Stephanie Mae, originally uploaded by: KnOizki

At last, the teething excitement of getting a new phone this year is nearly over. NO, not just yet. I am still feeling ecstatic with my new iPhone and its amazing feature, in my own finger tips. How easy to see the video and follow few steps until I realized, it isn’t always easy at first “touch” but I am already getting the hang of it, for just an hour.

Tap, tap, tap. It’s how this phone works. Say, tap any movie to bring up on screen controls, then tap again to hide it. Easy. What I find it fascinating is that when double-tapping a photo, it switches between widescreen and full screen, then by using two fingers, you can zoom out if you’re blind. And guess what, I can now check my local weather so that in case it’s cold outside, there’s no more forgetting to bring a thick jacket. It actually tells me the weekly weather forecast. What’s more? I can’t be lost in Hong Kong anymore. I can easily search for keywords like “Starbucks” in case I’d get lost in Causeway Bay (you’ll never get lost in HK btw) to find a coffee, and voila I can see it via satellite view.

What I like with the iPhone is the Wi-Fi. Totally cool. Even while you’re on a call, you can access to anything, email, other applications and even surf the web via Wi-Fi. It works pretty amazing that it actually looks like I am using a tiny Mac. Of course I tried it on with my blog. Another great feature is the iPod itself. Tap any album to see its track list, then tap any track to play it. Rotate it to flick through the art in cover flow and there you have it, a wider player.

And while my iPhone still hasn’t left the house for a real-world trial yet, I have spent a couple hours using it, testing the various features. As such, here are a few observations that I think iPhone is lacking compared to the regular phone like Nokia 82 Series with the Wi-Fi feature.

1. Sending SMS is simple. But why not allow an attachment file? How can I send my photos or an mp3 ringtone to someone if this is not working? Except that you can send attachment via using email. So the hardest part of the effort was trying to figure out how to send an attachment to a normal mobile phone.

2. For some reason, a number of my contacts imported as near-duplicate records. I was advised by the shop not to use the feature “transfer all contacts from my SIM to phone” as it won’t allow me to do it unless I live in the States. Now that iPhone can be used in Asia, I was warned to never ever update the software of the iPhone to the latest version. Why’s that? Apple warned iPhone users that an iPhone update could potentially break their phones (or basically will unlock the phone itself), and that just downloading the unlocking software voids the iPhone warranty.

Scary yet ridiculous. So transferring everything from SIM to phone one by one is a bit tedious. There’s no “message notification” if an individual contact that was added can overwrite the existing one, therefore you have to select the contact from the list, then go to edit mode. At first, I was like, “where the hell is the delete button?”. Then you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the entry to find the delete button. It would be nicer to have a Delete Contact button right on the contact viewing screen. Perhaps there’s some shortcut I haven’t found so there’s still plenty of time to play with this toy.

3. Typing on the small keyboard definitely takes some getting used to. While using my styllus pen from my Samsung, I’d pretty much find it rather weird using my fingers to click on the letters. What surprises me though that when you try to type your password, it magnify the letter so in case somebody is peeping behind you, they can actually memorize your password. My finger-tappig is getting better, though, so I think it’s just a learning curve.

Well the first person who actually played with the camera was my brother and I’ll have more to report to him tomorrow – both on the phone’s performance, and the reactions of some friends who’ll get their first look at it this Friday.

Let’s see.

Oh, here are some photos (not my camera, the quality was bad I suppose) taken from Macao trip on my birthday.

There’s more.

I said it was all about work but we had a nice lunch at FogoSamba, a Brazilian Steak House. The site-seeing tour was conducted by a friend who lives in HK and now resides in Macao as a Sales Rep of the Venetian Hotel Resort and Casino. Man, I thought I was in Las Vegas. Thanks God, nobody has taught me how to play the cards, or else, you know what’s gotta be like in a Casino. Pinoys are so visible in many restaurants, so as usual, I was treated like a tourist.

If you visit Macao, Venetian Hotel is the place to be amazed and feel lost. St Mark’s Square is the best place to walk-around. How can you miss the shopping? The Grand Canal Shoppes has all its big logo brands. Very impressive. It makes me feel like I am in Italy except that there were lots of Mainland tourists and gamblers alike whom for one minute I thought “no way this is another Disneyland”?. Also, their Convention and Exhibition hall are huge facilities (around I think 1,000,000 square feet) that can easily accommodate events of any size and has a 15 thousand seats Stadium which is exceptionally World class. Unforgettable trip and I figured, I am going back to bring extra moolahs. But now that I bought an iPhone, I am now officially broke.

Whoops, I think the iPhone is now fully charged. Time to play.

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