Skype's latest update now enables video calling!

Despite Skype saying it's only supported on Google Nexus S, HTC Desire S, Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo, Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro only, it actually works on other devices. So far I've tested it on a Samsung Galaxy Tab (with Overcome 2.0.1 Hermes ROM) and a stock HTC Incredible S. Both are working without problems!

Find the download link here.

Then, expand the notification bar by touching it and dragging down.

Finally, click on the part that says "USB connected", and click on the Mount button that pops up:

To those facing GPS lock on problem, you can try the following method but first, in settings under Location and Security, uncheck Use wireless networks and leave GPS satellites checked:

1. Go to GPS setup menu by keying in *#*#1472365#*#*
2. Go to SETTINGSPARAMETER SETTINGSPOSITION MODE and choose OPTION3
3. Then go back to GPS SETUP main menu
4. Choose gpsOne XTRA
5. Choose Xtra Enable then choose ENABLE
6. Then click on TRIGGER DOWNLOAD 2~3 times
7. Thats all.. after doing this procedure you will notice a speedier gps lock on…
8. But please remember to do the 'TRIGGER DOWNLOAD' once a week because the downloaded file is only valid for a week

Source

Alternate method:

1. Go to GPS setup menu by keying in *#*#1472365#*#*
2. Under “SUPL/CP Settings” Change the SERVER & PORT to supl.google.com and port 7276. Don't forget to write down your old settings before you change them.
3. Click «Delete GPS Data»
4. Go to clear area outside, and do «Get Position Test»… you should be able to get an accuracy of <15 meters.

Source

I also find installing the following app and leaving it on in the background when using the GPS option helpful:

Tracker Booster

Also, if you want to see how many GPS satellites you are tracking & other info like SNR:

GPS Test

As you can see from the graph, this phone with a score of 471 beats the more expensive Sony-Ericsson X10i's performance and is close behind the HTC Desire/Nexus One (I assume it's with Android 2.1 Eclair, 2.2 Froyo boosts its performance phenomally). In fact, after abit of probing, I found out that the SG5 shares the same Adreno GPU as the HTC Desire/Nexus One! So this means you should get similar 3D performance in the SG5 as the Nexus One, considering the SG5 has a smaller screen resolution!

So now that you know the capabilities of the phone, let's explore the games that I've tried out this week. But before we start, let's install the AppBrain apps first which I highly recommend. AppBrain allows you to browse apps on the internet with your PC/laptop with all relevant reviews, etc and then with just 1-click instructs your phone to download the apps wirelessly! You can of course browse through the apps 1 by 1 on the phone, but you know the screen is not that large and I still prefer to browse on a bigger screen and just tell the phone to go download the games I want automatically. So, for this to work you need the following 2 apps:

AppBrain App Market

Fast Web Installer

Now, I'll review the games and show you the snapshots of how it'll look like on the SG5 itself so you can decide for yourself if they look playable or not on your own SG5!

1. Raging Thunder 2 Lite

First up, Raging Thunder 2 Lite – a 3D racing game where you control it using your phone accelerometers. It's alot of fun and you can adjust the sensor settings to suit your style of driving and I can tell you the SG5 can handle this game with no choppiness & no lag. Also, the races are short so it's perfect for casual phone gaming!

2. Robo Defense FREE

Robo Defense is Android's answer to iPhone's Fieldrunners tower defense type games. In fact, it has similar weapons as Fieldrunners with some improvements but all in all, it is highly addictive and you can spend quite some time on this game!

3. Angry Birds

Angry Birds is the most popular Android game because it's easy to play and the sound of the angry birds really get to you..lol. Basically, you slingshot a bird to a fortified structure by the pigs with the aim of destroying the pigs under them! There a few different types of birds which give you a few attack options like cluster bomb, mid-air acceleration, etc to add variation to the game.

4. City Jump

City jump is where you play a superhero who jumps from wall to wall, trying to gather more power-ups and destroy enemies. It's fast-paced and the graphics are quite nice!

