Category: Info

Review – Samsung Omnia 7 i8700 (Part I)

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As my SingTel Mio contract is due, I decided to renew it for another 2 years since the service from Mio has been satisfactory. As part of the package, I am offered a mobile phone package. Though my Sony Ericsson W902 has served me well, I decided it is time to upgrade to one of those new touch screen smartphones since it has been almost 2 years anyway.

I have ruled out a Nokia device on Symbian, even though I didn’t have bad experiences with them except for a Communicator which went into the service center twice for a hardware failure (but that’s got nothing much to do with the ease of use or the interface). I am also an existing Blackberry user (provided by the office for work) but the 9800 ‘Torch’ is not yet available and I am not impressed with RIM’s 9300 and 9700 even though I must say they are the best Blackberry Smartphones since the 8820.

Everyone knows I dislike Apple, so the iPhone is definitely out. The main reason I disliked Apple is primarily because I find some of its business practices unethical. On top of which the fan boys are extremely annoying not to mention at times ignorant. Even if the product is really superior (and in the iPhone’s case it isn’t even true), leave me to discover whether something is great on my own and stop pushing it down my throat. Not to mention that I ain’t really interested in the apps available as I only install what I need.

So that leaves me with phones running on Android, where there is a variety for me to choose from. I have zilch experience with an Android phone and I gave up looking at the available models after awhile. Not because they aren’t good, but rather because I ain’t geeky enough to be really interested in being able to tweak the OS or install different flavors.

While I maybe wrong I also had this gut feeling that though on theory I can change between brands of phones running Android seamlessly, in reality that is hardly the case. Furthermore, the slight variations in flavors on different brands may turn Android into the Windows of mobile phones where it will become buggy and error prone because the writers of the OS just didn’t had those hardware in mind when they made the OS. Sort of like why phones running on Windows Mobile (WinMo) 6.5 and its predecessors became rejected by users.

It was then I noticed that SingTel is also offering a few devices running on Windows Phone 7 – basically a complete revamp of the much hated WinMo series. While generally it is folly to jump into version 1.0 of any device, I took the leap and bought the Samsung Omnia 7 i8700 just like the time when I got myself a Blackberry 9500 ‘Storm’ running on BBOS 4.7 (first as a loaner from a friend before I bought it). Using a device that isn’t exactly popular would free me to explore it at leisure without others laughing at my ignorance and showing off what great things they can do with the device. This is some of my findings after 5 days (I’ll not bother with the specs since that can be easily google’d.):

The Interface

SingTel delivered the handset to my office on Wednesday (27 Oct 2010) morning around 9:15am. It was shockingly early and I was actually expecting them to come around lunch. I quickly transferred the sim card over to test it out. First off, the interface is very different, since it doesn’t use an array of icons which has been a standard in many smartphones since the day of Palmtops. To describe the interface in my own words, it is like a 2-column electronic ‘Post-it’ Pad, where the user just pin whatever he likes / fancies – be it an app (which one can find more from the app-store called the ‘Marketplace’), or a contact, even a photo and music file. These will then appear as buttons (either square or rectangular) on the screen.

One can re-organise their positions by dragging. When too many things are pinned, then one would have to swipe up and down very often to get to what is needed. My advice is to keep it short and access everything else by swiping to the menu on the right.

Sending an sms or email is relatively easy using the on-screen keyboard, though I am quite unhappy that it can’t do a simple cut and paste. Why Microsoft is making the same mistake the iPhone iCrap 1.0 made is beyond me. It also doesn’t make sense not to have East Asian language input such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This is rather puzzling because I can receive an sms in these languages and it will display properly. (In fact, even Thai displays properly on this device). I hope an East Asian language input pack (or a version of the OS that caters to East Asian users) is in the works. Once it is available it should be released for the phone as soon as possible if this phone intends to find a niche for itself in Asia. Unfortunately from what I have gathered, it seems unlikely this is going to happen anytime soon.

