Author: Jayvee Fernandez

As a tech journalist I have had a long career following HUAWEI and the products it has launched in the country. I remember how they made the first LTE dongle for SMART when it debuted 4G in the Philippines back in 2011. I was there when they released the most affordable Windows Mobile phone ‘Ascend‘ for less than P10,000 in 2013. In 2018 I got to experience HUAWEI’s Innovation Lab summit which also coincided with the launch of the P20 series. I got that phone for myself that same year and it has lasted me through the pandemic. The P20…

The preorder comes with a HUAWEI Gift box worth P1,999 and HUAWEI FreeBuds SE2 worth P1,599. It’s rather insane that with the freebies, the upcoming HUAWEI Watch Fit 3 is roughly now the same price as the famed HUAWEI GT4, a watch that I have raved about in a previous review. It’s so good, I actually got one for myself (the green strap). HUAWEI wearables are top of class and I’ve been a fan of the GT series, especially the latest iteration that came out last year. The Fit 3 is in a way, the little sibling: it’s more affordable…

I’ve learned the hard way that setting up your home WiFi system might be a little trickier than expected. In fact, the only time you know that everything works perfectly is when you don’t notice it’s working well: your movies are streaming, your downloads are working, your games have great ping. But once your connection chokes, it’s as if you’re on a bus and the driver makes a sudden stop, hurling you into one big inconvenience. I believe, at the end of the day, it’s really about time. Saving time. It’s the balance of enjoying life versus adulting. Any gamer…

It has definitely cast its spell on the industry. To talk about HONOR, we have to talk about its origins with HUAWEI. It’s been roughly a decade since HUAWEI’s offshoot line was launched and though HONOR focused primarily on mid-range devices, it soon found itself at a serendipitous moment because of the banning of its parent company by then president Donald Trump. As a direct result to consumers outside the USA (where the phones are banned), HUAWEI could not directly carry the Google Play Store, and not have access to other Google apps natively installed on Android. Let’s admit that…

The first Huawei smartwatch I bought for myself was the green GT4 last year from Abenson. I was enamored by the fact that it didn’t look like a typical smart watch, and that it had a round bezel (the main reason why I’m not a fan of the Apple Watch). My fascination for the Huawei GT4 has officially extended to the Huawei Watch 4 (yes the nomenclature can be confusing), which is essentially the same device but with support for eSiM, WiFi, and ewallets. The Watch 4 is presented with a 46mm bezel, available only in one color, which is…

Like many Filipinos, I recently took a trip to Japan over the Holy Week. Not to see the cherry blossoms’ first bloom, but to dwell into an irony that many travelers have observed in their sojourns to the Land of the Rising Sun. That is, as high-tech and quirky the Japanese can be with robots, high speed trains, and fast Internet, they seem to be struggling with cashless payments. Unlike the Philippines where mass adoption of QR payments and cashless e-wallets from GCash, Maya, GoTyme, and the like are so ubiquitous, it isn’t as prevalent in Japan. To be clear,…

Once confused as an April Fool’s joke, Google’s GMail celebrates its 20th year in the industry. If you are from the Philippines, you will remember that before the days of GMail the Internet had to make do with Yahoo! and Hotmail email addresses — some even using the free Edsamail service because it didn’t need an Internet provider. But GMail’s rise to viral fame could have been easily construed as an April Fool’s joke because it was offering 1GB of storage — something that no other email service offered at that time, and that many in the industry scoffed at…

Today marks the 30th anniversary since Benjie Tan connected the Philippines to the world wide web. It is this time every year that I am drawn to an article written by a dear friend, Jim Ayson (may his soul rest in peace), who chronicled the evening before the Philippines went online. It involved a $70,000 Cisco router the size of a filing cabinet from by the DOST, a slow drive to the PLDT Ramon Cojuanco Building, and a celebration with pizza. This piece has been lost in the ethers of the Internet, and Benjie Tan has also since passed away…

As a child of the 80’s I was born into the world of the terrestrial landline. In my teens, mobile carriers were the new fanfare of the world as Nokia phones slowly populated the pockets of my classmates in college. As far as I can remember, the one constant gripe as a teenager was how two telcos seemed to dominate the space. There were repercussions for us youngsters who didn’t have a lot of budget for newfangled things such as “prepaid load.” Down the line, competition for user acquisition heated up, bringing forth the unli-text era where SMART and Globe…

I’ve been a realme convert for about a year now. Last year, I was using the realme 11 Pro+ 5G as my main phone. It was great — faux leather design, heavy 200MP camera. Everything was decent. It was a midrange phone that performed just as well as other flagships at half the cost. The 2024 refresh, the realme 12 Pro+ is exactly that but with a much better camera system. The realme 12 Pro+ focuses on new Street Mode filters and the periscope camera (so funny that their website says that “next gen imaging doesn’t rely on ultra-high MP”…