Two months with the Apple Watch

When the watch was first announced to launch in only several countries that excluded Singapore, I was slightly upset but for the first time in many years, I did not feel an absolute need to get the Watch on launch day.

I have owned a Pebble since when they were on Kickstarter, and thanks to the bad customer service and the cheap looking watch body, and the constant need to recharge the watch, I gave up wearing it after a few weeks. I did not know if the Apple Watch will be any different, and the biggest features that was announced like the health related stuff really was not what an obese guy like me wanted in life.

I resigned to my fate and decided to wait for a Singapore launch.

Then somehow I got a chance to purchase some Apple Watches for launch day, and bought a Space Grey Sport and a Apple Watch (Stainless Steel) with Black Sports Band. The Sport I gave to my brother, the nicer one I kept for myself.

And I started wearing the Watch.

At first I would only wear it when I go out of the house, and try to keep the Watch safe if I was going to be in a situation where I would be rough doing work. It was, after all, the first time I own a 800-dollar watch. Then I started wearing it more and more. Even on days when I don’t leave the house. Even when I enter the shower. Sometimes even when I sleep. It just felt natural because the Black Sport Band is so comfortable when you put it on that it hardly feels like a watch on your arm.

It was convenient after all, I could take calls anywhere in the house even when I was away from my iPhone (it works over wifi), I could text friends through dictation, see my emails and decide if they were important or urgent enoguh that I need to get up from the sofa and walk into my room to reply, send my friends stickers over Line, run some Automator-ish workflows from Workflow, and even add reminders to my phone as and when I remember something in any part of my house.

One function that I did not anticipate using much was the heart rate sensor function/Glance. It informed me that I have a high resting heart rate, and I started monitoring my heart rate measurements using the Health app on my iPhone, as the watch will automatically record the measurements and send them to your phone. The Activity Glance, which I did not anticipate that I will even use, turned out to effective enough at forcing me to clear some of the easiest goals set by the app on default, daily.

Notifications. Need I even explain how this can literally be why anyone will purchase a Apple Watch? Fine tuning the kind of notifications you receive on your watch is absolutely necessary, right from the get on. You should only set to receive notifications from important apps and turn off stupid notifications like say, from games or other spammish apps you have on your phone. And it never fails to tap you on your wrist everytime a notification comes in, even if your phone is in your bag, or if you can’t feel the vibration of the phone in your jeans’ pocket.

When you receive a notification, if you mute the watch, no one else will know that a notification came in except for you yourself, for the screen will NOT light up, unless you lift your arm to read the message. Which means that it is not going to affect you in your important meeting when some idiotic friends of yours suddenly started spam messaging you to sob about their sad sad love story. You’ll feel her sadness on your wrist, but no one else will realise that (so long you do not keep lifting your arm to read the messages).

Charging is so simple, you literally just plug in another cable (to a usb charger) next to your iPhone, and when you charge your phone for the night you just charge the watch next to it as well. Battery life does last way more than an average day but unlike the Pebble, there are so many things that you want to do with your watch everyday that charging it daily is not a chore. Not to mention how the shitty charging cable Pebble has keeps falling off the magnetic contacts everytime you lightly touch it – the Apple Watch’s magnetic charging cable fits snugly but does not require much torch to separate it from the watch in the morning.

There are so many things more I can say about this lovely “device” that I put on my wrist everyday – how much easier it is to put on compared to a normal watch band after you get the hang of it, how inconspicuous it is (despite wearing it around for 2 months only three people noticed the watch, and that was because I was playing with it) if you select one with a band that is not the Pink, Blue or Green sport band, so it works well for professional work places as well, etc, etc, etc.

I Will be getting more bands for my Apple watch. Probably the Pink Sport Band since the Sport Bands are so comfortable.

I love my Apple Watch.

Rumored pricing for Apple Watch in Singapore

Apple Watch Sports

38mm – S$478
42mm – S$548

Apple Watch (Stainless Steel)

i. Stainless Steel Case with White/Black Sport Band

38mm – S$758
42mm – S$828

ii. Stainless Steel Case with Milanese Loop/Classic Buckle/Leather Loop (42mm only)

38mm – S$898
42mm – S$968

iii. Stainless Steel Case with Modern Buckle (38mm only)

38mm – S$1038

Update: The rumored prices are off by a margin of around 40SGD.

Apple Watch locally will be available from S$518 for the cheapest 38mm Sport model to S$1,528 for the Apple Watch Space Black Link Bracelet.

No more Siracusa OS X reviews

I started with the Mac later than most long timers of the Mac Community, with my first Mac being an iBook (the last one assembled in Taiwan) running Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, and I had earlier used Jaguar (10.2) in school.

The first major Mac OS X I was really excited about with my Mac peeps was Mac OS X Tiger, and it was the greatest leap in OS X in its time (before Leopard anyway, Microsoft really copied all the new features in Tiger fast and hard). I remembered browsing (on the very first iteration of Safari) John Siracusa’s Tiger review, and being awed by the depth of the OS and the details in the review, which eventually made me want to dive further into the world of Apple and learn more about everything Apple is about.

John Siracusa just announced that he will no longer publish his annual OS X reviews.

Sigh. At least we still have ATP.

MI (Multimedia Integrated) Closes Down

Recently I was in Funan for lunch and noticed something slightly different when I walked past Gamescore.

