First Hand Touch on the new iPhone5

You better believe the title. Being such a geek, even if I am not agreeable to a company's business ways or the way they make their device, I still love to get my hands on new things. Yesterday was any normal working day in the office and suddenly my colleague started unwrapping something in his hands. I was looking at it and the first thing that hit man was OMG that is an iPhone 5. Don't believe me check this out....

That is the first look of a genuine iPhone 5 from the Apple company itself. First thing you will really notice about this phone is how light it is. Yea a lot of people have commented about it, however until you really feel it with your hands, you will never really notice how light it is. It is light but it still feels like a very well built device. It is not something like a Galaxy SII which is plastic and light and generally feels not that sturdy. The phone 5 was built to look good and even the edge of the glass has a very nice slanted shape to it.

Overall the phone is much thinner then the iPhone4. Amy was in the office and we did some comparison but forgot to snap some pictures. The lightning connector in my mind was long overdue and Apple should have done what other phone manufacturers did from the start which is to start with the smallest connector they could go with. If you look at the picture of the bottom of the phone with the lightning connector and the 3.5mm jack you can see what I mean by the glass has a slanted shape. Look at the edge of the glass where it meets the metal.

The rear of the phone is the standard iPhone look at feels very nice. It doesn't feel like the phone will slip out of your hand anytime soon. Much has been talked about the size of the screen and once playing with the iPhone5 I do believe in what Apple says. The width of the screen still allow for me to thumb the screen from left to the right. However the extra height and my short fingers do not allow me to go all the way to the top of the screen. 

The new notification of iOS6 is very much like that if Android and it looks very nice. However what is still disappointing is Apple has not seen the need to have "shortcut" buttons to say turn on/off data, turn on/off Wifi etc. It has been a standard on HTC Sense for a while and it has been standard in the Android platform since Ice Cream Sandwich. It took me close to 5 mins to menu dive to look to turn off the Data and after 10 min I gave up looking on up to turn off the GPS. This one thing that irritates me about the iOS where people say it is so easy to use but just to perform simple functions I need a manual.

The only so call new application that ios6 has brought along is the passbook which allows you to store boarding passes and tickets and coupons in a single app. I have nothing to test it with and I seriously doubt it will work any where other then in the US anyway. By the time it comes to Malaysia we would be saying hello to iPhone10.

Now I have no idea why Apple has decided to go with a nano sim when so far I would say the microsim is good enough. I am sure one day the telco operators would get fed up of Apple keep doing this thing because now telco operators have to stock 3 types of sims which to me is kinda stupid. 

Celcom doesn't support nano sim yet and my colleague almost went to Maxis. However I told him get the microsim from Celcom and lets see if we can do something about it. Took me about 15 minutes to cut the sim down to the right size and to my surprise it fits perfectly.

So we have a fully working iPhone on the Celcom network and I am sure my colleague's daughter is gonna be a very happy camper tonight as she is probably one of the few people in Malaysia to have an iPhone5. Now with all the pictures all done lets look at how the device performs.

I have been reading alot of news about the new A6 processor and it seems that it was design by hand instead of by a computer. This apparently means that it would perform much faster but it takes a longer time to design. From the start up time here it looks pretty dem fast. Again sorry no comparison can be made since we do not have any iPhone users in the office. I would say even with a 1Ghz dual core processor in the iPhone it seems really fast and zippy.

Much has been talking about the new map App from Apple and from my limited testing it is OK but it will take some getting use to. I like the hybrid map thing but it would be very confusing to use when you are driving and trying to navigate. I think it is a bit of a gimmick but hey those are the things that sells nowadays. Nothing much else to add about the map because there is very limited things I can do about it without going out in a drive with it.

Now comes to performance. Oh yea believe it the A6 processor is fast and I think in most circumstance it will hold its own to the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the HTC One X. I have read that in most benchmarks iPhone5 has beaten both the top of the line Android phones but I have yet to see one actual performance comparison such as when playing games and all that. I think those are more important and most manufactures nowadays are aware of the benchmark programs out there and tailor their software to score high but may not give real world performance.

