Asus Nexus 7 Dock

It is not yet available worldwide as of this moment, but I got a unit at hand straight from Japan and here it is, the Nexus 7 Dock. The dock costs 3480 Japanese Yen from the Japanese Asus online store and you have a sturdy, well-built casing, a micro-USB port to feed power to the dock and a 3.5 mm jack for audio.

The packaging is also well made and simple. Well, when I say simple, you only get the dock and a folded manual. The manual also have different languages which suggests worldwide release.

The dock, however, have some requirements. First, your Nexus 7 should be running the latest iteration of the Jelly Bean, which is 4.2. I have not yet tried Nexus 7 with older OS and I will not be able to because all of my colleagues that have a Nexus 7 already have 4.2 on their tabs.

Manual

Ports

The Micro-USB port and the 3.5 mm audio jack can be found at the back of the dock. As I said earlier, the purpose of the Micro-USB port at the back is just to feed in power to the dock. The dock will not work and will not be recognized by your Nexus 7 without it having plugged in with power.

Nexus Logo at front

Asus logo at the rear

You need this to make your dock work.

The good news with this setup is that the power will now be fed through the pogo pins in the dock. This leaves the micro-USB port on your tab to be used for other purposes. Right now I am using it with a USB OTG cable and plugged in some peripherals like game controller and keyboard.

Nexus Pogo Pins

Respective connecting port on the dock.

Attach good quality speakers and plug in HD movies and you have a mini theater system. 🙂

I admit, there should have been more to this dock like what most people expected, a HDMI port but the dock itself is fine. For instance, when docked, you can attach good speakers and you have a mini theater system, given the HD screen. Or, like what I am doing, I attach the speakers, use the micro-USB port of the tab to attach peripherals such as keyboard and mouse and I have a mini android desktop. 🙂 You can also configure how the tab will react when docked:

Daydream options

Audio options

Overall, the dock is nice. It is perfect for your desk at the office or at home, whether you are checking some stuff over the internet or using it to search, say, some recipes for cooking. It is a great companion when you want to set your Nexus 7 up in a landscape, tilted position good for viewing what is on the screen. Oh yeah, you can use it as your table top clock, just make sure you do not push it off the surface when snoozing its alarm. :))

Everyday with the Digital World : The BlackBerry 8520

Yeah, I know, it’s another Blackberry but this time, I will be holding this until I ditch it. It’s an old one but they still make it, the 8520 Curve. It was the cheapest BB you can buy during its time alongside with the Bold and the Torch. This particular unit actually had problems with its keyboard though probably because of the people who used it. In fact, if you will observe it properly, the rubber part of the body is completely removed. I don’t know what kind of sorcery they have but that’s how much damage the phone got. It even lost the silver paint on the back cover’s logo, completely erased. :)) Anyhow, it’s now in my possession and what are the things I noticed?

First, you really need Blackberry services to get the most out of this phone and, I assume, to the rest of the lineup. I was fiddling with this first without a sim card and it took me quite a while (without looking at the manual, online) to get the internet from a hotspot, working. This means that if you’re like me who’s used to uber-super-user-friendly interface like Nokia phones or HTC’s Androids, you’d really have a difficult time configuring this phone unless you really refer to the manual. In fact, at the last minute, I decided to go for BB’s online interactive manual and I did not get anything good from it. I kept switching and switching options until I get the WiFi internet working by turning on the Data services, which at first I thought was only applicable to the service provider. Then, the Facebook, Twitter and probably most of the applications will only work with BB services. So your last resort for accessing social networks would be the browser(I guess).

Second, getting the radio was difficult if you are afraid of switching “Mobile Network” because it may suddenly charge you internet fees but in fact, that was the radio switch to enable your phone search for you service provider’s signal.

