I finally got my iPhone 3G S from maxis on the 31st of July. Luckily I booked my unit at the maxis center in Queensbay Mall in Penang and even though they only opened at 10.30 AM, there was no crowd. I made my way to the maxis center expecting my unit to be ready only to be told that the number porting for my digi number wasn’t done yet. So I couldn’t get my unit on the same day. But I was so eager to get the unit that I decided to accept their inefficiency and sign up for an all new maxis number which would mean that I could get the unit on the same day! That worked well and in fact I got the unit within an hour.

How many of us have lost our mobile phones at least once in our lifetime? I have actually had my mobile phone stolen once but wasn’t able to recover it. Not only did I lose an expensive phone but also all my invaluable contacts along with it. So it was not just a financial loss but a real pain in the you know what! But a friend of mine was more lucky when faced with an identical situation. He recently lost his mobile phone at a mamak stall in KL but managed to recover it within 48 hours. So how exactly did he do it?

It has been quite a while since Motorola produced a mobile phone of any significance – both in Malaysia and around the world. The last that I can remember is the RAZR series which was re-used over and over again in subsequent designs. Motorola has launched the A3100 in Malaysia a few days ago which is pretty much following every other mobile phone in this planet – it uses a touchscreen interface. The phone can be activated by using either your finger or a stylus which I guess is pretty much redundant unless Motorola’s engineers have not been able to get the touchscreen right in the first place.

Interestingly the phone also sports a trackball for navigation. Again this makes me suspect that the movement on the touchscreen by using your fingers is not so seamless after all. If not why would Motorola go to the extent of providing a trackball on a fairly small screen. The A3100 is 3G enabled and is also equipped with aGPS (assisted GPS). aGPS uses cellular towers to fix the location of the user along with the satellites and is much faster than traditional GPS systems when it comes to Time To First Fix (TTFF). WiFi is also offered and Motorola boasts that it can provide PC like surfing speeds. The phone runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 and there is nothing to shout about the OS.