What surprised me is the web browsing performance of the iPhone5. Apple have been touting their Ultra Wireless and how you can browse faster. Well in the video above you can see that is not the case. It was so slow that I could actually bring in my 2 year old HTC Desire in to the picture after maybe 30 seconds of allow the iPhone5 to load and my phone still outperformed it.

Many of you might say ah maybe it is on a different network blah blah blah. However Apple on their website side WiFi is faster too. So here you go a side by side comparison....

I used a neutral website which both phones have not gone to before so it is not cached. Yes it is the website of my company and many Apple people might be cursing me because they know I would check my company website often. However I just flashed a new Jelly Bean Rom into my phone which means it is completely wiped cleaned and it has never been to my company website before. In the final 20 seconds of the video it shows that both phones are running on WiFi and both on the same network and again the iPhone5 performed significantly slower then my HTC Desire. It even loaded it completely but the iPhone 5 never loaded it completely.

Last but not least is of course a comparison of the 8MP camera on the back....

I didn't have any other phone to compare it against so my poor HTC Desire was used and you can see the vast difference in quality. I purposely left the size as it is to see the difference between a 5MP and 8MP picture size. You can see the iPhone5 has superior colors and sharpness compared to the HTC Desire. I think in terms of camera the iPhone5 is pretty good but not sure how it compares to the Galaxy SIII and the HTC One X.

One thing I have to add is that it took me over 30 minutes to get 2 pictures out of the iPhone5 and it took me 10 minutes to transfer 17 photos from my phone and close to 300mb worth of videos from my other colleague's phone. I still do not understand why won't Apple allow people to transfer photos via bluetooth? It is something that I have taken using my own device and I am transferring it out to my own laptop as well. In the Android system, just turn on bluetooth or plug in a USB cable and you can transfer the photos out. However for the iPhone you need to send it via email and the stupid thing is you can only attach one photo per email or use iTunes. Come on Apple, you are the richest company in the world. You tout you devices to be the easiest to use among all the competitors. Why the heck is it so hard to transfer something that I own out of my own device?

I was told later that I could just plug in the cable and it would appear like a disk drive on my laptop. However I do not have the lightning connector and I will go and try it out with Amy's phone tonight.

I hope you all enjoyed reading this as much as I have playing with the new iPhone5. Hope you gets your soon.

Final meal of the big Three O

Continuing with breakfast and lunch, of course has to be dinner. I know most chinese cultures have a certain dish that your parents will cook for your birthday. Things like red egg and tong yuen comes into mind. In the Fuchow cultures, we usually have Red Wine Mee Suah for our birthdays. The noodles is symbolic for long life, the red of the soup is of course good for all chinese cultures and the egg is to signify health and for many children. 

Ok I just made that up but I think it is quite close to what your elders would most likely tell you. Anyway usually my mum will be the one cooking the mee suah for me but this time there was a bit of a twist. This time around I will be cooking it for myself and Amy. What you need to cook mee suah? Well the most important thing is of course the soup.

The most precious ingredient in the soup is the black bottle at the back. That is the Red Rice wine which is fermented from rice. My grandma used to make it and my mum learnt it and my mum thought it to me. That bottle was made by my mum because I had a conference call on the day she was suppose to teach me and by the time I got off the call it was all done. 

So how do you cook the famous Fuchow Red Wine mee suah? Well first is to heat up some sesame oil...

Next is to lightly fry some ginger slices until fragrant....

Once the smell of the ginger and sesame oil is bothering the neighbour, you throw in the chicken and fry until it is a bit brown to seal in the flavours (che wah like real chef only)...

Once the chicken is say about 50% cooked, pour enough water to serve the amount of people that is eating and bring the whole thing to a boil....

Once it starts boiling. the most important ingredients goes into the soup which is the red wine and it gets to boil for a while until the chicken is nicely cooked....

Once it is done, skim the layer of chicken oil from the top of the soup and keep it away for later.

For the noodles it is quite easy, first boil the noodles until it is slightly translucent and remove it from the water and run the noodles under cold water to clean the left over starch from the noodles. Put the noodles into the bowl with the chicken oil and mix. It is like pasta but the chinese version....

