DiGi recently announced that they are doing some major upgrade work throughout the whole country to solve the network congestion issues and extend their high speed broadband coverage.Also,by upgrading the network,DiGi will have a LTE(a sort of 4G technology) ready and can be working as soon as they get 4G license in Malaysia.DiGi named that upgraded network as ‘The Tomorrow Network’.

DiGi also promises that after the upgrade,more than 95% of the most populated area in Malaysia will have high speed broadband access(EDGE&3G).

DiGi informs that the upgrade will be site-by-site and so some area may have service interruptions during the work and normally it will be at off-peak hour.DiGi users can check when you will be affected by this link.

There are many friends around me using DiGi’s service as it’s known to offer the most affordable phone plans in Malaysia.Well,the complaints about the service quality of DiGi(expecially on rate of drop-calls,slow 3G speed etc.) never stop.

I wish with the deployments of the new network,DiGi could get better reputation and really be the smart choice of their consumers.

What’s that day?If you’re an iPhone fan,you may also know it.Yes,iPhone 4S will start to be sold by those 3 mobile companies at the same day.That’s the very first time.

We can imagine that the competition among all mobile companies will be explosive,so maybe as a consumer,we could expect a better plan to bundle with the latest iPhone.

Maxis and Digi had started to ‘register your interest’ from days ago while Celcom also publicly announced the date of sales.

Just wait and see which mobile providers could offer a better value of service.

I think some people may feel disappointed as Apple didn’t push out iPhone5,they only show iPhone 4s on the stage which is merely an upgraded version of iPhone 4.They are twins actually,they have exactly the same appearance.

Well,for those who want to get an iPhone but not yet owned,iPhone 4S still has the merits.Engadget has made a group of comparisons for us.

The latest iOS 5 will be publicly released on next Wednesday-12 October 2011 with more than 200 new features and enhancements.The cutting-edge feature in this new iOS is called Siri which is the most advanced voice control technology.It can understand human language accurately and responsibly.That’s so great,but unfortunately this feature may only be supported in iPhone 4S.

Currently the prices of iPhone 4 have been dropped in some countries.If you wanna save pocket,you might just get the old iPhone 4 as it’s been quite good.If you wanna get a faster and more powerful one,iPhone 4S fits your need.

Pre-order of the iPhone 4S starts from 7 October,2011 and will be available in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK on October 14, 2011.

The iPhone 4S will also be available at 22 more countries by the end of October 2011(most likely 28 Oct 2011) including Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Malaysia is not yet in the list,but from the past experience,I think iPhone 4S will hit in Malaysia in coming November. Just be patient to wait for it.

From a pic shot by Apple Insider showing that Apple has hanged up a piece of poster to tell people what’s going to happen soon.

Well,there’s no sign of new iPhone.So Apple wanna give us a surprise?We still have to wait and see.I wish Steve Job will perform a wonderful show to all Apple fans.

Stay tuned!

A successful website should be able to keep readers staying on the web pages with longer time.However,it’s so hard to do it.Well,Apture has a simple solution that may be really helpful.

Apture is a kind of contextual search service.The difference among others is it provides in-site search results instantly.That means it will never drives your readers to another websites.It runs very smoothly and you could type nothing for searching something interesting.

Yes,once you’re making it work in your website,your readers just need to use their mouses to pick out the words/phrases they wanna know more and Apture will automatically load it and pop up within seconds.Just that easy!

This will not be the only profit of the service.You also could:

Apture claims that with using their service,it increases 2-3X in time on page,1.5-2X pageviews per person and 2X on page search according to their data without downside.

If you wanna try the real effect,you could pick up some words in my post as my blog now is Apture enabled.

By the way,if you’re existing CloudFlare users,you could activate in your CloudFlare apps settings by one click.Yes,just ONE click!

Minutes ago,Google officially introduced +1 button in official Google blog to the whole web.The +1 button is able to recommend content to your friends and contacts directly from Google search results and ads.

I think it’s really a cool funtion from Google as now we could easily share the online contents which we want our friends to have a look.

I just added the button in my post pages,you could press it to have a fresh try. They are located right below titles and comments.

Is that cool?Just visit here to get your own +1 button. It’s quite simple to wear it on your website.

