The Big Picture in Mobile Knowledge Worker Trends

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a "big picture" model to describe mobile workers and their role and power. This is all based on my experiences in the telco and Internet industries, my current work style, and general technology trends. Here's my thought : knowledge workers do not need to have an all-powerful device with them all the time, merely something that can give them universal access to all that power. Is what we have today enough? Good enough, for most uses. It's improving, and in the right direction. There's always going to be something faster, smaller and cheaper - well maybe not cheaper down the road. However, as we see now, availability is more important than capacity. Intel's Centrino platform emphasises on better battery life and wireless performance over pure processing power- letting you work longer hours without a recharge. You have VNC, telnet, web frontends, FTP, and therefore access to any number of applications to do what you need - right at your laptop. Phones, notebooks and tablets allow knowledge workers to produce, link and access multimedia content anywhere. Your smartphone today captures your thoughts and ideas in text, drawings, photos, audio and video - enabling you to produce content in a relevant, timely manner. We are simultaneously producers and consumers. Telecom companies don't get this - 10 years after the failed interactive TV projects, 5 years after the failure of "walled garden" WAP portals. Telcos are still obsessed with keeping the content within their control, with their "we know best for our customers" attitude. How do we share this content? With high speed wireless access - via WiFi, EVDO, EDGE, 3G and beyond you can do it anywhere. Again, it can be faster today - but it's fast enough right now to make a difference. With Bluetooth finally gaining ground among device makers, there's a lot of sharing and commercial transactions "at the fringe" - at no profit to the telcos. Meanwhile, personal portable storage gets cheaper for the person on the street. RM300 (US$75) will get you a 200GB external hard disk (paperback book form factor) or 1GB SD card (postage stamp form factor). Warranty periods are increasing - 5 years for hard disks and lifetime for SD, showing increased confidence in high reliability of modern storage mechanisms. That's enough to store your own content, and affordable terabyte home servers in portable form factors should be appearing within the next 18-24 months. With software like Orb, you will be able to access this content anywhere. Responsible copyright behaviour releases more and more data and media into the public domain, for example via Archive.org . And being a producer means you can get your stuff out to the public, too, via outlets such as Wikipedia and Ourmedia, not to mention blogs. With Creative Commons and similar licences, our ability to produce and derive, and mash up content grows exponentially. And any scrap of data, any small thought or idea could be useful to someone, somewhere, someday. As with everything else, 90% of it will be crap but with peer reviews the cream will still rise to the top. With all this content and data available, even making new discoveries will be easier. Imagine searching for specific event patterns across 50 years of TV. Utility computing makes it easy and cheap to do complex studies, simulations and calculations, without having to invest in any infrastructure. The Sun Grid and IBM/Lotus Workplace service promise processing, software and storage rental by the CPU and by the hour. The ease of setup and use of Apple's Xserve, Xserve RAID and cluster node system may see the rise many small "mom-and-pop" of specialised supercomputer clusters and grids. It's possible that we will see clusters for bioinformatics, mass marketing trends, for stock market simulations, for natural disaster prediction - for anything that makes sense. The one thing that ties everything together is the ability to find, and to put the pieces together. The ultimate, universal finder right now is still Google. You can search for text from HTML and PDF, for photos, for information within videos, you can search from your mobile phone and PDA. And putting pieces together? That's the role of the knowledge worker. For example, say I'm a Glenn Fleishman-wannabe with a passion for everything WiFi. I'm sitting in a cafe, sipping a cappuccino and surfing the web on my laptop. And it occurs to me, how many people are doing the same thing that I am, and what do they do? I'd go to Google and dig up data on number of cafes with WiFi access across the world, number of WiFi-enabled laptops and PDAs, average download speeds via DSLreports, and obtain some private data on average WiFi connect time from some service aggregator like Boingo. With all that data, I'd figure out a model of how everything connects to each other, send it to Sun to crunch the statistics, and end up with results that would be interesting for other wireless pundits and a hardware manufacturer or service provider. It won't matter where I am, or how powerful my laptop is. Like I mentioned in the beginning, it's a matter of what applications and data I can access, and what I choose to do with it. Download the Big Picture diagram in JPEG and PDF. I would love to get feedback on this. Send me email or post a comment. Tags: Mobile Knowledge Worker Free Agents Wireless Grid Computing