Once that is all done, it is time to scoop the soup and eat....

It was not too bad for my second try at cooking this noodles I think. So with the last meal of the night, I bid farewell to being 29 and welcome 30 years of life.

Lunch for the fabulous Three O

Now with breakfast which is the most important meal of the day gone, we concentrated on cooking lunch. Quite a few months back, we made the decision to buy a standard convection oven instead of a microwave oven or one of those dual feature ones. I also kinda got poisoned by my mum into buy a really big and at least a good quality one. It cost us a cool RM 899 and we have been sort of making use of it once in a while.

The oven comes with a rotisserie function and we decided to put it to good use by grilling and entire chicken. So the day before we bought a whole chicken from the market and seasoned it with Sage, Thyme, Rosemary, Salt, Pepper and Olive oil. We decided to stuff the chicken with what we can find in our kitchen and ended up with an apple, half a brown onion, the left over stalks from the herbs and some garlic.

We forgot about the lemon because the lemon was at my parent's place. However they came over for dinner the night before and brought the lemon. So I sliced half the lemon and put on top of the chicken and squeezed the juice from the other half all over the chicken....

Before the roasting can begin, I had to stick the chicken through and through using the rotisserie spit and this was the first time I did it. I thought it would be really hard since the chicken was so fully stuff with apples and onions but it went through really easily.

Next was to set the oven to 235 degree Celsius and put the chicken in for a nice sun bathing under the heating elements.

In total the chicken would be spinning around and sun bathing for 1 hour 45 minutes. At the 1 hour mark, I basted the chicken to ensure that the skin won't get burnt and also I put in some carrots lightly seasoned with salt, pepper and olive oil.

After another 15 minutes of cooking, it was the finishing touches to the dish and I put in some nice fresh brown mushrooms also lightly season with salt, pepper and a dash of olive oil.

The chicken gets to spin for another 30 minutes and after that....

The chicken came out nice and golden brown and it smelt oh so good. The carrots were nice, soft and cooked and the mushrooms were just soaking in the delicious flavors at the bottom of the tray. The most excruciating thing about this entire experience is that once the chicken comes out of the oven, it needs to sit for 15 minutes before we can eat it.

It was the worst things to have to do since it smelt so good and by the time it was done, it was close to 2pm already. After the 15 minutes of resting we could finally cut into the chicken and to my relieve it was cook all the way even at the thickest part of the bird.

What the verdict you might ask? Well for the first time we grilled and entire chicken I think it was quite a success. It tasted almost like Dave's Deli roasted chicken. It was succulent and the herbs have done their thing throughout the night. The skin was also very crispy which is a surprise. I think if we had the lemon earlier it would have tasted even better. The stuff apples and onions also did their job and infused the flavors into the chicken and they we nice and soft to eat. The remaining stalks of the herbs also gave the apple, onion and the inside of the chicken a bit of taste.

To think that it was so easy to do, I think we will be making this dish more often in the future and actually we did cook it one more time for my family. I am drooling just looking at the pictures now. I think just this roasting of chickens made the oven worth all the money.

It is not over yet to this crazy cooking and eating birthday. One more meal to go and it is gonna be a cracker.

The fabulous Three O

A lot of people make a fuss about turning 30. However on my big 30 day, it was a holiday and what did I decide to do? I felt the need to cook so the day before the 21st of August 2012, I plan to cook 3 meals for myself and my lovely wife on my birthday. For the first and most important meal (breakfast) I cooked Caramelised Malaysian French Toast. It is a recipe I took from Ben's restaurant in KLCC.

It is quite simple and the ingredients are....

The thing that I never use in my french toast is the vanilla flavor. So the first thing to do is to break the egg and put in some milk and vanilla essence.

Next is to mix all the ingredients together nicely before soaking some bread in the mixture....

By the way we were supposed to use Bengali bread which is the ones they use to do roti bakar. The day before we actually went to all the places in Kota Kemuning looking for Bengali bread and didn't find any. We did find it at Max Value and we were so happy, but in the end the bread was already expired by one day. So we ended up with having the new Gardenia Bran & Wheatgerm bread which taste just as good. 

