Cui – On My Way

As reported(Chinese),  people can watch the coming 2010 CCTV Spring Festival Gala on their iPhone by CNTV’s CCTV Mobile iPhone application, which I’ve talked before.  Screen shot above is captured at the time of writing.

Though the report did mentioned that Apple has agreed to give this application a big recommendation on its homepage(no clue on exactly which one, apple.com? apple.com.cn? AppStore or somewhere else?), at least until now I haven’t seen it on neither of them.

Anyway, if you are not be able to watch this traditional party show via TV or PC, perhaps you can give this application[iTunes Store] a try, though personally I’ve been spending less and less time on the gala year by year.

iPad is a browser?
Yeah, you said it. Actually it’s the best internet browser in this planet ever. Pinch, Zoom In & Out, Speed, yep, in all these respects. Safari works great, which has been proved in the iPhone. Now it comes to iPad. So it would be very easy for you iPhone owners to catch up here.

iPad is an ebook reader?
Absolutely. Apple even created a new application named iBook for this purpose. With iBook, you can get the ebook with one click, just like you do applications by AppStore, music by iTunes. Furthermore, the reading experience is ‘gorgeous’ and ‘phenomenal‘, esp. the part of paging up and down. You can even stick to the same page by paging up a little bit, exactly the same when you do a real reading in the printed book(video here). Not mentioned that your book are rendered on a shiny 9.7 inch wide-screen in the resolution of 1024-by-768-pixel at 132 pixels per inch(ppi).

iPad is a gaming device?
You bet. Did i mention iPad has an 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip CPU? Plus the whole multi-touch screen. You already played couple of games in the iPhone/iTouch, right? Very cool, isn’t it? Now with the new hardware, you can imagine how you will feel the new iPad games are coming.

iPad is an iPod, an photo organizer, an email client, an navigator?
True, to all of them. Larger screen, better viewing experience, faster and more powerful than iPhone. However, big size reduces its portability. You cannot put iPad into your pocket as you do to iPod. Actually we cannot expect one single device to do all things and meet all needs. That’s not fair, isn’t?

iPad is an phone?
No, at least officially no any phone functions until now, though iPad does have a model of  Wifi+3G. So iPad can’t take the place of your iPhone, either.

Do I need an iPad?
It depends. If you spend a lot of time on reading, including browsing the web and reading an ebook, or on gaming, and are willing to be an early adopter of Apple’s cool gadget, personally I think iPad is worth of a try.

Well, that’s my answer to the question of what iPad is. What’s yours, my friend? Share with me in the comments, please.

BTW, 2010 is the year of Tiger. sorry, Woods, don mean you here.

Enjoy, my dear friends and readers.

P.S.

1.300k iphone has been sold until Dec.27, Dec by China Unicom(Chinese). And China Unicom’s gonna present a big marketing campaign in eight big cities from Jan.1 to 3 of 2010(Chinese,again. sorry).

2.I’m expecting the Wonder of Apple’s Tablet as well on Jan.6, how about you?

[iTunes Store]

CCTV, the biggest video content owner of China and the state-owned tv station, has released its official free application for iPhone platform: CCTV National Mobile TV.

Built upon CCTV’s news, sports, entertainment, music, animation and other content, this product provides you with a brand-new experience of watching TV programs from China Central Television (CCTV).

凭借着CCTV旗下新闻、体育、娱乐、影视、音乐、动漫等强大的资源优势，该产品为您提供了内容丰富的各类精彩节目。CCTV手机电视会对国内外各类热点 事件，各类重大体育赛事，各类综艺节目进行详细的播报。您可以随心随意选择，随时随地收看CCTV众多拥有独家版权的精品节目。

I’ve tried it yesterday. My first try is in the morning and it’s a failture ‘coz all the videos cannot be played at all. However later in the evening when I tried again, the video played very smoothly. All that I can say is it’s not as stable as expected.