5. Tower Raiders FREE

Tower Raiders is another tower defense type game where you attempt to guard your resources. This is 3D-based, and it seems you can only upgrade the mini-guns but the enemies have health & armor and you need different weapons to destroy the armor and then the health. Also, another variation is that when the enemy steals your resources, they need to escape and you need to defend both the entrance and exit!

6. Dante: The Inferno

Dante: The Inferno gives you a very nicely-packaged game with really nice graphics. It's basically a top-down action game which relies on an on-screen joystick to play. With 121 levels, it gives you very long game play!

7. WordUp!

WordUp! is Android's answer to the iPhone Bookworm game, where you match the words like in a crossword puzzle within a time limit, but it can be diagonally as long as each letter is linked next to each other!

8. Paper Toss

Paper Toss is the perfect toilet game. You basically try to curl-toss a ball of paper in the rubbish bin with a fan blowing at different speeds!

9. Unblock Me Free

Unblock Me is a puzzle game, where you move the blocks of different sizes around to free the red block!

10. Jewellust Lite

Jewellust takes a different spin on the Bejewelled game by requiring you to solve a jigsaw puzzle within a time limit. In order to get the jigsaw puzzle pieces you have to destroy the jewels which fall below the jigsaw puzzle pieces so that it'll fall to the lowest part of the screen to solve the puzzle!

11. Brain Genius Deluxe

Yes, I said 10 but this is just a bonus. Brain Genius Deluxe is a brain training game that is similar to the ones pioneered in the Nintendo DS a couple of years ago. This uses some of the phone's sensors like accelerometers to make it abit different. It's kinda fun but takes up alot of memory space so it's up to you if you want to install this.

So, I got this last night in Carrefour Marina Mall for AED799, where I should have bought it last week when it was AED100 cheaper but now they included a bluetooth headset (Samsung WEP460) and a AED50 Carrefour voucher. Anyway, with my schedule these days, I can't really afford to wait so I went ahead to spend anyway. The Samsung Galaxy 5 was a pleasant surprise despite the lower price tag compared to the other comparable Android smartphones (e.g. HTC Wildfire was selling for AED1300, and the SE X8/X10 mini for AED1100-1300).

If you have the latest gen iPod Touch and want a phone to satisfy the "phone" part and not suffer from phone shame, this device is perfect & gentle to the pocket =) Aimed at the budget conscious market, it sports quite good looks and the only drawback is the smaller screen size (240 x 320) but it's adequate for mobile browsing (with Opera Mini of course), facebooking, twittering, reading small parts of ebooks while travelling on public transport and some occasional games. My only gripe with the phone so far are the buttons right below the screen, where they should have been designed to lit up in the dark; but I guess you'll get used to the controls pretty soon and most of it will be with the touchscreen anyway.

 

So, now for the benefit of Middle Eastern buyers, I should let you know the Android Market has not been rolled out yet in this region. Therefore, Samsung included a software called SlideME, which is kinda same as Android Market but seriously suck big time as it's so slow, the design looks quite cheapo and out of 5 apps I downloaded, only 2 of them managed to be installed! Fortunately, there's a way to bypass this and activate Android Market! So, I recommend to do this very early on as it'll perform a hard reset to the phone and you'll lose everything installed!

How to enable Android Market on Samsung Galaxy 5 series phones:

step 1: go to Menu–>settings–>Date and Time–> and check/choose 'use 24-hour format' option

step 2: Then go to phone keypad and type *#272*XXXX# P.S. The 'XXXX' here are not letters but any 4 number digits that tells you your current time. For example, if your clock shows 12:30 PM then enter *#272*1230# and so on.

