Finally, the iPhone 3G in my hand!

Well, after trying 4 times since Friday morning including twice on Friday, and 4.5 hours yesterday morning at the Apples Store Pasadena, I finally got the iPhone 3G in my hands. Yay!

I have to say one of the nice new feature of the new iPhone 3G is that it comes fully charged right out of the box so that you're up and running as soon as the plastice wrapper is removed and the acitivation process is completed. It also comes with a soft cleaning cloth to dust off grit, dirt and grimes on the phone as well as the screen. However, I have not need for that because i promptly purchased the antiglare shield an a see-thru plastic case to encapsulate the phone to avoid damages scratches and keep it in as mint condition as possible. Can we say "nut-job"? :-) Actually, it's a good thing as I already dropped my iPhone 3G twice already. I have this theory, the newer the phone and the more pristine condition of the phone, the slipperier or my inability to hand on to the phone gets. At least, that's my theory. :-)

I have to say the new iPhone 3G seems and feel thinner than the first generation iPhone. I made a side by side comparison. It's the same length as the previous phone but it's about 2 mm wider than the older phone. That's why the crystal protection screen shield will not work for both phones. You have to purchase the correct crystal film for the phone.

I also noticed that the screen seems to be sharper and crisper in displaying images. However, it's slight warmer and it has a yellow tint to all screens, not just images.

The virtual keyboard seems to be more accurate as I am mistyping less often. Yes, after a whole year, I'm still struggling with the virtual keyboard.

The battery life which Steve Job boasts is a lie. It can't possibly last more than 24 hours without charge, unless the phone is in non-use mode. Currently, I have 3G and bluetooth turned on, and it's sucking up battery like there's no tomorrow. I might have to bring it back to exchange it if it's defective. The battery went out on me 3 times today. Fortunately, I had my old iPhone portable charger with me. I was surfing on 3G, watch a quick movie clip of the "Shooter", and the bluetooth was turned on to connect my wireless headset. Literally, I can see a quarter of the power status bar went down. That's within 10 minutes of time!

I also noticed my cell phone coverage under 3G is not as good as EDGE. I usually have 4-5 bars of signal in the San Gabriel Valley area, but now it's only 2-3 bars. I also noticed that I had a couple of dropped calls for the first time in the SGV area.

Although, I still can't copy and paste, but I with the new 2.0 software (older iPhone can download for free upgrade), it's nice to at least delete multiple emails at once. And also a complete delete all emails within trash, sent items, junk, outbox, etc. It saves alot of time maintaining storage capacity and not get cluttered up with unwanted emails.

Incidentally, just a side note, a year ago today I almost returned my first iPhone due to a number of issues. Click here to read that post.

The New Apple iPhone 3G is here today!

I got up bright and early and head over to the Apple store at the Grove arriving just after 8AM, which was the scheduled store hours for today. The parking lot was relatively empty and I thought I beat everyone there. To my surprise there were at least 250 people already on line. I guess, I'll have to come back as the line is not moving at all. They are only letting a handful of people in at a time.

Upgraded My Macbook Pro with a 250GB Hard Drive

I upgraded my Macbook Pro from 160GB to 250GB hard drive tonight... actually it's early in the morning. It was no easy task because I needed to remove over 24 screws and 4 of those are torq screws which required a special tool. After 45 minutes of surgery, I was up and running with my new hard drive. I now have 90GB free space.

The whole process begins with getting a SATA 2.5" hard drive enclosure. I searched all over including the Internet. Most of these enclosures costs approximately $100 or more. I found one surprisingly of all places at Fry's Electronics for $19.99. Yes, $20!!! It's made by Coolmax. It comes with a carrying case and it's own little screw driver to tighten those tiny screws. You don't even have to buy a whole precision screw driver set. You can even use your tool for future use. My favorite part of this external enclosure is that it comes with it's own USB cable. When connected to a computer, it draws power from the computer via the USB. No additional AC adapter required! This really streamline the use of this hard drive enclosure without hunting for an electrical outlet.

I then connected my new 250GB hard drive to my Macbook Pro by installing it into the Coolmax hard drive enclosure. I then downloaded a freeware called SuperDuper and duplicate my hard drive to the external 250GB hard drive This freeware worked flawlessly. Copying 145GB worth of data took several hours. I basically click the start copying button and went out for dinner. When I came home, it was all done. I then followed the long process of removing the screws to open the case to get into the internal guts of my Macbook Pro. It was a delicate procedure. The hardest part is keeping track of all the screws that were removed. I removed the 250GB HD from the CoolMax enclosure and replaced the 160GB HD. I then took on the arduous task of replacing all the screws and secure the Macbook Pro.

When I turned on my Macbook Pro, it just kept on blipping and a quick constant LED flash. I was nervous that I might have screwed up my Macbook Pro. Most of all, I told myself "Crap! I have to remove all those screws again to get to the hard drive!!! Argh!!!" Fortunately, I stayed calm and researched on the Web with Lan's Sony VAIO laptop and Googled the symptom. It turns out that all posts on the Web points to a loose memory module. I guess I didn't seat the memory module tightly enough when I had to remove it to get to the internal hard drive. I reseated it and Voila! The computer booted right away and I heard the familiar chime. :-) My Macbook Pro now has an additional 90+GB of freespace!

By the way, the Fujitsu hard drive is only running at 5400 rpm . It's not the fastest but it's only $99.99 at Fry's Electronics this weekend. I needed more storage space and if I needed more speed, I'll just move projects to my Mac Pro.

