OK guys, if you’re reading this post it means that you most probably own a sexy iPhone 4 or 4s. You’ve made love to it, cradled it in your pocket for days, and have sworn everything to it. You tell everyone how beautiful a phone you have and yes you can even take it underwater. But, deep down, there is this one dark secret that you feel embarrassed about and it becomes a frustration which you try to justify every day: that your iPhone 4s has really crappy battery life. Take it out at 9AM and you’re down to 50% battery after lunch. Sucks doesn’t it?
If you’re a big fan of board games and own an iOS device, I highly suggest you download Ticket to Ride Pocket (that’s the iPhone version) because it’s free. Ticket to Ride is one of the best selling board games in recent history and the port to the iOS is just plain amazing. You know it’s a good game when you consistently see 5-star ratings in the comments section.
If you’re not into board games, I still suggest you pick it up because it’s not at all pretentious and rather easy to pick up for the family.
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.]
So along with the hot iPods, iTunes released the new Genius feature for iTunes 8.0 that does two things. First, the new version allows you to make on-the-fly playlists based on one song that you choose. The choice is heavily dependent on the genre, artist and I even think it has something to do with the cadence of the song. iTunes chooses similar beat counts for that playlist.
The second part of Genius is the iTunes recommendations sidebar, which is their monetization model. When you’re playing songs, iTunes can recommend songs from their library which you can click to purchase. It isn’t available in the Philippines, sadly (see first image).
The Genius concept is not new. Online services such as Last.FM and Pandora have implemented this related playlist scheme for quite some time. Of course, sometimes you get really off recommendations.
I tried a few playlist creations based on KENNY LOGGINS, JAMIROQUAI and RICK ASTLEY and got pretty good results (hmm there are one or two out of place songs, but hey, sometimes Geniuses make mistakes too!). The first song in the 25 song countdown is where all the songs are based from.
Share your Genius Playlist Mix? 🙂
P.S. And yes, I listen to BARRY MANILOW, OK? Mandy, FTW.
So hit me in the head. Here’s the listing of countries for the iPhone launch. The top screen actually says June 11 2008. This is the list for “coming soon.” See anything we like?
