The Unboxing: Smart Bro’s Batman Broadband

This may have been the most unorthodox Batman merchandise ever sold, and it happened right here in the good ol’ Republic of da Pilipins.

I shot another unboxing some months ago – and as work piled up, I completely forgot about it! The images languished in an SD card. But better late than never – so here they are in all their full-color glory.

The images are of Smart Bro’s limited edition “Dark Knight Edition” of their popular “jazz plug-it!!” USB modems. This one came all decked out in complete Dark Knight movie regalia, with a case seemingly better suited for a DVD or game rather than an HSDPA modem. And the modem itself looks like something straight out of The Batman’s utility belt. That characteristic appears to make this bundle unusual and newsworthy enough.

One of the more notable aspects of it was the use of a ZTE MF626 modem, which plugs in directly to the USB sans cable. In addition, there is a Micro SD slot which allows you to expand the memory up to 2GB (and based on local prices, this memory expansion card is now quite cheap and approaching the P500 mark).

This breaks the tradition of USB modems being tethered to your laptop or desktop via a short USB cable. As the photos show, the modem is on the pudgy side, not as svelte as your typical USB thumb drive. But it’s certainly a tad more convenient than the modems with the cable sticking out.

The modem itself is suitably high-spec, supporting 3G and HSPA networks – with a bone crunching speed limit of 7.2 Mbps.

Jan Blando of SMART handles the selection of these devices for Bro, and tells me there are all sorts of alternative form factors coming up – this won’t be the first.

Incidentally, we noticed that Globe’s new Visibility modems have jumped ship from Huawei and are now using the ZTE MF626 as well, albeit in a white casing. Guess you can’t keep a good idea to yourself!

First Impressions: The Dark Knight

I don’t know if I fully enjoyed The Dark Knight. At a longish 2 hours and 30 minutes, I thought it could have benefited from tighter editing. But maybe it was just because I saw it after a long day at the office and was already pooped by time the credits rolled. All this despite the fact that The Batman (with an emphasis on “the”) has been my favorite superhero since the Denny O’ Neil / Neal Adams reinvention of the character in the seventies, when the long pointy ears and billowing capes and scowling demeanor of the original character of the 30’s made their comeback. This was way before the Frank Miller “Dark Knight” graphic novel of the mid-80’s.

With enough of a comic geek subtext, how could I not have looked forward to the film?

The occasion was an advance screening of the film, courtesy of distributor Warner Brother and mobile content provider Information Gateway (“IG” as we call it in the telco biz). I was giddy with anticipation from the moment I saw the tickets lying on my desk. I even sent a photo of the tickets to my Twitter friends via the mobile photo sharing service Twitpic.

So off I went, psyched to the gills, when I drove up to Greenbelt (a place in a land called Makati for you overseas readers) on a rainy, traffic-clogged “payday” evening – Wedneday, July 15. Or two days before the North American opening.

Arriving at the theater, the first thing that struck us was an inconvenience brought about by the digital age. Absolutely no electronic devices allowed in the theater. Apparently, no one was taking a chance that your super-duper mobile phone might have enoough video smarts to produce a screen copy to be uploaded on Bit Torrent or mass produced on a DVD available on the streets of Beijing - or Quiapo - the very next day.