Been playing with the Samsung Galaxy Note for the past week. It’s a peculiar device, being the biggest smartphone to date yet doesn’t seem to have that bulky feel compared, say to Dell’s Streak. I’ve shown this phone to a lot of friends and the most common reaction is that of intrigue accompanied by the question, “would I look stupid carrying this around?”
OK. So here’s another side to my geekiness. Board games.
I’m hooked on Ascension. It’s the staple board game (sorry, Bang!) I play with my regular gaming group next to 7 Wonders. It’s fast, easy to understand, doesn’t require much setup, and you can play with 2-4 guys. A 30 minute game is already long. So I was thrilled at the chance to interview Justin Gary of Gary Games, creator of Ascension. For those who enjoy deck building games like Dominion, Ascension takes direct precedence as a more compact but still epic deck builder. This interview talks about how Ascension was conceived as well as the latest expansion, Storm of Souls.
The Inquirer reported this evening that SMART Communications would be offering the new Apple iPhone 4S come end of 2011.
Quote:
MANILA, Philippines—Wireless telecommunications giant Smart Communications is set to heat up competition in the offering of telco services bundled with Apple products with the rollout of Apple’s game-changing smartphone iPhone to premium subscribers within this year.
Manuel V. Pangilinan, chairman of Smart’s parent firm Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co., confirmed that Smart was in talks with Apple to launch the latest version of the iPhone—iPhone4S—before yearend.
Similar to what happened to bigger markets like the United States, Germany and Canada, consumer electronics giant Apple has abandoned the regime of exclusive iPhone distribution.
With the lapse of the exclusivity deal with Globe Telecom, the original iPhone official carrier in the Philippines, Smart is now getting ready to launch iPhone4S as well.
[source]
The article also mentions the possibility to bring in Apple iPad tablets with data plans.
It seems that a Twitter hashtag campaign has started called #smartiphone. You can try to follow this for more developments. This development is rather interesting as SMART has already cornered exclusivity deals with HTC for their Android phones. WIth the iPhone 4S deal, has SMART locked in the smartphone business for both Android and iOS?
Aside: During the launch of the Netphone 701 and SmartNet platform at the Jump store, one of the execs did hint of being in talks with Apple for something related to smartphones. It seems like the cat is out of the bag. Are we going to see a SmartNet app pretty soon on the iTunes Store?
[N.B. There is a general disclosure on my blog’s about page on who I work / consult for.]
I spent my birthday in El Nido, Palawan together with some media friends and the ASUS crew. Here are 5 things I took home after ASUS presented their product lineup for Q4. In the evening of our first night, Jamie Ysrael together with Gabe Mercado (a good friend and fun host) launched the drool-worthy ASUS Zenbook.
On the side, I was also able to take several underwater photos from a dive fronting Miniloc island together with Intel’s Wowie Wong and Randy Kanapi.
So here’s what I learned:
I don’t watermark photos. That’s because the photos that I sell are always printed on canvas anyway and I never give out the high resolution files so it’s really not a big deal for me if people grab my shots and post them all over the place. I’d love a linkback but if that’s not given, well, welcome to the Internet. So unless photography is your bread and butter I don’t see the need for you to batch watermark everything. Here’s a work-around solution to watermarking photos.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
I think this is actually makes more sense than having a huge www.mywebsite.com at 50% opacity in the middle of your photo. It’s informative and you can even get creative with the use of empty space in your shots. I prefer doing text because I can’t draw but if I did, I’d doodle on them (<--- that cooking blog is amazing). What do you think?