Many years back when I first visited The Line, it was priced at a premium. Lunch or dinner, it was one of the most expensive buffets in town. Things have changed somewhat, Their frequent promotions means, well, it’s not difficult to find yourself at a $29 lunch buffet like I did. (Besides that, buffets at other hotels have steadily increased in price too, so now The Line’s not considered terribly pricey.)

I used to look forward very much to visiting The Line. It’s premium dining. But my last visit has changed my mind somewhat. Their buffets are getting far too popular. Too many people. Too long queues to get food.

Like, for example, the queue at the oyster counter was just impossibly long and slow moving. I looked at the counter several times and gave up joining the line because, well, I didn’t want to spend my lunch time standing in a queue. Despite there being at least 2 chefs there shucking the oysters, they just weren’t fast enough to cope with the throngs of people waiting in line.

There was a similarly long queue at the Japanese counter. The queue was for the sashimi which is sliced on-the-spot.

I begun to wonder if they called the restaurant “The Line” because, well, there are meant to have long queues.

Anyhow, I did get around to have a small serving of fresh oysters. Sadly, I think the quality has declined. I don’t know how exactly to describe it, except that it simply didn’t taste good.

I wonder if this has become a case of over-popularity leading to decreasing value. It’s probably still pretty worthwhile for $29. But if I had to pay the full price, I would be very dissatisfied.

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Surely SingTel knew the number of subscribers they had on mioTV. I think most subscribers are on mioTV only because of the football programmes. Otherwise they would probably find better programming offered by StarHub.

But never mind that, surely they know how many are signed up on the sports package. These are diehard fans who probably switched over to mioTV because of football, and surely you know they are going to tune in to the season finale. So, isn’t it quite plain obvious what kind of viewing load the mioTV network will experience?

So, on Monday, SingTel apologized. The problem with the way apologies work in Singapore is that, well, they are not sincere, and in same breadth, so to speak, they attribute blame to someone else. In SingTel’s statement, they blamed the disruption on an “unprecedented number of viewers”. Yah. People who were forced to switch to mioTV, paid for a football contract, are not expected to tune in to the season finale?

Then, in a so-called goodwill gesture that, I’m sure, does nothing more than further insult affected subscribers, they plan to waive one-month of subscription fees? Do you seriously think one-month subscription fees will make up for the failure on Sunday night?

I think the least SingTel should do is to return all the monies paid by all affected subscribers, and continue to offer them free subscription for as long as they can deliver a problem-free season.

MDA, please stop imposing silly $50K fines. Do you know how much SingTel mioTV collects from its subscribers?

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I’ve traded in my Samsung Galaxy S II (SGS2) for the HTC One X, HTC’s latest flagship smartphone. It was, surprisingly, not a very difficult choice. The Samsung Galaxy S III (SGS3) was just announced earlier this month, and it does look like a a great phone. The choice between the SGS3 and HTC One X, however, was quite clear to me. I’ll tell you more about that later. Let’s talk about the HTC One X first.

When the HTC One X was first unveiled in Singapore at the Marina Bay Sands, I was actually not particularly interested about it. In fact, I even passed up on an opportunity to go down to the event. I was not planning to change my phone yet. I could find the technical specifications and read plenty of reviews online. I didn’t really do any of that either. But several key points did catch my attention: quad-core Tegra 3 processor (plus one extra low-power CPU core), and the awesomely fast 8 megapixel camera.

My SGS2 was a pretty good phone. However, one aspect that did disappoint me was its camera. Compared with the iPhone 4S, the SGS2 was colossally slow. Image quality was not on par with the iPhone 4S either. But it’s not the image quality that annoyed me (it’s quite decent, actually, just not as good as the iPhone 4S). What was really bad is its slowness in focusing, capturing the shot, and then being ready for the next shot. Unless you’re going to be capturing only still life, the SGS2 was often too slow to get any good photos.

I like to take photos. I’ve often talked about how convenient a camera phone is because it is something you carry all the time, always ready to take a photo. But to be really useful, the camera phone has to be actually ready to take the shot when you need it too. It needs to be fast. Preferably with reasonable quality too.