Step 3: As soon as you enter the code you will be greeted with a settings, simply scroll down and choose 'XSG' —> then install market

step 4: when market installation is completed the phone will automatically hard-reset itself wiping all your existing DATA on the process.

step 5: reboot your phone and congratulation you now have Android market on your stock firmware!

step 6: enjoy and start downloading apps from the market

Source

So, that being done, feel free to download all the apps to your heart's content! Also, if you happen to not have wireless access, you can also access the Android Freeware website, download them to your computer, transfer them to your SD card and then use the "My Files" app & install the apps manually. Also, don't forget about the Android widgets, see how you can customize your screens:

Some apps I recommend to be downloaded:

0. Gesture Search
1. Opera Mini
2. Hancent SMS
3. Advanced Task Killer
4. Facebook for Android
5. Twitter
6. Angry Birds
7. Barcode Scanner
8. Laputa
9. Brain Genius
10. FxCamera
11. Nimbus
12. Robo Defense
13. RealCalc
14. AppBrain App Market
15. Fast Web Installer
16. Google Goggles
17. Google Finance
18. reddit is fun

More Snapshots:

Samsung Galaxy 5 I5503 a.k.a. Samsung Galaxy Europa Specification:

And here's a benchmark of the Samsung Galaxy 5 against other phones:

More info here.

1. Opera 10 Beta – my browser of choice. Main attraction points are the integrated RSS reader, search creator, bookmark grouping. the start bar, auto synchronization & mouse gestures! And now Turbo Mode is pretty cool, basically it compresses the page for you if you're on slow network on their own server & so you access their fast servers instead.

2. Teracopy – accelerate your file transfers and also to a certain extent, reduce wear & tear in your HDD due to larger buffer being used. Also, it is smart enough to skip files that just won't copy and continue with the rest, or even pause file transfers!

3. Media Player Classic with K-lite Codec Pack, Real Alternative, Quicktime Alternative – plays everything you can throw on it! I used to prefer VLC but it seems that it doesn't take advantage of the dual-core processor like MPC does.

4. Avira AntiVir – free anti-virus with one of the best detection rates out there, but the best thing is that it's very light on resources!

5. 7-zip – the all-in-one archiving/unzipping utility which opens any archive!

6. Foxit PDF Reader – opens PDFs much quicker than the Adobe ones, a real time-saver. Also, you can add notes too!

7. ImgBurn – no-fuss image burner. small in size too!

8. Revo Uninstaller – uninstalls everything including registry entries! Important tool to keep the system running small & efficiently.

9. TightVNC – remote control your other computer and it works on Linux too! Give your home PC a domain name & you can access it from practically anywhere in the world with an internet connection! Alternatively, you can check out LogMeIn too.

10. Truecrypt – on-the-fly desktop encryption, works on a single file, a whole partition, or even a whole USB stick! Perfect for storing sensitive info, Edison Chen should have used this to store his stash =P

11. Launchy – a search engine for your computer. Saves alot of time for sorting out files for me since I just dump everything into 1 document folder, and I can search all the pdfs, xls, doc documents in there! Also it indexes your start menu, so you'll never need to access your start menu again! Furthermore, it functions as a calculator as well!

12. Microsoft Time Zone – track time in multiple countries! A truly indispensable tool for me!

Went around shopping for a netbook as a light entertainment machine mainly for surfing the net & watching movies but I found this little gem in Tesco for RM788 instead! This model, CQ2120L has exactly the same specs as the CQ2035D model (sold for RM988) except that it doesn't come bundled with Windows Vista Home Basic.

The specs were pretty OK for the price:

• Intel® ATOM™ 330 Processor
• 1.60 GHz, 512 KB L2 Cache, 533 MHz
• Foxconn H-I945-ITX Iwith ntel® 945GC Express Chipset
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• 160GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
• Intel GMA950 Graphics
• DVD+/-R/RW 16X 12X +/-DL LS 12X RAM SuperMulti SATA drive
• Realtek 8102 10/100 BaseT LAN
• Realtek ALC662 onboard High Definition 6-channel audio
• SD, MMC, SDHC, MMC Plus, MS, MS-Pro Card Reader
• Agere Systems PCI-SV92EX Soft Modem

But i guess the reason I went for it is due to its looks & small size (it's as big as a small DVD player) as it doesn't look too bad next to the LCD TV. Also, it's really quiet and it consumes very little power as it only comes with a 65W power supply!