James Dyson quote on Product Development

Some wise words of wisdom from the British inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner: "Anyone developing new products and new technology needs one characteristic above all else: hope. This comes down to a few elements: * having high expectations that you will succeed - despite any setbacks or frustrations * having the sense to break down an imposing task into smaller, manageable ones * believing that you are able to achieve your goals, whatever they may be. Be dogged and determined * and don't be afraid to be different." This would be true for any project or business. [via MetaCool]

7 Ways to use your PDA

1. Remind you of events Meetings, birthdays, anniversaries : you never have to memorise them, thanks to Date Book (Calendar). Set an alarm 2-3 days before the event to give you plenty of time to send a card, arrange dinner, buy a gift, or plan a getaway. 2. Keep connected Put all your contact information in your Address Book (Contacts). Instantly lookup an address when you need it. Even better, jot down your impressions of that person immediately after a meeting for next time. 3. Replace your business card. If you meet someone else with a Palm, beam (send) over your business card via Infra Red or Bluetooth. You can add as much information as you like, and you save your counterpart some work. 4. Be prepared Keep all the notes and information about a potential customer in your Palm before a meeting. Store all product or service info so you never have to say "I'll get back to you on that". 5. Fill up your spare time A large portion of the workday is wasted waiting - for a client, for a colleague, for a traffic jam to clear up. Download an ebook or two, and those Internet articles. 6. Arrange priorities Keep a to do list of all your objectives and things to do. 7. Do it now Send an email, draft a follow up letter, create a proposal. Jot down your ideas down and do it now. It's harder to leave things unfinished once you've started on them. I wrote this five years ago. All seven points are still valid today, perhaps more than ever. The PDA has now transformed into the smartphone, and almost all mobile phones now have organizer-like functionality. Like it or not, the runaway success of Jeff Dubinsky's original Palm Pilot PDA has changed the lives of a whole lot of people. Tags: PDA Palm

Mac OS X Tiger - Dropping soon

Apple's latest operating system - Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is reported to have entered final candidate status and should be released in April. I'm looking forward to a few new features such as Spotlight (a cool desktop search engine) and Dashboard (progammable widgets). Tiger sells for $130, but Amazon has a $35 rebate if you pre-order now. For $95 it's very good value, considering that each successive version of Mac OS X actually makes my hardware faster (hear that, Microsoft?). Tags: Apple Mac OS X Tiger

My gadgets : New External Hard Drive

I am starting a new personal project - building a media repository to consolidate and backup all my media files - image, text, audio, video. This means all my ebooks and reference documents, photos, music, audiobooks and podcasts, TV series, and movies would be in one place. I bought a 160GB hard drive and external enclosure at the PC Fair, for RM388 (USD$100). The enclosure is nothing special, quite cheap and easy to install - 2 connectors (power and data) and eight screws to hold everything in place. The actual space on the Seagate hard drive is around 149GB, which is enough for around 300 hours of video. The enclosure supports USB 2.0 (High Speed) which is fast enough when transferring data from my iBook. One problem is that most of my stuff is archived on hundreds of CDs, and my CD drive (being a combo DVD/CDRW) on the iBook only reads at 24x speed. So it takes around 10 minutes to copy over a CD, depending on the number of files. The final result would be to have all of my digital media in a box the size of a paperback book. With storage costs getting lower and lower, I would anticipate that I would have a terabyte of data (1000GB) within the next 18 months. I am working on a concept, a "big picture" of how this would affect people like me within the next few years. I'll talk about the concept further in an upcoming blog entry. In the meantime, I have already filled up 40GB of my new drive - and there's plenty more where that came from.

Cool tip : Adobe PDF to Text conversion

This is an excellent, little-known tool. If you have an Adobe PDF file you need converted to plain text or HTML), all you need to do is email it to Adobe. They will send back the converted file to you. It's that easy! For plain text, email the PDF file to pdf2txt@adobe.com, for HTML, pdf2html@adobe.com. I tried it out, and it took only 2 minutes to convert a 100kb file (including time to send and receive email). The results: Document : Futurefeedforward.pdf File Size : 96.9KB Converted File : Futurefeedforward.txt File Size : 39.2KB This is a great tool - I no longer need to use the Adobe Palm client, which is slow as molasses. I can convert text files to Palm doc format using Pordible. [via Lifehacker]

BCF saga update 2

Tonight Bob delivered my new road tax sticker along with a photocopy of my geran kereta and insurance documents. Thanks to Bob and Osman from BCF.