So, anyway, how did I come to meet the HTC One X since I wasn’t very interested in it in the first place? Well, thanks to working demonstration sets available at some retailers. Manufacturers should take note to make demonstration sets as easily available as possible, especially if you feel you genuinely have a winning product.

I was at the Challenger outlet at IMM one morning, and found a HTC One X demonstration set available. The first thing that hit me when I picked up the HTC One X was that the phone felt very good in my hands. It’s a little large. But it feels good to touch, and feels comfortable to hold. The body feels very solid. I think it helped a lot that the unibody construction didn’t need to accommodate a battery cover that will weaken the body. The display was absolutely brillant. In that instant, even before actually playing with the phone itself, I had a very good positive impression of the phone.

The SGS3 has been hyped so much, and just about anyone who’s watching Android smartphone development will want to wait to see what Samsung will unveil. I, too, was waiting to see what the SGS3 would be. The announcement came, and as I mentioned right at the start, I decided to go with the HTC One X. I wouldn’t even wait for a demo SGS3 to land in Singapore to try out.

I ordered my HTC One X online. I didn’t have to go play around with it a second time. It’s the first time I’ve bought a phone online, and the first time I’ve committed to a purchase so quickly. It’s also the first time I’ve done so with so little “hands-on” time with the phone.

I was sold onto the HTC One X for a couple of reasons:

• It looked good.
• It felt good to hold.
• Awesome speedy 8 megapixel camera.
• And of course, it has all the features it needs to have to be a flagship.

Yes, I know there are many more things that the SGS3 probably does better than the HTC One X. But I really don’t like the look of the SGS3. No matter how Samsung says the SGS3 design is inspired by nature, there is nothing natural about it to me. It just looks so awkward to me. There are so many simple things that could have been tweaked to make the SGS3 look better, but it seems to me like Samsung purposely chose in every instance to make it look worse. (It was made ugly by lawyers to avoid law suits.)

I don’t know if, over time, I would get over or get used to the look of the SGS3. But I don’t want to risk the chance that I would continue to dislike its look for a long time (or forever). It’ll be quite a problem considering that I’ll be looking at the phone so much every day.

This is one of the few times I’m choosing a tech gadget not based primarily on its tech qualities, but because of its aesthetics. It’s the first time for a phone. It’s not that the HTC One X fails in its tech qualities. It is the SGS3 that has failed in aesthetics.

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. I liked the SGS2′s design. I wasn’t font of the Galaxy Nexus, but I could tolerate it. The SGS3 seems to have amplified the parts of the Galaxy Nexus that I didn’t like. As much as I dislike the look of the SGS3, obviously some others will absolutely love it.

I wasn’t planning to go back to the HTC camp. My first Android phone was the Google Nexus One, which is made by HTC. A nice thing about HTC is the free pickup and return service when you have to send in your phone for repairs. Samsung requires you to visit their service centre (although it is fairly conveniently located, and queue times are short). Of course, it’s best that phones are made so good that you never have to send them in for repairs. Nevertheless, this is one up for HTC over Samsung, and it’s something to consider too.

As you can see, I chose the Glamour Grey colour. One reason is that I was slightly concerned that the Polar White version might discolour over time, or be more difficult to maintain. The more important reason, however, is that the Polar White seems to be featured too much. Even the demo phones I saw were Polar White. I’d like to have something a little more unique.

So, that’s how I came to choose the HTC One X.

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The Pureview 808′s camera boasts a pixel count of… 41 megapixels. That’s right. It’s not a typo. Forty-One Megapixels. It’s a camera resolution that outdoes any other smartphone, all compact cameras, and most of the DSLR cameras too.

The 41 megapixel camera produces still shots that measures 38 megapixels. But the default photo size is 5 megapixels. What Nokia’s trying to do with their new camera is oversampling, so as to produce higher quality images. Each pixel in the 5 megapixel camera shot is made up of 7 pixels on the image senor. This allows the camera is average out the sensor input to effectively remove noise, thus providing image quality that is unprecedented on camera smartphones.