MI (Multimedia Integrated) closed down.

A quick check to its website revealed this;

with a QQ number to facilitate the possible sale of its domain name to Xiaomi, since anyone searching for Xiaomi Singapore is likely to go to www.mi.com.sg instead of Xiaomi’s www.mi.com/sg domain.

In the old days, MI was one of the big boys in the local Apple retail scene, together with iShop and Epicentre. Epicentre became a big shot, and we all knew what happened to iShop.

Seems like with Apple favoring only retailers with big capital these days (nuBox and Epi) and the skyrocketing local rent, sheer “legacy” is no longer enough to keep certain retail stores alive.

I did not know anyone in MI even in the past, but it is still sad to see another part of local Apple legacy go.

Mac OS X Default Wallpaper Collection – 10.1 to 10.4 (Puma, Jaguar, Panther and Tiger)

Hell man, I hope I don’t get a cease and desist for this.

Got really sick of the default “universe/galaxy”-style wallpapers introduced since Leopard, and extracted some old wallpapers from pre-Leopard Mac OS Xes.

Am currently rocking this setup.

Here are all the default Aqua Blue and Aqua Graphite Mac OS X wallpapers from the past. Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah has the same default wallpapers as Mac OS X 10.1 Puma so it’s meaningless to include those.

Do note, due to the maximum supported screen resolution being quite limited in the earlier Mac OS X releases, the resolution of the earlier wallpapers will be much smaller, and might not look great on current-day screens.

Here goes.

Mac OS X 10.1 Puma

Classic Aqua Blue Classic Aqua Graphite

Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar

Jaguar Aqua Blue Jaguar Aqua Graphite

Mac OS X 10.3 Panther

Aqua Blue Aqua Graphite

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

Aqua Blue Aqua Graphite

You can follow MacRyu at @ryuworks on Twitter and @ryu on App.net.

My thoughts on business analysts (and similar humans)?

Business analysts (and similar humans) are the most useless human beings alive.

Their “expertise” is to be an expert at nothing, making brief and often factually incorrect analysis on companies.

They make absolutely ZERO contribution to mankind, yet consume most of the limited resources.

In other words, they are not just MORONS, they are also the SCUMS of the earth.

If anyone has to die in a war, it’s them.

Go fuck yourselves.

Tech Review: The iBLEAH (or at least that’s what the owner calls it)

Let me make this clear – the object being reviewed is undoubtedly a SOLID PIECE OF CRAP. I am not even going to make excuses for it.

From time to time I get to see seriously weird gadgets, and by that I mean stuff that were made so badly, without any effort or thought going into the design, and probably manufacturing into a single product for sale just to get rid of unwanted, crappy parts that no decent manufacturer wants.

“Shanzai” is the chinese term for imitation products, and is often used in the tech industry to describe knock-off lookalikes of popular tech gadgets like iPhones and iPads made by disgusting Cheena manufacturers. The quality of shanzai items ranges from complete lookalike (which may cost you almost the price of a real one) or a half-fuck knock-off that only slightly resembles the real thing. One common point of all these stanza products? The software, or operating system is always SHITTE. More often than not they run some older version of Android, and since Android is free, any joker can shove Android into their crap shanzai item and call it a tablet. Where else did you think all that Android marketshare came from?

This object I am “reviewing” today, after a lot of careful inspection, seems to be a shanzai Original iPad.

It is truly the finest work of art, with “the greatest of originality and innovation”, or at least that is what Samsung will say about all shameless knockoffs anyway. Samsung’s idea of innovation has always been “look at customers’ designs after accepting manufacturing orders, copies the designs, rejects the orders, make a product based on the customers’ designs, print the Samsung badge on it”. Perfect and flawless strategy.

Specs/Details

Manufacturer: Unknown Cheena Manufacturer
Price: Unknown
Category: Shanzai Wannabe iPad Original
OS: Android 1.6
Display: Unresponsive pressure-based touchscreen, resolution unknown
Chipset/CPU: Unknown
Place of purchase: China

The display is horrible

The extremely low resolution pressure-based touchscreen display is so bad, that I am having difficulty reading smaller elements on the screen. The touchscreen part is so bad that despite frequently pressing and poking, the screen rarely responses to my touch. I guess the display is still enough for displaying low resolution photos. Oh, and the light leakage is DAMN BAD.

Speed. Or the lack of.

In other words, it took me 5 whole minutes to boot the thing up to its home screen. I’m not even sure why it is that slow. Apps open dog slow, and only after frequent pokes of the screen, even scrolling in Android Browser was extremely lagging and unresponsive.

Conclusion

I guess the item’s cheap and all, and will make for an interesting toy for a day or two, but I still cannot understand the logic behind purchasing junk. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t even look like the original iPad enough to fake your tech-idiot friends. Makes for a great paper weight though – the thing is really heavy!

M1’s Prices and Launch Details for iPhone 4S in Singapore

Was really waiting for all carriers to come up with their prices before posting this, but I guess I can’t be bothered to wait for Starhub.

M1 was the earliest with their prices, and these were released since last Friday.

M1’s launch is a first come first served event at 12am at the usual Paragon M1 shop, with no web preorders allowed until the 28th itself, unlike Starhub and Singtel.

Other M1 shops will start selling the iPhone 4S at 7am on 28th October 2011.

More information at here.