BCF saga update

Bob from BCF Kampung Baru called me at 5.45pm this evening. My geran was with him and we made arrangements to meet for him to pick up my insurance cover note. We met at my neighbourhood Giant supermarket at 9pm tonight. Tomorrow he will do my road tax for me. So far so good.

Treo 650 : GSM ROM update

Today I downloaded the Treo 650 GSM ROM updater from a member of the KVPUG forum. The zipped file is approximately 9.5MB in size. This is the same ROM updater available at Palm service centres but it hasn't been released to the general public. Of course I had to try it. This update addresses the oft-mentioned NVFS (Non-Volatile File System) bloat - it includes the NVFS improvements that optimize memory handling and free up more memory. My free space almost doubled from 5.4MB to 11MB. The instructions (from the README file) are quite straightforward: 1) Backup your Treo data 2) Extract palm.zip to a SD card 3) Hard reset your Treo 4) Insert the SD card to Treo and follow the onscreen instructions to complete the upgrade. I backed up my data using triple redundancy : BackupMan (to SD card), palmOne's Hotsync (to my iBook) and SyncBuddy (also to iBook). Updating the ROM took about 45 minutes from start to finish, including backup and restore. Restoring took the longest time because I have a lot of Calendar, Contacts and Memo entries. I'm happy to say that there were no hiccups during the process. Before : Firmware : 1.14 Software : Treo650-1.05-ROW After: Firmware : 1.15 Software : Treo650-1.06-ROW Since the Sprint ROM update is already out, I expect the official GSM version will be out soon. Tags: Treo Palm Smartphone

Thumbs down : Bumiputra Commerce Finance

It's only 10 in the morning and already I'm having a bad day. Bright and early this morning, I braved rush hour traffic to get my geran kereta (car ownership grant) from my car finance company to renew my road tax (which expires tomorrow). My finance company, Bumiputra Commerce Finance (BCF) is in Menara Promet. For those of you who are familiar with Menara Promet, it has basement parking facilities typical to that of many city centre buildings : narrow and winding paths, sliding parking mechanisms, guest parking only at the bottom levels, expensive hourly charge - overall a very painful parking experience. After parking at level B4, I went to the ground floor. Lo and behold, there was no BCF there! Instead there were brand new offices, under the name of Bumiputra Tijara (??). I was then informed that BCF had moved to PJ. Well, that's news to me. No letters from BCF, no email, no call. I didn't see a notice in the newspapers. There is no BCF website. Bizchannel still has the old addresses : http://www.bizchannel.com.my/BCF/listing_of_branches.html http://www.bizchannel.com.my/BCF/about_bcf.html What kind of business doesn't inform its customers that they are moving? Even my newspaper deliveryman will give ample notice when he goes on his annual holiday. To top it off, as I was exiting the car park, there was no one at the parking booth! I had to wait for the parking attendant to come, and then wait some more as they had no change for my RM10 ("saya belum tukar duit lagi, bang"). The barrier was up at entry and so I had no ticket. I arrived at 9.30am and left at 9.45am. And they had the cheek to dispute the time of my arrival. So I called up the new BCF number, selected Road Tax from the IVR - no answer after 20 rings! I called again and asked for the Customer Service Manager. A gentleman by the name of Osman answered. So why was I not informed of the address change? "Ini kali pertama saya dengar kes macam ni." No indication whatsoever that they ever sent a notice. No apologies for my trouble. "Macam mana Encik bayar bil bulan-bulan?" I pay my monthly loan installments online, so there was never any need to go to the BCF office except for this annual occasion. Initially, he insisted that I come to the PJ office (which is along the Federal Highway aka traffic hell) to pick up my geran. There is no way that I'm going to spend another 1.5 hours in traffic for this. After much discussion, he finally agreed to send a runner to pick up my insurance cover note from my office - "tapi saya tak berani janji". They need to do it today. We'll see what happens next.