The 41 megapixel image sensor also lets you zoom… without digital extrapolation like other camera smartphones would do. To produce zoomed in photos, less of the image sensor is used, and there is less (or no) oversampling, but every pixel from the resulting image really comes from the image sensor. No moving optics involved, and no digital extrapolation. A key advantage of this solution is that there is no noise from any motorized zoom mechanism like often happens with compact digital cameras.

Is the 41 megapixels overkill? Well, if you care very much about good image quality that you can capture anywhere you go… well, there is no better way to achieve that with a camera smartphone that you can carry around with you all the time.

The Pureview 808, unfortunately, is otherwise a little dated in other aspects. It’s a Symbian phone (yeah, didn’t Nokia already want to abandon Symbian?), has a 4″ display with 640×360 resolution, a single-core 1.3 GHz ARM 11 CPU, and a rather clunky form factor. Oh well, the space is needed to house its amazing 1/1.2″ sensor (yes, beats about all the compact digital cameras out there).

Would you get the Pureview 808?

For me, I’m quite decidedly done with Symbian phones. Regardless of how they rename it. But the 41 megapixels camera with Carl Zeiss lens is quite awesome hardware.

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The last couple of days we’ve been entertained by the public inquiry into the spate of SMRT disruptions. We’ve just come to the juicy part where SMRT ex-CEO Saw Phaik Hwa gets grilled. Not unexpectedly, we’re going to learn about many more things wrong about SMRT.

One of the key issues is about the maintenance budget set by SMRT had not kept pace with the growing ridership. To cut a long story short, Ms Saw claimed a mid-life refresh had averted spending on maintenance. However, we learnt that those refresh were primarily about upgrading of air-conditioning and passenger cabins. These are good for passenger comfort, but don’t help to improve reliability and safety of the trains.

Ms Saw also claimed that productivity improvements helped keep maintenance cost low. I’m not sure I understand this. Ordinarily, I’d think about human productivity. Fewer people to do the work of more people. Yeah, of course, you reduce headcount, but there is the same amount of work to do, of course productivity increases, but do you get the same quality result?

Broadly speaking, productivity is simply about how much output you produce per unit of input. Whatever she means by productivity, it comes down to doing more with less. I don’t know if the same quality of work was produced, and I don’t think we’re ever going to get a simple answer about that. But quite clearly, SMRT has put in less input.

We also learnt about how some of the headcount lost due to natural attrition were not replaced. That means, basically, you reduced headcount. You don’t necessarily need to fire people or retrench people, you could also reduce headcount. That’s what many companies do to reduce manpower overheads.

The public inquiry has become like a drama. Each day unveils little snippets (or sometimes larger ones) of information about what goes on inside SMRT.

What SMRT has been doing is probably not different from most other private enterprises. Most businesses, if not all, ultimately wants to maximize profits. Maybe they could have lofty vision and mission statements about how they want to make the world a better place, or improve our lives, etc. But ultimately, isn’t it the case that they want to maximize profits?

The trouble is that our government has made train services a basic and critical transport infrastructure. You can’t run such infrastructure services like a typical private enterprise.

I was just about to compare with other basic infrastructure like water and electricity. Then I remembered, electricity providers are, technically, also privatised. But perhaps it’s different here because for consumers, the electricity tariff is fixed formula that depends on prevailing oil prices (and the irony is that our electricity is generated from natural gas, not oil). Big consumers of electricity have the flexibility to call for tender and benefit from healthy competition between the providers. So it’s different. Sure, electricity providers still want to maximize profits, but they do so by lowering their cost, and the quality of their output is easily measurable.

Having said that, I hope tomorrow we don’t wake up to a first blackout in many years, and the start to a new era where we’re told blackouts are “unavoidable” and we just need an incident management plan to deal with it.

I don’t think our “train disruption rate” has improved since December 2011. Despite everything that has been said and done, many of us are going to assume train service disruptions are very much a part of life. I seldom take the MRT, but a week or two ago, when I had an early meeting appointment in town, and had the option to take either a train/bus combo or just buses only, I actually factored in a variable delay component into the train segment of the journey, exactly like how I would do for buses.