Several hours ago,Google finally held a live conference about its new products:Google Wallet and Google Offer.In fact,it’s not too new as many tech experts have predicted that Google would apply their NFC(Near field communication) devices into some sorts of mobile wallet.Well,now it comes true.

The latest Google Nexus S has NFC inside.Google claims that a special security chip is also setting in the phone so that when the cellphone is activated to make payment,the chip will secured the privacy during the transactions.

To use of Google Wallet is very simple,only few steps will be taken to make your first purchase.

• Make sure your cellphone is NFC enabled and your credit card is supported for Google Wallet.(currently only Citibank Mastercard or Google prepaid card is in the list)
• Install Google Wallet in your mobile phone and then log into it,set up your wallet PIN
• Add first card in Google Wallet with filling up some necessary information(quite similar with making an online transaction)
• Submit the card information and wait for the approval from the bank
• Receive the confirmation from the bank and now you can use your phone to make payments on merchant’s Paypass POS(currently only available in some partner stores)

I like the idea so much as it could definitely ease the whole payment process and let the shopping experience much happier than ever-no more long queue needed.

At the meanwhile,Google Wallet can add your royalty cards and discount vouchers too.That’s means when you’re shopping at some places with royalty card and discount vouchers,when you make the payment by Google Wallet,it automatically records the transactions into your royalty card and so you entitle the rewards/points immediately,of course,you could get some discounts too as the vouchers work for you.

Is that amazing?Well,Google Offer will satisfy you more.When you explore Internet and find some offer,the only thing you need to do is to save the offer in your PC and it will sync into your mobile phone.The offer will apply while a purchase is matched and paid by Google Wallet.It’s just that simple.

Well,after Google Wallet expands to worldwide,I can throw away the whole pockets of cards and let them sleep at home.I will feel less weight.But how long should I wait for the day coming?  :P

Here’s the whole product launch:

CloudFlare is so successful as it provides convenience and safety to the users even without any charges.Well,they never stop improving their services and in contrast,they are making more exciting movements.This time is about CloudFlare Apps.

If you’ve been CloudFlare users,I bet you know that in the setting,you could choose which functions that you prefer to apply,inside the options,one of them is to set up Google Analytics to make statistics of your sites.

The only thing you do to enable it is to fill GA code into the blank and CloudFlare will take care of the rest.Is that simple?

CloudFlare Apps are the same thing.From 1st June,2011,CloudFlare will start to introduce one app per day and people who want to use the app only need to make some clicks and all could be running perfectly on your sites.

That’s just an initial list of apps.For sure,more apps will be on the board soon.

I like it so much because all CloudFlare apps will be tweaked by CloudFlare so that websites using the apps could be working at the best condition,meaning loading faster than ever.How amazing the work they’re doing!

If you haven’t tried CloudFlare yet,just take 5 minutes to register the service and make it run instantly.It’s really cool!

In conjunction with celebrating 10 years opening of Apple store in US,all Apple retail stores there have made some upgrades.The most changes could catch our eyes are iPad 2 locating everywhere next to each product showing pricing and information.

(Thanks macstories for the nice pics.)

In Malaysia,iPad2 is so hot that the stocks always sells out in hours;but in US,they put iPad2 as a display and guild tool.You can use it to see the brief introduction,price and tech specs.If you have anything ask,you could just simply ‘call’ the representative through iPad2 to get help.

Feel envy,huh?Will Apple Store in Malaysia upgrade to 2.0 soon?

Most laptop speakers are working quite lousy except your laptop is quite high end so that the speakers are designed by some audio experts such as Altec Lansing.Well,my laptop is not so lucky and today I just shopped one to let me have a bit better audio experience-the model is Sonic Gear Tatoo 515.

It’s a low end product with a quite low price,selling at only RM69(US$23) in Thunder Match.It’s a 2.1 channel audio system with 2*4W small speakers and 1*8W little sub-woofer.The overall design is really simple and clear,but I really care the sound quality,at least it should worth the price.

I tested to play some 1080P HD trailers from Youtube as well as a few classical musics and I feel that the speakers could play voices quite clear,but treble is a bit thin and bass is not deep enough.However,considering that is such a mini system,it’s quite fair.So I still think it’s a good choice if you are not a HiFi user.Of course,no one will think that products locating in this range could be outstanding.Cheers!

