As an iPhone 4S user I’m looking for something new and yes I am a fan of Samsungs, Don’t get me wrong, my iPhone has done a stella job, but it’s coming to the end of it’s days so I’m just beginning to look what’s out there. Before I learned that the Galaxy S4 was coming out I did plan to buy the Note 2, but the word is that the new Galaxy S4 will have a 4.99 screen,  That in it’s self begs a question, just how big is this new Galaxy 4 going to be, and I was always under the impression that a large chunk of people did not like the size of the Note range and tended to go with the Galaxy S3, I do hope Samsung have considered this as they bloody well should do hehehe.

Now we all know Samsungs are really attractive to look at, and there generally lighter, I must admit it is an appealing thought to loose that metal brick I have been carrying round for the past two years!!! But is the build quality there with these lighter phones, the only thing I’m not concerned about is changing operating systems, in fact I’m quite bored with apple now, and need something new.

Unfortunately there is one other factor for me to consider before I invest my hard earned money, the new Blackberry Z10, you have to admit the BB 10 OS is really impressive, and visually the phone is attractive, And I do believe the build quality of blackberry’s have always been decent, The phone itself definitely has the specs that I need and I have to say that it’s a hard one now, A three legged race and know clear winner!!! A dilemma is in front of me it would appear!!!

Clearly I have to wait for the Galaxy S4 to be released then make a choice from there, But I do hope the S4 is a clear winner as picking from the Note 2 or the Blackberry seems really close. Any advice at this point would gladly welcomed!!!

Hey great news everyone, SW-BOX are holding a Valentines Day giveaway, starting on the February 1^st and ending on February 18^th. There will be 16 lucky winners picked from everyone that qualifies for the give away. Winners will be announced on or around the 21^st of February. Now the prizes up for grabs are 10x 16GB Flash drives, 5x Google TV Devices and one lucky winner will get a free white iPad Mini 16GB WIFI version, sounds great right?

Imagine you win the top prize, for me the iPad Mini is the best iPad ever made, It’s a good size to play games and surf the net, and it’s still big enough to read books on line, plus it fit’s in some of my Jeans pocket so I can carry it around with me all the time, I guess for me I wouldn’t be disappointed if someone gave me one for free!!! But winning the other prizes would still be cool, imagine your mates all come round to see you, and there you are watching youtube on your TV? Then comes the how are you doing that then? You can tell them you’re a genius or you could throw them a wink and say yep, I’m a winner on SW-BOX!!! And let’s face it, even if you just win a Flash drive, that’s still something really useful.

So how do you have a chance to get any of these cool gadgets, Well it’s simple to enter, all you have to do is spend over $10 USD, collect your order number, then go to SW-BOX’S Facebook page and find the Events box on the top right of your screen, click it, then click the join button on the top right of that screen, then paste your order number into the comments box, it’s that simple, you will then automatically be entered in to the draw where you have a good chance of winning a cool gadget or if you are a really lucky person, you may win that fantastic iPad Mini.

Wow That sounds great but how do we make the give away fair, well the best way to be fair is to have a live draw, what I mean by that is, I will collect all the order numbers from Facebook then print them out, put them in the raffle box and let some of SW-BOX employees help me to pick the winner’s, and all winners will be notified via email. Now I wonder how many of the 16 winners would be so kind as to post a comment on there own Facebook page, just saying YES I won a ……  from SW-BOX, I guess we are going to find out, good luck everyone!!!

