New Year... New Gadgets... (Pt. 1)

Coming back to Singapore from a year of hard work has definitely paid off. Therefore I want to pay special tribute to the rewards that I have received; by writing a short review on the items. They were either given to me or purchased by myself. All in all, it is definitely the way to start of the New year for me; New "toys".

Firstly, I attained the sought after item as my Christmas present from my mom. The most bought gift in the US of 2007; An iPhone. The iPhone that I got was direct from the US and surprisingly, it has already been unlocked. However, after unknowingly syncing the iPhone to iTunes to update the firmware, the phone was once again locked. It won't read any other SIM card other then an authorised service provider; AT&T. Therefore the search was on to source for a way out of this dilemma. YouTube and other internet sources gave me what I needed but... was a slow and painful process in which you'll have to hack into the OS to enable you to downgrade the firmware. In the end, I found out that the unlocking process wasn't as complicated as it may seem. All I had to do was to find out what is the phone's firmware version and just download the appropriate software, run it and Walla! It's unlocked. So now, just to play it safe, I just left my iPhone at a firmware of 1.0.2 and never updating to a higher firmware.

Overall, the features are fun to use with a whole range of applications for you to download through the use of the wi-fi of the phone. There are ultilities such as Financial Managing programs, Flashlight (phone acts as a touchlight), games and many useful as well as redundant stuff. The iPod works normally with good sound quality (for a phone) and the special earphones provided doubles as a earpiece for normal phone conversations. The cool feature (I think) is that when a text msg or phone call comes in, the music will fade away before the ringtone starts to play. It gives you the nostalgic feeling of those incoming msgs over the intercom of shopping centres and malls.

The negative part of the phone comes from the problems of inputting ringtones as well as forwarding and mass sending SMS. Ringtones, by right, must be purchased from iTunes and sync into the phone. Plus, you're not able to use any of the mp3s in your iPod as a ringtone. The solution I have found was to download a software called, iPhone Ringtone Maker. It allows you to make ringtones and sync it directly to the phone without the use of iTunes. However, the drawback is that whenever you sync music into your iPhone, the ringtones will be reset to the default list. Therefore, you will need to input the ringtones through the software again. Regarding the SMS problem, the solution to it is fairly simple, all you have to do is to download through the use of the phone's wi-fi, an application called iSMS. This is an application that uses the classic text messanging platform. This would mean that you'll have two SMS application on your iPhone although it doesn't affect the performance of the phone.

Overall, the iPhone is really a breakthrough in the mobile and nano technology. Just for numerical rating sake, over 10 (highest score), I rate it at a non-bias rating of 8.5/10.