Fav Links : Baen Books

Who says nothing is free nowadays? Baen is a book publisher that "gets it". The Baen Free Library contains a selection of ebooks from their back catalogue. For fans of Science Fiction & Fantasy, this is a treasure. Best of all, they are made available DRM-free in your choice of formats (Palm Doc, Mobipocket, HTML, etc). Several of their hardcover books have included CDs with dozens of ebooks. If you do some Googling, you might even find the CDs online. Baen also has a service called Webscriptions which gives you access to their latest books (in ebook form, again) even before they are released to the public.

Treo 650 Review : Part 3

Continuing my review of the palmOne Treo 650 smartphone. Read Part 1 and Part 2 first. Having unlimited GPRS/EDGE service is a double-edged sword. One one hand, I am productive anytime, anywhere. On the other hand, it's very difficult to "slow down". The freedom and power while on the move is intoxicating, and extremely addictive. I can't help but check my email at every opportunity, and my list of mobile bookmarks grows by the day. By power I mean I don't need to have the most powerful computer in the palm of my hand - only access to it. I have remote access applications on my Treo (e.g. ptelnet, VNC) if I need to do something myself, and SMS, IM, email and web access if I need someone else to do it. On the "Phone" part of the smartphone, PalmOne has been slowly evolving their application suite over the past several generations of PDAs. This is why you have many different browsers on the palmOne PDAs, including Web Browser Pro and Blazer. Both my TT3 and Zire72 had email, SMS and Web applications, and the Zire72 also added an MMS application. The Treo650 sports a combined SMS/MMS messaging app called Messaging, which is well integrated with the camera and address book. It's a pretty seamless process to take a photo or capture a video, add a sound recording and send it out via MMS. Both sending and receiving MMS worked "out of the box" for me. For SMS, it has a "threaded message/chat-like interface" for those back and forth SMS conversations. This makes it easy to communicate with several people at one time. I'm a heavy user of email. My corporate email address is forwarded to my Gmail account and I download all my messages to Versamail. I have used many different versions of Versmail, even back in the old Multimail days. The latest version is 3.0B, which is similar to its predecessors. There is an option to sync/download your email from as often as every 5 minutes. I discovered soon enough that this was a mistake, because an "always on" GPRS connection seriously drains your battery life. Versamail can download attachments, and Word and Excel files can be opened natively by Documents To Go. Conclusion for Communications Overall, I am quite impressed with the communications abilities of the Treo 650. I would consider it a real smartphone, as opposed to a PDA with phone functions attached to it or vice versa. Because the applications are in various stages of maturity and integration, they do not have a consistent user interface. For example, "Disconnect" is in different menu locations for Versamail and Blazer. Unless they change web browsers again, I would expect to see a streamlined interface in the next version of the Treo. Top on my wish list is an integrated Communications suite ala the Psion Series 5/7 - an all-in-one email, SMS/MMS, IM and fax application. Tags: Treo Palm Smartphone

Gmail help needed!

I have 3825 email messages totalling 993MB in my Gmail account. Since the Gmail team said, "why delete email when you have 1GB?" - I did just that, and never deleted my email. Downloading old emails (from the beginning) stops at 300+ emails, for some reason. Anyone have any idea how to proceed? Can I pay Google to get 2GB? The search is fast and invaluable.

Treo 650 : Free MultimediaCard

Just about everybody complains about the Treo 650's skimpy memory. For US buyers, you can claim a free 128MB SD card here. As soon as I bought my Treo, I tried to use the online web form but it would not accept my ID number. So I sent an email to the Asia support group. Apparently, they won't just give the card to everyone who buys the Treo 650. You need to convince them that you are a "power user" and the 22MB RAM isn't enough for you. For me, I gave them my Palm history and gave them serial numbers of my past Palms including the TT3 and Zire72. Yesterday (three weeks later) I received an MMC card in the mail, postmarked Singapore. No notes, no cards or anything else, just the MMC in its case and the bubble wrap. It was the ATP brand. For those who are interested, here are the VFSmark results : File Create: 248% File Delete: 213% File Write: 52% File Read: 236% File Seek: 513% DB Export: 154% DB Import: 316% Record Access: 470% Resource Access: 436% VFSMark: 293 So the bad news : - it's an MMC, not an SD card - it's slow (slower than my three year old 64MB PRETEC MMC) The good news : - it's free - I didn't have to wait too long for it, and didn't face much of a hassle.

