The Beanster Blog

My SMART SIM card has been residing in the XiaoMi Mi3W coming up on a month now. This decision was made since I was not getting LTE at home or at the office anyway. The Mi3W is a H+ (3.75G) device only. Yesterday I saw SMART boasting about LTE-Advanced (they are calling it 5G) more false advertising and empty promises from SMART. I have decided to keep my SMART number for awhile longer because changing numbers is such a chore and to cover my bases. I do miss iMessage on my SMART number tho, I guess WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger will have to do. Meanwhile on the iPhone 5S I have had my newly minted Globe account with a recycled number which means SPAM text even without giving out my number. Changing the number is an unnecessary expense that I would rather not have so I guess I am stuck with this number. I have not been using it heavily since I have a 1.5Gb cap on my current plan. This actually made me think about how my iPhone uses data. I went into Settings -> Cellular -...

Got myself a Globe line after 2 yrs.  I hope I don't regret this.  I chose the lowest plan possible which is P299/mo which has a P500 PV (peso value). For my combo I chose GoSurf 499 which includes. 1.5Gb data Spotify Premium  So basically I have 1 peso left on my plan and everything else is on top. I do not expect to exceed 1.5Gb as this is a secondary line and not my main one.  According to Gerry (or Jerry) the sales person at Globe Center V-Mall My LTE SIM card should be activated in 3 to 5 hours.  Spotify Premium is free for six months only, after that I can choose to continue the service for 129PhP/mo via Spotify or Globe (I haven't checked) Data allowance is not affected by using Spotify. I am skeptical that this is the case. I mean will they monitor the traffic on my device and mark Spotify's usage as free while the rest of my consumption is counted against my allowance? [edit: reading between the FAQ lines it seems Spotify Premium w...

Spotify App I embraced digital media quickly, yep I was one of those guys who converted all of their music to digital and now I rarely purchase physical media. However I cannot get my head around streaming. I just feel that internet bandwidth and reliability are not there yet. My phone still gets No Service and EDGE for fuck's sake. iTunes Radio (in the Music App) So the quick response of streaming apologists would be to cache the songs (read: keep a local copy) and my response is that isn't that what I am doing now when I purchase a song, download the file, and sync it to my device?  I know I am in the minority tho, digital music sales are on the decline . Downcast (podcast app) For now I think streaming's strength is in music discovery. Still music discovery can be done via social media like twitter or facebook or my preferred way podcasts!