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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As I am writing this, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 just came out for the Mac an It has also been recently announced that the final version will be ready for download on Tuesday, June 17. As a long-time Safari user, this marks the week that I am finally ditching Safari and will be using Firefox 3 as my primary browser.

I have always been a Safari user ever since I got my first Mac. It has an excellent user interface and is blazingly fast. Minor annoyances such as not remembering tabs on exit and the lack of option to open new windows in tabs were fixed by Saft, an excellent Safari plugin. However, I’ve been experiencing lots of lockups lately which will, of course, cause the Spinning Beachball of Death to appear. I don’t really know if the reason for this is the website I am visiting, Safari itself or Saft, all I know is it happens often enough that writing long paragraphs in textareas makes me feel uneasy. That finally made me download the latest Firefox 3 RC.

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I’m a pretty lucky guy when it comes to my gadgets. Almost nothing I own have ever broken down while I was using it. Having said that, If I want to make a purchase and a lot of users have been reporting lots of problems with theirs, I usually just disregard them and buy it nevertheless.

Last night I was playing Portal on my Xbox 360, which I got just a couple of posts down. I am extremely close on solving the final level when the screen suddenly froze. I did not think much of it since my progress have been saved before that so I turned it off and turned it back on. What happened next is the one thing that all Xbox 360 owners are afraid of, the omen of an impending doom, the red rings of death:

Like a scene from a movie wherein a loved one died, I let out a loud and grim ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOO’ as I say goodbye to hours of fun that my Xbox 360 has brought me. I have read about it on the internet, heard it on the news and still I could not believe that something like that could really happen.

The good news is that the store is offering me a replacement—as soon as they get new stocks. In case you didn’t know, Microsoft Philippines is not supporting Xbox 360 units as it is not officially distributed here.

For now, there’s nothing I can do except wait.

I was talking to some friends telling them how sad and lonely I am lately. Understandable since it’s the new year and 2008 is pretty uncertain for me with masters application and not knowing for a while if I l get accepted or not. I often walk down Ayala Avenue with a blank stare lost in deep thoughts. Then I thought about what I could do to take my mind off this and one option immediately crossed my mind: buy a new gadget.

I have fallen into the pit of consumerism a long time ago and I could never climb out again. New stuff really does make me happy and when I think about the last time I felt contented was when I bought my iPhone back in September.

So what it is that I bought this time around? Well, it’s something that I don’t really need but I’ve been wanting to buy roughly a couple of years ago. An Xbox 360. I just thought I could totally justify buying it now since we now have an HDTV, DSL connection is pretty fast and I have a bit of cash saved up for “emergency”.

I bought Halo 3 as my first game because, you know, why not? I am also planning on renewing my Xbox Live gold subscription for a year after the free trial expires because the online aspect of the 360 is pretty awesome and the console feels lacking without it. At 2000 pesos a year, it’s not really that much of a burden financially.

There is also a service called Gamehopper which is basically like a Netflix for games for Metro Manila residents. At 600 pesos per month, you can rent any game you want, one at a time and they deliver the games for free. I cannot comment on the service yet since my subscription won’t start until the end of the month but they have an OK selection of games. Their website is crappy though but if they happen to have excellent service and I get the games that I want then I won’t complain.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my purchase as it does fill the void on the times that I have absolutely nothing to do. I only get to play with it for an hour or two on weekdays though because my mom has to watch all those stupid ABS-CBN teleseryes and they want to see it on the big TV which I don’t get because it doesn’t really make much of a difference since it still in standard definition. (Breathes…)

I have been hearing about the free WiFi blanketing Power Plant Mall and nearby areas in Rockwell Center, Makati. Great news considering Globe WiZ and Airborne Access’ hotspots in the mall are very spotty and limited only to a number shops.

I decided to do a little bit of shopping there today since I’ve got nothing better to do on a Sunday anyway. After trying on a few shirts but not buying anything, I went to Seattle’s Best to get some coffee and maybe read some of my RSS feeds. I took out my iPhone, sniff some WiFi in the air and there on the top of the list, WiGO Free WiFi. I connected, tapped on my Google Reader bookmark and was taken to a nice blue login page. “Sign-up is free!”, a button happily announced so I tapped on it. There it is, the catch: I have to install something called WiGObar.exe. An executable file on my iPhone? I know there are dozen of third-party apps for iPhone but I highly doubt that the WiGO guys were able to come up with an emulation software to let it run a Windows executable file.

Great. Mac users (and Linux and every other device that isn’t running Windows for that matter) are left out again. They seem to be forgetting that Rockwell is a Mac users haven. They now have a beta version for the Mac and you can get it right here.

For the sake of this blog post, I decided to give WiGObar a whirl when I got home on my Mac through VMWare. I registered, downloaded the 500-something KB file and ran it. So, what does the WiGObar do? Serves up banner ads. Surprised? Here is how it looks like:

Doesn’t it remind you of AllAdvantage and those get-paid-while-you-surf services back in the late nineties? Couldn’t they think of a better way to serve ads to their users and not take precious real estate from my screen? That bar is on top of everything and when you try to move it, it will always bounce back to that spot.

I know I should not be complaining since it is free for us users after all but jeez, that thing is hideous. I can think of better alternatives such as contextual text ads or maybe that same bar but one that appears and disappear after a set amount of time. For now I would rather pay for my WiFi, thank you very much.