Gone are the times when we could be quite confident that if we got to the train station at time X, we would be at our destination train station at time Y, give or take 5 minutes.

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I had been considering getting an Android tablet. I’m already on my second Android phone, and I’ve got two iPads at the moment. But I’ve not had any Android tablets. Previously, I had considered getting the Asus Transformer Prime (but ultimately decided on that 2nd iPad), and also a cheap $100+ basic Android table, something like Ainol/Anova.

So, anyway, this Android tablet came along. I’m quite satisfied with the Android experience. The iPad is okay too. But I interact with Android everyday through my phone, so it would be nice to also move up to a bigger form factor with the same operating environment.

This nameless Android tablet, is really very OEM-ish. There’s really no branding on the box. Except, well, for the word Android. Talk about the pure Android experience, this could not have been more pure.

The tablet inside the box is equally nameless. Not a single branding on it. Yes, I tried hard to figure out. Here’s how the tablet looks.

The tablet came loaded with Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). Pretty modern. It has 4GB of internal flash memory, a front camera (no rear camera), capacitive menu, apps and back buttons, hardware power and volume rocker, 3.5mm audio jack, mini-USB, 5V DC-in jack, HDMI output, and a TF Card slot (which I found out is the same as MicroSD). The screen measures about 6.85″ diagonally. I don’t have a weighing scale to check the weight, but it’s reasonably light. Something like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7″.

Decent specs for a freebie tablet. I suppose it will cost a little over S$100 if one had to pay for it.

Performance isn’t great. Swiping through homescreens was not smooth. But, I suppose it is good enough to be usable. Besides, Angry Birds, which was preloaded in the tablet, ran well enough.

I’m really curious to identify the device. I know my way around Android gadgets, or at least I think I do, so I tried to connect to the tablet via adb. Nothing detected. Yes, the tablet has USB Debugging mode turned on. Too bad, I could not use adb to find out anything about the device.

There was no terminal emulator installed. It’s just one step away to go to the Google Play store to get it installed, and in no time, I had a shell to poke around the internals. It’s ARMv7 architecture CPU, single-core. I could see dmesg output, the tablet looks to have 448MB of RAM. Out of the 4GB internal flash, about 2GB was available for /data.

I’ve got to find out more about the device. Things like how to get it into recovery mode (I can see the recover partition in the NAND partitioning), download mode, or how to get ADB working with it.

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Not that I’m sold over to the SGS3. You’ll see why.

I must admit that my initial impression of the SGS3 wasn’t good, because to me, it didn’t look good. Yup, I’m firmly in the camp that thinks the new SGS3 looks bad. It is too curvy. I wasn’t really fond of the Galaxy Nexus, and I think the SGS3 accentuated the aspects of the Galaxy Nexus’ shape that I didn’t like. Next, the face of the SGS3, to me, looks awkward. The display doesn’t fit in the face, and there is too much space between the bottom of the screen and the home button. It’s not balanced with the space that’s above the screen. Why does the SGS3 look the way it looks? Well, Android Police surmises that the SGS3 was designed by Samsung’s lawyers.

Let’s put the looks aside for now. The main things that I want to look at are basically hardware features, features that are only possible because of hardware, and possibly also software features that neither the competition nor open source projects can offer.

The first thing about the SGS3 that stands out is, well, the look: it remains relatively thin at 8.6mm. It’s still thinner than the HTC One X, despite the latter having a slightly smaller screen. Furthermore, the SGS3 is also thinner despite it having a substantially larger battery capacity at 2100 mAh (the HTC One X’s battery capacity is 1800 mAh).

The bigger battery capacity, hopefully, will mean that the SGS3 will run much longer. I have a Samsung Galaxy S II (SGS2) and I think its battery life is pretty good, especially after the ICS upgrade. The Exynos CPU on the SGS3, although a lot more powerful, is supposed to be quite light on power. But we’ll have to wait for more detailed and in-depth reviews to know about the SGS3′s battery life for sure.

Something that I missed on my SGS2 is the notification LED. It’s such a simple piece of hardware that I cannot understand why Samsung would omit it. Fortunately, the SGS3 will come with a real RGB LED notification indicator.

