iPhone4 in Taiwan: Cost of Ownership

Aside from the fact that the iPhone 4 is pretty expensive, I'm still a bit unsure about the deals available in Taipei.

iPhone photo from OSXDaily

To help myself and anyone else who cares, fanboi or not, I did a quick total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis below using the current offers from Chunghwa Telecom (CHT), which some say are better than the ones from all other local providers, specifically Fareastone and Taiwan Mobile. These prices are currently valid until 10/2010.

View the full spreadsheet here.

You can follow the guide below to nail down the plan you should get:

• Am I willing to get stuck to a 2-yr plan?
• If no, get a phone with no plan. You basically pay full price for the hardware. CHT phones are unlocked so you could use them with any SIM.
• If yes, get one of the plans. The TCO is much lower considering that you get voice and data.
• Do I care for unlimited data (3G)?
• If you are almost always in a Wi-Fi hotspot, maybe you do not need unlimited 3G, which is much slower than Wi-Fi. Consider plan A for NT$649 a month. Note that this and all other plans provide free access to CHT's Hinet public Wi-Fi (not 3G), which covers some restaurants and public areas.
• If yes, consider plan C (NT$1349 monthly). It's the cheapest way to get unlimited 3G, which means you have Internet access wherever you have a CHT cell signal.
• Do I need a 32GB phone?
• If no, get the 16GB. From my own experience, unless you keep all your music in your iPhone, it's pretty hard to fill up all this space.
• If yes, make the big jump and get the most expensive iPhone unit with your preferred plan (or no plan).

Good luck and hope you enjoy shopping for the iPhone 4!

Going Down as Predicted

Not sure if this is a temporary set back due to major players taking profit, but RLC (and the entire PSE) is on a downward trend. I hope this doesn't mean the bull market has lost its horns.

I tried to sell at an unrealistic Php16, hoping to make some profit, but RLC went only as high as 15.54 (if I remember correctly). It went way below that to around 15.25, but it managed to close at 15.5. I haven't checked the last few trades, but this price may have been semi-manipulated. Some brokers actually buy their own shares at a higher price right before closing. Hopefully, the price is legit and the bull still has balls.

Documentation Architecture Research


I'm currently doing some relatively interesting work-related research about better content creation, reuse, and delivery. We're aching to deliver a documentation center that will put to shame whatever big players like Microsoft and Novell have. That's an exaggeration--were actually still starting and are hoping to implement in phases. First, we'd like our content to at least have some Web presence. We need decent hits from Google (and maybe Yahoo and Bing), since search engines are now the de facto entry points for any kind of content on the Web.

I just had a good back and forth with an experienced technical writer on LinkedIn (these people are mighty helpful), and my liking for wikis have been enforced. I will be checking out Confluence Wiki to find out exactly what their highly affordable but powerful product can do. For a $10 charity donation, you can mess around with it as well.

Enter the PSE Bull Market

I've been "playing the market" for about year now. Finally, I've started to recoup my losses and make a little bit of money. A very little bit, but it's better than nothing. I'm talking about investing in the very bullish Philippine Stock Exchange. Apparently, only the Indonesian, the Malaysian, and the Philippine Stock Exchange (aka PSE) are making sizable gains.

I bought MEG, OPM, and OV last year. OV and OPM are still in the red, but I've made some money on MEG. I got so excited I sold immediately after I got my 10%. I should have held on and made something like 30%. It's OK 'cause I decided to buy energy (EDC) and made about 13% in three weeks, until I got excited again and decided to sell. If I still owned my EDC stocks, I would have made close to 30% in like five weeks. Yes, it is a bull market and, apparently, my online broker's target price of like Php7 from 4+ will be hit in a few weeks.

I've been aching to get back to real estate, so I got RLC after selling EDC. I was thinking about FLI, but I was seeing a downward trend with lots of players taking profits. RLC looks like it still has some room for fast growth. I've made ~2.5% in the past 2 days of trading, but I can see sellers outnumbering the buyers by a large margin. The numbers are like 1m sellers (asks) vs. 10k buys (bids). It seems like the rally is over. The broker's fundamentals-based analysis says Php19 (currently at 15+) is doable, but their technical analysis says HOLD. I wonder why lots of players are aching to sell. Do they know something I don't? If I sell now, should I buy MER or some mining stock?

We'll see what happens tomorrow.