Anyway, I installed Windows XP Professional over it, but it seems that 5 components were not detected & it took me some time to find it:

1. GMA950 graphics card driver – on Intel's site.
2. System & chipset driver – on Foxconn's site.
3. HDA audio driver – on Realtek's site
5. Modem driver – it's not listed on Agere's site, but you can find it on Windows Update.

If you need any more drivers, you might find that the Foxconn 45CSX motherboard is pretty similar and you can check out more drivers over there.

No Room for Expansion =P

Well, if you crack open the case, you'll find that there's not much space for expansion though, with only 1 bank for the RAM i.e. you need to take out the 1GB RAM and install a higher capacity one (but motherboard manufacturer listed 2GB RAM as max), also PCIe slot was already taken by modem which I guess you can take it out and replace it with something else but with a pretty cramped place inside, there might not be room for a graphics card. Also 5.25" bay already taken up by optical drive & 3.5" drive by the HDD. Furthermore, the ATOM processor is soldered onto motherboard giving you no choice to upgrade the processor.

Backplate/Connections:

Unfortunately, it doesn't have much connectivity options, there's a VGA port, 2 PS/2 ports, 2 USB ports in the back, another 2 USB ports in the front, 1 LAN port, 1 modem jack port & 1 audio jack set (line in & out, microphone) on both the back side & front. But if it's just gonna serve as a light entertainment machine for the living room, I doubt you need that many connections.

Performance:

This is the hard part since I'm too lazy to go do the benchmarks and all, and afterall, this is a very low powered machine. But still the ATOM 330 should be 2x as fast as the ATOM N270 which is fitted onto netbooks 'cos it's just 2x of it. Anyway, I tried playing Halo on it with the max settings and it's kinda jerky but playable, probably making like 17fps. Movies play great and multi-tasking with browsers and Office apps (MS Office 2003 tested) were a breeze.

But if you wanna read some kinda performance review which is similar, you can probably check out this link on Neoseeker.

Conclusion:

Certainly a value-for-money buy suitable for the living room if you're not an avid gamer. I think the offer in Tesco ends on 17th June, so go get it now otherwise, you have to pay an extra RM100 for it in other stores.

This is what I call a truly Malaysian design! A hook for your teh/nescafe ais/soya bean/etc…

That's available in the new Proton Exora, seems to be a practical car for big families!

dosh = money in brit speak. doshbank = moneybank

so in the current times of financial difficulty, what better than an aggregator for the best deals online?

Currently, the site aggregates the latest deals from hotUKdeals.com and moneysavingexpert.com (MSE) and discount codes from retailmenot.com

If you have any more sites you think should be included, feel free to contact me about it.

Googling for it doesn't seem to help either, but in the end we found a workaround, which is kinda lengthy but pretty easy.

Here's a step-by-step run-down:

1. Login to cPanel, run phpmyadmin:

2. Select the WordPress database you're using on the left side panel:

3. You'll see something like this, might defer from yours as some plugins will add their own tables:

4. Anyway, on this screen, under the "collation" column, if you see latin1_swedish_ci, you'll need to change that to utf8_unicode_ci!!! Click on the button 2nd from left on the column that says "Action" shown below:

5. You'll reach a page that says Structure as shown below, check everything that says latin1_swedish_ci, then click on the edit button which looks like a pencil:

6. You'll reach another page like the one below, change everything to utf8_unicode_ci, then click Save:

7. Then, when you finished saving, goto the tab that says "Operations":

8. Change again setting to utf8_unicode_ci, then press "Go":

9. Repeat steps for all that are not "utf8_unicode_ci". You should be able to write in Chinese characters now.