Can you believe this? Finally, someone is offering us FREE Apple iPhone! Like what one of the recent comments said about the new iPhone 3GS, I literaly had to use my hands to close my jaws when I saw the promotion on iPay88.com!

Without wasting a single second, I called iPay88 to check out the details. But, I was told they are offering Free Touch Screen iPhone look-alike phones, and not the real Apple iPhone! Hahaha… what a nice promotion they are running! But it does look like one from the picture. It is actually called the D-Phone. If you were not careful, you might drop in the “trap” and get a nice D-Phone.

Anyway, I think he Malaysia Payment Gateway scene has changed so much in recent years. I still remember the early days when it was only Commerce Payment or the US gateways, (mainly 2checkout.com).

Now Commerce Payment has all but disappeared, but the local payment gateway market continues to hot up. The choices for Malaysian Merchants and Netpreneurs have truly mushroomed.

Leading provider iPay88 (part of the Mobile88 group) started an aggressive push some 2 years back. Since then other tech players are also eying a slice of this increasingly lucrative market. Not to be outdone, iPay88 launched en exciting offer yesterday: FREE iPhone!… ops, I mean FREE TOUCH SCREEN PHONE!

So what’s the catch?

To qualify, you just need to sign up to iPay88’s SME plan for 2 years.

Here is the cost of the SME package:

• One-time Setup Costs: RM488/-
• 2 Yrs Maintenance Fee @ RM500 per year
• Total Cost is RM1,488/-

iPay88’s transaction charges are pretty competitive, around 3%. If you are an iPay88 Reseller, you can get back some commission too.

I did an iPay88 integration recently and it wasn’t too bad. Of course the system was not quite as developed as something like PayPal, but their staff were helpful and very patient with me. If you need to setup iPay88 for your website, feel free to drop me a line and I should be able to help you out.

Wanna get a D-Phone for free? Be quick, as the iPay88 free phone offer runs until 31 July 2009 only.

Not many people may know this but the Palm Pre has been rumored to be under development since back in 2004… but then, Palm was still mucking about with their handheld PDA phones being complacent as they have dominated the arena, being the inventor of the popular Palm PDAs. It took some rough times before the company bucked up and introduced two things: the Palm Pre phone and also the company’s next gen OS, webOS.

At first glance, the Pre looks like a polished stone, and is quite think too at almost 0.7 inches at the thickest point. However the curvy exterior makes it a comfortable fit for your hands and easy to slip in and out of even the tightest jeans pockets. The phone has 8GB of storage and runs on a Texas Instruments processor and an undisclosed amount of RAM. More importantly, it has capacitive touchscreen, the same technology used in the iPod Touch and iPhone which means it is very responsive to fingers. It is 3.1 inches wide, which means it is a wee bit smaller compared to rival iPhone’s specs. However the resolution is the same and the screen quality is no doubt top notch.

The Pre also comes with 3.2 megapixels of camera goodness equipped with proper flash for taking pictures in low light situations.

WebOS works on a cards system

The phone runs on webOS, the new operating system developed by Palm which will conceivably be put on all the future phones and is an important cornerstone for the Pre experience. Early reviews have found it to be robust and refreshing. First off, it works on a ‘cards’ system similar to the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1’s home screens. Each card represents a specific application and you can switch around them simultaneously, meaning the phone is designed from the ground up to be multitask friendly. Palm recommends not opening more than 8 cards at once, as the phone will slowly run out of memory the more cards you open up. However, the experience is smooth and you may feel some lag if you start piling on the apps, similar to what would happen on your desktop computer I suppose.

The touchscreen runs down into the black plastic area, which Palm has dubbed the gesture pad. This area will be used solely as gesture control, meaning you have to memorize some simple one-finger swipes that can accomplish such tasks as switching around cards, closing them, navigating backwards or forwards while viewing webpages, etc. The user interface is smooth and slick, clearly polished for many nights as Palm readies it to compete with the crowded smartphone market dominated by iPhones and Blackberries.

