Fancy New Stuff at CES 2007

Stayed home today as I am on MC, somehow couldn't get to sleep in the afternoon, so ended up checking some hot new product releases due out in the market this year. Dun think I am going to 'feature' the iPhone since it has been blogged to death by 5 million other sites.

Some which caught my eye:

Nokia N76:



Availble in sleek black and hot red (which incidentally one of my favorite colours); 2 megapixel camera; MicroSD Expansion card slot (up tp 2GB); Also can view your office & pdf documents. Looks quite sexy la, huh? Though it does look a little like Moto V3 Razr if you look from angles.

Nokia E65:

Well, I don't have a visual for this but managed to get a hold on this one during one of the meetings I had last week. Apparantly, it's going to be a key model for Nokia as it has amongst many other functions - WIFI enabled, that means able to make free outgoing calls at WIFI spots or at home if you have a wireless network at home and subsribed to the service. SingTel has this service called 'mio mobile' currently, $15 a month I think. It's 2/3 thinner than the SE W850i, something which I think I am looking at owning. Nice ...

Onyx Concept Phone:



Apparantly, only at it's concept stage with no buttons at all (sounds a bit like iPhone, no?. According to CNet, "it's a bar-style phone that would integrate GPS, music, teleconferencing and calendar events". It uses a thin high res touch screen for nearly the whole handset.

S-XGen Ultramobile Personal Computer (UMPC)





Targetted at the mobile warrior, this device runs on intel PXA 270 Xscale 520 Mhz processor running Windows 5.0 CE. Has also bluetooth, GSM/ EDGE capabilities, and 20GB of hard disk. And of course a fold out QWERTY keyboard like you see above. All of the above for about US$1395.

Sandisk Sansa View

At a capacity of 8Gb capacity, this is one of sexier Portable Video Player (PVP) in the market. It also boasts extra SD Ram memory slots, so you can store more videos there and play it too. One of the key features it that the screen is 4 inch across, which is heaps bigger than the iPod video (which is a strain to my eyes currently!). It also has a output for u to connect this to a TV if you want to watch content on bigger screens

Sandisk Connect


This device is something like Zune , but is able to log on to any wireless zone and grab any photos or music online - that means buy a song from anywhere. You can also listen to internet radio if you're near a wireless hotspot, but this is prob quite useless for most of us since we're mostly on the move all the time. It has 4Gb of memoey with expansion slots but does not have video playback capability or radio function. Around US$250.

ADS Tech Instant Video-To-Go

I find this device rather intriguing because I have been converting DVDs to iPod format recently; and it takes about 4 hours depending on the length of the actual movie. Too long!

Supposed to be the first "self-contained, hardware-based video-content conversion solution for consumers", this device, once plugged into your USB, can crush a 100 min video in 20 mins. Wow! Need to get my hands on this to try it!

Faithful Creator

Apparantly, I'm a FAITHFUL CREATOR type of personality. I did this more than 1 year ago and found the link while clearing up "My Favourites" folder today.

The personalDNA map looks pretty cool but I can't seem to link in here some how - how accurate do you think it is? = )

http://personaldna.com/report.php?u=7b9791a057d2&k=TsFYqCGHXuhTnfh-HH-CAADC-efd3

Go to personaldna.com, do up the questions and let me know yours!

2007.1

Wow, time passes quickly during the festive periods, huh? First post of 2007 ... let me try to recall what I had been busy with in the last 3 weeks

1. SingTel party at NYE, Ministry of Sound - spend the countdown with a customer service officer (because i had to validate some customer details!!) Organized the whole shebang with balloons drop blah blah (didnt get to see it!)

2. Coping with workload of my entire team when they were on holiday during the last 2 weeks of Dec. Well, it's kinda difficult not to let them go as they had given up a lof of their personal time thruout the year for work and my whims and fancys, so if it's one time in the year, it's during Xmas peroid. Never ever ever again , it was hell!

3. SingTel mio demos, visual mrchandising stuff - the whole mio was relatively fun to work with, primarily because there seemed to be unlimited budget. Marketing is fun when you dun have to talk much about the budgets hahaaa ... "just do first, later then count how much!!"

4. Getting my aunt's car for 1 week and basically not using it to the max since much of what I did during that week was really work related. The best part was prob having my own transport back after the NYE party since we saw so many people still waiting for cab at 4 - 5 am? Crazy!

