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P1 Streamlines 4G Packages, Eliminates Business Unlimited Usage

Ah Yen — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:58:53 +0000

Celebrate a Stronger, Wider and Faster New Year with P1 4G. 50% Off Your 2nd & 3rd Bill and a FREE 2X SPEED UPGRADE For Pro. Yup that’s what the new promotional banner says. There’s nothing new about the first part with the 50% off the 2nd and 3rd bill but the 2X speed upgrade – now that’s something worth looking into. P1 promises an upgrade to 4.8Mbps from 2.4Mbps for their Pro plan. So what about the Office Premium Package? What Office package? There no longer is an Office package!

P1 4G (formerly known as P1 W1MAX) decided to start off 2011 by streamlining their packages. Instead of 5 different packages (3 for home, 2 for business) there will now be only 3 which cater for both home and business users.

The P1 Pro Package now comes with a limit of 30GB but the price has been slashed from RM199 to RM139. That’s terrific news! Coupled with the extra bandwidth that’s like hitting the jackpot! Home users rejoice!

Too bad we can’t celebrate for the business users. The absence of a business package means that the maximum subscription is P1 Pro at 30GB. Anything more than 30GB of usage and your line will be throttled. You and I know how bad throttling can be. You will be placed on the low priority list where multiple users fight for bandwidth. That places you on the same level with those who purchase the P1 Lite and P1 Plus subscribers. Plus we can’t be sure if there is a priority list for that.

Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia on bandwidth throttling.

When a server using bandwidth throttling reaches the specified limit, it will offload new requests and not respond to them. Sometimes they may be added to a queue to be processed once the bandwidth use reaches an acceptable level, but at peak times the request rate can even exceed the capacities of such queues and requests have to be thrown away.

There could be various reasons why P1 is cutting off the unlimited business package.

There were too few subscribers for the business package in 2010
There were too many business package users abusing the unlimited usage
To meet the current demand but maintain the current hardware capacity

Whatever the reason, I am quite sure that P1 has a good one to back up their decision. I just hope they are doing the right thing to compete with their biggest competition – YES 4G by YTL Group!

HTC EVO 4G: Successor of the HTC MAX 4G?

Ah Yen — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 07:12:03 +0000

Back in 2008, HTC announced a model which supports GSM and WiMAX called the HTC MAX 4G. Yes the HTC EVO 4G was not the first 4G phone to hit the market. At that time 4G was still new and the coverage was minimal so this baby was launched in Russia instead. It is pretty obvious that this was where the HTC EVO 4G started off – crude and effective just like the Russian mob (just kidding).

Now lets make a comparison on the specifications with the help of GSMArena.

Click on the image for the full size

As you can see there are some notable differences between the two giants. The one year gap gave the HTC Evo 4G some noticeable upgrades. The only downgrade was the battery life dropped from 7 hrs to 5 hours which was probably due to the large screen size.

Screen (3.8″ resistive to 4.3″ capacitive)
OS (WinMo 6.1 Touch FLO 3D to Android 2.1 HTC Sense UI)
Memory (288MB RAM, 256 ROM to 512MB RAM, 1GB ROM)
USB (miniUSB to microUSB)
Camera (3.15MP to 8MP with dual-led flash)

So can we say that the HTC Evo 4G was really an upgrade from the HTC Max 4G? Well the technical specs and the upgraded housing from the HTC Diamond look seems to say so. I’m quite sure it is.

What say you?

More reviews on the HTC Max 4G: Engadget, GSMArena

Apple iPad Price in Malaysia: Estimate Accuracy

Ah Yen — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 06:52:54 +0000

It’s been a while since my last post as I’ve been busy working on the eatgod report. The sub-domain was facing some issues so while waiting for Exabytes to solve the issue, I thought I’d whip up something on the ole blog. Since the Apple iPad was FINALLY launched in Malaysia even though the iPad2 is about to be announced in January, lets take a look at how accurate were my price estimates.

Here’s the price I posted in one of my older articles on the iPad.

Wifi only:
• $499: 16GB (estimated at minimum RM3318?)
• $599: 32GB (estimated at minimum RM3983?)
• $699: 64GB (estimated at minimum RM4648?)

Wifi + 3G:
• $629: 16GB ( estimated at minimum RM4183?)
• $729: 32GB (estimated at minimum RM4848?)
• $829: 64GB (estimated at minimum RM5513?)

And here’s the official price from the Apple Store Malaysia

Wifi only:
• 16GB RM1549
• 32GB RM1849
• 64GB RM2149

Wifi + 3G:
• 16GB RM1999
• 32GB RM2299
• 64GB RM2599

Haha what a long shot. I was off by at least 100%. The prices are closer to an actual currency conversion. Then again there are so many factors to consider like the iPad2 being launched in Feb…

Better luck next time I guess :)