Smart Stay, the feature of the SGS3 that looks to see if you’re looking at it so that it can keep the display on instead of going to sleep, sounds like an awfully useful feature. I don’t know if it is worth the battery drain though. Even though face recognition will probably be done in dedicated imaging hardware rather than CPU, the fact that you’ve got to run the front camera is definitely going to cost some battery. This will have to be determined when in-depth reviews become available.

The SGS3 also continues to have features that we’ve taken for granted, but which has gone missing in HTC’s flagship One X: removable battery and MicroSD card slot. The battery might not be such a big thing if battery life is reasonably long, but it seems like a very good thing, at least to me, to have a MicroSD card slot. The SGS3 is also blessed with extra sensors like a pressure sensor. (I would like to have an ambient temperature sensor.)

It’s also nice to know that the SGS3′s CPU and graphics performance outdoes just about all the competition, including Apple iPhone 4S. Unless you play intensive games on your phone, this may not matter too much. But you never know how even in the near future, before your phone contract is up for renewal or your handset is reasonably old enough for you to consider replacing it, some new super duper application shows up that demands all the extra compute and graphic power that the phone can muster.

Are these features enough for the SGS3 to outdo its competition? We badly need the detailed in-depth reviews and input about real-world usage to decide.

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I didn’t stay up to watch the launch event live. I think I would have been utterly disappointed to learn, bit by bit, over an entire hour or so, how “The Next Galaxy” is really just, well, another gadget in their now very populace line of Galaxy devices.

Don’t get me wrong. The Samsung Galaxy S III is a great phone. The problem is, we’ve been expecting something more revolutionary. A whole lot more revolutionary.

So, I was disappointed to learn:

• It’s a Super AMOLED screen without the Plus, which probably means it’s a Pentile display. This is not the true RGB-type display we have on the current SGS2.
• I don’t need a 4.8″ big display. This is practically midway to the Galaxy Note from the current SGS2.
• The size is a little largish. Taller and wider than the HTC One X, but a little thinner. There’s too much space between the bottom of the screen and the new slenderized Home button. They might as well have left the Home button in the original size.
• 1.4GHz Quad Core Exynos CPU. Hey, HTC One X already’s got a 1.5GHz. I know, don’t just look at GHz. The benchmark seems to say the SGS3 does perform pretty well.
• Still a 8MP main camera. Of course, we’ve got to wait for photo samples to judge the camera quality.

I was so disappointed that I actually checked out the HTC One X specifications again, to see if it might be the better phone after all for my next upgrade.

The good things going for the SGS3 are the somewhat larger battery capacity (2100mAh). I hope that means longer battery life, and not it is a necessity to compensate for bigger power draw. I’m not a fan of the Galaxy Nexus styled curved top and bottom, but the new flatter back without any chin or lip is a plus to me. The camera seems to be better protected by a bezel that juts out a little bit. There’s also NFC built-in, with simple device-to-device sharing using NFC+Wifi Direct. Wireless battery charging is said to be coming.

A lot of the improvements are in the software department. For example:

• Phone stays awake because you look at it. Nice.
• Vibrates to alert you of missed calls/messages when you pick up the phone.
• Knows to call the person you’re texting simply by holding the phone to your ear.
• Camera takes a series of shots at one go, so you can then select the best shot. (This could mean the camera hardware is now much faster.)
• Automatic photo tagging.

I think, we’ve got to wait for more detailed reviews to learn more about the SGS3. Hopefully, they will not be disappointing. The HTC One X is very tempting.

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Vanessa and Ian have been quite miserable to be stuck at home all day. Last evening, Vanessa was bugging me to fix up her 3-D puzzle. I had just bought it earlier in the day. I’ve seen a larger version of the same puzzle at another shop selling for somewhere close to $30. I thought it was much too expensive. While out shopping yesterday, I spotted the same puzzle going for $19.90, and the smaller version I eventually bought for $14.90.