Making a call it also easy. One can either select a contact from the list and call or enter a number for the on-screen number pad. When a call is received once has the choice to either answer or ignore it, and I would prefer the on-screen buttons to be colored (green – answer, red – ignore) so that it is easier to identify which one to press. While that is only cosmetic and it doesn’t really make a difference even if it is not done, it does remove the perception that the interface appears unfinished.

It does however, give me the feeling that it had used the iPhone as a reference device (or perhaps even took some ideas form that of Palm’s WebOS) in its design. An ex-colleague who has played with an iPhone before played around with the Internet Explorer on the phone and his comment was that everything else from tapping the screen and the pinch-and-zoom is ‘completely the same’ with the iPhone. (I will talk about the browser on a later post.)

Phone Security

This is easily enabled under the ‘lock and wallpaper’ under settings. From here the screen time-out (to conserve energy), wallpaper and a 4-digit pass-code to unlock the phone can be set. In my opinion, the security is almost non-existent because a brute force code cracker would probably just take a few mini-seconds (ms) to break it. On top of which, I certainly hope it doesn’t fall prey to the same vulnerability that plague the iPhone. If there is going to be an OS upgrade or patch coming soon, offer users a choice to select a pass-code with more complexity – such as a alpha-numeric password which the Blackberry offers.

Ringtones & Alerts

This is one of the things I didn’t like the most about this phone. I am limited in choices to the ringtones & alerts that comes with the phone and I cannot select an MP3 I have loaded into the device to serve this purpose. This is ridiculous because even on some of the simple phones I am able to choose a sound or alert of my choice. There seems to be a divide between the Zune player function and that of the phone function. In my opinion, priority should be put into fixing this right away.

Contacts Organisation

The primary function of the phone is to make phone calls so I have to start populating the contacts list. For some odd reasons I configured it to login to my Facebook account first, and it started to pull in the news feed (which updates only when I touch the ‘People’ button) and populate the contacts with my Facebook friends – complete with their profile photos. Note, this isn’t the same as the Facebook App (downloaded separately) which has more functionalities.

While this is nice, it is hardly impressive. That’s not mentioning that I hated the font size of the options (which I felt is too big and ugly and it makes a mockery of my eyesight) and after almost a week later I have not found the option to make the fonts smaller.

I soon added my Windows Live Mail (or Hotmail) account and it pulls in the new mails and contacts too. This isn’t a push mail device so I set it to download at 30 minute intervals. If I am expecting a mail, there is a refresh option which allows me to download on demand. But it became very messy because of the duplicate contacts. While the phone did automatically ‘link’ some obvious contacts with those on Facebook, I had to go through the rest of them to clean up the mess and this is where I encountered my first annoyance. As some of my friends has created multiple Windows Live Messenger (WLM) accounts previously (and I had not bothered to clean them out), I am always prompted with a message that informs me I can’t link two WLM contacts when I tried to link them.

My advice here is, organise contacts in the Hotmail account first before setting up the account in the phone. Otherwise a lot of time is wasted deleting unwanted or defunct contacts and linking them. The phone also automatically suggest linking with those with similar names and email addresses, this process is hardly seamless. However it is pretty neat once it is done – I can now sms, email, make a call or even send Facebook messages just from the ‘People’ button alone. In this aspect it sort of lives up to Microsoft’s ads that a user can spend less time on the phone while doing more.

At this point of time I have also set up my Gmail account on the phone, but I have taken care not to sync the contacts with the phone to avoid the need to clean up my contacts list again. On top of which I also have my Yahoo mail account set up and thankfully it doesn’t sync the contacts.


To be continued…

Daily Discourse – Outsourcing Went Bad

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The failure of DBS Bank’s electronic banking services reminds me of an incident that is rarely known by the public but told to me by a friend who is a UNIX administrator. It was a classic example of outsourcing went bad. The following is the account of the incident, but the names of the company and the internationally acclaimed vendor are changed (for obvious reasons).

This is the story:

It was during one fine night shift, when a data centre operator delete *.* accidentally. According to her own confession, she thought she was deleting files in a folder. Unfortunately for her, she was actually in the root directory when she did so. (For the uninitiated, the root directory is sort of like the main trunk of the tree. In short, while she thought she was cutting off a useless branch, she had actually chopped the whole tree down.)

