Nokia 5800

Awhile back I had the chance to play with the new Nokia 5800, complete with access to the Nokia Music Store, and here are my thoughts (note this review is restricted to phone, music store and internet functionality as I did not have a working sim card):

Speakers
One of the first things I tested was the speakers, and the verdict? I’ve heard laptop speakers that sound worse than this little phone. They are amazingly clear and powerful and the Nokia people definitely put some thought into the functionality of a music phone. Of course, I’m not sure if people on public transport share the same opinion when that annoying teenager is blasting his music from the back of the bus.

Touchpad
The touchpad was the biggest source of frustration because it’s nowhere like the iPhone’s (which I’m used to). Scrolling felt sluggish and quite like a chore, and after about a day of use I resorted to using the stylus exclusively.

Nokia Music Store (via phone)
Coupled with the touchpad issues that I had, the menus for the Nokia Music Store weren’t terribly intuitive (and admittedly, I didn’t read the user manual). Sometimes double tapping got me where I wanted to go, sometimes tapping and holding did. It wasn’t terribly consistent. As far as the Music Store on the phone goes, I was fairly happy. It was relatively easy to get what I wanted and speeds were fairly quick.

Nokia Music Store (via computer)
Using the store via computer was a slightly better experience just because there’s more space to navigate on a laptop screen than on a phone. Searching by artist was pretty easy and some of the results really surprised me, showing tracks or albums I never expected to find. However the usability of it wasn’t as strong as with the phone access and speeds were terrible (I was using the same mobile broadband access for both the phone and the computer usage). Around the same period another person online was complaining about disruptive connection on the streaming plan he purchased, so I’m guessing it was an error on the other end.

All in all, while there were little usability hiccups along the way, the value proposition of getting unlimited music even while on the go is a strong one which can probably eclipse any minor snags along the way.

[image credit: letsgomobile.org]

I got an email from Marc of Text 100 awhile back:

URL shortening services are great, especially for microbloggers. However they provide fraudsters with a golden opportunity to exploit the service for phishing and spamming. For example we now witness get-rich-quick schemes simply banking on the perceived legitimacy of the shortening service.

In addition:

• Singapore rose from 11th place to 9th for country/region in which the most malicious activity takes place or originates in APJ.

• Singapore came in 5th for top countries/regions of origin for Web-based attacks in APJ, ranked only after China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Globally, Singapore ranks in 26th place.

The advice? Use an URL lengthening tool when clicking on these links so that you can reveal where the true web destination is. I don’t know about you, but my data is precious and I don’t want to lose it, nor let someone have access to my email and other accounts, so what’s downloading another add on to protect yourself!

Full details of the threat can be found at the Symantec blog.

I was listening to the awesome podcast Marketing Over Coffee, and there’s a great tip in there for keeping track of who’s doing what with your email address. Or at least your Gmail address.

It turns out, Gmail addresses can be “customised” by adding a + (that’s a plus sign) immediately after your username, and adding something after that, but you’ll still get it delivered to your Gmail account.

That’s a little confusing, so here’s what I mean:

Let’s say you’re entering this contest or registering at a website (let’s call it abcd). Naturally, they need your email address (let’s call it myemail@gmail.com).

What you do is fill in your email as myemail+abcd@gmail.com, and all correspondence from abcd to you, will still be delivered to your regular email address (myemail@gmail.com),.

The great thing is, should abcd ever sell your address to say, an insurance company, that inbound email from that insurance company will reach you, and you will see that it has the +abcd attached, and therefore, abcd sold or shared your personal details, then you can blog about it an raise hell online.

Neat, huh?

Rewind back to the IT Show last month (where I bought my kick ass new desktop), I also got the Western Digital HDTV Media Player, which I have been enjoying immensely ever since.

What does it do? Very simple. You connect it to a TV via a HDMI (or RGB) cable, insert in a USB thumbdrive or harddisk (or both, since it has two USB ports), and it’ll automatically scan the drives for photos, music and videos, and enable to play them straight to your TV. One cable, one device, one USB drive is all you need. And by the way, this thing is pretty small, check it out taken against a regular DVD box:

WD HDTV Media Player Size

Needless to say, this little contraption (that can be bought for between $175 and $190, depending where you get it), is really awesome. It literally plays any media format you throw at it (except for .rm files) and the quality is excellent when connected to and viewed on a HDTV. Even my mum took the opportunity to show off just about a thousand pictures from her USB drive.

The only negative thing about this device is that it can really heat up, and even when it’s switched off, power is still supplied to the Media Player as well as any USB drives that may be attached to it. I’m sure it’s not a big deal, but I personally prefer to switch off the mains so that it never gets overheated. But that’s definitely not a deal breaker, and I’d recommend the Media Player to anyone who might want to watch videos, listen to music and show pictures on their TV, because this really is one of my better buys of 2009 (so far).

A few weeks ago, Reuben, Rubin and I headed down to the IT Show, and I had the intention of getting a new desktop. We eventually ended up at one of the booths, Chamoxa, and got a 3.0Ghz duo core processor, 4gb of ram, and a Nvidia graphics card, the GTX 260 (along with the power source and other peripherals).

Desktop: Parts

Here’s a short video of how it looks like, put together, take note how huge the monster of the graphics card is:

All in all, I’m really happy with how the desktop turned out (especially since it only cost $1,185). Dawn of War II, Empire: Total War, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress2 all look fantastic, and future games should stay that way for a time to come.