Treo 650 : Return of the voice memo

Owners of the Treo 650 smartphone would notice two applications missing : Voice Memo and NotePad. Well, the Voice Memo application from the Zire72 works with the Treo! Just transfer the following files to the Treo 650: -VoicePad-Vpad.prc -VoicePad-Vpad_enUS.prc You need a file manager like Filez to copy the files. The Voice Memo application doesn't support the 5-way navigator but all other functions work, including automatically saving voice memos to SD card. I have mapped my side button to activate Voice Memo. I don't understand why PalmOne didn't include the application in the Treo650 in the first place, considering that the smartphone is primarily a business tool, and Voice Memo is only 100k in size. Tags: Treo Palm Smartphone [via Treocentral Forums]

Fav Links : PocketMovies.net

If you have a multimedia PDA, then head on over to PocketMovies.net. They have a lot of small movies, mostly in MPEG1 and DivX format. In most cases you don't need to convert the files to view on your PalmOS or PocketPC PDA, just load it up to your SD/CF card. Choose from ads (including the infamous Office XP ad), trailers and short movies. Perfect for those many many instances of 2-5 minutes we spend in the queue.

Treo 650 Review - Part 2

It's been almost 3 weeks since I got my Treo 650. I am continuing my review in bits and pieces. This time, I will focus on the communications aspects. The "smartphone" concept is a convergence between two different tools : the PDA (personal digital assistant) and the mobile phone. Companies from both ends of the spectrum (e.g. palmOne, from the PDA world and Nokia, from the mobile phone world) are introducing their own smartphones with varying degrees of success. In most cases, it's very difficult to balance between the "phone" and the "PDA". The Treo 650 works well enough as a phone - and it's very easy to use. There are dedicated "Call" (Green) and "Hang Up" (Red) hardware buttons which are common on almost any mobile phone. The Phone application is a simple yet clever combination of a normal phone keypad and an application launcher. You can easily see your battery life, your signal strength (including GPRS availability) and Bluetooth status. Voice quality is fair. The speakerphone is not loud, mainly because the speaker is at the back of the unit. I use DiGi as my service provider, and all the settings were automatically loaded upon startup. In the SIM Services application, it detected the djuice service: The data services (GPRS/EDGE) were also automatically detected, with zero configuration on my side : EDGE support is excellent where I am: Blazer is a solid web browser - if a bit schizophrenic. It's called Web in Applications, but when it opens up it's called Blazer. palmOne has used many different browsers in their various devices in the past that it's hard to keep track. All that aside, Blazer renders text and images well - and like the name, it really is fast. These are the various Applications that I've grouped into the Communications category: In the next part of the review, I will talk about Messaging (SMS, MMS, Email and Chat). You can get your own Treo 650 at your local retailer or from Amazon. Tags: Treo Palm Smartphone

Treo 650 Bluetooth Headset

Six months after releasing the Treo 650 smartphone, palmOne finally has a Bluetooth Headset specially designed for it. Apparently palmOne took the easy way out : rebrand the Jabra BT330 Bluetooth headset, and modify it to accept the Treo power adaptor. I'm still happy with my Sony Ericsson HBH-600 headset, but it's always good to have one less charger to carry. From the palmOne website : * The unique hook-shaped over-ear design flips smoothly from right to left and can be easily adjusted to fit your ear * Well positioned speaker provides crisp, clear sound * Lithium-Ion Polymer battery provides up to 7 hours talk time and 170 hours standby and charges in 2 hours with the included AC adapter or Treo 650 smartphone adapter * Multifunction button allows you to answer calls, last number redial, put calls on hold and more * Dedicated volume buttons make adjustments easy * Secure voice transmission provided by advanced Bluetooth communication protocols * Headset weight: 0.595 oz (16.9 gm) * Works up to 33 feet from the phone * Bluetooth 1.2 compliant Comes with: Headset, AC Adaptor (100-240V) with 5 International Plugs, Carrying Pouch, User Manual Tags: Treo Palm Bluetooth

Mac mini - Choose your colour

The folks at Colorware will soon introduce 20 colour options for the Mac mini. If you're tired of basic white, or if you want to match your mini with your audio/home theatre system, this is worth getting. Prices start at US$599. [Via Engadget.]