Third, I think it also has the hibernation feature that recent Android phones integrated to their systems. For example, if I turn off the device using the power button, it would turn off and turn on quick. However, removing the battery and putting it back would give the device quite a significant amount of time to boot. I like it. 🙂

Fourth, BB made me realize that I am no good with tiny keyboards, even if they are already physical keys. 🙂

However, this isn’t really a bad device overall. The build quality is solid, as you can see how much damage it got and still everything inside it works perfectly. And the simplicity of the graphical user interface is just mind-boggling. I mean, talking about aesthetics, HTC’s Sense is just too awesome and BB’s GUI is on the other extreme. It’s so good because it’s just so simple. Though I haven’t really gone deep as some say the battery life’s bad but that’s probably because of the Data usage. 🙂 I’m going to hold this for now and see how it goes for someone like me, who’s more used now to touch devices. In fact, when a message window appears, I kept poking the screen, hoping I’d click the “OK” button. :))

Everyday with the Digital World : The BlackBerry 9700

I must say, even after a day, I’m not a “BB” user but I also admit that it was fun. Today, all the phones within my reach were utterly useless with both mobile phones out of credits and the landline isn’t working. So brother left that phone above to let me have something to use whenever I need to contact key persons for today.

So, what’s the 9700 like from a developer’s perspective  ooor a touch-screen device user? IT’S HARD! I will talk about this device based on my usage today, which is the daily dose of text messages and calls. I am veeeeeeery thankful for the physical keyboard as my fingers missed it a lot. Though the problem is my hands were so used to touch screens that it needs quite a significant area to touch. Which means, that when pressing the 9700’s small keys, it was as difficult as the virtual keyboard on my HTC in pressing. I had to press BackSpace a couple of times for pressing the wrong key. Given that the keyboard’s arranged in the standard QWERTY layout, I can’t believe how difficult it is for me to press the right keys. Second, the call was also a difficult one if you’re a BB noob. I don’t even know how to start a call by dialing the number. All I see when I press a button, which is the number on the keyboard, is a contact search window. xD It was difficult for me today to make the calls and texts but I guess it’s a matter of getting used to the thing. After all, it’s meant for business people and some socializing.

I’m not bashing BlackBerry here by all means, in fact I find this device quite interesting. Though I haven’t fiddled with it too much but I find the graphical user interface quite simple and elegant, not painful to the eyes. The navigation throught the interface is quite tricky but get used to it and you’d be fine. The styling of the devices of BlackBerry have that uniqueness factor. Even the services have a unique approach. I find the BIS/BBM as “another Social network” but something that would not be perished because of a dominating entity though it depends on the service provider, I guess.

Overall, I think it’s a so-so device. It’s hard to use from my perspective because I’m used to touch-screen devices and I haven’t been in the physical QWERTY device world. But the simplicity and elegance caught my attention and that’s why despite the difficulty of using one, I enjoyed it. 🙂

iPod Touch 4th Gen, Camera and Lomo

I’ve been fiddling with my iPod’s camera and to be honest, I am not that satisfied with it but at least you can still use it on immediate moments as well as capturing motion picture with its good HD vid recording. To make the stills-capturing interesting, I browsed for apps that can make the shooting really pleasing. So I got some apps that can do photo editing on the spot. I also love Lomo-cams, though I haven’t fiddled with the real one, but I saw some Lomo-shots and it looked creative. I got one that does Lomo effects:

From our excursion in Tagaytay, the image was simply taken beside Taal volcano and had the Lomo effect. It looks nice despite the blur or grainy image.

iPod touch’s retina display

I am still amazed by the iPod’s resolution. It’s so nice. 😀 Even at this screenshot, the image is very crisp.

iPod touch 4th Gen Long term test

Since I am not an iPod person, I’ll blog here my impressions on my iPod as it spends its life with me. So far, as music is concerned, it is running well and no questions about it. It’s been running fine and no errors in the OS have been spotted. Though I have one concern as it heats up at certain points. I read some questions about it on the internet and it says that the heat produced was due to the location of the processor. They say it’s the processor that’s producing the heat. Oh well, I am concerned about since there are issues regarding it’s safety involving heat and fire during it’s first release together with iPhone. 😀