Once both side of the bread has been covered evenly, I heated some butter on a pan and....

I cook them till they are nice and golden brown and remove them from the pan...

Usually that is about it for my french toast and I either put butter or honey on it. However the Ben's recipe was to melt some butter and  put some brown sugar and a bit of water to make a syrup. Reduce the syrup and serve on top of the french toast...

I have to say that the vanilla essence and the  syrup did make quite a lot of difference. However since we strive to be healthy we got the bran & wheatgerm bread. I think that didn't taste so good. I think it would be much better with the Bengali bread. It was a good first try and I think it can be improved.

Stay tuned for the next meal which is lunch.

6th Anniversary

Time moves extremely fast and time also heals almost everything. 6 years ago exactly on 13th August 2006, my life changed for ever. I think I posted on my MSN status the weeks before the 13th August 2006 was that I was in bliss and just before the 13th I also posted saying that I had to do something real important soon. In the end what happened was.......

What I did was to ask my then good friend to take a chance with on me and to be my partner. Fast forward 5 years after that and this happened....

Even after getting married, I think we need to keep the fire burning and we decided to celebrate our 6 years getting together anniversary at the last minute. I think only at 4pm we decided to head out for dinner and we decided to go to some place nice and we decided on....

This place is totally awesome not only for the food but also for the atmosphere. Check out how nice this place is.....

We were at ABC before but we only had drinks and cakes and since we were late and didn't have a booking we were put up in this really dark area of the restaurant. We decided to give this place another go since the food look really good and smelt good.

We decided to order an appetizer, a salad and also a main. For the appetizer we decided to go for something really out there and we ordered...

Grilled "bacon" wrapped snails with coco beans & parsley garlic sauce wrapped in turkey bacon. This was a seriously good dish. The most surprising thing about this dish is the turkey bacon actually tasted like pork bacon. It was nicely salted and it had enough of fats to taste like real pork bacon. The snails didn't have much taste to it but the parsley garlic sauce made up for it and the parsley garlic sauce really had a very nice earthly taste to the dish.

For the salad again we tried something that we don't usually have and we ordered the Chicken Fajita Salad which had grilled chicken breast, water chestnut and a honey mustard dressing. This is a seriously good salad I can tell you. The chicken breast was thinly slices and grilled till crispy. So it tasted almost like crackers. The water chestnuts was very neutral but it was very refreshing, However the 2 ingredients that made this salad a winner is the honey mustard dressing and the pomegranate seeds. The pomegranate seeds was just so refreshing and when you eat it with the honey mustard dressing you achieve very close to umami. The pomegranate was sour and slightly sweet, the honey was of course sweet and the mustard was a bit bitter and spicy. Not to be forgotten there is also some avocado which provides and added texture to the salad. This was a total winner for me and to me it was the best dish of the night.

The mains was Smoke Duck Breast Pasta  which is a simple spaghetti carbonara with smoked duck breast. This was again a nice dish. I am of course a bit bias since I love spaghetti carbonara but this was very nice and creamy. I always say that a spaghetti carbonara can only be complete with some real pork bacon but again complements to the chef for being able to mimic the taste of real pork bacon with turkey bacon. I totally love this pasta but unfortunately the salad still took the cake and was the winner for me.

We totally enjoyed our dinner except for the family sitting on the table beside us. The kids were I guessed schooled in the US and the oldest kid totally had no respect for anyone. I felt like going over to the table and smacking his face. When they left I was like "phew good riddance". After dinner we had to have their famous.....

Cempedak pandan cake. We had this the last time we were here and it was totally good. The cempedak has been mixed into the cream and just layered on some pandan cake and that is it. To add a bit of texture they put some crushed pistachio nuts on the side and no cake is complete without some....

It was a perfect dinner to cap off 6 years of our relationship. It is not easy to keep anything for 6 years especially a relationship. I am very lucky to have Amy as first my friend, then my best friend, then my partner and now my partner for life. I could not ask for anything better. Happy 6 years Anniversary (it is a bit late since been a bit busy) Amy Koh many more to come.