Despite the overly-hyped tweeting refrigerator, my eyes obviously got caught on the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0. I’ve reviewed the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 before so i’ll concentrate on the features that excel in the Galaxy Note 8.0 instead of the overall functionallity.

The Perfect Size

The 8″ size is definitely the friendliest form factor. It’s lighter and thinner than the 10″ version (obviously). This is important because my experience with the 10″ version was rather awkward, it felt uncomfortable to hold with one hand and I can’t use the pen while holding it with both hands. Holding the 8″ with one hand and using the s-pen to take note, draw, or browsing feels natural.

The Galaxy Note 8.0

I didn’t like the size bezel taking up a lot space but the bezel stops my hand from reaching (and screwing) the touch screen so I guess it has it’s uses.

The Phone OS

Because this is the Galaxy Note line so the Galaxy Note 8.0 uses the same OS as the Galaxy Note 2.0. It’s good for previous Note users as they would feel perfectly at home, those with prior experience with the Android Tablet OS would need time to get used to the diffence as it doesn’t provide on screen Home and Back buttons but rather a hardware touch screen buttons for Menu, Home and Back. Everything works the same as the Galaxy Note 2.0, the dashboard, the apps, the multitasking, the note taking and even the phone function.

Multitasking like a boss

Yes! It can make phone calls! Though you would look like an idiot if you perform this stunt on public places but that’s for you to decide.

Looking classy!

The S-Pen

The S-Pen is bigger than the Note 2.0 but still remain uncomfortable to use. It’s too small to hold, there’s a button to select text and it’s hard to press. Maybe it needs getting used to. Maybe it’s a good idea if Samsung provide a bigger alternative Pen to use (sold separately is fine).

The Conclusion

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0? I think you should if you are thinking of buying the 10″ but feels that it’s heavy and uncomfortable, or you like the Galaxy Note 2.0 to draw and do creative stuffs on it but in need of a bigger canvas, or you lost your TV remote and you want to replace it with big giant expensive touch screen TV remote.

Update: just heard that the price would be $450 for the 16GB Wifi Version.

Disclaimer: this is a paid but honest reviews which reflects my personal opinion on the product. The review is based on my short experience playing with the device at the press conference launch.

You can go wild or you can make a perfect copy of yourself, that’s up to you. I’ve been playing a little bit more on what to do with my face and I think it would be cool to make it into a t-shirt (yeah i made tees so obviously that’s the first thing that comes to mind. I made this using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator but you can do the same with Corel Photo Trace or any other vector tracing software. So here’s a bit of a tutorial on how to make a cool shirt out of your face.

1. Make your face

Of course this is the first step, download the app and make your own face. I decided to go with the image below for my representation. Save it to your computer somehow like emailing it to yourself.

2. Convert the image into a vector

We need a higher resolution so why not just change into a vector image so you can resize it all you want. Open your Adobe illustrator and open the image using the Illustrator. Do the steps below:

Now after clicking the live trace, don’t worry about the image going black and white because it’s customizable. After the step above, follow the steps below.

After that you should get something like the image below. Now remove the things that you don’t want and you got the image in vector mode!

3. Send it to tees.co.id!

Now that you have the image in vector, you can put it in the template from by tees.co.id and send it to them accordingly. I added by twitter name for further customization and the end result is something like the image below.  I’ve ordered mine and I can’t wait to wear it in public! If you’re too lazy to do it yourself then you can just email order[et]tees.co.id and the staff will help you make it into a t-shirt.

Can’t decide what looks to make? Look it up here for inspiration.

Despite what you’re thinking right now, it’s a smart move to make the screen bigger to accomodate a 16:9 screen ratio, the previous one had 16:10 which makes it rather awkward to watch videos. It’s fun to watch movies with the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 because you won’t be seeing a black border at the top and bottom and I gotta say it again, the screen is bright and beautiful.

I only had a brief time to try this at the Indonesian launch (thank you Samsung Indonesia for inviting me) so there’s not much time to play with it. The 8MP camera doesn’t hold up in poor lit room and the press conference room was rather dark, I can’t test it on the outdoors so I have no idea how it will perform. What I love about the Camera is the best face feature where you can rewind the best moment when taking a picture and get their best expression. It works on multiple faces as I’ve seen the promotion guy demoing it when taking 2 faces at a time.

The stylus holds up nicely compared to high end drawing tablets that I’ve used before. Drawing with the stylus feels really great especially because the screen is that big. Creative people would definitely love to sketch ideas, draw directions or just play around with your friends photos by putting a mustache on them (corny I know ahaha).

I’m also loving the app that Samsung made for the Galaxy Note 2, I love that we can take notes when on the phone, which would be really useful at times. The multi-window is great at taking notes while browsing for sources. The idea sketch is great for taking visual notes. Of course since this runs on the latest Android so you can install all the apps you want to support you even further.

The big screen may put some people off, it’s not really comfortable when you’re using it to call so I would recommend a hands free accessories when calling. You would need to use 2 hands to reach all of the screen as it is quite huge, most of the time you’ll be holding the phone with one hand and the other using a stylus. It’s also quite pricey giving the normal price at around 7 million rupiah.