The result of her action was disastrous. She effectively wiped out the OS and the mount-points on the SANs etc. Almost 4.3 TB (Terabytes – i.e. 4 x 1012 bytes) of files were deleted. Unlike the command prompt in Windows, where one can terminate a bad command with CTRL-C or CTRL-BREAK or close it down with Task Manager, a command executed in UNIX just keep going until the job is done.

So, even if she had realised her mistake and tried to stop it, she can’t. 23 Servers all across MNC X which were connected to the same SAN volumes (all affected by her erroneous command) went down immediately. Slowly the other servers were affected. The final ‘body count’: 168 servers of MNC X in that data centre were affected. The end result, nobody from any country, in any outlets / offices, could connect back to MNC X. It is simply an IT Black Day.

Best of it all, this happened somewhere around midnight and that gave the operator time to cover up what she did. She quickly modified whatever log files she has access to and deleted all her entries. So when the monitoring system (which is miraculously still functional) sent alerts to the ‘owners’ of each affected system, the tech guys who were awaken discovered to their own dismay they couldn’t login remotely (since theirs servers are all down). They were left with no choice but to drag their tired bodies back on site.

It took all of them almost 3 hours to be back on site, and they found no trace of what happened and could only scratch their heads since the log files were manipulated. Even more puzzling was that the redundancy failed – the backup systems had not kick in.

To cut the long story short, MNC X was left with no choice but to restore from backups so they can bring all their systems back online. It was over 15 hours later before they finally restored some semblance of order to the entire IT infrastructure. Meantime, Vendor Y launched an investigation and ultimately a guru in UNIX administration discovered the log files manipulations and even found out exactly who did it.

The saddest part of it all was that MNC X never discover the truth, even though MNC X probably also lost millions that day since it also has offices in other parts of the world which is still running. According to Vendor Y’s findings, the reason why the redundant systems didn’t kick in was a result of the backup systems being too old and they no longer matched the same configuration as the primary systems. (Doesn’t that sound almost as ridiculous as the reason DBS gave in their official statement – an upgrade – as to the cause of the break down of ALL their electronic banking services?)

That was of obviously the many droppings of a bull’s behind. After all, any IT technical person worth his salt would have asked what the heck vendor Y has been doing if it has not implemented hardware and / or software upgrades to the redundant systems to keep them up to date! They would have taken the vendor to court and sue them for a substantial amount of damages.

The story gets even better from here. The culprit was totally untouched because she has been Vendor Y’s perm staff for 20 over years. Instead, a contract staff was made the scapegoat and fired to appease MNC X.

What is most ultimate to this sad story of outsourcing went bad was that the contract staff who got fired was one of the three UNIX gurus who discovered who altered the damned logs. I personally suspect that the story doesn’t end here. Vendor Y probably convinced MNC X and sold it yet another several million dollar worth of hardware to ‘make sure this will never happen again’. (Note: The part about the vendor profiting from this fiasco is just my own speculation, not that it actually happened.)

When I looked at the magnitude of the staggering damage caused by Vendor Y in this major fxxk-up, the lack of dedication of the staff hired by the vendor which my current employer outsourced some of its IT services to paled by comparison. After all, the minor delays caused by these morons who simply didn’t put themselves in the shoes of our business users is nothing compared to what MNC X suffered in that one single morning.

BlackBerry Storm I – My Gripes

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I have been using a BlackBerry Storm for quite some time now, and I have only recently updated the OS to 4.7.0.186 after meeting up with Nicole to check out the Storm 2 passed to her for review. Don’t get me wrong, upgrading the device OS to 4.7 won’t make your Storm a Storm 2, because in the core the Storm 2 is a different creature entirely. The Storm 2 also comes with WIFI and I had always complained about Research in Motion [RIM] releasing models that are 3G but not WIFI-capable and WIFI-capable models which are non-3G. Whatever RIM’s business strategy is, it is my considered opinion that a manufacturer should just put in everything available, as long as it does not cost them significantly to do so. Whether the area support the technology provided, or whether the user uses is no reason to remove a feature.

