They dressed up the hotel’s ballroom and had 3 giant laptops in the front, and there were slick, dressed-up hostesses with face paint who were taking pictures with guests.

The two pics above from TianChad.com – see his post from the event.

Why the face paint? Coz that was the campaign creative:

P1 W1MAX-1NSiDE Review

I was also lucky enough to get a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 which had the new embedded WiMAX chip to test out for 2 weeks. I don’t have any pictures of the device itself because the review is more of the WiMAX service (and also because the Dell still had the cling wrap on it).

So how is the performance of P1 WiMAX on the go? Here’s a speedtest I did from The Curve in Mutiara Damansara:

I was impressed at the sustained download speed of nearly 2Mbps. It’s as good as my DSL Streamyx connection at home.

Here’s another one I did from Kota Kemuning (where I live):

Holy frickin’ crap!!! That’s a sustained download speed of more than 9Mbps. I’ve never seen that on any local broadband provider, so that really blew my socks off (No, I haven’t tested out Unifi yet) and live up to their claims that the service can achieve speeds of 10 Mbps.

Granted, the tests are to servers based in Malaysia but it’s still pretty impressive. Many of the popular sites that I visit with a decent CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Yahoo, YouTube and Facebook loaded really quickly.

Who Needs W1MAX-1NSiDE?

I’m not the target market for these embedded WiMAX devices. I work mainly from a single location (my home office) – plus, I’m a Mac

However, I think these WiMAX-inside netbooks and laptops are great if you

1. Spend lots of time in cafes and on the go. If you mainly use your laptop on the go you’ll find that you’re pretty much tethered to places with WiFi. With WiMAX you don’t need to squeeze into crowded cafes and share the WiFi with everyone else. And on the occasion that you are out of WiMAX coverage, you can always fall back to WiFi since the devices are both WiMAX & WiFi capable.

2. You are a minimalist who likes to travel light. I prefer my MacBook but maybe you like something that is half the weight. And you don’t want to carry extra USB dongles to connect to 3G or WiMAX. These additional dongles also drain your battery faster, so another plus point for embedded WiMAX.

3. You are sick of Streamyx. I have a pretty good Streamyx connection but it’s not very reliable. Just 2 days ago, I had problems connecting. Turns out, apparently someone stole TM’s cables.

Where To Get W1MAX-1NSiDE

If you want to find out more about these embedded WiMAX netbooks and laptops, head on over to www.wimaxinside.com.my.

On the site, you’ll find out details about the plans and the locations where you can buy the devices. They even have an introductory promotion where you get the first 3-6 months WiMAX subscription free and pay a discounted rate if you continue later.

Finally…

Happy birthday P1! Packet One Networks turns 2 today. They’ve done a great job to push innovation and competition in the broadband industry. Thanks for inviting me to the launch and providing me the review unit, and I wish you all the best.

So I’ve had my iPad for a little over a month now. By far the thing that I do the most on it is to read ebooks. In fact that was one of my main motivations of buying the iPad in the first place. In this past month, I’ve read at least 3 whole novels on my iPad and this blog post aims to share my experience of using the iPad as an ebook reader.

Books on the iPad comes in many forms, from PDFs that you read with a PDF reader, to apps that only contain a single book, to library-style apps which allow you to download and manage entire book collections. The reading experience depends a lot on what you use to read the text of the book and my review is based on 2 library style apps – Apple’s iBooks app and Amazon’s Kindle app.

(Click on the images for larger versions)

iBooks

Kindle

iBooks vs Kindle

iBooks is a beautifully designed application which makes reading on the iPad a joy. The Kindle app is good enough. Both have some common features:

Automatic sync reading location and bookmarks across all devices that are reading the same book

• Multiple font sizes & colours
• Change screen brightness
• Search
• Table of contents & bookmarks
• Highlights & notes

Additional iBook features

• More fonts to choose from
• Much better highlighting and notes feature
• Pretty much a lot better looking

Additional Kindle app features

• You can also read your Kindle books on other Kindle platforms – the Kindle reader itself, as well as PC or Mac, Android and Blackberry phones.
• You can turn off the page flip (I feel that it’s a bit distracting).

