卦Trigram 2.0

My old G4 12″ iBook recently started making really loud grinding noises, which seemed to come from the bottom left-hand corner. Sometimes, when I started it, it gave an error message saying that it couldn’t find a hard drive.

Oops. Not good.

A trip to the new Apple Store in Sanlitun village led to me “checking in” my ailing laptop for inspection. Yesterday, the diagnosis was made: a new hard drive is needed.

Hmmm. That’ll cost me 3000RMB. While I was in Singapore recently, I spent SGD244 on a new battery, since the old one had lost most of its capacity. How annoying! But it makes me think that’s probably not worth it, to keep throwing money at an old machine…

OK. Well, I liked that iBook because of its small footprint. However, I’d already stopped carrying it around… my Asus EeePC 700 has filled that niche… I mostly used it as a home media centre, and for video editing. That suggests I should replace it with a Mac Mini, which would cost 5,388 RMB. 

I wonder whether Apple offer an educational discount in China? On their web page, I can’t see the icon, which is a little frustrating. In Singapore, I bought a few items from them and took the benefit of the discount, both as a student and, later, a lecturer. If they’re not offering it here, what does that say about their brand positioning in the Chinese market? Are they cutting loose the education sector as too insignificant, and just going for the urban hipster segment?

Well, I need to go to the store this afternoon to retrieve my iBook; I’ll ask them then.

My MBA classmate from Tsinghua, Muskie, sent me an email to tell me that I must blog about the MacBook Air. Well, OK, but… meh. I’m left pretty cold, to be honest. OK, it’s thin… very thin… but too many places where I work have either no wifi or an unreliable connection – I need an ethernet socket! I also still use my optical drive a lot to watch my movies, and I’m not going to start downloading them all again; neither am I going to start carrying around an external drive. Plus – only one USB port???

So: it’s not for me. Some of the tech it uses is cool, though, especially the multitouch. It’s worth reading Bob Cringely’s take on what the Macbook Air is all about, really.

I was more interested in the updates for the iPod Touch, which is now taking its first steps towards being what I would like it to be. This also turned out to be a letdown, though. Like many others, I am rather resistant to paying for what I can’t help thinking ought to be either a free upgrade, or cheaper. As for the new features:

1.  Customisable screen. Bleh. So what?
2. Mail. Bleh. I use webmail pretty much exclusively. Maybe this is useful as a way to get PDF files, etc, onto the iPod – but I would much rather have the iPod visible as an external filestore.
3. Maps. Aah, now you’re talking! This is useful – or would be, if I wasn’t about to leave for Beijing, which isn’t covered by Google Maps…
4. Weather. Useful… but not really a must-have. I can very easily check online before I go out.
5. Notes. Useful. But… I almost always have a pen and notebook with me, and frankly that’s easier than trying to use the iPod’s keyboard.
6. Stocks. Meh. Maybe this will be useful next year, but I don’t need it right now.

So, overall…. nope, not excited. Sorry, Muskie!

I’ve been under the impression that when the iPhone is launched next year in Asia, it will have Korean and Japanese input, but not Chinese. Unfortunately, I can’t locate the source that originally mentioned it. Anyway, it seems there’s already a hack that allows the ‘Sinification’ of the iPhone.

However… this only appears to change the menus. You know what I really want Apple – or someone else – to provide? I mean, come on: this is a touch-screen device. I want to be able to write characters on the screen with my fingers, and to have hanyu pinyin options. No small demand, I know, but with Chinese characters being used all over Asia, even the world, surely there’s a big enough market for someone to develop this…?

I was writing recently about losing my Nokia 6708, and was talking about it off-line with Niti. One of the annoying things about it was the lack of a password, meaning that the handset can be sold on and re-used by whoever’s got it now. The only security measure available was for the SIM card, not the phone itself; we were wondering why such an obvious and needed feature wasn’t available for what was quite an expensive smartphone.

Happily, my new iPod does have password-protection, so at least if this goes AWOL, no-one will be able to benefit from it…

Anyway, I read an article today on Virtual China, about a Chinese-designed phone that seems to be pretty well-protected, with fingerprint-ID required. This is the CECT T100 (heh, sci-fi fans will be smirking at that). By the way, beware the CECT website – every link seems to open in a new window, and they have horrible background music on every page. But if they can’t do web design, their phones seem to be done very well – to me, it’s a reasonably nice-looking phone, with an interesting set of features that will suit the Chinese businessman on the go! (Not necessarily what I would want in a phone myself, but it features streaming TV and Karaoke as well as the usual multimedia features). Most important, though, is the biometric access control. Pretty cool…

When China Tech News reviewed the T100, the comments list seems to indicate that it already has a substantial global following; the most common query is about the lack of a manual in English. This suggests to me that people are buying it from Chinese suppliers based on its design, but that the company isn’t actively marketing it outside China.

I know from my time living in Beijing that the phone shops are very well-stocked with locally-designed handphones, and it would appear that their quality is just getting better and better. China definitely seems to be innovating fast in this sector, and once they start making a serious effort to market internationally, they would seem set to transform the market – particularly as here in Asia there’s none of this ridiculous locking of handsets to one particular network, as I read about in the US and Europe…