Anyway, I liked the Storm 2 a lot better than the Storm. The feel of the SurePress touchscreen on the Storm 2 was definitely way better than version 1.0. Nicole subsequently informed me that even DK also agrees the successor is way better. He was so annoyed with the Storm previously, he just passed it to her for review after a few minutes.

Anyway, the reason I haven’t gone all the way to OS 5.0.0.451 on the Storm is because there isn’t yet an East Asian version available. No East Asian means no Chinese text input and I won’t go without that. Nicole and I had several chats on the Storm / Storm 2 and she came to the conclusion that as far as these two models of BlackBerry Smart Phones are concerned, a user will either love it or hate it. To add on, the Storm is a product I will use, but one I probably won’t recommend to others. The reason is not because it’s terrible, since it had met all my usage requirements. It is just my personal opinion that some users might find their experience very unpleasant when using it.

In short, unlike iFreaks who have 101 excuses to justify for every bad thing about the iPhone, I will follow my conscience and talk about some of the features I didn’t like – for e.g. Copy & Paste, and zooming, not to mention the long start up time when you reset the phone. Anyway, I did not play with the Storm 2 long enough for me to tell whether it has significantly improve over these features, so do not take my rants into consideration until you see the Storm 2 for yourself.

It will be difficult for me to put down in words everything I dislike about the Storm’s Copy & Paste and zoom feature. So I did a series of screen shots to make it easier for me to explain it.

I loaded up one of my Plurks on the BlackBerry Storm as an example. (By default, my BlackBerry Browser is in ‘Pan’ Mode.)
Same Plurk shown here. Tap the screen once and it brings up the little ‘toolbar’ below. (Yep, don’t have to press or do anything, just tap it.)
Let me bring up the menu and toggle ‘Select’ mode.
As a long time BlackBerry user, I tapped the screen once to indicate where I want to start selecting text, and then slowly slide the finger across the screen. Just like what I would have done using a track ball / track wheel cousin.
FAIL!! I had only moved slightly to the right and then everything on the screen was selected. Frankly, for months I still haven’t figured out how to select text in this mode. I have tried tapping it at one corner, then another but to no avail. (I scrolled up the screen so the other selected text will be visible.)
Let me tap the screen once to bring up the ‘toolbar’ and change to ‘Cursor’ mode instead. (The ‘Cursor’ mode is very much like using the track ball or track wheel on earlier BlackBerry models.)
Noticed the icon change on the ‘toolbar’ after I changed mode? I brought up the menu and toggled ‘Select’ mode again.
SUCCESS!! I did exactly the same thing as I did on ‘Pan’ mode but this works. I joked with Nicole that by now, an iFreak would have finished cutting and pasting at least 10 times on his iPhone. (Again, I scrolled up the page so the text which are not selected are shown.)
Now if I want to copy the text I just need to press the icon ‘Copy’ (highlighted) on the toolbar and it will be done.
Next, I move on to demonstrate the ‘Zoom’ feature. To zoom, press the icon ‘Zoom’ (highlighted) on the screen.
Now it’s zoom in, dead center.
If I hit zoom again, this is what I will see, and this is the most it will ever go. You can’t zoom anything more than that.
If you want to zoom in at a particular area, you need to press on the screen at the area you want to zoom into. (In my case, around the word ‘install’. This is where it is zoomed once.)
Similarly, this is the largest it will zoom. In short, there are just two zoom levels, medium and large.

Anyway, several hours after I finished the screen shots (and the first version of this post), I discovered a easier way to copy a block of text in ‘Pan’ mode. All I need to do is tap once on the start, then at the end and it would selected the text desired. Not surprising, since FoxTwo told me the Palm already have a feature which allow you to click on one point, and on another to select the text in between a very long time ago. Shameful that it took me so long to rediscover this. The price of not reading the manual and assuming that I have used BlackBerry Smartphones so long I don’t need to read it *slaps forehead*. I had forgotten that a touch screen smartphone would behave like… a Palm, the ancestor of all Palm sized handhelds. After all, most smartphones these days arrange icons in a grid, and on touch screens our fingers have replaced the stylus.