So far all the content are not live, but VoD. However, the news part are updated so frequently, which makes it almost ‘live’(almost as soon as it’s played on TV).

The videos are from 32 well-known columns covering 8 channels(CCTV 1~5,CCTV-7,CCTV-12 and CCTV-News) . Besides, there are also 9 topic-centered videos including Shanghai EXPO and 11th National Sports etc. As to the Top chart, it’s just another view of the 32 columns.

It’s not as good as expected, but better than nothing.

Theme has been changed back to whiteasmilk.

I may back to work couple of days later.

Besides, Taotao’s gallery has been added more photos, of which the following one is my favorite

One more thing, in order to eliminate spam, the gallery has been re-set to only allow registers to comment. Thanks for understandings.

I’ve been using whiteasmilk theme on this blog for a long time. I myself do love those kinda simple but classical themes,you know, text-centered, very few colors, eye-friendly fonts etc, just like whiteasmilk.

However, in order to make this blog a little bit ‘holiday’ with the coming long National Day Holidays, I decide to get a new theme for celebration.

That’s why you see Redtopia, my final choice after hours of googling and testing.

The big/small roses are for the country’s 60 birthday. The main red-only color seems just in time for my celebration purpose. So that’s it.

Hope you enjoy it as i do.

Title says all.

Source from the iCosta official blog(Chinese) here, which says the update fixed the bug of the iCosta’s easy crash when not-enough system memory left.

I myself did see a few crashes by icosta before, esp. in the SMS.app when I wanna reply and ready to type in the input box. That kinda crash really drove me crazy.

Hopefully it wouldn’t happen any more.

Update(Sep.17,2009): title modified based on the author says 1.2.8 also works on the latest 3.1 too.

Update(Sep.22,2009): the install source is http://iphone.freecoder.org/apt, fyi.

Update(Sep.28,2009): iCosta 1.2.8 works well on the latest iPhone firmware 3.1.

Just happened to get this new theme from the admin page by the part of plugins->most popular. After a little bit playground I think it deserves a new post to recommend to my readers.

Official website is here. And the latest version is 1.9.2.2(Thanks to WP for its very charming feature of installing/upgrading the plugin in the admin page directly. Very nice.)

Below is what this site looks like in the iPhone’s safari browser.

I don have other mobile devices like gPhone or Blackberry, so don know how it performs in that devices. It does look quite nice at least in the iphone.

Besides, it loads fast and the user experience of the whole ajax-powered interface does make me very satisfied. Not mention its very nice feature of allowing the reader to switch between the regular lookings and wptouch version. Really cool, isn’t it?

I should say, with wptouch, time to say goodbye to my long-used iwphone plugin.

I’ve been waiting for it for a long time, really. I love it so.The reason? I’ve talked it before, not mention so many new features has been added in this release.

To quote a few, brand new UI design(i think it cooler), full screen browsing, support direct installation from .deb,.pxl,.ipa, support music(.3gp,.mp3) and movie(.mov,.mp4)) download and playback, last session restore…

I myself still haven’t enough time to digg deeper into it yet. To get more, you better try it out by yourself. Just give it some patience ‘coz it’s still in beta and buggy, from from as stable and user-friendly as Safari.

However, it IS worth of a try.

Cydia/Icy source is: http://wap.ucweb.com/iphone/cydia.

Compatible Firmwares: 2.0 | 2.0.1 | 2.0.2 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.2.1 | 3.0 | 3.0.1

Here’s the new home and a downloaded mp3 ready to play.

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Update(Sep.28,2009): UCWEB 6.7 beta rocks on iPhone firmware 3.1!

It’s my first time to see this: sad iphone. Just wonder why choose the  letter of ‘F’ and ‘3′ to mean sad.

Anyway, you’ll see this when SpringBoard crashes which leads to the phone entering safe mode. Below is the message box as it happens.

BTW, i’m on 3.0 right now.