Open Snap Philippines - A Must for Foodies

OpenSnap Philippines is here!

Hey Coffeeholics! How is your summer so far? Who did some food tripping during the break? (raises hand.. haha) Everyone loves to eat and I bet (just like me) you take photos of your food as well.

One of my cousins and I would joke, "Pinakain mo na ba phone mo? (Have you fed your phone already?)" referring to me snapping a photo of the dishes at a restaurant where we were eating. Well my dear co-foodie, I found a better way of "feeding" my social media feed with pictures of food through this amazing brand new mobile App here in the Philippines called OpenSnap!

Yes, eating has somehow evolved to a social/technological experience as well with the advent of smartphones and the internet! haha. Yes, I'm sooo guilty in that aspect of taking photos of food and sharing it on my social media accounts. I can't help it! I love to share to my friends and to the world (chos! haha) about a particular food that I've tasted, fell in love with, and want other people to experience it as well. Now thanks to Open Snap, it will make "sharing the food love" so much better.

At the launching of OpenSnap where they explained what OpenSnap is all about and how we can easily use it on our smartphones!

OpenSnap is a revolutionary mobile application for iOS and Android smartphone and tablet users where they can find popular restaurant spots through food photos uploaded by friends and families. It is the first & unique food photo app in the Philippines and Asia that allows users to create personalized food albums & share their dining experience with friends and families wherever and whenever!

Connected to the OpenRice database, OpenSnap allows users to locate over 1 million restaurants in the Philippines and in Asia, share dining experience, and identify OpenRice members, as well as Facebook friends and Celebrities. It allows Filipinos to enjoy local and  worldwide cuisine on their fingertips with the support of advanced i-cloud technology.

Food that we ate at HEAT Edsa Shangri-La Plaza Hotel
The soup was the best! Loved it!

OpenSnap offers a user friendly and convenient approach to creating one’s own food photo albums, photo sharing, hash tag locations, photo filtering and use of stickers in photos.  OpenSnap users can also tag their friends in their photo uploads, as well as share the information to their personal social networking platforms, such as, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Weibo.

Here's some tips in taking photos for OpenSnap:

The  major  features of OpenSnap include:

1. Use food photos to search nearby restaurants - Users can search nearby restaurants by browsing photos uploaded by friends. It helps you to save the time to locate alternate dinning locations while lining up long queue at the designated restaurants.

2. Create and share your personalized restaurant albums - OpenSnap provides users with personalized restaurant albums and easily share their dining experience wherever and whenever! Users could check the restaurant details by clicking the food photos, with more supplementary information for a perfect dining experience.

Just started my own album. You can also add friends and like their photos.
Add me - kaisensei. :) I will follow back!

3. Browse  over 1 Million restaurants in Asia - OpenSnap has an advanced search function to reach out dining photos and restaurant information of  other Asian regions such as China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and HongKong.

4. Photos come with a wealth of information – Each food photo provides the user with restaurant address, map, contact details, reviews and comments.

And that's one of my photos on open snap! I ate at Cafe Adriatico at Gateway Mall Suites with my family. That's where we celebrated Mother's day. :) The food was awesome! And yeah, looking for what to eat in the mall or the nearby areas was so much easier when we used this app. Its very very useful! So not only OpenSnap becomes your personal food photo album and social media sharing tool, but its also an app that will help you when you make some of the most difficult decisions ever that you have with your barkada:  "Saan kakain?" or "Kahit saan na lang?"

Hehe. Your problem will be solved with this cool app. Wala ng away away. hahahaha. The app is available for android or iPhone users. The only thing I noticed though that it's mostly available for the latest android versions. They are still in the works in making it available for lower android versions (like for my phone. haha! I used my sister's ipad for my opensnap account). Thank you very much OpenSnap for inviting me to this event! Hope you all have a "full" summer! :)

Silver Linings and Gadgets

Hey Coffeeholics! This last quarter of the year has definitely been a season of ups and downs for me. Most of the downs has got to do with my health. My lungs aren't quite agreeing with the erratic changes of weather.. but I'm coping thank God. I have learned that though there are times when have to go through rough circumstances in our lives but with faith, love, and hope we can overcome these and find the silver lining so to speak. For me, it wasn't silver. Its GADGETS! Hehe.

Meet my brand new SAMSUNG GALAXY S II! After 2 years (yes >__< its that old!), I finally retired my Samsung Galaxy 5 phone and was able to buy me a brand new android phone - the Samsung Galaxy S 2. I've been wanting to replace my Samsung G5 since the beginning of the year. Its actually one of the goals for this 2012 that I will replace my old phone. It hasn't been working properly since the upgrade of the Android Market to Google Play. I haven't been able to download anything from Google play since then which has been quite frustrating for me. So I was really looking forward to trade in my old phone to a new one as an advance Christmas gift to myself.

