Great Pleasure

This is a picture taken using my new LG Viewty phone. Not a bad investment. Great to have such a picture taken. I know it is trivial but i am getting to this phone now. It is cool. Buy it.

Me and Wife. Her name is Seow Yuin. hee hee hee

IT Fair

Attended the IT fair that just passed at Suntec last weekend. This is the first time i really took time to visit one without my wife or friend. Result of this is outing with myself has proven hilarious and eye opening.

The IT fair never fails to amaze me on how disgustingly irresponsible Singaporean/PRs are when they attend this fair be it being the vendor or the purchaser. It spells the shortest life span of any brochures print in this world. The electronic big names employs part-time job thirsty undergrads to give away brochures to consumers like us who dumps it immediately into the paper boxes just 3 steps away.

Information overload. How do you choose a laptop with 20 brochures and 10,000 people rubbing shoulders plus half-educated ah bengs shouting out discounted prices of their products across the exhibition halls ?

What is the best response when any of the eager to serve kid asks you " Hi looking for laptops ? " most will keep quiet and walked on. Polite ones will say " looking around only "
So this is a mass orgy to celebrate technogy. Come together to feel the opulence of retailer and consumer. The taxi queue is formed by a line of trolleys that came free with the printer you buy. Amazing. Everyone has something to buy. Everything comes with free giftssss. And free gifts always comes with its usual price if bought separately to show u how much you have gained.
Only Singapore has the quality in its consumers to stage such a distorted retail extravaganza every 3 months.

IT Fair has spread its roots into unseen territories. We are seeing more laptop sales than desktop. This is fair. Probably the only logical thing that happened for this IT Fair. because at the most conspicous entrance of the 6th floor exibition hall you will find yourself slapped with bright sale tags for FRIDGE and WASHING MACHINES. I am not sure whether they are to freeze your overheated Intel Chips or to WASh off the virus in your harddisc. But they are there. Hiding at one corner, but not wasting time at all is SINGAPORE POOLS trying to get people to set up phone betting accounts at the IT fair. I will spare the credit card companies because they are suppose to be everywhere. But most absurdly Nutrisoy trying to give out samples and selling SOYA BEAN MILK at the IT fair. This means this is not an IT fair afterall. Just a big scale Pasar Malam.

I did my national day parade thru 4th and 6th floor, stopped momentarily to speak to the standing soldiers of the IT Fair asking seemingly in depth questions to make them feel important. It was a friday early afternoon so the crowd was just nice for the oxygen percentile to remain healthy.

A few products did interest me though.

Trend spotter number 1 - more are taking MP3 players seriously. So we have good people from Samsung and Sony selling Mp3 players at cheap affordable price ( just because it is time to clear old stock to make way for the new stock ). I remember the good days 10 years back when i first got my FIRST MP3 player ( the brand was Wewa, Taiwan brand ) it was state of the art 128 MEGABYTE mp3 player with NO expandable memory. I can store 30 songs in it , 32 if i am lucky. Then i knew MP3 players will surely be the next big thing. The very fact that a lipstick size gadget can bring music to the ears with almost no pocket space needed is just bliss. Think walkman and CD player. Think jeans pocket. Not very sexy without an MP3 player.
Now we have 4 gig player with expandable memory wih video play back voice recording plus radio and a clock. Enuff to steal a good portion of any companies trade secrets with your MP3 player.

The next IT fair will come before i forget about this episode. Lets see whether my dream MP3 player will be at half the cost or perhaps appear as a free gift with the next washing machine i buy .

Review on a not so popular phone

Recently I bought a new phone - LG Viewty ( catchy catch line - view the next technology ). Why did I decide to write this review ? Well i think there is a lack of good indepth review about this phone out there so i just want to put my few cents worth for readers.
Firstly the big question. why am i a sucker to buy it. I am really really not sure. i think it is the fact that no one really wants to buy it. LG has been pushing this phone with lots of advertisement on paper and TV media. I have yet to come across 2 person having this phone now. I am highly curious why this is so because this phone boast the first 5 mega pixel phone with 120 frames per second video recording. This is definitely a first for camera phones.
So i guess curiosity kills a cat. If i do not lay my hands on one i would not be convinced that this is a lousy phone that no one wants it.
This phone cost SGD 838 dollars retail price off the shelve with no strings attached. But i signed a plan with Starhub and got this at SGD 338 dollars. And with the loyalty voucher i got from starhub it cost me 100 dollars less so i paid $238. And this phone was in promotion with Jeff Chang Concert tickets. I got a pair of tickets for free ( each worth SGD 90) so essentially i paid about $50 for this phone.
The packaging of this phone is superb. I have never seen a better packaging. LG actually bothers with the phone box and packaging. Each of the component comes with a nice sleek black box with nice silver font saying what is inside. The sevral small blackboxes snuggles nicely in the main box which is a hard cased cardboard box. Nice sleek. No complains. You get what you paid for ( for the packging at least)
The first thing that strikes me is not the phone. it is the little stylus that comes along with it. This stylus is like NO other stylus that you have seen in the market because it is retractable. And it retracts into a lip stick like cap. very very sleek but also very very " gu niang". My stylus is still in the box. come to think of it .. only LG dares to design a phone without a stylus slot. it is suppose to hang dangling off one corner of the phone as an accesory ! Cool and not cool.
ok come back to the phone functions. This phone lacks nothing. it has everything you would love to have so i will not go through the obvious. I will just highlight the touch screen. it is a good one. The LG icons are nice and the touch screen key pad comes with a vibration when you touch a button to simulate a "real" key pressing down. This is a pretty cool function. Sensitivity wise i would give it an average because the touch screen cant scroll that well but it works really well on button tapping.
The camera works like a beauty. Really the selling point. it comes with some funky photoshoot options like panaroma which produce a rather decent job. Video recording is easy to use as well.
It does take sometime to get use to tapping on a flat screen for messaging and dailing but it is just a phase that you need to go thru breaking into a phone.
One draw back about this phone perhaps is the phone's PC suite. it is not design by the best programmers in the world. It is a challenge to decipher how the designer want you to work with it. Highly not intuitive but then we get by. But for sure this is one area LG would like to improve on.
I will give this phone a 8/10 overall score. despite the intial irritating phase of gettng use to the phone touch screen and software. it is a beauty itself because everyday you discover one more function it can perform. little surprises that comes along.
The best thing i think is that not many has it. you can easily churn a topic when you bump into anyone by flashing your phone. simply a beauty.