In short, Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is great for creative people that loves to draw, express things visually and watch movies and play games on the go. If you think you’re that person then go for it!

Disclaimer: this is a paid but honest reviews which reflects my personal opinion on the product. The review is based on my short experience playing with the device at the press conference launch.

Quitting is never easy, people told me that quitting is the easy way out and it’s a loser’s way of taking care of a problem. Well I disagree, quiting is hard, and it doesn’t solve the problems of those that you leave behind.

Nevertheless quitting is infact necesarry. Maybe it’s because of the countless disagreements, lack of appreciation, the long hours of meetings, the pointless bickering, the feeling of going nowhere.. But I guess it all comes down to the different personal vision about the business.

It may look like all the work you did in the past is such a waste but it’s better to waste the past that you can never get back rather than wasting the future that you can actually fix.

At this moment of time. I believe it is better to go separate ways and hope each other the best. So here I am hoping the best for Anang Pradipta which will be leaving his position as Partner and Chief Marketing Officer of Gantibaju.com.

Things will change, and things will change for the better.

Good luck and Na zdorovie!

Well anyway,  I’m still writing for dailysocial.net (since I’m under contract) and here’s last week’s writing about the grim reality of newspaper digital distribution

The push for digital in the US is so heavy that it forces traditional newspapers to either go digital or go bankrupt. But then again the push for digital posed more problems than solutions for the business owners as they’re still finding it hard to find a profitable business model. For every $1 gained in digital, $7 are lost in print revenue.

You can also read it in Bahasa Indonesia here. Thx for translating it guys

~cheers

What I do with every important email is turn it into a task on my favorite to do app or put it into evernote for archiving. The rest of the email that doesn’t get into the to do app is pretty much useless. It’s just there as an archive just in case I need to get back at it.

So what’s going to happen after you delete all your emails? A peace of mind. If an email is important enough and you actually miss it, it will come back eventually. What you lost will be the things you’ll never read or things you’ll never reply.

If you happen to use Gmail, it does a very good job at archiving all the emails you have deleted, so it’s not really gone. It’s being archived in Trash folder. So you can still be at peace even if you delete it. Thank God Google for 8GB of free space on Gmail!

For me having a 0 unread email is important for the peace of mind, it’s probably the same as having zero task on today’s to do app. It helps me focus on the important things today and forget about everything else. Tomorrow’s task is tomorrow’s problem, don’t bother thinking about it today unless you have to.

Of course I would only comment on things that I’m interested like creative business model, digital startup, and Indonesia-related scene and environment. It doesn’t have to be a startup idea, it can be some marketing strategy you would like to try, a launch plan, a new business model from existing business, etc.

This is basically from startup to startup, I’m a practitioner myself building startups from scratch. This is not me acting like I’m better than anyone, I just love helping people out and listening to great ideas. This is also a learning process for me.

Would gladly help if I can introduce you guys to some contacts I knew if I feel that it can help materialize and excel the idea even further.

If I think I’m not familiar enough with the field and your idea intrigue me then I would ask help from fellow businessman, investors and my other contacts. Don’t want to name drop so I’ll leave it as it is.

Just a reminder that I’m a very honest person, so if you can’t handle the truth then don’t bother emailing.

My only condition is that you would let me use your use case as a material in my blog so that everyone can join the discussion and learn from your ideas as well. I’ll be sure to leave out the top secret part of it of course.

So hit me with your best ideas!

I didn’t sell my Playbook though. Contrary to the iPad, the Playbook fits nicely for my needs. It has the books that I want to read, the movies that I haven’t watched and the games to keep me occupied. I’ve been using it for months and unlike all my other friends, I love my Playbook. You want to know why?

Perfect form factor

I thought 10″ is the best form factor for a tablet but after using 7″ for months, I changed my mind. 7″ is perfect on the go. It’s tiresome to carry a 10″ iPad on the go, especially if you need to bring your laptop at the same time.

Btw it’s really a bad idea to read on your iPad while sleeping. It fell on my face more than once T_T..

Judging on my experience, I dare say that on March 7th, Apple will release a 7″ iPad. It’s a perfect move to block the massive growth of the Kindle Fire and to introduce an entry-level tablet experience to price-sensitive consumers.

Great media player

I hate the fact that I can’t just copy my movies onto the iPad. Playbook accept any format I throw it so far, be it avi, mpg, even a full HD mkv file works flawlessly. I believe I speak for a lot of Indonesians that we’re are in the habit of collecting movies and music in our hard drive (which we copy from ORIGINAL and LEGIT sources of course *ehem*) so I’d rather copy those movies directly and watch it on the go.

I never bought a movie digitally because the whole movie and music store ecosystem of iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and also Amazon is unavailable in Indonesia.

I also bought the HDMI connector for $10 (CHEAP!) so I can watch it on the big screen whenever I want to. $20 cheaper than the iPad HDMI connector.

It’s just so easy to plug the Playbook with USB cable (or wireless transfer) and copy it like your usual thumbdrive. No uber-long syncing just to copy some files or doing time-consuming video conversion. No conversion means I can just copy it back again whenever I want to.