Whatever the case is, the BlackBerry Storm’s touch screen has this non multi-touch feel. The absence of the ‘pinch and zoom’ (or reverse a zoom) features aside (since it is patented by Apple and thus RIM cannot reproduce that on the Storm), selecting a specific area to zoom-in is not available. On top of which, the ‘pinch and zoom’ feature is available on the Nexus and Palm Pre, so there is a question of how much that patent actually covers.

While a friend pointed out that ‘pinch and zoom’ is nothing more than meaningless gesture to make the iPhone look high tech and revolutionary, the best I can do is still zoom dead center on a pre-selected point just twice (large, then larger) on the Storm! Granted that zooming in on the point I tapped is actually isn’t significantly different from a ‘pinch and zoom’ as that also zooms in on a point, the main difference here is that the user cannot control the ‘depth’ of the zoom. That inevitably makes a user feel the technology on the Storm to be ‘ridiculously outdated’. Thus, if the Storm did not have much impact in the touch screen smartphone competition, I am not really surprised. In a separate discussion with FoxTwo, he mentioned that if a feature is available on another device and you are a device in the same class, it is best to make that feature also available, unless it has been condemned to be utterly stupid or useless. It doesn’t really matter whether the user use it or not, just put in it and make no excuse like iFreaks do for the iPhone when they are confronted with the obvious handicaps.

Thus, these are the reasons why I won’t recommend the BlackBerry Storm to anybody, even though I personally find it good enough for my usage. It will be hard to convince the user of today – ‘pampered’ by all the other feature packed smartphones – to consider the Storm. The best I can do would be to offer my set to my friends to evaluate if they want to know more, and let them decide whether they can live with it.

The only good news is I heard is RIM has acquired Webkit and it will soon release a new browser for the BlackBerry smartphones. I hope the new browser will do more to improve user experience on not just the Storm series of BlacBerry smartphones, but even on their qwerty-keyboard based products.

By the way, I also told Nicole my ‘crackpot idea’ of sticking a track pad at the back of a mobile phone with a large screen, and that would still give us a smartphone with capabilities almost similar to a touch screen. I thought of this when I was working on my BlackBerry Storm one day, and my idle fingers were just roaming all over the back cover. I thought that would be cool since we won’t soil the screen anymore and we won’t be spending our time wiping it. Nicole mentioned to me that such a product – the Motorola Backflip – already exists. Apparently, some times even ‘crackpot ideas’ are conceived in big companies.

Cityscape – Tower Fifteen

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Whenever I am late for work, I will be taking a cab and I have at times noticed this building. Though I remembered that the building was “extended” with another built right on top of it, I could not find the photos to support my memories.

However, whenever I passed by the building on a cab, be it rushing to a gathering with friends at SunTec or Marina Square, my interest in the building will be renewed. So as the building entered my sights one morning while the cab stopped at the traffic junction, I made up my mind to find out whatever information there maybe on it. The reason is that I personally thought it was pretty cool, and even some kind of architectural marvel since there will be difficulties piling and digging beside an existing building and then building right on top without damaging it.

So, I take note of the roads at the junction and the nearby buildings around it, and then went online to find out its name on gothere.sg. It wasn’t long before I found the building name and then I went on to look for any articles and images of the building through Google.

Surprisingly, I ain’t the only person who noticed it, and in fact I am a bit slow in talking about it since people had been talking about it since Aug 2003 on a forum. In fact, it was in the forum post I found most of the photos, and also a reply from the design architect himself. I quote:

As the design architect for the refurbishment of Tower Fifteen I have been requested to add inputs to how the design evolved as I have done with other project here.

The design was conceived when I was working in Singapore in 2006. I left Singapore early 2007 and am pleased to see the final build result from various web sites. Unfortunately have not yet returned to document the completed project to add to my portfolio.

This project was highly unusual as the actual building in itself was very unique. It comprised out of the old Euro Asia Centre from about 30 years ago and then a decision was made early 2000 to extend the building to 29 floors. It was technically not possible to have the new structures load supported by the older building, hereby three major columns where build to support the new building above (one support housing the lift shafts). While this technically worked it left a very disjointed and unsightly building.

With the sale of the building, we where approached by its new owners (Ezra) and where presented with a challenge on how to convert to building into an A-grade commercial building.

The two architectural styles of the (two) buildings made such an impact, that the approach from conception focused on unifiying these into a single language and introduce elements to enable the building to read as a singular building. While the solution may appear evident, the true challenge was working around the highly rigid URA mandates. GFA is highly priced in Singapore and hereby the form had very little room to move, hence a need to follow the old building form but yet make it read as a singular building with a current aesthetic character.

The character of the buildings where overpowered by the support pillars of the upper floors extension. As opposed to trying to minimise their impact we focused on celebrating these unusual supports and used this very language to tie the upper to the lower. Through their extension the overall building got framed.

The framing established the overall expression of form succesfully. From this step it evolved into an excerise of developing all the components in between, and yet again great variances between the old and new where found. Through the development of an appropriate facade system that allowed for flexibility it adapted to the buildings framework, yet provides the facade character of a singular building.

The overal height of the building remains, however louvered screens where added to hide the mechanical equipment and at the same frame the roof of the building to offer it a firm standing presence (avoiding the typical cut-off look).

So, even though everyone would be more impressed with the Marina Sands IR building or even the Sail at Marina Bay, I present the photos of Tower Fifteen. After all, even though it isn’t grand, it is quite a feat on its own.

Food Report – Maxwell Market

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A job is a job is a job, and the consolation to even the most stressful and depressing job is payday. Anyway, things have been rather depressing at work for recently, with most of the sh*t coming from someone I considered an useless a**hat in my department. The final straw that broke the camel’s back was of course an outburst from someone whom I suspect is either having menopause or suffering from PMS.

That probably is part of the reason why I am getting writer’s block and have no idea what to put on the blog for quite a while. Either way, in between paydays, my other solution is either eating good food, having a good time drinking with my pals, and sleeping.

Several months ago when our office shifted from Raffles Place to Tanjong Pagar, I was even more depressed because I am leaving my usual lunching places behind. Fortunately for me there is some good food at Maxwell Market, which is about 10 mins walk from the office so even I can get some comfort in between work. This is a ‘field report’ *wink* of two of the stalls we used to frequent there:

Stall Name: Traditional Claypot Chicken Rice

I personally hadn’t try their Claypot Chicken Rice because it comes in a big pot which probably requires at least 3 people to finish. But their chicken drumstick noodle (or mee hoon or mee sua) is heavenly. The soup is made from some medical herbs and the drumstick is so well cooked that it usually just falls off the bones with a slight push from the chopsticks. At $3.80 a bowl it is very filling and would usually last me from lunch until knock off time. The tonic in the soup might probably even go into repairing some of the damage done to my body when I blew my top over the idiocy of the usual suspects.

However, my personal advice is not to eat this too often. But if you can’t resist the temptation and would love to eat it everyday, I would personally recommend you take some Chinese herbal tea to ‘cool’ your body. I bear no responsibilities if you get nose bleeds from eating so much herbal tonic.

Stall Name: 75 Peanuts soup

When done with the main dish, my colleague and I would usually queue up to get ourselves some deserts. Diagonally opposite would be a store selling peanut and red bean soup. But what is really nice isn’t the soup, but the sweet dumplings made of glutinous rice flour. For a bowl of $1.30, you will get two where one contains black sesame paste and the other peanut paste – the real heavenly stuff. If you would like more you can just go for the $2 one which will contain four dumplings.

Business for this stall is so good that by 1pm or so they would have run out. Thus they are usually closed after 2pm and you can only try it during lunch hours.


So far, all of the people I told enjoyed the food from these stalls. So, head down to Maxwell Market and try these stalls out if you work nearby in the near future.

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