Tag: Price

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Lenovo A65 is Dual SIM, Android 2.3, bigger steal at P5,499

EDIT: If you’re after a more powerful device in the PHP 10,xxx range, check out the Lenovo P700 that runs on Ice Cream Sandwich, has a bigger 4″ screen and a larger battery life. It’s also dual SIM.

Met up with John Rojo, the new Business Unit Head of Lenovo Mobile (Open COmmunications) and he showed me a bunch of new tech they have coming. One of these was the new Lenovo A65 which is their exciting follow up to the A60 released in October of last year.

Well guess what? I forgot to take photos. Because I was took busy making chika. You know. So instead, here’s a photo of the A60, because the A65 looks very similar and the differences are really in the internals.

For one, the new A65 comes with the latest firmware update that is a MUST. If you were an early adopter, the old issues had a recurring problem with SMS getting disabled. Fortunately Lenovo addressed this with a firmware update that fixed this one and only issue.

The new A65 is near-perfect given its price point of below PHP 6,000. It levels up the competition with the Samsung Galaxy Y and the Alcatel Blaze / Alcatel Glory because it sports a bigger 3.5″ screen and a faster 800Mhz processor (the A60 had a 650mhz processor).

So, really. Reasonably fast user interface, Android 2.3 OS (you don’t need ICS for this), dual SIM, huge 3.5″ screen. Then factor in a price point of only PHP 5,499.00 and it’s really a steal. A bigger steal than its precursor which retailed for above PHP 7,xxx.xx

Verdict: Highly recommended. I wouldn’t call it a budget phone because ‘budget’ connotes sacrificing functionality. But it doesn’t. I’m still wow-ed by the impressive price-point.

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Under the Hood: HP Z1 All in One Workstation

The HP Z1 is an engineering marvel. In the same way that space-saver apartments are awe-inspiring, the Z1 is wireless (as in everything is snap on!) solution to the workstation that saves a ton of space inside and out. This cuts corners when it comes to maintenance allowing your IT guy easy access to remove and replace hardware by just snapping modules in and out.

I’ve never been in love with a workstation before; a workstation you’d actually find in a call center floor or your run off the mill IT department. But that’s just how amazing this thing is. Treating the desktop workstation like a car, you can easily pop up the hood and see the insides laid neatly on the 27 inch flat screen’s behind. Everything is removable — from the motherboard to the fans and heatsink, the NVIDIA Quadro video card (optional), Intel Xeon Processor, and the hard drives. Even the wireless USB receiver is located inside the hood allowing you to use the mouse and keyboard without any wires.

The HP Z1 Workstation isn’t just available on bulk order for the enterprise market but will also be made available over the counter for consumers who want a desktop solution that even mom can take apart. It retails in the PHP 80,000.00 and thereabouts.

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Mostly Everything

SMART Netphone Pricing for Postpaid and Prepaid

Well here it is! The moment you’ve been waiting for — NETPHONE PRICING SCHEMES! The first Netphone will be available on both prepaid and postpaid plans. You can hop on to www.netphone.ph for all the details but to sum up everything:

This is the list of plans on postpaid. And here is the list of daily and monthly “bite sized” plans for data.

If you look closely, there is an obvious “sweet spot” in the pricing scheme under the “all-in” unlimited monthly data for PHP 999 a month as apart from unlimited IM and social stream usage (that’s SmartNet, Facebook and Twitter), you also get 3,500 SMS messages and 200 minutes of voice calls. Insane. I’d change my 8 year old plan if I could.

If you’ve all been curious as to what exactly the Netphone can do, there’s a guided tour on the Netphone site.

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Mostly Everything

RIM BlackBerry Playbook Video Review (25 minutes)

UPDATE:
Official BlackBerry Playbook PH pricing:
16GB at P23,990
32GB at P28,990
64GB at P33,990

The Playbook will be available August 6 2011 via retail and telcos.

I host a weekly tech show called ‘The Geeks’ every Wednesday from 2-4PM, live over the Internet. We archive copies for future viewing. If you’re interested, catch us at this url: http://www.flippish.com/vjlive at that time.

In this segment I show my co-host Sheena Dian the BlackBerry Playbook. We spend a half hour talking about this outlier tablet. If you want to see more photos and commentary, I featured the Playbook back in its infancy at Mobile World Congress ’11 with Andi Manzano.

Pros
Best form factor among the 7 inch tablets
Comes with neoprene case
Amazing multitask functions
Imaginative touch sensitive frame

Cons
Very limited number of apps
Noticeable UI lag (which we have to bring up given the new standards of dual core Android tablets)
We have to wait for Android Marketplace support
Very hard to do PIM and email if you don’t own a BlackBerry
No 3G version (rely on a BlackBerry phone to tether unless you connect via mobile WiFi hotspot)
Although not available here yet, the rumored price is at PHP 30,xxx.xx

Verdict
The BlackBerry Playbook has always seemed like a work in progress to me. If you track the progress of this tablet for the past 12 months you will see how RIM has brought it to life by supporting Android apps. That’s the whole irony — the Playbook (will) support Android apps but PIM only works well if you own a BlackBerry smartphone.

I honestly cannot give a real verdict. We will have to wait for the time when the Playbook truly supports Android apps. If you already own a BlackBerry smartphone, the Playbook makes sense … but so does an iPad or Android tablet. There’s the rub.

One comment to note from my high school barkada who now lives in Canada:

Since RIM is a Canadian company, the Playbook has been all over the place here in Vancouver. And yet, it is not doing so well. At all.

I’ve gotten some serious hands on time with the thing and spoken with a few Blackberry reps, Blackberry App developers, as well as some local tech bloggers, and it looks like Blackberry keeps making promises it can’t keep. They told us that the Android support and the native email client would come in June. Well, June came and went and it’s not here.

App development for the thing is apparently pretty difficult, definitely not as easy as developing for the iPad and Android OS, so Apps have been very slow to the marketplace.

For the apps that are there, most of them work fine, but there are random performance issues that keep cropping up with the Playbook… apps will hang for no reason, crash for no reason, and even sometimes refuse to load. Even Blackberry’s own browser is one of the most unreliable when it comes to performance.

It’s sad because the hardware sure looks pretty and it does promise great things. But for now, promise is all it has, it seems. There are rumblings around the country that RIM is dying fast, and the Playbook is one of the big reasons for that.

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Mostly Everything

Unboxing The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings Premium Edition

The wait is over. I would have bought the regular “el cheapo” edition but Datablitz didn’t have it. They only had the Premium Edition on sale so what the heck.

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