information is already shown in the main screen of CantoNotes. The program does have a reference in the Hanzi Lookup screen to the iTunes App Store page for the separate Hanzi Lookup app.

The Hanzi Lookup app allows users to locate meanings of Chinese characters in English, plus it provides pronunciations for the Chinese character in both Mandarin and Cantonese, along with the phonemes to enter the Chinese character in JyutPing and PingYin.

The developer is asking a relatively steep USD1.99 and USD0.99 for CantoNotes [iTunes App Store link] and Hanzi Lookup [iTunes App Store link] respectively. Given the functionalities of these application, I suggest you give it a pass.

Other than the “Red Shirt Movement” in Thailand there is also a movement to stop using Facebook.

This all started when Facebook announce their “Open Graph API” initiative. I am not going to explain the details of this API here, because there are extensive documentations on Facebook’s Developers web site. The reason for concern is not because Facebook has opened its API, but how Facebook is doing so and the side effects of these actions.

From the beginning, users of Facebook have used it as a private network where people share personal information with only people they desire and no one else. In recent days/months due to various changes to Facebook it has betrayed this trust that over 400 million Facebook users have placed on the site.

One may argue that Facebook does have many privacy settings (100s), and these settings are design to protect the personal information of a user’s account. Unfortunately Facebook set the default for these settings to allow “everyone” access to these personal data. So if a user is not familiar or not aware of these privacy settings, his personal information, which were originally private will all become automatically public.

Facebook’s responds to these concerns from users by saying that any information posted to the Internet are public. This statement is correct, as I had already explained in my post Dangers of Young Generations on The Net, but this does not justify their recent actions.

The reason why people are so angry with Facebook is because Facebook originally established itself as a private network. So private that only people from certain US universities can join network. Even then only people that a user approves can see his personal information. Unlike services like Twitter and others, where the site/service owners explicitly remind their users the information submitted are public. In the recent months Facebook quietly changed this and began publicizing users’ personal data onto the Internet and search engines. Each time Facebook does this, users will have to carefully examine Facebook’s actions and revisit their Privacy settings to ensure proper personal privacy is maintained.

Due to Facebook’s recent actions and attitudes toward personal privacy, the We’re Quitting Facebook movement is asking people who agree with them to quit Facebook and delete their account on the site. To make this impact more public, they asked everyone to do it together on May 31st.

Unfortunately for many deleting their Facebook accounts is not an option. One reason may be because your Facebook account is associated with a Facebook Fan page, which you are an owner or administrator to. Deleting the Personal Facebook account will prevent you from managing these Fan pages.

If you’re like me, belongs to the group of users who are concern with Facebook’s exposure of our private data but do not want to delete your Facebook account, then the following will be the steps you should take:

1. Log into Facebook.
2. Go to the Facebook Edit Profile page.
3. Go into each section:
   • Basic Information
   • Profile Picture
   • Relationships
   • Likes and Interests
   • Education and Work
   • Contact Information

   within this page and remove all content that you will not want to published on the Internet. Don’t take into consideration your Facebook Privacy settings, because Facebook may change the meaning of these settings anytime.

If you are not administering any Facebook Fan page, you should still do the above and then deactivate your account.

If you want to voice your opinions you can leave them here as comments below and/or post them on the Facebook Site Governance Fan page.