My New iPhone 3GS. Just wow.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is here. My new Black 32GB iPhone 3GS is finally here. All the way from Shenzhen, China, making its way through Anchorage, Memphis and finally in my hands, this lil’ beauty was well worth the wait.

The S, is it for Speed? is it for Superb? Is it for Simply Fantastic? All of the above I say. I am just simply thrilled by its speed in everything – may it be browsing, apps, search, GPS location, maps.. I could go on forever.

A more in-depth review has to follow of course. But for now, I will go revel in the joys of the phone. Loving it!

TomTom coming to the iPhone 3.0.

Yet another reason to upgrade the Firmware and get on the 3G Bandwagon.

iPhone OS 3.0 – almost perfect

I know it is early, and the official release isn’t till the 17th of this month, but I couldn’t help looking around at the NZB world for the OS 3.0. To my delight, I found it on the first query for my phone. Downloaded and installed, I am just delighted with the new OS.

First and foremost – SEARCH! Universal Spotlight like search on the iPhone. It will search through email, calendar, contacts and what not!

Secondly, NOTES SYNC! Oh my dear goodness how I have waited for the two-way sync betwitxt my iPhone and Mail Notes. It seemed to be a no-brainer – it should’ve been there when the original iPhone was released, but it took Apple until now to get it working. What a time saver. No need for Evernote or any other semi-functional apps now.

Next up – VOICE NOTES, record short snippets – though I don’t see any use for those personally. Oh and yes, I do love the new and improved Google Maps App! The triangulation based on Cell phone signal has improved considerably. It can now pinpoint one’s location very accurately, even on a weak signal.

There are a number of other changes under the hood, most important of those – push services. However I have not seen apps make use of this yet. More to come as I test.

Back from Disney

After a week of intense fun and excitement at the Walt Disney World in FL, we are back home, and are certainly feeling the Disney Withdrawal Syndrome. A skeptic to begin with, I ventured forth a week back, not knowing what to expect. Conscious of the Disney brand and the fact that we were being subjected to Disney marketing etc, I was wary of becoming a “tool” in the ploy.

DXVA, CoreAVC – x.264 & MKV playback in Windows 7 RC

With the advent of the latest and greatest of Microsoft’s OSs – Windows 7 – come a slew of issues with the reliable playback of HD videos that we have lying around in our collections. According to specs, Windows 7 RC1 shipped with an x.264 decoder built in. However this is far from a panacea for those of us with older hardware.

I use a custom HTPC for all my playback needs with my Full HD (1080p) LCD TV. The HTPC rig, built back in 2007, does not have the latest and greatest processor, but runs Windows 7 RC1 with aplomb. I did upgrade the graphics card recently to an OC’d NVIDIA 9800GT.

With Windows Media Player 12, I have had no issues whatsoever with 720p playback. Though the Activity Monitor (or its Windows equivalent) showed a spike in CPU usage while playback, it was low enough to be ignored. However when I threw a 1080p video at the system, it would choke. I briefly considered upgrading the CPU, but thankfully decided to do some digging around.

I narrowed the culprit down to the laggy x.264 decoder included with Windows 7. The answer was simple. Update to ffdshow or CoreAVC. I chose the latter after reading that CoreAVC is better in terms of CPU usage. However, on installing the latest version (1.9.5), I for the life of me, could not get CoreAVC to load with Windows Media Player 12. Forums advised registry hacks and key deletion that seemed to work for some, but not for yours truly. I had to find another solution.

A bit of digging later, I found the superb world of DXVA! DXVA or DirectX Video Acceleration uses the hardware of the graphics card for video acceleration. It is featured natively in Media Player Classic – Home Cinema. It requires a powerful Graphics card which I am happy to say I own – the NVIDIA 9800GT. To enable DXVA in Vista or Windows 7, just select EVR Custom mode in MPC-HC options. The result? CPU usage has dipped to 3-4% for 1080p videos, compared to nearly 60-70% usage previously. I am so impressed and hooked.