The iPod touch and others

Honestly, I am not a fan of Apple products. I don’t like the iTunes munching up my computer’s resources when it’s open. I don’t like the complicated synchronization sequence of its devices to Windows PCs and I hate their pursuit to being unique. That’s why I’ve always been shouting at everyone that Apple products are basically the electronics world’s fashion item manufacturer. If there’s one thing that I like about Apple, that would be their music playing device lineup, iPod. It’s been a successful product no matter how many its requirements for non-Mac computers. I admit, I do hate the iTunes installation but I guess I can’t do anything about it.

So after decades of saving up money, I finally decided to get this iPod touch of mine. It’s currently running on the new iOS 4.2 (whatever that is), and it has a capacity of 8GB (though the firmware says 6. ) I need iTunes to put music on it and get my epic movies be played on its “retina display” which in few words, just a typical screen with doubled number of pixels. 😀 I do like the screen’s effect now as it is more crisp than the previous ones. The model I have also boasts two cameras, one at the front and one at the back, both can take pictures and record high definition videos. There are other features but those are software-wise and I did not fiddle with it much since I bought it for my music playing purposes. I was about to jailbreak this device but I guess I’ll just wait for the warranty to end so that the jailbreaking would be guilt-free.

It took a long time to buy this iPod. I decided to get one, with the help of my mom, December last year but this is the only time I got the music player. The reason was the place where to get one at a good price. Since Apple is quite an established company, all their products should, ideally, be purchased at their own stores or authorizes reseller. We do have here at school an authorized reseller and even offer discounts for the students. So I decided to see whether I can get one here, since it’s reliable. To see the extent of the advantage, a factory priced iPod touch 8GB which can be purchased in Power MAC Store, iStudio, digitalhub and so on, costs 12K++ Php (12490 Php for the one in digitalhub). Here in our school, you can get as much as 2K Php discount, which brings down the cost to 10,635 Php. 😀 Sounds nice! However, since the store here is just a reseller, the deliver of stocks takes too long. It gets worse as I am buying in the month of January, which is the month after December which is shopping day. Annoyingly, a lot of people have reserved majority of the 8GB and 32GB units that until now, they are not accepting any reservations for those models. And you end up disappointed. >:E Plan B? We went back to gadget central Greenhills and went to one one of the authorized resellers and…guess what? We got the iPod touch 8GB for 10,500 Php. 😀 A significant ~100 less than the discounted price at our store. So, not only I have an iPod now, I have the iPod from an authorized reseller and at a cheaper price that the discounted one at our school. 😀 How cool is that?:D

So far I am coping well with this “foreign” device and even if it impresses me a lot, it won’t convince me that the rest of its family will be a good match for what I need. 😀 But, this device, the iPod touch is still a great wonder. 😀 It really hit the spot.

 

Thanks to Mom, for giving financial assistance. 😀 Though it really bothers me for disturbing her for this. 😀 Oh well, I’ll just study harder. 😀

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Review

This review is pretty much a personal opinion and observation but nevertheless, there might be some stuff that you may find interesting. I’m a gadgeteer and whenever I get something new, I always blog about it. Except that I was really busy with my academics that I did not have any enough time to write about it. But! I have it here now, and it’s my new phone, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic:

Shell-Ferrari Model Cars with real Engine sounds

Yup, I have them all~! Here’s the new set of model cars recently released by Shell. 😀

My Barkada’s Gift

Yep, two Choro-Qs were given to me as Christmas presents from my beloved barkada during the famous UP Lantern Parade. It was a Bayside Blue Nissan Skyline GT-R R34 and a Silver Honda NSX-R. I was planning on modifying them so that I will be able to mount them on the R/C Chassis Q-steer but I think the sentimental value of these cars led me to a conclusion not to do so. Thank you guys, I love these. Merry Christmas!