I’ve used CloudFlare service since the early days of March.As visitors of my blog are mainly from South East Asia and my hosting is in USA,the latency is quite high(>300ms most of time) because the connections between Asia and USA usually are very congested.So when I found there’s a free service which could reduce the latency and providing some security features,I decided to try it.

It’s around 2 months since then,how’s performance of this service?In fact,I think most frequent visitors of my blog should have their answers already.Yes,the improvements are tremendous:lower and lower response time,faster and faster loading speed,last but not least,less and less down time.

It also helps me save a lot of bandwidth as well as prevent some potential threats.

Initially,CloudFlare only had 4 data centers.Well,frankly speaking,it was not performing well as the cut of latency was quite limited and they always face attacks which caused the downturn of overall performances.However,through putting more resources such as better hardware,open more data centers and also with more experience on dealing with different kinds of issues,all have been fantastic.

The list of current data centers are:

United States:

San Jose, CA
Chicago, IL
Los Angeles, CA
Ashburn, VA
New Jersey, USA

Asia:
Tokyo, Japan
Hong Kong

Europe
Amsterdam, Netherlands

More data centers will be set up in the coming weeks.

I could see the great movements from CloudFlare from the angle of a user.I believe CloudFlare will not let me fail because they’ve declared that they will be keeping improving the services.It’s awesome.I’ll definitely keep my thumbs up!

Finally,I want to stress it again-it’s starting from free!!!Also,I didn’t get paid for talking about it.

Google I/O Day 2 introduces batches of excellent enhancements about Chrome and also officially releases Chromebook.

Google announced that up to date,there are 160 million Chrome users all over the world and the number is increasing.That means Google Chrome has more attentions in the browser market.Google Chrome will never stop to improve the performance and simplify the user experience.

1.Chrome is going to add some useful features such as speech and live translate.To fulfill the features will be tremendously easly-just need add on one row of codes. That’s all.

2.Chrome will have better GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D support,meaning that the websites written by CSS will get much faster loading speed in the near future.

3.Chrome is keeping focus on Canvas 3D and WebGL which could enhance web gaming experience.From the test result of FishIE tank,the next edtion of Chrome could run 10X faster than current one.

4.In-app payments will be rolled out in Chrome web store.The whole process will be very simple,a few clicks could complete the transaction.And Google also claims that only 5% of sales will distribute to Google,the rest of 95% sales will all belong to the developers.

5.With the improved performance of Chrome,web games have been possible.This time,Angry Birds land into Chrome Web Store with exclusive levels for Chrome users.

6.Chrome OS will be available in Amazon.com and Bestbuy in US from 15 June,2011 as well as well other 6 countries:UK,Italy,Spain,France,Germany and Netherlands.All features are based on cloud and Chrome OS need only 8 seconds to boot up,usable for up to 8 hours.Some features will also be available for offline use,for example Gmail,Google docs and Google Calendar in this summer.Samsung and Acer are the main manufacturers of chromebook.The monthly subscription for business is US28/user;for schools and government administrations,US20/user.

Here we know more about chromebook:

Are you ready for this?

I may miss out some parts of key notes,so here’s the video for the whole Day 2 key notes.I hope you could enjoy it!

I watched Google I/O live last night.In the event,quite a number of surprises brought in and of course,Android is the main role.

1.New music service.

Google now has the music service even though it’s just beta version currently and only available to US customers.It’s allowing users to upload up to 20,000 songs to the cloud,all will be automatically sync to Android devices that under the same Google account.

2.Movie rental service

Just a few clicks and you could start to enjoy hot films on the go.You could choose to live steaming the film or offline to watch it.Good,huh?If not mistaken,it’s also only for US customers currently.

3.Android 3.1 Honeycomb upgrade

The upgrade includes multiple changes and improvements such as resizeable widgets,USB host and accessory support etc.Verizon’s Motorola Xoom users will get the update immediately.

4.Android Open Accessory

USB accessory mode is added in Android 3.1 for tablets and Android 2.3.4 for mobiles.In this mode,Android device will act as a host to control other devices connecting by USB port.