I originally had a different model in mind (Samsung Galaxy W) but when I found out that there was only a lil bit of difference with the S2, I decided to go for it! I normally don't change phones right away so I figured if I was going to get a new phone, might as well spend for it a lil bit more so that it will last longer. No I didn't get the S3 coz it was way beyond my budget. (Everyone I know keeps asking me this.. :P)That's the main reason why. I'd like to thank Kuya Paul and Japz for helping me out in buying my phone at Greenhills. Yes I bought it at GH. Some people might be a bit apprehensive in buying there but with the right friends who knows the ins and outs.. its not that bad! Hehe. I believe I got the best deal there thanks to my friends. So yeah, I'm really grateful for that. So yes my dears, finally I have INSTAGRAM! :) So you can now all follow me @kai_sensei (same as my twitter account).

Follow me! Just add @kai_sensei!

Another silver lining in Gadgets that I have just recently is this lil tab right here - its my brand new Cherry Mobile Superion Tab! The best part of this gadget is that I got it for FREE! Yes finally I won at an event held by SM Accessories -- the Fashion Authority at the Republiq, Resorts World last Nov. 15. I'll be telling you more about that event and the exciting new, fab, and trendy accessories SM has in store for us. So again, thanks so much SM Accessories for my new gadget! I never thought that I'd actually win (it was a twitter contest during the event by the way) it but I still tried to join and lo and behold.. I won. It was unexpected and when I did win I felt really really blessed. Thank you Lord for this silver lining in my life right now. :)

Anyway, so yeah, I have many things (besides these gadgets) of which I am grateful for which also helped remind me to stay positive. So what about you coffeeholics? Are you going through something these past few days or weeks? Have you too found your silver lining or blessing? Do share share share! Have a great weekend!

Thanks SM Accessories and Smart for making my day!

My Android Phone

I know it has been months and I apologize horribly. I have sorely neglected my blog which I regret dearly. This on-off relationship with blogging should really stop! LOL. So yes, with the encouragement of my dear real life friends, shopgirljen and fashionistarchitect, I'm back in the blogging world! Yay!

Anyway, there are so many things that I want to blog about.. especially about my major highlight moments of 2010! But that would take up a lot of time to share all about that. Right now before I go to sleep, I just wanted to share you one awesome 2010 highlight that improved my life right now.

I BOUGHT AN ANDROID PHONE!!!

Its a  Samsung Galaxy 5 I5503 (read specs here!) and its using OS Android 2.1 Eclair.
I LOVE IT! Its affordable. Its easy to use. Its an ANDROID phone.. what else can I say?
the only issues that i have with my G5 is BATTERY LIFE (I'm a heavy net/game/ebook user) which is only less than a day with me and LIMITED MEMORY (phone memory I mean.. coz you can only store apps in phone memory and well it limits the phone's potential.. ).

Its one of the cheapest android phones I could get my hands on last December 2010 (bought it for 10, 650 php). And yes, obviously, thats where most of my Christmas money was spent on.. getting my hands on a new phone! Would you believe that the last phone that I got was in 2004. It was NOKIA 6600.. the "latest" colored nokia phone at that time.. and just remembering how much I spent on it tears me up coz I bought it with a postpaid line attached to it and its even MORE expensive than my brand new awesome android samsung phone! (It cost me 19,500 php on mobile phone only.. excluding 2 year plan that i have to pay Php 500 monthly!) Anyhow, I think a new phone was long overdue. Coz when my N6600 conked out I got a hand-me-down phone from my dad (N70 Music Edition) and well its great and all but I wanted a WIFI phone bad! So I promised myself this and I think I made the best decision ever when I got my G5 phone. :)

I was supposed to buy Samsung Wave but I'm glad I made the right decision and bought the galaxy phone with the android os. I swear, it really changed my life! I found myself more "online" active than before (twitter, facebook, updated with the news, etc!) and having this new phone has also helped me to be a bit more "tech savvy" than before. Not that I'm a techie now but it has helped widen my knowledge and understanding and yes.. indeed its a galaxy of fun! I mean, FREE EVERYTHING!!!! (apps, games, mp3 access, wifi access, ebooks, etc)!!!!

So what am I saying here? Well, if you are planning to get a phone anytime soon... GET AN ANDROID PHONE! And yes, I would highly recommend Samsung. :) Transferring from Nokia to Samsung (and to a touchphone at that!) was one of the best moves that I made last 2010! So grab an android phone now.. its amazing!