Aim! Shoot!! Duck!!!

Having rekindled my Transformers interest, I find myself checking a couple of Transformers fan sites daily nowadays, checking on news of new figures, new happenings, conventions & stuff like that. It’s a very lively community, with yearly Botcon conventions organised by Transformers Collectors’ Club & Hasbro in the USA. There are BotCon organised elsewhere around the globe too like in Europe & Japan.

Two sites I check daily nowadays are Transformer World 2005 (TFW2005 in short) & Seibertron.com. TFW2005 is more of a forum while Seibertron is more of a news site. There’s a gallery section in Seibertron where you can check out tons of galleries of past & present Transformers figures. Browsing these 2 sites, I can’t help but notice a link to BigBadToyStore.com on both sites. So curiously, I went to check it out. Turns out it’s huge online toy store with an amazing variety of selection you can gawk at. They sell mint as well as 2nd hand toys in loose, opened or sealed form which is great as buying used toys is the only way to get some very hard to find figures, provided you can afford it of course. My focus was of course Transformers, in particular the Alternators section. As mentioned in my Transformers! Final Part post, Alternators are rare collectible figures now so I was wondering if I might be able to find 1 or 2 figures that I was looking for at reasonable prices. To my surprise, there were 2 figures, in good shape (one is sealed, one is opened but Back in Box condition) & price wise I can afford it. So I took the plunge, created an account, paid for it with my credit card & sat on the order for a while, wondering how I was going to ship it back here.

I had 2 options for shipping it back, use BigBadToyStore shipping by US Parcel or use Borderlinx, a shopping consolidation service by Citibank. Shipping it by US Parcel was cheaper but slower delivery (3 weeks) & most likely will get stuck in customs. Shipping it by Borderlinx was a little more expensive but faster delivery (5 days) & might slip through customs, depending on my luck. So I decided to use Borderlinx & try it out. I’ll blog about the Borderlinx experience seperately as it was not a very smooth one, unfortunately.

So finally, I got my package from BigBadToyStore, delivered via Borderlinx & here are some pictures to commemorate the ‘joyous’ occasion.

Overall I’m very happy with the packaging & how they sealed each box individually. I have no issues recommending BigBadToyStore to anyone, but please keep in mind, you’re shipping from USA so shipping cost is a bomb. Always try other cheaper alternatives in finding your rare figure, whenever possible. But if you can find an alternative method to ship it back, then shopping on BigBadToyStore is highly recommended, especially since they have clearance sales quite often.

UPDATE 21/04/2010: Talk about coincidence. BigBadToyStore is having a 15% sale on almost everything till this Friday, April 23, 2010!!! So go check it out.

Something I forgot to mention yesterday was BigBadToyStore has a ‘Pile of Loot’ shipping system. What this does is allow you to buy an item, store it in their warehouse for up to 6 months, all the while adding new items you wanna buy to the pile. A great way to consolidate stuff you want to buy & ship it in one go. I still have stuff sitting in my ‘pile’ over there now .

So finally we have the official announcement about the rumored iPhone OS4 & yes, multitasking is now coming! Steve Jobs said, they maybe be late, but their multitasking will be the best. So I guess everyone should rejoice & the naysayers should now be happy, right? Well, maybe. So why am I not jumping for joy now that the biggest stumbling block for me to adopt Apple’s iPhone has been removed? Because the implementation can’t achieve something basic I need. Yes, there’s multitasking but it’s not the usual multitasking everyone knows. In some sense, yes this is actually a smarter way of doing multitasking but at the same time, it’s implementation will mean it can’t be used for all situations, yet. This can of course change in due time.

So what am I so bummed about? I still can’t open instant messaging or Twitter, background it & let it update & notify me when someone replies. You might say that it already does that, using push notifications, & rightly so, even Apple says that, in their opinion, this is the best way to do it on their platform. But then again, push notifications for instant messaging SUCKS!! Try using it & you’ll get sick of it very fast. Save states might help to ease this a bit but anything that needs to load updates from a server will always suffer from delays as you wait for the app to catch up & display it. So yeah, unfortunately, no better solution for this, yet.

However, the rest of the updates in iPhone OS4 are great! The multitasking is actually pretty good, in it’s confined context of use. The background task completion &  save state function will definitely help a lot now that it’s open for all devs to use.  Previously on iPhone OS3, only Apple apps had access to these functions.

App folders is a long overdue feature, since I’ve long used up all 12 pages of app screens on my iPod Touch.  Now I can add even more junk. LOL! And finally, enhanced email app! Threaded messaging view & a merged inbox view! Now this is going to be super useful to me.

There are more updates in the OS but these are what caught my attention as they impact my daily use. Check here for more details of the rest of the updates. Here are a few vids of the new OS in action.

The iPhone OS4 will be out for the iPhone & iPod Touch this summer, or June 2010 to the rest of the world. iPad users will have to wait till fall, or September 2010 for it. Oh ya, one last note, not all features of the new OS will work on iPhone older than iPhone 3GS or iPod Touch 3rd Gen. Specifically multitasking won’t work which is a bummer but not surprising. What other features will not work wasn’t detailed out so I guess we have to wait till June 2010 to find out.

Ok, I’m late on this, a week late. But I think there’s enough confusion that it warrants a brief explanation on the plans DiGi is offering for their iPhone.

DiGi iPhone Plans

DiGi iPhone Payment Options

I’ll be focusing on only the iPhone 32GB model & iDiGi 88 plan as the principle is the same all across, so no point repeating it. Basically DiGi subsidise around RM1k for you, the buyer, but you pay this back monthly with RM88 which gives you a set number of calls, SMS & MMS. The confusion seems to happen on the payment options side, which even I have to admit, I didn’t get the first time I went through it.

You are given 3 options to get the phone, pay cash + 6 months monthly fee, 24 months installment or 36 months installment. Now all plans are tied to a 2 year contract so even if you take the 1st option, you will still be paying RM88 for the next 18 months. In total the 3 options works out as follows:

Option 1: RM2544 + (RM88 x 18) = RM4128

Option 2: RM176 x 24 = RM4224

Option 3: RM117 x 36 = RM4212

So you end up paying almost the same using any of the options. But of course there’s a catch. There’s a 5% service charge charged each month you pay your bills. So the longer your installment, the more service charge you pay. Simple as that. So if you can manage it, take Option 1 by all means.

Just to clarify Option 3, you’re only tied to a 2 year contract with DiGi so during the 3rd year, you’re just paying back your credit card installment & not paying for a iDiGi plan. You won’t be on ANY DiGi plans after the contract expires but you are free to sign-up for a normal DiGi plan or move to another telco.

Now I’m not going to compare DiGi plans to Maxis plans, DiGi already provided that here. Safe to say, DiGi doubles up everything on what Maxis offers for every plan. But the more important things to note are:

1) DiGi charges 1 rate to all networks for calls, SMS & MMS. This is a BIG plus to me.

2) There’s no extra charge if you go over the limit of the quota set for local internet access. Just your speed will be reduced. This is quite important as you will use the iPhone to access the internet often, not just for web browsing, but any apps that require internet connection. In fact I think even with the throttled speed after going over quota, you might still get better speed than on Maxis with it’s congested network.

So I guess my blind faith in DiGi paid off. Yes I did pre-order the iPhone, for fun, but no I didn’t get one because I’m broke. LOL!