Synergy pulls information from Gmail, Facebook and Google Calendar

One nice thing about Pre is something called Synergy. It is an app that can pull in information from Gmail, Facebook and Google Calendar and integrate all the information into one platform to make it easy for your to manage the information. Unfortunately, you cannot control what type of information gets dumped into your phone or set up filters, as not everybody on Facebook should be imported into your phone just for the sake of it. Unfortunately Synergy in its current iteration does just that and you end up with a lot of superfluous information. The idea is great, but needs some improvements and polish due to these glaring problems.

The SMS and IM function of the phone has also been integrated together into a cohesive whole. It doesn’t matter whether you are SMSing your friend or IM-ing him on your phone, all the conversations and sent messages are kept as one continuous flow even while you are jumping around from SMS to IM. The result is a nice way to track everything being said. It also syncs with iTunes just fine, although I don’t think Apple will be very pleased with that.

The phone will probably be hitting Malaysian stores unofficially soon, although the quoted price unlocked is near the US$600 mark, meaning it will probably cost upwards of RM3000 when it does arrive. This puts it in a pricing position above that of iPhone, at a time where official contracts with Maxis have been available for months now. For all the revolutionary things Palm put into the Pre, basic economics may be the final hurdle it faces.

The application is a slick upgrade from the previous Twitterrific and provides a host of new features making it currently one of the best Twitter apps for Apple’s handheld currently.

The moment you start the app and log in to your account, you are directed to the Sources main page showing you the latest topics (so called trending topics) currently being discussed in your Twitterverse. Once you have selected an account and viewed the list of updates, you can choose to view @username profiles, and also the option of marking tweets for later reading, although with 140 words for each tweet, it’s not exactly hard to read on the spot instead of saving it.

The app also comes with three skins to give you some choices. It is available as a free download which is ad-supported, or you can choose to pay a fee to get the ad-free version.

The ability to have access to Twitter from this slick app is pretty powerful, and also allows you to be able to access Twitter using GPRS or 3G on your iPhone. For those running on iPod Touches, it is less useful as WiFi coverage here isn’t great yet, but that said, give Twitterrific a spin and you won’t need another Twitter app on your Apple handheld ever again… until the next version update that is.

Last year, around the same time now, Apple placed an order for about 50 million 8GB NAND flash memory chips and many people speculated that the iPhone 3G and updated iPod Touch will be launched, which, with the benefit of hindsight turned out to be true.

Now they are repeating the exact same thing this year, except they have doubled the order to 100 million such memory chips, suggesting perhaps the same pattern?

More to that, references to a next-gen iPhone-like device have been found in the latest iPhone OS 3.0 after hackers have a field day ripping through the source code. The new device appears to support some new features hidden in the operating system. Perhaps we won’t need to wait much longer than the June/July period, which is also coincidentally the time period when Apple CEO Steve Jobs is slated to return to the company (he took 6-month leave due to health concerns last year).

Thus, it’s no stretch of the imagination that we will have another new device on our hands, and possibly a lot of early adopters will be selling their superseded devices for cheap in the second-hand bin. =)

Note that the chips are in 8 gigabits, or 1GB denominations, so Apple has 100 million GB to play around with to create a combination of 8, 16 and 32GB devices. It’s still a large number though!

iPod Touch

This is a device that needs no introduction. It’s small, slim, sexy and packed with enough games and features to make it one of the most desired mobile devices next to the iPhone. However, while it can be good at doing many things, such as playing games, listening to great music, etc, it still lacks in certain areas especially when compared to other portable WiFi devices.

Most people who get the Touch would probably want to jailbreak it first, to break Apple’s evil control of the device and return full functionality to it. There are many merits to doing a jailbreak, such as enabling various features that Apple has disallowed such as copy & paste and changing themes.

