2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003

A friend of mine figured out a way to get Siri to learn your home and work address as well as other addresses. Just follow the steps below:

1) Open the Maps App
2) Find your home, office or other location
3) Place a pin on the street in front of your location. Street not building or land etc…
4) Click the blue arrow that appeared over the pin
5) Click on Add to Contacts
6) If it’s your office address add it to your contact info
7) Go to your contact info, click on edit, then go down to the address you just added and make sure the label for that address is work (or if it’s your home address then home)

And that’s it. You can now tell Siri to remind you when you get home or to your office and she will do it. You could also add locations like super markets for example so you could tell teach Siri where Sultan Center is and then tell her to remind you to pick up milk once you get to Sultan Center and she’ll do that.

Thanks Saleh!

The coolest/freakiest/creepiest thing I’ve seen online for ages. I’m not going to ruin it, just visit the website and connect it with your Facebook then sit back and watch. [Link]

Fatburger is finally opening up their Burj Jassem branch in Kuwait City on the 25th of this month. Burj Jassem is located opposite the Ice Skating Rink.

The 99 Unbound film premiered at the New York Film Festival earlier in the month. The animated series will be starting soon so this featured film was a way to launch it. I’m not sure when we’re going to get to watch it here in Kuwait but for now you can watch a short clip from the film above. You could also read a review of the film [Here]

Yes it exists. If you’ve got a cat you can join the Kuwait Cats Club. [Link]

My iPhone 4S arrived from the UK yesterday and so I managed to spend more time with the device and now have a few things I want to highlight, mostly the negatives.

Reception
According to Apple they’ve improved the reception on the iPhone 4S. I never had any issues with the reception on the original iPhone 4 but I do have an issue with the new “improved” reception on the 4S. Although the phone signal now spends most of its time with full signal bars which is great for people who use the phone to call people, another problem has come up instead. The phone now spends a lot more time on Edge instead of 3G internet. I hadn’t seen the little “E” icon on my iPhone for ages but now it’s popping up all the time. I first noticed it in my underground parking, I used to get a weak phone signal before (say 2 bars) but would have 3G. Now I have full signal bars but Edge instead of 3G. I figured it’s not an issue since I don’t spend too much time in the basement checking email or tweets. Once I got out of the parking it swapped back to 3G, but then once I hit the traffic light near Corniche Club on the Gulf Road it was back on Edge. It swapped back to 3G again before going to Edge once I got near TGIF. I even got the Edge signal at the Kuwait Stock Market traffic light. And I’m not talking about Edge appearing briefly and disappearing again, I’m talking about Edge being there the whole time while I’m waiting at the traffic light.

Edge SUCKS. I might as well not have internet since Edge is that horribly slow. I don’t know what Apple did to the reception but I hope this is just a bug that will be fixed in the next software update because I would rather have 2 signal bars and 3G instead of full signal bars and Edge.

Siri
She’s great but I have an issue and it’s not that she doesn’t understand me sometimes (check above). In my previous post I mentioned how I wanted to use Siri to remind me of stuff when I get home or get to work. For example “Remind me to walk my dog when I get home”. Siri is supposed to know when I get home and remind me to walk my dog. Problem is because we are in Kuwait we can’t teach Siri where home or office is. Siri uses Google Maps address to learn our home and office locations and right now Google Maps addresses only work in the US. What I don’t understand is why Siri won’t learn the locations using GPS positioning. If you use the Reminder App without Siri you can teach it locations using your GPS position. I already has a saved location in the Reminder App called “Work” and I can tell the App to remind me to do something once I get to the location “work”. Why can’t Siri use the already saved location information or why it can’t learn locations using GPS instead of street addresses doesn’t make any sense.

Finally another issue with Siri and I don’t know if this problem is only happening with me or not but Siri refuses to make phone calls. If I tell her for example to call my wife or call my brother, she will start the calling process and show me she’s dialing the number but then she replies back apologizing that she can’t call them. I’ve tried it with a bunch of different people in my contact list, I’ve removed the +965 from numbers, I tried everything and Siri will keep telling me she can’t call them. Again a strange issue which hopefully will be fixed in the future.

Speed
The phone is fast, for day to day operations it’s not noticeably faster than the regular iPhone 4 but just run any game and you’ll instantly see a huge difference. Most games were loading and opening instantly and even games like Rage were loading in just a couple of seconds. If you’re a gamer you’re gonna love the 4S.

The only thing really left to test is the battery life and I can’t do that right now since I’m too busy playing with Siri and the new features. Maybe once my phone use goes back to normal in a weeks time I’ll be able to compare it to my previous iPhone.

If anyone has any questions or anything they want me to try just ask in the comments below.

Update: My guy at Alghanim just called to tell me they’re selling the iPhone 4S 16GB for KD289 and they already started delivering the phones to people from yesterday. I purchased the phone from the Apple Store in the UK and with shipping it ended up costing me around KD230. But I guess if you want the phone right now and don’t want to wait 2-3 weeks for it then this is probably your best option.

A bagel place opened up in Kuwait City which I think is pretty cool I haven’t tried them yet but some friends at work did. Their website is horrible (slo-mo 90’s style flash) but they’ve got their full menu up there for you to download and order from.

Here is a link to their website [Link]
Here is the link to their menu bypassing their website [Link]
Finally here is their Facebook [Link]
Their phone number is: 55444303/313

The Radio Control Car Club of Kuwait track next to 360 Mall is one of the largest offroad tracks in the world and it’s currently getting a makeover in preparation for the new season.

