Late last year, I made a somewhat snarky post about WiGO and their free WiFi service. I admit, I was a little hard on them, after all they were just starting out and naturally they would not try to roll out features all at once. Now that they have enough time to settle in and get comfortable, maybe it’s time to give them a fair review.

Armed with my MacBook and iPhone, I went to the Power Plant Mall last weekend. WiGO blankets the whole mall and surrounding areas, which is awesome. I can be anywhere and still get a signal but I’ve decided to stay at my favorite coffee shop, find a comfortable spot and order a latte. I woke my MacBook from sleep, connected to the WiGO hotspot and launched the WigoBar application which I downloaded from their website. On the Mac, the application is a Java jar file which is really jenky but will do until they realize that it sucks and write a proper Cocoa application. So anyway, I launched my browser, logged-in on their customized welcome page and off I go, pretty much free to do anything I want.

Now there is a bit of a problem here, the WigoBar. Remember the bar that sits on top of all your windows and display ads? That bar and the business model behind it died during the dot-com bust. Now, WiGO dug it out from the grave and renewed its sole purpose of annoying the hell out of us.

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Here it is, the moment we have all been waiting for ever since Steve Jobs announced that there will be a 3G iPhone in 2008, and they are calling it iPhone 3G. The rumor sites pretty much got everything on the dot this time by predicting 3G, GPS and a 50% price drop over the previous model.

As previously reported, Globe Telecom will be bringing iPhone 3G over our shores here in the Philippines. Apple’s iPhone Philippines page does not detail anything specific. Availability, pricing and plans are still up in the air. I hope Globe releases this information as soon as they can so we can prepare our wallets.

Speculations abound as to what kind of arrangement Globe has for iPhone 3G. Will it have Visual Voicemail? If you are a Globe subscriber right now, you couldn’t even use the regular voicemail as they shut it down in favor of Voice Txt or whatever they call it. Bigger question is what kind of rate plans will iPhone be offered in. Globe already offers specialized plans for Blackberry users, will we see the same for iPhone? We are very much used to pay-as-you-go and Globe has already confirmed that they will also offer iPhone on prepaid and will most likely be unsubsidized.

Data is another thing as iPhone 3G can take advantage of Globe’s HSDPA network. Unless they are really greedy, there is no possible way that Globe will insist on its current data scheme–P5/15 mins or P0.15/KB, because of all the Push stuff that will be happening. Looking at their Visibility plan, the most expensive at P1499/month only has 100 hours of internet use. With iPhone, you can use up all that in a week! Although not in their official website, some blogs are saying that they are still offering unlimited Visibility plans at P3000/month. I cannot imagine paying that much on top of the regular voice plan. An ideal price for me will be P1000/month on top of regular voice, maybe even up to P1500 if their HSDPA coverage is pretty much everywhere I need to go.

Whatever happens, for sure this Apple zealot is going to get an iPhone 3G. I absolutely love my iPhone and the only time I feel that I want to throw it against a brick wall is when I’m surfing in Safari over EDGE. Luckily, that problem has been solved in this new release and I can only imagine what great (or not-so-great) things we can do with having the internet on our pockets everywhere and actually use it.

Everyone on the interwebs is talking about the new MacBook Air and how mind-numbingly thin it is. I swear, you could use it as a weapon to slash a mugger’s face when one tries to steal it from you.

As if I did not show enough evidence from my last post that I’m a gadget-whore, I’m actually thinking of buying this thing. Why? I don’t know, it’s so pretty. It’s not just that but the thought of actually carrying around a full mac and not feeling the weight in your bag and the ability to whip it out in just about anywhere is pretty amazing. It will be a downgrade power-wise and I still have to add a hefty sum so it’s something that I really need to think through.

I was browsing around Installer.app on my iPhone today and was delighted to discover that my favorite application, MobileScrobbler, has been updated. I thought this is probably a just minor one to fix some issues on the previous version. Imagine my surprise when I see the swanky new player with Last.fm radio streaming right on your iPhone. It’s almost as if they ported the client from the Desktop.

MobileScrobbler can be installed through Installer.app on the Community Sources repository under Multimedia.

I was not a big fan of 3rd party applications on the iPhone. I’m one of those who think that it is perfect for what it is because it does everything I expected it to do. Also, a big reason for not installing apps is most of them are pretty useless and, dare I say it, ugly. Well, not anymore. Though a lot of them still are ugly (who am I to complain? they’re free), there are notable ones which will definitely add the much-needed functionality that we had to do without before. I assume you already have a jailbroken iPhone and have Installer.app installed.

weTool

Pretty much every one I show my iPhone to ended up being wowed by it. Until I tell them that it cannot forward SMS and for most it definitely is a deal-breaker. Luckily, weTool now lets you forward messages to any of your contacts. If that’s not enough, you can also use it to send texts to multiple recipients and copy messages to the Notes application. Call logs can also be manage allowing you to delete individual entries for whatever reason (I can only think of bad ones).

weTool is not yet available via Community Sources so you need to add: http://app.weiphone.com/installer/ in your source list.

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