I prefer iBooks’ reading experience over Kindle. In iBooks, the line-height and spacing are a lot better, and it has a helpful ‘X pages left in this chapter’ at the bottom of the page. I can’t understand why the Kindle uses a gray background instead of white. If Kindle switches to a white background I would automatically like it twice as much.

Where to Get Books

Unfortunately, getting books into iBooks and Kindle is a bit tricky.

iBooks & iBookstore

iBooks supports ePub and PDF books. ePub files can be copy protected – meaning you can’t email the files to your friends. ePub is also a popular ebook format that is supported by many online book stores. The bad news is that the iPad can only read copy-protected ePub files from the iBookstore. This isn’t Apple’s fault, it’s a feature that publishers require all ebook readers to have.

Luckily, there are places you can find ePub books that are not copy protected. Manybooks is an example of a directory where you can find legal ePub books for free. I’ll let you figure out how to find illegal ePubs on your own

Finally, iBooks also supports PDF. Unfortunately, PDFs don’t enjoy all the same features like a regular ePub. For example, you can’t take notes and resize the text.

If you download ePub or PDF books from the internet, you can easily transfer them to iBooks by importing them into iTunes and syncing with your iPad.

Kindle & Amazon

Being an Amazon product, the Kindle mainly to help Amazon sell paper-less books, and thus Amazon is the main way to get books for the Kindle app. You simply go to Amazon, find the Kindle version of the book and click the ‘Buy now’ button. Next, launch your Kindle and the newly purchased book will download into your iPad. Pretty magical. The other advantage is that the Kindle boasts the largest ebook library in the world.

The Kindle actually also supports other formats like PDF and copy protection-free ePub files. However, you’ll need to email these files to Amazon and pay them to convert it to Kindle format for you. Bummer. I haven’t tried this feature out myself – I’m not about to pay to get my book converted when I can read it in iBooks!

The difficult part is to create an Amazon account that has access to Kindle books. Amazon only has rights to sell ebooks in certain parts of the world, and Malaysia is not on that list. So if you want to use your Kindle, you need to convince Amazon that you are in a country where they can legally sell you ebooks. It’s a pretty complicated process, so I’m glad that I created my Amazon account long ago before these shenanigans. If you want to create an Amazon account today for use with Kindle, you’ll need to do a little research. Here are 2 articles that may be helpful:

• Lowyat forum post: How to use Amazon Kindle 2 in Malaysia, The What, the Where, the Hows
• Michael Yung: Buy Kindle 2 from outside US

Conclusion

Amazon’s Kindle Store beats Apple’s iBookstore hands down in terms of the breadth of the library. The Amazon website offers more browsing and rating features to help me decide which book to buy.

However, in terms of reading experience and the ease of transferring books to the iPad, iBooks comes out on top.

Personally I prefer reading with iBooks. If I can find an ePub or PDF that is not copy-protected I’ll read it in my iBooks. After all, you don’t buy everything you read right? With real books you can borrow from friends. If not, I’ll buy it from Amazon and put up with the bearable reading experience on Kindle. Hopefully the process of creating ePubs will become easier and more and more independent publishers will release their ebooks in ePub format.

I hope this review helped you in your research!

Gallery

Before you say anything, yes I know I wasn’t looking directly into the camera. I was looking at the preview, which was just to the left of the lens and didn’t think it would be so obvious. Besides that, I would love any more feedback you may have about the review.

Book Info

Author: Jonathan Fields – read his blog, or follow @jonathanfields on Twitter

Book Website: CareerRenegade.com

Buy the book from Amazon.com

Career Renegade by Jonathan Fields

When you buy the book with the link above, I get paid a small commission by Amazon–thanks!