Desktop: Assembled

Songbird Logo

I’m pretty obsessive about my music. I like the tags to be right, the cd cover image to be right, and all information should be correct. Windows Media Player does a good job of playing music, but not storing it as a library. Mediamonkey does the library function well, but doesn’t have enough worthwhile features for me to pay for it’s full functionality. iTunes… well, let’s just say if iTunes disappeared off the face of this earth, I wouldn’t be sorry.

Enter Songbird. The best way to describe it? Songbird takes the best features of the other media players (alright, I guess iTunes may have one), and combines to form what I feel is the best media player and manager around. It even made #8 of the Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008 on ReadWriteWeb. There are many reasons why Songbird is just awesome, here are a few:

1) Add-ons and Plugins
Songbird is like the Firefox of media players. The applications you can add on are incredible. Take a look at my screenshot. The mediaflow (like iTune’s coverflow) looks impressive, artist information is available at the bottom, and to the right is a customisable panel where you can put anything from your Last.fm tracks, recommendations for similar artists or lyrics for that particular song. Lifehacker has a list of the Killer Add Ons that you will want to install.

Songbird - Plugins

2) Integrated Music Discovery
Something that Songbird has embedded, is The Hype Machine, which lets you search the latest and most popular music on the internet. The amount of new tracks I’ve discovered and listened to from The Hype Machine is astounding, and I play with it for a couple of minutes every time I open Songbird.

3) Tabs
Surf the internet, right from your media player. That’s right, you heard me. Songbird has tabs. So you can open a tab and check your email right from within Songbird, while your music is playing. How about that for some cool functionality?

Songbird - Tabs

4) Character
When I tried to change the theme/skin of my Songbird programme, it wasn’t listed as a theme or skin. I was asked if I wanted to change “feathers”. How’s that for an application that has a little bit of quirkiness?

I love Songbird and you should really give it a go. If you’re ready to try, you can download it from their website. If you need more convincing, how about checking out 10 Things Songbird Does That iTunes Can’t?

[image credits: Songbird logo]

These were a gift from the fiancee two years ago, and as much as I took care of them, they finally died a natural death after serving me well on many, many travels. Annoyingly, they chose to die when I was on a 3hr train ride from Toronto to Kingston, so I couldn’t watch as many episodes of How I Met Your Mother as I would’ve liked.

Anyway, enter the replacements:

They’re called Skullcandy earphones and came recommended at the store. They are admittedly a little cutesy (the red bits has a small skull on them), but the sound quality isn’t bad. The bass is a little stronger than I’m used to from the Audiotechnica ones, but all in all it’s pretty decent. That said, I’m probably still going to buy an Audiotechnica set when I find them (Kingston is too small to have a big electronics place). The difference between a $25 pair of earphones and a $100+ one is still detectable.

In the meantime, if anyone has any recommendations, let’s hear them! I don’t need active noise cancellation, but in-ear ones that block out noise will be good enough. Basically as long as I can walk down the street and not hear random conversations, it’s fine! Thank you in advance.

Yesterday was the HP TouchSmart PC Blogger’s Nite at Brotzeit and I have to say I had a blast. Hands down it was the best blogger event I’ve attended (yes, even over my own Social Media Breakfast: Singapore). And I’m not saying that because I organised it, but there was just something about a killer product, great people, great venue and alcohol that makes for an awesome event. And there is no charge for awesomeness!!

So I’m going to launch straight into the pictures and not talk about what the HP TouchSmart PC can do because there are write-ups and videos up already at Sheylara and Claudia’s blogs. Claudia has a great video, check that out!

Brian, Mark and me

Me and Hisham

Me and Krisandro

Jacelyn and I

Me and the Geek Goddess herself, Estee

Me and Daphne

Myself and Yin

A table full of Pingsters!

Me and Nicole

Jerrick, Sheylara, me and Darryl

Sheylara, myself and Nadnut

My competition on Plurk, Jerrick with his new “harem” consisting of Darryl

Rinaz, Jacelyn and Coleman

Drinking on the job

Claudia taking a picture of me taking a picture of her through the glass with Matt taking a picture of us taking each other.

Jerrick jumping into my shot of the crowd

Early arrivals

Beeeeeer.

99 bottles of beer on the wall… 99 bottles of beeeeerrrr

mugs!

Brotzeit

The note scribbled by the bloggers says it all.

Remember what happened to my Ipod screen? Well, the feedback came in and an Ipod Touch it is.

Thanks to Wanida, I got it from Apple and saved some money and I’ve been playing around with it for today and here’s what I really like:

• The screen – Wow. 3.5 inches makes a huge difference over 2.5 inches. Utterly amazing to watch videos on this thing. My flight to Canada is going to be so much more enjoyable now!
• Photos – The capability to zoom in on your photos and move them around and everything is just phenomenal. Such a great way to show photos to friends and family!
• Wifi – I tested the Wifi at home and it’s great. The way I can zoom in on certain parts of the webpage and them navigate around is really amazing. If I’m at a Starbucks and have both my phone and Ipod Touch with me, I’ll use the Touch even though my phone gets wifi too.

Un-surprisingly, I’ve used the Touch for everything but music. I do think this is the ultimate in media portability. Music, videos, tv series, podcasts, video podcasts, pictures and the internet all on a neat (but expensive) device. Next best technological purchase next to my phone and mobile broadband modem.

Oh one thing though, I’m glad the Iphone wasn’t my eventual decision for the new gadget. I had to retype my username and password for Gmail four times because I couldn’t get the darn keys right!