5. Partying? Hmmm ... have really cut down from my usual standards. Just dun really want to spend too much money on alcohol, dun get anything out of it except feelin sick the next day. That said, both ol skool prog DJs Nick Warren & Dave Seaman who played at Zouk last weekend and yesterday respectively was kinda dissapointing. Luckily the company with Zek & Jason was good. The music seems to be getting stale these days.

6. Went to JB and bought some DVDs back! Yey! Real one ok real one!! Mr Policeman, pls dun visit my house! But got irritated with Yit as she was blarbaring some insensitive nonsense again during dinner. Aiya, dunno why some people like that one. Oh well, luckily I know she's kinda 'talk w/o thinking' pattern.

7. Oh yes, and I finally bought my macbook , and I am typing on it right now. Trying to start to learn GarageBand and Ableton and hopefully make some music (from whatever inspiration's left in me!).

8. Missed Candii who's still in Sydney. 30 something days more to go!

Happy New Year, all!

My Space

Wah, finally I hopped onto the myspace bandwagon today. So if YOU'RE on it, please add me ... actually I am not sure how to tell you to add me, I think you have to visit my myspace site at

www.myspace.com/stellarmusicdigital

... and then click 'add me'.

Someone tell me how to upload music & my own blog etc ...

Well, it's primarily to promote my podcast: Stellar Music. The latest featured mix is from DJ Aldrin at Zouk, really interesting DJ mix there. Subscribe at www.stellarmusicdigital.com hor ...

Happy Christmas!

Merry Christmas!! Well, I am 45 mins late . . . guess Xmas came and went real fast. Didn't even realize the significance of it this year, perhaps because my loved one is kinda far away in another land.

Did you read this article on CNA online today?

=====================

Monday December 25, 10:17 PM

Thousands turn up to celebrate Christmas at Orchard Road

SINGAPORE : Thousands turned up at Orchard Road on Monday evening to celebrate "Christmas in Singapore."

The entire stretch was closed for 12 hours for celebrations which will last till 1am.

Organisers said $800,000 and 3,000 volunteers were needed to put the event together.
Many got up close to the seven specially designed Christmas floats which have been on display since mid-December.

"Singapore is one of the great Christmas cities of the world. We travelled quite a bit and this is just spectacular," exclaimed Suzanne Sald, an American residing in Singapore.

"It's the first time I'm in Singapore. It's really nice. It's a bit too warm but it's okay," says Jonathan Craven, a tourist from UK.

The parade attracted three million people as it kicked off at Orchard Road. Of that, 94,000 were tourists, according to the Singapore Tourism Board.

This year, organisers hope to hit the five million mark islandwide, since the floats have also been travelling all over Singapore during the festive period.

As day turned into dusk, the voices from 200 carolers rang through the entire Orchard Road.
Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean also took time out to join in the celebrations.

STB said 1 in 5 tourists surveyed last year chose to visit Singapore during the year-end festivities. And 22 percent were also repeat visitors during the Christmas season. - CNA /ls

===================

Doesn't the article sound a bit too 'propaganda-ish'?

First of all, the headline wrote "thousands" turned up and then in the article itself, it said "3 million", that's a bit misleading right? Maybe it meant the all the floats travelling to 3/4 of the island, and then somehow it meant that 3 millions people saw it?! I sure as hell didn't, guess I am part of that remaining 1 million unhappening folks.

And then, which part of the world does "Suzaane Sald" come from!? "Singapore is one of the great Christmas cities of the world"?? You're kidding me right? Has she been travelling to places like Papua New Guinea, Afgahnistan and Rwanda - and then somehow she's making the comparison? How can an island located at the equator be one of the great Xmas cities when we dont even experience snow?

And to top it off, STB said 1 in 5 tourists chose to visit Singapore during this period.

I wonder what did the other 4 say?

That they REALLY didn't want to come to Singapore and they unfortuantely ended up in Singapore on some unpredictably predictable rain/sunshine weather.

Anyway, it's just my 2 cents - be careful of what you read in the papers ... hv your own misintepretion and make your own judgement. Oh btw, this is not targetted at any media company in particular ... so dun come knocking on my doors. =)