They’re changing the layout and rebuilding the whole thing to make it even better than it was before. I can’t wait till it’s done so I could race my car there.

If you’re interested in becoming a member it’s just KD20 a year but you need to have a car and it needs to be 1/8 scale. The weather is becoming a lot better so if you’re interested in getting a car there are four shops I know of that sell the best 1/8 scale cars:

Extreme Hobby – 24348123
Pro Hobbies – 24313277 (where I got mine from)
Hobby Time – 24346744
Al Hamar – 22431989

You can check out more pictures of the track underconstruction on the RCCCK Facebook page [Here]

Thanks A

Now this is an organization that needs all the support they can get. Their mission: Make Kuwait Green.

This group is for an environmental project which calls on people who go camping during the winter time to plant 10 trees of certain type and irrigate it during the winter season. By the end of the season this tree will be able to survive and year after year our deserts will be our kid’s oasis.

Doesn’t sound very difficult and you can buy the small trees for really cheap from the nurseries on the 4th Ring Road. Imagine how beautiful the desert would be all green. Check out the Kuwait Oasis Facebook page [Here]

My favorite gym gloves are Harbinger and I’ve been using them for nearly two years now. I had a hard time finding them back then since there were limited places that sold them and not only did I have trouble finding the right model I also had a hard time finding the right size. Over the weekend I noticed Go Sport started carrying the Harbinger brand as well and they had a huge collection of gloves on display as well as support belts. So if you’re interested in new work out gloves you should pass by before they also run out of models and sizes.

I’m a big fan of the Hotel Costes music compilation and I found out yesterday that Kuwaiti musician Zahed Sultan has one of his tracks featured on the new Hotel Costes 15 which I think is a very cool accomplishment. The track is called “I Want Her But I Don’t Want Her” and you can watch it [Here]

As I mentioned in my previous post, Alghanim Electronics sent over an iPhone 4S for me to try out. I’ve been using it for a few hours and thought I would share my first impression on two of the most important new features.

The Camera
Thew camera on the iPhone 4S is a much better camera when compared to the regular iPhone 4. I saw some sample shots on the Apple website and they looked great but those shots were obviously taken in perfect lighting with an amazing photographer. I was curious to how the camera would fair in boring regular situation with random light and a not so great subject. Since the weather today is a mixture of humid, hot and dust, I decided to go to the roof and take a landscape shot.

On the left is the iPhone 4S shot and on the right the iPhone 4. Although it doesn’t look like that dramatic a difference when you zoom in at 100% it’s a complete different story as you can see below.

As you can see the iPhone 4S photo had a lot more details and a lot less artifacts. Another advantage of the iPhone 4S camera is that the lens is brighter which means better shots in low light situations. Below is a photo I took indoors.

Again zoomed out like this the details don’t show as much but once you zoom in at 100% (check below) you’ll see that the iPhone 4S shots are a lot less noisier and a lot more sharper.

One of the main reasons I purchased the iPhone 4S is because of the camera. I take a lot of shots for the blog and although I should, I don’t usually carry my good cameras with me all the time. Most of my shots are taken with an iPhone so the ability to take better shots is a great advantage for me. If like me, image quality is something you care about then the difference between the iPhone 4 and 4S is actually pretty major. You can download the full resolution images I shot and used above from these links:

Landscape with iPhone 4S
Landscape with iPhone 4
Low light with iPhone 4S
Low light with iPhone 4

Siri
Another reason I got the iPhone 4S is because of Siri. I’m a huge Stark Trek TNG fan and Siri reminded me a lot of the computer on the starship Enterprise. Even though Siri is limited when compared to the computer on Enterprise (it can’t prepare meals for example), it’s still very impressive and I love it. Siri is going to get even better in the future and I honestly can’t wait.

There are a few things that won’t work in Kuwait though. If you ask Siri for the best burger joints in Kuwait it will tell you it won’t know. Some of the Siri features are US only for now but it does do a whole bunch of other things. You could ask it to convert currency for you, find out the population of countries as well as other trivia. More importantly for me it can take notes and set reminders which is a big deal for me. I’m a very forgetful person and also very lazy so even when I usually remember something I never write it down or set a reminder. Now with Siri, once I remember something I can just tell it to write it down or remind me when I get home or work to do something. She’s really going to be my personal secretary/assistant.

Siri didn’t have that many problems understanding me. I do tend to mumble and I did have a few instances when Siri wouldn’t know what I was talking about but I also found Siri pretty forgiving. For example I might start saying “tell me” and then mid sentence change to “I mean what is the capital city of Kuwait” and Siri would still understand and tell me “Kuwait City”. Yes it does feel weird (ie stupid) talking to a phone but I’m sure I can get over that.

I ordered my iPhone 4S last week from the Apple UK store but for those of you who haven’t ordered yet and just want to walk into a store and pick one up Alghanim Electronics will have them in stock starting tomorrow. I asked about the price but as of this post they still hadn’t finalized it yet.

Update: The prices for the iPhones has been released by Alghanim and they are the following (don’t shoot the messenger):

iPhone 4S 16GB for KD350
iPhone 4S 32GB for KD390
iPhone 4S 64GB for KD420

My iPhone 4S is currently stuck in customs but Alghanim Electronics sent me one over to check out. There are two things I was looking forward to, Siri and the camera and so far it feels a bit weird having a conversation with my phone, it’s something I need to get used to. I haven’t tried the camera yet but will be doing so in a bit.

Thanks Yousuf