How i wish the Philippines could properly implement the Comes with Music program of Nokia. In Singapore, buying a Nokia phone allows you to enjoy one full year of free music downloads. In the Philippines, w cannot implement such a scheme because of (1) the record labels and (2) there’s a rule that value added services should go through a company that is owned by a Filipino. Which means Nokia may have to go through a third party service provider or through a telco, which completely defeats the purpose of having the Ovi store and the Comes with Music freebies. …read more

I’ve been toying with the HTC Magic and my verdict has been telltale of expectations that were basically preconceived with a “Google OS.” Apparently Android may be too early in its stages to support a couple of things, especially with the Mac. I’ve been having bad trouble trying to do two things:

1. First, a total free sync solution to the HTC Magic with my iCal and Address Book. If there existed one, the telco where I got it from didn’t really elaborate on the apps. Apparently, not all Androids are created equal and the version for the Philippines packed into …read more

Similar to how Nokia launched their Ovi Music store in Singapore, it seems like the new Android OS for the HTC Magic isn’t fully implemented in other parts of the world. In the Philippines for instance, the Android store isn’t even a built in on device application which you can launch.
There isn’t even talk about integration with your Google Applications. Nonetheless, the HTC Magic is a good piece of hardware that seems very promising in what it can deliver. Not sure about when HTC will deploy the rest of the features, or if this is something the telcos should …read more

A few months ago I was part of a team that was consulted upon to help launch a Philippines-based service that had “everything in a box” related to a particular telco’s property. Although the focus was with the blogs on my end, the bigger picture was with the actual portal itself. The name of the portal is Sandbox.

Sad that the current product doesn’t use “open technology” to share with the outside world. It doesn’t have RSS feeds and you really can’t permalink much. Not much Javascript either for photo uploading. What it does fulfill though is having all of SMART …read more

Huge news for the Asian telco industry. But just to put a little perspective … there’s been a lot of speculation on the Google Phone business model since 2005. With Google’s core competence being contextual advertising (wasn’t it search a long time ago?) they’ve never really kept secret about their plans to use the 700MHz spectrum for a completely free, advertising driven telco and broadband (?) service.
Free, advertising driven telco.
Well, Asia has just opened up it’s first and it’s in the Philippines. Pardon me, I had to break the news in my personal blog simply because of regional implications. I …read more

I’ve been out of the country three times last year to different parts of Asia. Activation of roaming is automatic for post paid lines on my network. Because I love to be redundant I’d take a short trip to the service center at the mall and always reconfirm my roaming activation. And yes, the girl on the counter, patient as ever would always say the same thing – my post paid subscription entitles me to automatic roaming.
Trip one happened and I had to buy a SIM card because upon touch down, my BlackBerry refused to grab a signal. Trip two …read more

My BlackBerry got bust. The middle “Pearl” stopped becoming sensitive enough to scroll through anything. So the SOP was to send it back to the telco via the service center and it will be shipped to Canada. Here’s a story for you … I had always been in touch with “Grace” one of the account managers for SMART and though this is a telco here in the Philippines it is still a good example of excellent service.

So the procedure as I had it in my head would be to hop on over to the service center and leave the …read more

Back here we have three major telcos (Globe, SMART, SUN) on GSM and one that runs on a CDMA network. The latter, called Bayan Telecommunications dominates the “wireless landline” market by releasing CDMA based landlines without wires made by HUAWEI and some cellphones that also run on CDMA.