The small size and sheer thinness makes it virtually unnoticeable when slipped into your jeans pockets, although the shiny silver back attracts scratches like nobody’s business. You’d think that in a battle between steel and fabric, steel would win. You’d be wrong in this case. Do invest in a quality protective film such as the Invisible Shield or Bodyguardz.

Nokia N800 and N810

This device trades in slim & small size for more function. Compared to the Apple, it is perhaps twice as big and thick, making it a pretty apparent bulge in your pants if you decide to carry it around. The size may turn off some people who are always on the go, or people who don’t really need the big sized screen and would rather have portability.

The resolution is good at 800×480, making it possible to view web pages comfortably and watch movies, although it isn’t as crisp as the iPod. As a web browser, it’s hard to beat these N series devices. It runs on a mobile Linux operating system, but you can conceivably install any types of OS such as the Android as long as it supports the ARM9 processor, which is used in this device.

Best of all, the Nokia device supports full Flash, making your browsing much more complete, especially with certain sites which make heavy use of Flash for navigation. The difference between the newer N810 and N800 is that the N810 has a very much welcomed slide-out keyboard, making typing a very easy and comfortable affair vis-à-vis the small and cramped keyboard in the iPod Touch. The N800 uses an on-screen keyboard, which makes it thinner, and also accepts a full sized SD card while the N810 uses the smaller microSD for memory.

These two devices are your best bet if you want a portable browsing device. The Nokia also comes with built-in GPS, although performance is not that great. However, the iPod is a more developed device with tons of applications and games available from the App Store, while Nokia is still lacking in this department. Depending on what you want from your device, each has its own merits and pitfalls. But both are wonderful for portability and ease-of-use.

Sourced from Flickr.

The saga of the Touch 2’s jailbreak journey is long and exciting. When Apple first announced the device, fans were happy to pick it up because the features, such as volume control, integrated speakers and a nicer and sleeker form-factor beats the older Touch by a comfortable margin. But it wasn’t long before people realized the new Touch cannot be jailbroken using existing techniques developed for the iPhone and the original Touch.

The reason is that Apple added some new circuits and changed some of the IC, thus fixing the older loophole that allowed jailbreak to be possible. Ever since then, the race is on by developers chr0nic and the iPhone Dev Team to find a new way to break the system.

It took a few months before the first jailbreak, also called Red Sn0w, was released by the iPhone Dev Team. It exploits some features of the new Touch chips, but was limited due to the fact that it needs to be connected to the computer and have some special commands sent to the iPod before it will boot. Thus, anytime the device restarts or hangs, you cannot boot it until you find a computer and plug it in. It is also known as the tethered jailbreak.

A few weeks after that, somebody threw together a way to have the Touch 2 boot successfully without having to connect to a computer, but if this happens, you will not have access to any applications or features that depend on your device being jailbroken. You will boot into a virgin iPod and only have access to native programs, but that’s better than being stuck with a non-booting iPod so many people made the switch.

A few weeks after that, a new and complete jailbreak is finally released that addresses the problem of booting. It’s released by the iPhone Dev Team as a result of seeing copies of a commercial app that does exactly what they have discovered. Hence in order to prevent the person from monetizing what is essentially a community effort and get rich off the work of others, they have decided to release it for free.

They were holding back the release until after Apple announces their next mobile device, be it the iPhone 3 or the iPod Touch 3, in the hopes that they will not fix the hole and force the jailbreakers back to square one. However, their hands were forced, and no doubt the method that this current jailbreak uses will be fixed by Apple in their next device.

Whatever the case, the iPod Touch 2 is now officially jailbroken, and you can check this tutorial out if you are using the tethered jailbreak for a way to convert it into the untethered version, or if you are starting from scratch, this tutorial will better suit you. An easier way/application is on the way, but for the impatient, the above links are good enough and come with comprehensive tutorials.

The new functions are split into three major categories and we will take a look at each.

