Darrel

Consider this scenario:

A Farang sells his large condo to a Thai Person

Interesting scenario but have you ever heard of this happening?

Why would any Thai person buy a Farang-name condo when he could buy a Thai-name one for less?

The noise seems to not be constant all the time, and sometimes not so loud.

It surely is vibration. Bend the heat exchanger pipes.

(and that was in the good old days -2005/6).

You must be one of the newer fellahs.

The good old days were pre-1990.

The building is Life @ Siam (or Life at Siam) and it isnt an email address. Oddly I cant find any online reference to either the developer or the building's own website, only some links to real estate agents who deal with it. Strange as most Pattaya developers go completely overboard on their websites.

I will walk up there and have a look in person tomorrow.

You can only use one provider at the time, but you can logout from one and login to another. I've done that in the past.

That will only work if both ISPs use the same circuits at least as far as the DSLAM (and probably beyond). So this will only give a measure of redundancy for problems affecting the routing after the point where they split, if indeed there is such a point and that one ISP isnt just reselling the a service provided by the other.

Either way, doing it like that wont help you if your line develops a fault, and it wont give you more bandwidth.

Personally if I was paying two subs a month to get some back up I would want two lines, two modems and a load-balancing router. That would be worth having. And I would make sure that the two ISPs were in no way related.

It may just be the motor knocking against the body or the heat exchanger pipes at the back. Try pushing them (gently) and see if there is any change. Also try switching it off for 30 minutes.

Even the Pattaya International Music Festival doesn't seem to attract more tourists compared to previous years.

Hmm. I dont know. I walked down to Beach Rd near Central last night, saw the throng of people moving aimlessly between the stalls, did a u-turn and came straight home. It would not have been possible to cover more than about 20 yards a minute in that lot. Horrible. It was more congested yesterday as a pedestrian road than when the pedestrians are restricted to the pavement.

OK, I just reviewed all 3 pages of the ZTE Blade CyanogenMod-7 thread and see that you have now rev. 18, with nightly drops. Looking through the history it does seem like there are a lot of problems that they seem to be working through. You seem to enjoy it but I think many would find it a bit frustrating to have to flash their phone every day?

What new features, Android 2.3 or otherwise, do you get with this ROM? I realize that your phone only has an official Android 2.1 release so you have no choice but to flash a custom ROM if you need 2.2 features. Most phones have a 2.2 upgrade already available, with 2.3 planned.

Build 26 is the current one. This is a new ROM being worked on daily (nightly!). There are hardly any bugs left at all now and I would expect it to go final quite soon. Until then of course it would be silly for a total newbie to use this ROM and as you mention there are various other 2.2 builds that would suit. (That said, I find the current nightlies of 2.3 to be more stable than the stable 2.2s, and I cant personally think of anything in the build I'm using that would stop me from using it permanently. It works really well and is so much nicer to use than the original Orange branded 2.1)

The main advantage of 2.3 is the speed increase and general prettyness of the OS, which does seem to be more robust also.

There is ongoing talk of an official 2.2 being released for the Blade. I dont think there will ever be an official 2.3 for the Blade as ZTE are set to release newer products soon.

The Modaco Blade forum has a lot of information about the various ROMs and other questions, and the site orangesanfrancisco.co.uk has information in a more readable format. All in all most people consider this phone to be comparable with phones costing several times more, which for under GBP100 cant be bad.

However I find it a little funny that none of the previous posts actually "establishes" that you can not buy the Blade in Thailand.

I'm sorry. I thought that I had made it clear.

(Actually I'm still rather surprised that a good cheap phone like this isnt sold here.)

This thread is about Pattaya being low on tourists and so all my comments are on-topic.

I dont like any foreign group that makes up such a huge proportion of the people I see in the street. I expect to see more Thais than farangs here, especially at this time of year, but that just isnt the case any more.

The Russian families are particularly annoying in that they are large and are always standing around pointlessly and getting in the way. There are other races and nationalities that are just as bad for this, but not as numerous. If they were as numerous then I would complain about them also.

Yikes. My mileage definitely varies. I spend my day using my smartphone, and not flashing it. Clearly your usage patterns are outside the norm. I've only flashed my phone twice, and am quite happy with the current ROM. I can't imagine waiting every single day for that moment when a new version drops?

Hmm.

I flash my Blade every day because at the moment people are working on a new release of the firmware that turns a good phone into a great phone. It takes me 5 minutes to do and is of interest to me as each release brings new features (and less bugs!), for free. When the firmware development is finished then I will flash the final release version and that will be an end to it. There are many Blade users who have only flashed earlier releases and are now waiting for the final 2.3

That's a valid choice also. That's the nice thing about my phone: it offers a lot of options for very little outlay.

If my phone wasnt being developed to the same extent then obviously I would only flash it once or twice until I had a ROM that I liked.

No, I'm not certain. Any easy way to check?

From the settings: applications control panel you can look at the individual apps and see what the memory usage is for the app and for its data. It also shows what proportion is on the card or on the phone. So you should be able to see which apps are filling your phone up the most.

This assumes that your Android phone shows the same info that mine does, but I dont see why it shouldnt.

You would have to fly to the U.K., France, India or Bulgaria to purchase this phone. And hurry as it is so good that it should be sold out by now?

Facetious comments dont help.

That phone is widely available in many countries and could be easily obtained by someone travelling soon, or knowing someone who is coming here. I suspect that description covers many in this forum. It could even be sent by post for that matter.

Whilst it does sell very well due to it being very good value for money, I dont think that is it sold out on a regular basis.

No I have not read the entire thread. I Googled for Galaxy S2 and landed on this page. Saw that people recommended buying the Blade for 4500 Thai baht.(Not pounds sterling.)