New iPhone 3G announced today

A little more than a year ago, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at the MacWorld 07 Conference. If you're a follower of this blog, then you would know that I have been using the Apple iPhone for the past year. Although I was not completely happy with the first generation iPhone in my initial review, I wanted the new 3G iPhone to improve on the first generation and I've been anticipating today's keynote address by Steve Jobs.

The new 3G iPhone was announced today at the WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is a much anticipated and rumored announcement. For months, there are forums speculating the new iPhone of its features, design and cost of the phone. It's now only $199 for the 8GB and $299 for the 16GB version. It sports a 3G data connection. Basically, Apple finally addressed most of my gripes (and other iPhone owners as well) with the debut of this new iPhone. I'm happy to say, job well done. Watch the keynote below.

This is the commercial for the new 3G iPhone.

As you already know, this new iPhone has 3G data connection from AT&T which is not available to the iPhone until now. 3G was only available to the Blackjack, Treos, and Q. The old EDGE data connection was so slow that it wasn't feasible to use the iPhone for Web access unless you have a WiFi access near by.

The other new feature that I was anticipating is the Enterprise email connection to Microsoft Exchange Server. iPhone users can receive their company's corporate emails, data, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, with their iPhone. They improved on their PDA portion of the iPhone

The new 3G iPhone has built-in GPS. It's not a big deal to me since I already have a portable GPS (Navigon 2100) and my Blackberry Curve has TeleNav. Nonetheless, it's one of the big selling point of the new iPhone 3G.

Finally, you will be able to download Apps right from the iPhone such as games, and other utilities.

MacWorld Keynote 2008

Watching a live MacWorld Keynote 2008 transcript right now on my iPhone. How cool is that! Here's the video of the Highlights of Steve Job's Keynote Speech.

RAID 1 of My New Hard Drives

After installing my 3 new 500GB hard drives, I decided to RAID two of those drives to RAID 1 which is mirroring. Should one of these 2 hard drives fail, the hard drive will act as a backup and rebuild the replacement hard drive. I use OSX's disk utility to create the RAID set.

RAID 1 basically makes 2 hard drives as if it is one drive. When you save or write to one drive, it will automatically save or write an identical file to the other drive hence the concept of mirroring your drives. The only drawback is that you lose half of your storage space. In my case, I have 2 500GB drives which would make it 1 Terabyte of disk space. By mirroring, I reduced it by half and only have 500GB of storage. It's a drawback but I'm willing to live with it because I would much rather have data redundancy and not have to risk any of my data. I can't afford to lose my clients' wedding images because they are priceless. I can't ask them to reinvite all their friends and families, and dress up in a tux and gown again.

So now-a-days, I sleep much better knowing my data is secure. Next week, I will take one step further and employ Leopard OS's Time Machine. Stay tune... more to come next week...

Installing Hard Drives to My New Mac Pro

The new Mac Pro internal configuration is magnificent. Simply genius as it's so clean and tidy, totally cable free. The memory, optical drives, and hard drives are all snapped in with it's own installation cage.

The 4 hard drives bay slide out easily and cleanly for quick hard drive installation. You'll notice in the video below, it's relatively simple without changing jumpers, nor have to indicate master vs. slave drives. All I needed was one small screw drivers. In fact, the screws were pre-fabricated with the hard drive cage. All I need to do is screw on the hard drive to have secure mounting of the hard drive. I now have 1.75 Terabytes worth of disk space.

Tune in next week as I'm going to attempt to install an external hard drive and test out Leopard's Time Machine. The external drive must be at lease the same size or larger in order for Time Machine to work. I'm also going to try to replace the original 250GB hard drive in the Mac Pro. I purchased a SATA hard drive enclosure at the LA Computer Show today. My plan is to remove the 250GB hard drive which contains MAC OS Leopard which I will copy to another 500 GB SATA hard drive. Come back next week and read more.

Photoshop CS3 Design Premium doesn't work with Leopard! Bummer!

I just tried installing CS3 Design Premium on my brand new Leopard driven Apple Computer. And I sadly discovered that it's not WORKING! Here is the link to Adobe with the Leopard FAQ and the timeline of the updates.

I just added 4 more GB of memory to my new Mac Pro

Wow, it was so easy to install memory into my new Mac Pro. I came from the PC side of the computing world and I used to build computer "hot rods" as a hobby. I have never seen a computer with a tighter inside configuration than the Mac Pro. It has no cables, everything just snaps in directly to the motherboard and daughterboards. The most common upgrades are easily accessible.

The computer compartment door has one latch which requires no tools to open. The internal memory are separated into 2 daughterboards. Since I already have a pair of 512MB on the first daughterboard, I have to install the first pair of memory on the second daughterboard first. The heatsinks are "ginormous" on these memory module. I guess it gets really hot and it dicipates heat. All I needed to do is align the notch on the memory to match the socket on the daughterboard and snap in the 2 ends until it locks the memory in place. I repeated the second set on the first daughterboard. I was up and running within 2-3 minutes.

It now has a total of 5GB of memory.

Picked up my brand new Apple Mac Pro

Well, my new "baby" arrived home. We picked it up at the Apple Pasadena Store tonight right before they closed. Boy this computer is very heavy considering it's all aluminum.

Bought my Video IPOD today

I've been trying to avoid purchasing and upgrading to yet another IPOD for quite some time now. There's nothing wrong with my current IPOD except it can't play video. I finally succumb to the new video feature and bought the 30 GB version today. It's really slick and I love it. I'm glad that I finally got one.