5.Ice Cream Sandwich

This version of Android will be released in Q4 2011.It will be a cross-platform OS that applies both tablets and smartphones.This will ease the developers to create apps as for Ice Cream Sandwich,they only need to make apps compatible to one OS.I believe more apps at that time will land to Android Market.

6.Android@Home framework

Imaging that you can control all your home appliances by your Android phone?!Yes,Android@Home framework is working for that.Once you have all appliances with this framework,you could simply remote control them,for example,open lights and air-conditioner when you nearly reach home.Awesome!

You could take some time to watch what happened in Google I/O 2011 Day 1. Have a good day!  

Google also gave out a great gift to 5,000 participants.What is that?The limit edition of Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Just after several days of getting the news about Android 2.3.4,Nexus One has received it in some ways,right after Nexus S which is first to get this update.

In Nexus One,there’s no front camera so that no video calling function in this version.However,it consists of of some bug fixes:

• GPS Navigation problems
• Battery life ‘shortened’ issue
• others

It will be rolling out OTA by stages.However,if you’re not so cool on waiting it,you could directly download and install it manually.It should be quite simple if you’ve done it before.

I’m using CM7 in my Nexus One and I believe it will release a newer version based on Android 2.3.4 soon.Stay tuned!

Google through its tweets announced that Android 2.3.4 will be dropped into the market in few weeks(hopefully that will not another long waiting period).

New functions and improvements are always welcomed.

Google said the video call funtion will integrate with Google Talk and available to use it over WiFi or 3G/4G data network.Let’s watch the demo first:

Of course,the video call function is only a part of Android 2.3.4.More details will be released only after AOSP showing out.Stay tuned!

[UPDATE]

Some people have leaked out the source file to manually upgrade Nexus S to Android 2.3.4. If you have that cool device in your hand,you could try it now.

Fring is good at mobile communication service and now it goes further.Fring announced that from now on,all Fring users could start to enjoy free group calls connecting up to four person.The group calls can work on 3G/4G/WiFi and the app is available on iPhone and Android fringsters.

Fring applies proprietary DVQ™ technology which is able to deliver the highest quality video for all four participants.If you wanna try it,just download it from Apple’s App Store,Android Market or directly download it from m.fring.com . It’s free to use!

Dear Malaysians,if you’re willing to get iPad2 in the first place,you can now go for camping in front of those Apple Authorised stores to queue up the line getting the first batch of iPad2.Yes,anonymous source on the inside said iPad2 will definitely land in Malaysia on this Friday!

The estimated prices are as follow(UPDATED):

iPad2 Wifi Only:

16GB: RM1549(1499)    32GB: RM1849(1799)    64GB: RM2149(2099)

iPad2 Wifi+3G:

16GB: RM1999(1899)    32GB: RM2299(2199)    64GB :RM2599(2499)

Smart Cover Poly : RM150

Smart Cover Leather : RM250

Thanks joshuaongys.com for sharing the latest information.

In Lowyat Forum,there are several reports saying that they’ve made reservations in a number of authorised store.Lucky them!!!

I know time machine could be really cool,but unfortunately up to now,no one could build it up.However,Google cooperates with NASA and Carnegie Melon University working on a project called GigaPan Time Machine which uses high resolution cameras to record the movements in a scheduled duration,giving out a way of seeking the things happened in the past.

See what’s happening on the growing plants:

The entire playback is here.Hopefully this could satisfy people’s curiousness on a ‘Time Machine’.

I seldom switch off modem and router at home because if I make them off,I will have no IPTV and VOIP.Turning them on in a hot day is not a good thing.Sometimes I try to touch the surface of modem and router,feeling that they can boil eggs.

Taiwan PC accessory company Evercool gives a solution:a well-designed router cooler.Check out the video:

If your modem/router is on fire,remember that now you have a way to deal with it.

It looks like a crab as this design could make users fit most of routers easily.In fact,you could use it in more devices such as iPad,iPod,nettop etc.You name it!

You can get more details on the official website.

I think most people only know the sun is very huge and very far away from us,it brings heat and light to us,but don’t know what the sun really looks like.

NASA has a Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite working in the universe for one year and shot lots of amazing imagery to give us more chances to know about it.I think you should have a look at it:

How’s your feeling?I feel the scenery is so magnificent and the universe is so great!

Thanks NASA for providing us an opportunity to watch the sun so close.