The Treo 710

What, I've just started with my review of the Treo 650 and they're already coming up with a new version? Actually, no. The folks at Treonauts tried their hand at imagining a new smartphone by combining the Treo 650 with the Blackberry 7290. At palmOne's current rate of development, we'll probably only see a new Treo model in October this year or April next year. The Zire7x series is due for a refresh, though. On another note, the twice-yearly "Apple's going to release a PDA" rumour is out again, this time at Powerpage. Everyone seems to think that Apple is going to resurrect a version of the Newton (with iPod-like success, of course) and singlehandedly save the handheld computer industry. At this point I think it's a matter of timing and $$$ potential to Apple rather than anything else. I'm sure Jonathan Ive and his team at Apple can outdesign and outmarket anything available in the market today. Tags: Treo Palm Smartphone

Scenes from Kuala Lumpur - Early morning

Early morning (or really late night, if you prefer) - 4am, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Jalan Sultan Ismail /Jalan Kinabalu: Jalan Tun Razak/Jalan Ampang: Jalan Hang Tuah/Jalan Loke Yew: The Federal Highway: Courtesy of the Kuala Lumpur City Hall City Transport Department online traffic cameras. I cannot sleep.

My gadgets : palmOne Treo 650

The Treo 650 is the latest in my history of PDA acquisitions. Starting from a Psion Series 3A in 1995, I have used, in order : - PalmPilot Professional (1MB) - Palm V 2MB, later upgraded to (8MB) - Palm m505 (8MB) - Palm Zire (2MB) - Palm Zire 71 (16MB) - Palm Tungsten T2 (32MB) - Palm Tungsten T3 (64MB) - Palm Zire 72 (32MB) The Treo is my first smartphone (combined mobile phone and PDA), and my first PDA with a keyboard in 10 years. It's taking me some time to get used to the keyboard, after many years with Graffitti. As previously mentioned, the T650 is compelling to me because of the upgrades : high speed mobile wireless (EDGE) support, removable battery, and Bluetooth. Many people see the limited available memory (23MB, plus a 30% larger file sizes due to the new file system) as a major no-no. I have learnt to live with limited resources before so this doesn't bother me. I still use a 256MB SD card for music, documents, and photos. The T650 is smaller than my Zire72, and feels a bit heavier. This is fine because it will replace both the Zire72 and my Sony Ericsson T630 mobile phone. The screen is beautiful. The resolution is the same as the Zire (320x320 pixels), but because the screen size is smaller, the images look sharp and crisp. By the way, palmOne includes a free screen protector (check inside your manual). Here's the traditional "box-opening" photo gallery : Included in the box are : - Treo 650 smartphone - Lithium-ion battery - AC charger - USB HotSync cable - Headset - Software Installation CDs (Windows and Mac) - User guide The sync and charge cable seen here was bundled in by my regular retailer. Here are the specifications from palmOne: wireless radio • GSM/GPRS model: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz world phone • CDMA model: 800/1900 MHz nationwide digital phone processor • Intel™ PXA270 312 MHz processor memory • 23MB user-available stored non-volatile memory (22MB multi-lingual) battery • Removable rechargeable lithium ion battery • GSM/GPRS model: Up to 6 hours talk time and up to 300 hours standby time • CDMA model: Up to 5 hours talk time and up to 2 weeks standby time operating system • Palm OS® 5.4 size • 4.4 x 2.3 x 0.9 inches • 11.3 x 5.9 x 2.3 cm weight • 6.3 oz. / 178 grams display • Color TFT touch-screen • 320 x 320 resolution • 16-bit color (displays over 65,000 colors) expansion • Supports SD, SDIO and MultiMediaCards audio • RealPlayer included • Stereo audio headset compatible digital camera2 • VGA with 640x480 (0.3 megapixels) resolution and automatic light balancing • 2x zoom • Self-portrait mirror • Captures video additional features • Full backlit QWERTY keyboard with number pad • 5-way navigation button • Speakerphone • Polyphonic MIDI ringtones • Infrared port • External ringer on/silence switch • