Tag: review

“Bricking” a Blackberry Storm

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After previewing the Blackberry Storm at Geek Terminal – courtesy of Paddy Tan from Bak2u – I was itching to get my hands on one for more detailed ‘testing’

After some hassling, a friend who obtained a Storm overseas finally agreed to let me have a go at it. After picking it up at the MRT Station, I happily swapped out the simcard from my office-issue Blackberry 8820 once I returned to the office. I definitely didn’t like the design of the simcard slot and I wished RIM had design it like the Pearl or the 7290s. It is damned difficult to remove the simcard inserted in the Storm. Even the iPhone comes with a little hole where a pin can be inserted to eject the simcard!

Anyway, in spite of my earlier perception, the Blackberry Storm is just about as large as the 8820, with one notable difference. The USB slot that the Storm use is different from those of its predecessors since the 7290. That means, after upgrading from another Blackberry model to the Storm, the old USB cable can no longer be used, unlike the old ones where it is interchangeable between the 7100, 7290, 81xx, 870x, 88xx etc. That shouldn’t be an issue since it’s the standard mini-USB cable, not some proprietary cable that Sony Ericsson is very fond of using. I would skip the specifications since they can be found on RIM’s website.

So after putting in the simcard and the battery, the Storm (like all Blackberry handsets) automatically powered up. Just like the any other Blackbery, it still takes awhile to initialise and power up. Once the handset established a connection with the M1 mobile network, I look for the Blackberry browser icon and fired up the browser. The first site I visited was of course my own blog. I had to see for myself how that compares to the browser on the iPhone.

Compared to the 8820 where the blog loads oddly, with certain parts appearing where they shouldn’t, the Storm loaded it much like my desktop browser would, albeit in a minimised state. As far as appearance is concerned, it doesn’t look very much different when loaded on the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone where finger gestures zooms in or out, on the Storm you tap the screen once to zoom in, and if I recalled correctly, it isn’t as easy to zoom out. I would admit that definitely wouldn’t appeal to iPhone users at all!

Anyway, I wasn’t very familiar in navigating on the Storm’s browser, but after awhile I did found out I could toggle it show a little pointer which I can move around with my finger just like I did with the scroll ball on the 8820. The actual Plurk page failed to load properly, but the mobile version worked, though I have no idea why it came up in simplified Chinese mode just like any other mobile phone – a problem that does not exist on the 8820. Sadly, the original OS that RIM installed on this particular Storm did not have Asian language support so I could see zilch when some plurks appeared in other languages.

Back to the main screen of the Storm. The arrangement of the icons also looked a little different. I have yet to figure out how I can hide or move the icons. I found out that Instant messengers are now assigned to its own sub-folder, while applications goes to another. This is very unlike the older models where everything is loaded on the same screen and you can rearrange them as you like.

I tried downloading some programs and I am not sure whether it’s just psychological, but everything seems to install faster. Installing Bloomberg Mobile, Windows Live Messenger and Facebook were all under a few minutes. That’s comparable to the 3G Blackberry 8707.

The Storm comes with what I called a ‘feedback’ capacitive touchscreen. For the uninitiated, that means you have to actually press on the screen itself to activate something. This is unlike the iPhone where just tapping the icon will do. I originally disliked this feature while my friend Alex loved it. He mentioned that prevents him from activating the wrong icon since touch screens he has worked with, have the tendency to ‘misinterpret’ his touches and activate things even when he didn’t want them to. I begin to appreciate this feature after that.

Sending a message is not as easy as the other Blackberry models. That is perhaps the reason why most people say that the Storm is slow. The touch screen is at times not as sensitive near the edges perhaps because of the way it is designed. Surprisingly, this is also where I actually start to appreciate the Storm’s ‘feedback’ touch screen, and understand the point my friend Alex raised. The reason being that it reduced my errors when typing since I can now see what lights up under my fingers before I press on it. After a while one would notice that when the wrong letter or number (such as the keys ‘f’ and ‘g’) keeps lighting up when touched with one thumb, using the other thumb will do just fine. I am sure some people would hate that but that has reduced my use of the backspace key and prevents me from ‘over-stretching’ one thumb to the other side of the screen. I suspect that would actually reduce the risk of dropping the set.

Still, I didn’t quite like the on-screen keyboard because it covered up much of the screen when entering text in landscape mode. The on-screen keypad in portrait mode isn’t much better, because it isn’t as easy to use as that of the Pearl or the any other mobile phones. These are some of the things I definitely hope that RIM will fix in a new OS release!

Of course, there’s one thing I definitely hate about the Storm. At times, when just slightly tilted, it changes from portrait to landscape or vice versa. Then at times I actually had to shake the damned thing so that it becomes aware of the change of orientation. Also, it will continue to do this even when the device is locked, and I personally think that is a waste of energy.

My take is that the Blackberry Storm is quite adequate for users like me who uses it to browse the web, or reply to messages and SMS infrequently. It should also meet some of the basic multimedia needs – like taking quick photos, storing music (there’s a slot for a mini-SD card) etc. I am quite sure users who like things fast will definitely hate it.

Anyway I did not have the chance to try out intensively the other multimedia features though the few pictures I took in low-light mode with the camera are quite bad. I wished I had uploaded them before I ‘bricked’ the device. [Note: To ‘brick’ a device simply means rendering it completely inoperable while attempting to update it.]

So how the hell I ‘bricked’ the Storm? I decided I wanted to find out how Chinese pinyin text input would look like. I also wanted to see how well does it support East Asian languages on the display so I downloaded the latest OS release available to one of the telcos in Singapore. Yep, it doesn’t matter they just had the Storm available on that same day [24-Apr-09]!

Just like I would upgrade the OS of any other Blackberry, I checked that the version of my Desktop Manager is compatible with the Storm, happily fired it up and selected what I want to install. All went well for the first stage, in which the Storm would restart for the first time.

Desktop Manager patiently waited for the Storm to signal that it’s ready for Stage Two, which never happened. After several minutes, it timed out.

On my system, the USB detection for the Storm goes up and down every few minutes. When I unplugged the Storm to check, and I found it is stuck in perpetual reboot mode (starts up -> white screen -> error too fast for me to catch -> repeats).

For the next 4 hours I attempted to recover the device with articles obtained from RIM’s official knowledge base. None of which worked. By then it was 5am in which I was so exhausted that I simply knocked out after crawling to my bed.

The next day I informed my sheepish friend. I assured him I hadn’t tried updating with some hacked, beta or leaked OS. Because he obtained this set overseas, he was also concerned that RIM might consider the warranty void and refuse to replace it. After contacting RIM, it appeared that they have come across such issues before and without much fuss offered to replace it for free as long as we pay to ship ‘the brick’ back to them.

While all is well, I am a little concerned with this because updating the OS on the Blackberry has always been hassle free. I had updated at least 50 or so Blackberry handsets from ancient 7730s to 8820s. Articles on the RIM knowledge base would resolve any issues as long as I looked hard enough. I really hope this is a one off case, because users might get even more frustrated with the Storm if they are already frustrated by the interface.

Movie Review: 幸福万岁 [Love Matters]

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Watched this during the gala premier (20.01.2009) with free tickets courtesy of my mei xinyun at GV Vivo City. After the movie, I met some of the members of the committee of the Association of Bloggers (Singapore) who were also there.

The movie is typical of Jack Neo movie, there is much jokes and laughter and also a subtle educational purpose behind it. In this case, perhaps a ‘lesson’ on family, marriage and relationship. Set in Malaysia, the story surrounds these main casts – Bo Seng (Henry Thia aka ‘Alamak’) and wife Jia Li (Yeo Yann Yann), playboy Jeremy (Jack Lim) and girlfriend Ms Wong (Cheryl Lee), and teenager Benny (Alex Leong) and crush Jennifer (Natalli).

In my opinion, each of the couples in the movie depicts a stage of life – from the puppy love of Benny for Jennifer, Jeremy’s playboy lifestyle and his unwillingness to settle down to start a family, to Bo Seng’s otherwise stale relationship with his wife. I believe it is producers’ objective to make the audience ponder on the meaning of love, family and marriage as one stage wife Jia Li made the audience ponder with the question: Can’t there be love without sex? and playboy Jeremy justifying his lifestyle by claiming it to be God’s design. It also showed A breakdown in communication between parents and children in which mother Jia Li found a difficulty to bring up matters to son Benny, and Benny trying to hide mistakes he made in school from his parents.

On the down side, there are parts of this movie which is over-exaggerated, especially the parts depicting how Jeremy ‘turn over a new leaf‘ and choose to settle down. I found myself looking at the time and wondering when the movie will be over. My personal opinion was that even though everyone in those parts acted pretty well, it sort of killed whatever message that the movie wanted to bring across.

But on the bright side, the ending while not spectacular nor unexpected, was good one. At least, Bo Seng finally understood he has a part to play to maintain a healthy marriage, Jeremy finally settled down, and Benny won the heart of his crush Jennifer.

I’ll give the movie 3 stars out of 5 and not more as I felt it could be better done.

Movie – 赤壁 [Red Cliff]

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今晚我和一个旧同事和他的好友去看了赤壁这部电影，看了之后觉得有点是在看喜剧片的感觉。有些对白真的可以说的上是低俗和不知所谓。真的我还真怀疑我是否是在看星爷以前拍的电影。如果你问我电影里的情节哪里最印象深刻，我只记得 “还匹马有责呢!” 和 “你们现在读书，将来就有饭吃。” 这两句莫名其妙的对白。虽然如此，但是如果你工作上有压力，我看这些好笑的对白可能有松懈身心的益处吧！

感官上一看上去就知道这是出自吴宇森的电影，因为里头充满了《英雄本色》的影子。甚至连演赵子龙的胡军都有点像《喋血双雄》里的李修贤。但是叙述历史的电影不是英雄片，太过的注重夸大一些人物的勇猛或者过分的渲染英雄主义却成了这部电影最大的败笔。这部电影的血腥和排场肯定是可以媲美《投名状》，只不过《投名状》比较严肃一些。

电影的情节往往和历史是有些差别的。就如电影里的周瑜和诸葛亮一见面就犹如惺惺相惜，连话都不用说就明白对方心里在想什么为例子，就是其中的一些差别。况且，江东的东吴和荆州的刘家宗室是有杀父夺将之仇的，孙权哪有那么容易就被诸葛亮的三言两语所动摇，和刚战败的刘备结盟?

不过电影归电影，历史归历史。当你观赏这部电影的时候就用娱乐的眼光去评价它好了。如果你把它当成历史记录来看，那你肯定会大失所望。最后要提起的是，这只是他妈的上集而已。看了实在有点不过瘾，还有一点被骗的感觉。

我个人建议就是不要在周末票价比较贵的时候看。反正都是上下两部的，周末看还会觉得有点不值。

Movie: You Don’t Mess with the Zohan

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If you are expecting any serious stuff from this movie, then you shouldn’t watch it. It’s an Adam Sandler movie and pure comedy.

The story is about Zohan, an Israeli super-commando who can kick through walls to knock out terrorists hiding behind them, strips a terrorist’s weapon faster than he can pull the trigger, catches bullets with his noise, and kicks any terrorists ass many ways. Yet all he wanted to do was to get away from all the fighting, and be a hair stylist.

Failing to get the understanding from his parents, Zohan fakes his death in a mission to capture the terrorist known as ‘The Phantom’, and then stow away on a plane to America to seek his dreams. After failing to be employed by several hair stylists, he ends up in a neighbourhood where the Arabs and the Israelis live side by side along a common street.

This is where he met Dalia, an Arab girl, and was given a job in the her hair salon and he subsequently fell in love with her after a while. In the background were subplots on how Halim, whose goat was taken by Zohan back when they were still in Israel, trying to take revenge for that deed, and how an evil developer tried to create tension and hatred among the Israeli and Arab expatriate communities so they will move out to allow him to build a mall.

Of course in the end the man gets the girl, and the bad guy gets his just deserts. Behind all these is probably this one big ‘lecture’ on how there isn’t really much separating everyone except for the politics, while the politics also linked them together, and how everyone can put aside the hatred and live happily together. You know, that usual bs about America is the melting pot of all cultures and the land where everyone goes to live out their dreams. [I believe the Russian word for that would be Strana Mechty – Country of Dreams.]

I wondered beyond that, whether the underlying theme behind this movie is trying to tell us that Israeli super-commandos are horny and immoral to the point they don’t care who they are humping. Or is it trying to hint that the Americans – symbolised by the the white real estate developer Walbridge – is the mastermind behind all the flare ups in the Middle East. Of course, I agree entirely that it is meaningless to capture the terrorists only to exchange them after some talks.

My personal opinion is just enjoy the movie and laugh about it without looking for too much meaning. We all need some mindless humor and relaxtion once in awhile and this movie would definitely provide it if you would keep yourself from being too critical or trying to hard to be an artsy fartsy dimwit.

Movies Watched: Kungfu Panda & The Incredible Hulk

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Kungfu Panda
This is one of the funniest animation I have watched in a long time. There are parts which are exaggerating but compared to some of the Chinese kungfu comics I am reading, it’s medium rare compared to over-cooked.

There’s also many parts of it that I would considered ‘very Zen’ . For example, Master Wugui (乌龟) saying ‘One often meets his destiny on his way to avoid it’ , and it is generally true, as many people end up facing what they tried to avoid because whatever they did inevitably resulted in it. The Dragon Scroll is the other thing that is ‘very Zen’ too. But I won’t reveal anything about that because that will be the spoiler if I did. (It makes me wonder if that’s the general view of Westerners of Oriental culture because there are parts of Forbidden Kingdom which I felt are quite Zen too.)

Anyway, the story line is about picking one among the inhabitants of the valley as the Dragon Warrior to face the greatest threat they have ever faced, and the Panda Po was chosen. (I won’t get to the part on how a Kungfu ‘moron’ got chosen as it would be yet another spoiler.) The task to train him into the legendary fighting machine fell on the master of the five kungfu experts – Tigress, Mantis, Viper, Monkey and Crane. It is a daunting task that left the master disillusioned and disheartened as Po definitely isn’t cut for the job.

Master Wugui finally convinced the master to have faith in Po and nothing happens by coincidence. After Wugui passed on, the Master finally had enough faith to put his mind into training Po. It is then he discovered Po’s hidden potential and ultimately found an ingenious way to train him – as most of you would probably have seen parts of that in the trailers. And of course in the end there would be the showdown between the villain and the hero where our hero will be triumphant. (And oh, don’t forget to sit through the credits… it will round up the story nicely, and there’s a little bit more at the end.)

The Incredible Hulk
In spite of what American audiences prefer, this is definitely a better make than the previous one made by Lee Ang. In other words you can just wipe your memories and forget that there was ever a Hulk movie made previously. (Just like the Batman Begins completely restored our faith in the series after the disaster of the previous few featuring Val Kilmer and George Clooney.)

No more picking up tanks and throwing them this time round and the story line is way better. The pace of the movie is also controlled very well as it at least keeps me captivated. I do not know how much it has deviated from the original comic series itself but when I looked up Wikipedia articles, at least some of the characters, for e.g. General Ross and Betty Ross etc are from the comic itself.

The story line revolves around how Dr Bruce Banner turned into the Incredible Hulk after a gamma radiation experiment went awry. Unknown to Banner, the experiment is a secret army program to create super soldiers. In General Ross’ own words: Instead of making the hardware better, we made you better.

After destroying the lab where the experiment is conducted, and causing harm to his beloved Betty, Banner escaped to Brazil, where he and ‘Mr. Blue’ tried to find a cure to his condition. While at the end Banner and ‘Mr. Blue’ did almost find the cure (or at least a method to suppress the creature within), Banner was forced to make the choice between living peacefully forever, or to wake the creature within him to fight the Abomination, a creature created by the remnants of the very experiment that created the Hulk, and blood samples taken from Banner himself. The story climaxed with a battle between these two creatures of immense strength and power in the streets of New York.

Spoiler: At the end of the movie, Tony Stark (Iron Man) appeared to invite General Ross into joining him in a special force. I wondered, is Marvel setting up the scene for an Avengers movie featuring all the Marvel Superheroes featured so far? (And no, this is not another ‘after credits’.)