Hey last Saturday was SW-BOX end of year party, and there was so much fun, all the bosses and managers had to dance to Gangnam style, that was the start of the show, ( if they don’t find out I will post a video on youtube ) it’s quite amusing anyway every department had to put on a show, even me, I tried to sing a Chinese song, ( Badly I might add ) but I did try anyway. There was games to play, gifts to hand out, lots of good food and of cause some serious drinking to be done, we’re get to the drinking later,  
before that the show had to be preformed, there was singers, dancers, acting TV shows out and we even had our own rock star!!! He played his electric guitar and belted out a classic rock song, ( extremely well I might add ) The games of cause were meant to make fun of who ever was selected and there was know getting out of it, if anyone won a game they got to throw our dice we made, on each side there was something ridiculous you had to do like give a girl or boy a hug, or tell someone that you really love them, all taken with the highest of spirits, There was merits for the best employees of the year and many other games and jokes, after all the shows had been preformed the fantastic food came out, and of cause the drink, this is the point when the bosses and managers fear the most as there is always a target, I know, what does a target mean, well in SW-BOX culture we the employees all secretly select one manager or boss and then every employee will go to cheers him with a drink, so picture this you are the manager and we are the employees, there was over 40 of us, there’s one snag I forgot to tell you, in China there is a word called Ganbei, this means you must empty your whole cup of drink, in our case it was red wine, Anyway this can only lead to one result, you the manager paying a visit to the toilet hahaha, and then hoping one of the other managers is going to get you home, so being a manager at SW-BOX does have some draw backs but the evening is always great fun!!!

Anyway I can’t wait till the next party!!!

Apple has brought us a lot of surprises and changed our world entirely. People like this company and their products. But some people showed their love in quite a different way. Between Dec 19th to 2012 Dec 26th,, some thieves slipped into 3 Microsoft offices in Microsoft Building 5 and collected 2 iPad 2, 3 iPad 3. That was not an end. Just a week ago on the New Year’s Eve, some armed guys broken into a Paris Apple store and taken about €1m (£800,000) of goods away. And it’s hard to calculate how many individuals’ iPhone were stole. So iPhone protection is not only for protecting your phone against unwanted damages, it’s also for avoiding getting targeted by thieves.
Well, not taking your iPhone to the street must be the safest way. But it’s impossible. And here are some methods worthy a try. Check the details below:

• Install some Apps so that you can find your iPhone back when it’s lost.

As more and more Apple products are targeted by thieves, you’d better prepare for the worst situation. Get some apps from itunes to knock your iPad Mini when it’s lost, or use some special tool to track the position of it. There is a lot of information online about how people get back their iPhone/ iPad and you need to do some work now.

• Fake it as something else with a 3D Case or an Anti-theft Case.

Most people may choose a case for their iPhone for the style and protection against damages. Not many people aware how important another protection they need to establish for their devices: protection against thieves. And some cases can do this job very well. A 3D case that fakes your iPhone into a pig, bird or a camera is a nice choice. It’s like a mask, which covers the Apple logo and turns it into something that people have no interest with a second glimpse.

Also, you can try a anti-theft case.

Yes, you may notice there is a weakness for this method. People can know it’s an iPhone when they see the screen with the Apple authorized icons. And here comes the third weapon.

• Use a Privacy Screen Protector in the Public.

Arm  an anti-spy privacy screen protector for your iPhone 5 (iphone 4…). Unlike a regular screen protector, this privacy screen protector protects you against unwanted attention around you. They can’t see what’s on your phone. That’s amazing. And the screen may look a little darker and thicker with this privacy screen protector. Consider how it works, it worth the sacrifice.

So Blackberry 10??? How and where do we start, It does seem a far more advanced OS than anything else in the market, every article, every demo every blog I have read tells me it is phenomenal, but can Blackberry really make a comeback, They are 5 years late in the game, but RIM do seem to have really stepped up to the challenge, and I’m quite excited to see how things pan out over the next few years, although I have the iPhone 4S I am actually a Blackberry fan, and really hope they can pull this off. Now I have done some digging and found quite a few key points that RIM have done with Blackberry 10, and none of it disappoints me, I like the fact you can have up to 8 apps open at the same time, that’s cool right, plus the Blackberry Hub, the Hub allows users to receive and send emails, text messages and messages from Social Networks (Facebook and Twitter) That means you can post status updates to Facebook and Twitter without leaving the Hub, and you don’t even need to waste your time opening the app, now that is amazing!!!
Next lets look at the browser speed, there have already been tests done against a iPhone 5 running IOS6 and Blackberry 10 was faster and it’s faster than windows 8, I have not seen it pitted against the Android Samsung Galaxy S3 yet but I’m sure it will be competitive.