The bigger version, apart from being larger in total dimensions, also had more pieces. The information printed on the box said it’ll take about 150-180 mins of assembly time. The smaller version would take 120-150 mins. I figured, the kids are not going to have that long an attentino span, so I’d better get the smaller version. Besides, it’ll be better that the completed model not take up too much space. Space is always precious. The less space these things take, the more of them I can build.

So Vanessa and I got started on the model. I think it’s still somewhat too advanced for her, so I had to do the reading up of instructions and most of the heavy assembly work. But Vanessa could help out removing pieces for me, and poking out the holes within the pieces. We went on and on. Not unexpectedly, her attention started to wane. It’s not entirely her fault, I guess, because there was something on TV and it was also demanding her attention.

Ian, wanted in too. I gave him the simplest of jobs. He doesn’t really know how we were trying to build the model, and I was much too afraid that in his carelessness he would end up tearing or breaking something. Most of the time I just told him to watch carefully so that he could do it the next time. It made him feel like he was doing something important so, well, he didn’t hound me too much.

After almost 1.5 hours (I think?), we were finally done. Under 90 mins. Ahead of the expected 120-150 mins. I suppose I ought to be doing it much faster than the expected audience. My first 3-D puzzle. It’s actually not complicated at all, it’s just a matter of following the instructions. Totally unlike doing, say, a jigsaw puzzle.

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The question posed in the PhoneArena article has a simple answer. A tablet is excellent for consuming information. By consuming information, I mean activities such as browsing the web, reading email, and watching videos. This is what a tablet is good at. Tablets are, however, not good platforms for creating information.

By creating information, I mean activities such as composing elaborate emails, do up presentations, edit documents, or moderate photo editing. Updating your Facebook status does not really count as information creation. Neither does performing simple Internet banking transactions, nor even online shopping.

The main reason that makes the tablet unsuitable for information creation is the lack of real keyboard input, and lack of screen real-estate to effectively lay out application windows side-by-side. Furthermore, neither iOS nor Android at this time allow you to open multiple application windows side-by-side. Sometimes, this is what you really need to do.

Tablets that have a real hardware keyboard dock, or when paired with a bluetooth keyboard, alleviates the keyboard input limitation. This helps make the tablet slightly more useful for simple information creation tasks, but in my opinion, still fall short of usability for “heavy work”. There are still other requirements like large screen size, I/O options, etc. I’m not going to mention people who have specifically more demanding requirements such as graphics designers, gamers, application developers, etc.

So, I think the simple answer here is, you will continue to need a notebook around as long as you need to create information. That’s basically almost all of us.

For me, the question I asked myself is about replacing my notebook with a tablet for my commute between home and work. This will certainly lighten my carrying load. I have a desktop PC at office. I could leave my MacBook Pro, the one that I carry around at the moment, at home. So whether at home or at work, I’d have no problems with information creation activities. While on the road, all that I’ll do is consume information.

There is the question of operating environment that bothers me. I like working in Mac OS X. So, the office desktop PC running Windows 7 is not very palatable for me. Of course, I could also try leaving the MacBook Pro in the office, and just use the tablet as my primary device at home. But that’s not ideal either, since I do information creation at home too.

So for the sake of this argument, suppose I had two MacBook Pros, one for the home and the other for office. I choose to go with another MacBook Pro in office rather than an iMac or Mac Pro, because sometimes I still need the portability, to go from one work place to another. Alright, this sounds alright to me.

Hmm, now that I think about that arrangement, what would I use the tablet for? My commute between home and work isn’t all that long. Whatever I need the tablet for, I can probably settle with on my smartphone. So I don’t quite need a tablet either.

Maybe, the tablet would be useful if I had to be out of the office for much of the day. For example, if I had to attend a half day meeting, or full day seminar. The tablet would be useful in such situations. I’ve actually done precisely this a few times.

So I think, after ranting this long, the bottom line seems to be that the tablet isn’t going to replace my notebook at all. It probably won’t replace a notebook or desktop computer for most people either. It is an additional gadget that’s useful to have. Sort of like how a smartphone has complemented notebooks.

Perhaps this is what Samsung had in mind with their Galaxy Note. It is a much clunkier phone. But it might be able to replace a tablet for people like me.

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