Peer-to-peer connectivity over Bluetooth is now possible for gaming and info-swapping, which is very useful because you and your friend no longer need to be connected to the same WiFi hotspot in order to do those things. Mobile phones such as the Ngage from Nokia has this feature for a long time now, and Apple shows they are being serious in pushing the iPhone and iPod Touch as a mobile gaming device.

Paid apps can now have subscription-based fees as well as optional paid content, which is a major boon for one game in mind: Tapulous’ Tap Tap games. For years they have offered their music for free, as they were not allowed to charge for paid content. With this system, expect to see this app skyrocket with more exclusive tracks and new, premium music! Of course this new model will encourage more creative games and things like download-able levels, etc.

Push function for developers so that it’s not only limited to official apps and streaming video and audio, as well as allowing in-game voice use. This means more Web 2.0 applications will be near the horizon and apps can now call out to Google Maps, allowing for more unique uses.

For the general functionality side, we can finally use Cut and Paste, allowing you to shake the phone for an undo/redo dialog box should you wish to do either. MMS and stereo Bluetooth is also finally available via A2DP, and there will be a new Spotlight function so you can finally search across your apps, contacts, metadata, but not email. One more exciting piece of info is that Bluetooth is finally enabled on the iPod Touch 2!

As for the Apple official Apps side, we can have a new app called Voice Memo, which does exactly what you think it does (only for iPhone obviously), landscape view for Mail, Text and Notes, Note syncing, YouTube account support and a shake-to-shuffle feature for iPod. Nothing special here but it adds to the little things.

The update is now available for developers, and will hopefully be released for the general public not long after. It’s free for iPhone users, but you need to shell out $9.95 if you want one on the iPod Touch, just like the last iPhone OS update. Oh well, I’m sure jailbroken iPods won’t find this too much of a problem. .

Well, Apple has finally released an update to almost all their product family and the change left almost no Apple product untouched, although most of the changes are more evolutionary than revolutionary.

First, we saw some new iMacs, which look as beautiful as ever with the all-in-one approach that integrates the CPU components directly into the body of the screen, giving it an almost cable-free look perfect for any office desk. The entry model has a 20-inch screen while the more expensive models all pack a humongous 24-inch flat screen. They have also updated the graphics card to 9400M and GT 120, depending on your price range.

I find it a little funny that the graphics chip is from that of a notebook, but I suppose the space and thermal constrains of the iMac made this the only powerful chip that can fit into the body without causing it to melt down.

And rumors have already surfaced regarding the 17-inch unibody Macbook, which is glitching out and causing the screen to display strange colors. Many have attributed the problem to the 9400M overheating and causing the artifacts seen on the screen, suggesting that there will be a lot of pissed users with nothing they could do, because if the problem is having a hot graphics card, you can’t really tell users not to use them, can you?

The new Mac Mini is also updated with better hardware and now have a total of five useful USB ports. Another change is that the new Apple Keyboard will lose the numeric keypad, bringing it in line with their Apple Wireless Keyboard which also comes without a numeric keyboard.

Finally, the Apple Time Capsule and Airport Extreme are now able to operate two different wireless networks simultaneously. That means they operate on 2.4Ghz on one channel and run a different network on the 5Ghz frequency, and conceivably you could have two different networks, one for your home computer and one for guests-only access, although I am sure hackers will surely figure out novel ways to harness this ability.

The hardware refresh meant faster processors running mostly on Core 2 Duo, which irked a few as they would have liked the faster Core i7 processors from Intel. However, the enterprise-level Mac Pro will come with Intel Nehalm, also known as the new Intel Xeon server-grade processors based on the i7.

There are even rumors that we could see an Apple-based netbook coming out soon, although it seems that Apple is vehemently denying such news. Anybody else who likes to see them do a netbook ala Eee PC?

Anyway, let’s check out iPhone’s latest ad.

What do you think? Does the cool ad make you wanna dump your current mobile phone (be it Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung or even LG) and fork out RM3k for an iPhone 3G?