There is two more key points that suggest RIM will succeed, first the Blackberry 10 OS is compatible with Android apps, so you basically get an Android phone too, and second is there all new TimeShift feature on the Blackberry 10 camera. The camera is capable of facial recognition, and allows you to move forward and backward in time to avoid eye blinking and also change facial expressions. This is incredible; it means when there are multiple people in the picture. You can put person A at -1 seconds, person B at +2 seconds and person C at 0.5 seconds. This creates the perfect moment that did not actually exist!!!

And there’s a lot more than that I’m sure, so like I said, I’m excited to see how the world views Blackberry in the future, come on January 30, lets have another mobile war hehehe!!!

I believe it’s pretty accurate, I tested it in two totally different ways, the first night I went for some really strong alcohol that was 54% , I poured a normal size shot, downed it, “coughed” composed myself and waited for about 3 minutes to let the initial alcohol off my breath, then proceeded with testing it, straight away it indicated that I was at 0.6 and dangerous, so I thought well actually that’s not a fair test and didn’t tell me a great deal, so the next night I purchased one can of beer and a bottle of red wine, the beer was a standard 330 ml can with a 4.2%  and the red win was 11% , so the alcohol was as close to standard as possible, I then drank the beer first, ( It went down quite nicely hahaha, ) then set up the alcohol tester and waited 3 minutes, tested myself to be 0.2 and safe to drive, I then poured myself a nice glass of red!!! It was just over 1 ¼ of the bottle in size, ( I got three glasses out of the bottle before it was empty and my head was spinning hehehe ) anyway the first glass I drank took me around 20 minutes to drink so I think that is reasonable for a glass of wine, I then tested my breath again and the device said I was at 0.5 and dangerous!!!

At this point I was rather happy with the device and my testing, so I casually continued to sip away another glass, then feeling rather happy I foolishly decided that I should do what was only right in these situations and finish the bottle, my third and final glass went down much faster than I had initially planned and gave me a rather unwelcome spinning head, so I took to heading for the bedroom, I did make it there but found the bed spinning round, and I remember thinking, oh I ‘m going to get on that bed the next time it comes round!!! I slept well that night, and have decided that the product works well on my iPhone 4S,

Now let me explain how to use it, you have to plug the device into your phone or apple device, then open your phone, then turn on the device via a button on the side, at this point it turns on and counts down ten seconds to warn itself up, after it has done this it will ask you to blow into it for 5 seconds, then it measure your breath to get the blood alcohol ratio in your system, it then tells you the measurement and if you are over the legal limits to drive,

Here is a link to the product

http://www.sw-box.com/iPhone-Alcohol-Testers.html

And here is a video I made with Vivian from the customer service team,

iPad Mini finally launched after a long-time expecting. And it’s time to grab it a cool smart cover or case for it. If you want to save some money, Chinese online stores are always the best choices. However, the price for  iPad Mini smart cover varies. It charges at $5 at one store and $15 at another. If you try to figure it out by contacting the dealers, you will find out that’s frustrating as dealers always say their products has no quality problems. Surely there must be some difference. And Neill will show you the difference between a high quality one and a low quality one in this video.

Functionally the high quality one can automatically detect your tablet and catch it when you put it close enough. The low quality one is not as sensitive as the other does. Neill also did a test. He raised the iPad Mini by holding the smart cover side. And it shows the high quality one works better. The iPad Mini never drops. Plus, the high quality one stands more stably without slipping off, which happens to the low quality ones a lot.

Maybe we can find out why from the design. Actually both high quality ones and low quality ones are made of Polyurethane. (You can hardly tell the difference from the outside) But obviously the high quality smart cover sports more sophisticated stitching and cut-outs. And the main difference between them is the different material used on the inside of the bar area. The low quality ones use the same material in this area with the others. Well, the high quality ones are not.

The result turns out that price counts. Those high quality smart covers for iPad Mini that Neill used are from here: http://www.sw-box.com/iPad-Mini-Smart-Cover.html.