I made the original post and in it I went to some length to point out that the price was the GBP equivalent of 4500B and that the phone was possibly a good option for anyone visiting or coming from Europe (or some other parts of the world), or knew people coming from there soon. I think that many people reading this forum are in that situation.

I stand completely by what I said.

You didnt deserve the cutting remark but it was funny. Anyone who cant take a bit of flaming should stay off the interweb.

I find it hard to believe that the strange people who seem to spend most of their waking moments buying and selling condos in Pattaya actually go to the trouble of moving all the money in and out of the country each time they buy and sell anything here. And what does it achieve anyway? Apart from letting the banks earn more fees, of course.

once it is at 49% then Thai's can only sell to Thai's but foreigners can sell to anyone. So the Thai's do suffer from lower prices.

That depends on your point of view. I would say that Thais benefit from lower prices. And also a much more stable market.

High property prices are just palaces (or high-rises ) made of sand and in the end they may well turn round and bite you in the bum, as many have discovered all over the world.

Perhaps you drew that conclusion from a situation where a building was already at the 49% for farang. If there were many units for sale and a farang-registered unit were sold to a Thai, then the 49% allocation would open for the next farang wishing to buy a Thai-owned unit. In essence, in that case, the unit for the farang-sold now Thai-owned unit would not be able to be easily sold back to another farang in the future.

I understand that happens frequently in popular buildings where the farang 49% is at the maximum limit.

It seems most unlikely that a Thai would want to pay the farang name premium simply to lose it the second he buys the condo. Never seen a (decent) building yet where Thai or company name units for sale dont outnumber farang name units for sale. Surely a Thai would just buy one of the cheaper Thai or company name units. I would, in his shoes.

Pattaya is lucky in many respects, most notably its "sex appeal" and proximity to Bangkok. The latter is important because an increasing number of Bangkonians are wanting to get away from Bangkok, especially on the weekends, and many go to Pattaya. Without these two things, the city would die.

Not any more. Russian families surely outnumber Thai tourists and the traditional single male by at least a factor of 10 now. Beach Rd and Second Rd are crawling with them at all hours, and there's no shortage of them in Soi Buakow. Go to Jomtien and Wong Amat/Naklua and there's pretty well no one else. I've never seen anything like it. They get more and more numerous every day. I'm just glad that they dont stay where I do.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. My main problem and reason for wanting to try another ROM is the lack of available internal memory, but if, as suggested, the problem is down to the relative small internal memory of the Desire I guess I'll just have to live with it for now.

Are you certain that you dont have a rogue app that is storing data in the phone?

Flashing a custom ROM is a very lengthy and complex task, Anyone would be a prat to suggest otherwise, more so for a newbie like the OP. But you can find some videos on youtube which will walk you through the process. For me, backing up and restoring all user apps and data, via Titanium Backup, and backing up and restoring all my user data (pictures, videos, music, contacts, call records, calendar, SMSes, etc.) takes quite a bit of time, at least 60 minutes. Unlocking, rooting, flashing to stock, master clear, factory reset, rerooting, adding ROM Manager, flashing CMR, the actual ROM, then restoring everything can take quite a while. But I've only done it twice.

Your phone must be harder than mine. I flash mine every single day at the moment as Cyanogen are putting out nightly builds of 2.3

It does not take more than 5 minutes and I only need to wipe the cache and reboot. In fact downloading the ROM takes far longer than flashing it. (Thank you Maxnet.)

The first flash did require unlocking (5 mins on the web) rooting (5 minutes with Androot), installing Clockwork recovery, full wipe/reset , flash the ROM and then the reinstallation of my apps and data but that didnt take long at all. ROM manager is not required and most of my data like contacts etc just reload themselves from the Google account. No need to backup or restore any music or pictures at all as that part of the SDcard isnt touched when flashing.

YMMV

Have you even read the thread?

Hope you do better research on the property you deal with.

Cruel but funny.

I choose to buy only condo's in the lower price ranges and i have no occupancy problems at all. ROI easily around 10%. And because of the lower price range (think 200-400k) all are paid with cash.

Nice idea, in the right area. In Pattaya 300k will just about get you an allocated parking space in a decent condo. Or half a small studio in one of those great buildings on Sukumvit with yaba addicts loitering on every landing.

Foreigners just bugger of when they not like it anymore.

You're right there. In the right part of the right town you are onto a winner, I'm sure.

Many empties are bank owned - they have a different philosophy here than Europe - they will set a price and hang on for years, decades sometimes, to reach 'their price'

For sure. There's a big block of low-rise shop/appt units half-way down Jomtien Beach Rd. I was at the gala opening about 20 years ago and I fondly remember the rather classy (free) seafood buffet on the front terrace: some fancy restaurant had set up shop there. Now the whole place looks derelict and most of the units seem to have never been occupied at all, except perhaps by squatters.

Well... the market speaks! I usually get 7/8% net and get 3/4% net in Europe - you can think what you like but I get what the market gives me - I explained that this year it has lowered a tad to 6/7%. You can't compare with Europe - you can get many things cheaper here and more expensive here than your dear old Europe - and what???

Hmm. Thailand is full of properties that are empty and either for sale or for rent (and indeed this is the title of the thread). Europe is quite different: most places available for rent or sale go in days or weeks at most. If they dont go quickly everyone knows that there is something wrong with them or they are seriously overpriced.

Hence my doubt as to the validity of the figures that are bandied about. Maybe people do sometimes get 8% when they finally get a tenant here, but it is patently obvious that there are far more properties than potential tenants (or buyers for that matter) and as such the numbers just dont add up. I still think that this is classic Thai style pricing: it it doesnt move, increase the price.

We are talking about rental yield, and not ROI.

I saw several different people talking about several different things.