After the Playbook OS 2.0 update, it now supports A2DP bluetooth which is pretty awesome to use with my Jabra Halo or other bluetooth external speakers like Jawbone Jambox or Nokia 360 Play.

I tried using VLC for the iPad (which is not available anymore on iTunes) but my first generation iPad isn’t powerful enough to play HD movies. Bummer..

Best price-by-value

I got mine for free at Blackberry DevCon Asia, but the official price for the 16GB is $199. Super cheap! So cheap that I bought my sister one. I found one priced Rp. 2.499.000 at blibli.com that you can buy right away.

At the similar spec, the iPad is priced at $499, that’s more than 2 times more expensive. Samsung galaxy tab is about $399, even Acer Iconia is about $349.

Nothing came close with that price range, except for Kindle Fire of course. But again, it’s not available in Indonesia and the whole Amazon ecosystem is useless here.

On a personal note, I hate the Android platform (haven’t tried the ICS 4.0 though) so the thought of buying a more expensive Android tablet is beyond me.

I dare you to find any other tablet with this specs and built that is better than the Playbook. I sure as hell can’t find it.

Good for e-Reading

Super sharp resolution means better reading experience. I use Kobo mostly because I already bought a couple of books in there. Kobo also has a lot of free books which I downloaded like crazy. Kobo is also multiplatform so you can use it on iOS, Android, Playbook, even Mac and Windows.

Kobo supports paypal so it’s a good choice if you don’t have/use credit card. I don’t have a credit card so this is a big deal for me.

Even if you don’t use Kobo, you can use Adobe Reader. It works as advertised and it’s free.

Document editing on the go

Playbook comes with DocsToGo, great for editing Office files on the go. It would be cooler if it supports Google Docs syncing like on the iPad.

Well to be frank, the DocsToGo App is not better than the same app on iPad. It’s pretty much barebone in the Playbook but it works.

I don’t use the Office feature very often but sometimes I need to review some documents and this feature comes in handy.

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, I still hate Blackberry phones and I still think RIM is screwed. But my hate for Blackberry phones doesn’t affect my frequent use of Playbook.

I’m also not implying that the Playbook is better than the iPad or any other tablet. But it’s the one best suited for me for the condition that I’ve mentioned above.

Playbook also have it’s weakness. The usual rant is that the app is not that much compared to the iOS library and there’s no 3G model and RIM is going bankrupt, etc. My complains is that the Playbook sucks at Map App, the Message, Calendar and Contact app do not support Portrait mode and.. well that’s just it for now.

Well I have all the app I need for now, I don’t need another phone bill every month so WiFi works for me. It fits into my needs and I won’t complain on the things that I don’t really need.

I don’t want to argue about the continuity of the platform, the developer not building apps on it or whatever. It’s mostly certain that I’ll exchange my Playbook for a better device in about a year or two anyway. So why would I care about the features I need to use in the future? NOW (at least this year) is the only time I care when investing on a device.

In conclusion, it’s an awesome entertainment app if you can get the movies, music yourself (which most Indonesian can). It’s great for reading books and casual playing (Angry Birds, Cut the rope, etc) and the best of all: It’s cheap. I’m a sucker for cheap and free stuffs.

Then it hit me, is $1.78 per hour cheap? The workers work 12 hours a day, let’s assume that they work 5 days a week. That would make about $1.78 x 12 hours x 20 days equals $427.2. That’s bigger than my first salary at an IT company in 2004! Not to mention it’s still a starter salary for most small companies in 2011.

Read more here

Here’s the 3 main reason why you should just leave your email alone and get back to work

1. It’s a major distraction

Unless your main job is replying emails, checking emails or getting email notification too often is a major distraction. Every single time you check your email, you literally stop working.

So step 1: when working, put all notification to silent.

2. Email doesn’t need immediacy

The thing that I love about email is that it is asynchronous, it doesn’t need both party to be available at the same time. In essence, it doesn’t need immediacy. You have the freedom to reply it whenever you want, so use it wisely. Besides, If it’s important then they’ll use a more disruptive method: Phone calls.

I usually limit checking my emails 3 times a day at max. Which is in the morning when I start working, after lunch and at the end of the day to check if I miss anything. Now I’m not the one to receive massive amount of emails everyday, maybe just about 10-20 important emails per day so it works.

Step 2: Limit your email checking.

3. It’s mostly spam anyway

I wish there’s a technology to detect which emails are important to me and which are not. Gmail actually did a decent job with priority inbox but after using it for about 3 months, I periodically miss a couple of important emails. I guess the algorithm isn’t perfect so I switch back to classic.

Most of our emails are spam, junk, mailing list and daily deals subscription anyway, no reason to jump right away to look.

Step 3: Relax, it’s probably spam

Conclusion

So to recap things, here’s the steps:

1. Put all notifications to silent
2. Limit your email checking to 3 times per day max
3. Relax and don’t over-think it, it’s probably spam anyway.

If you’re applying these then let me know how it works in the comment sections. Would love to hear your feedback.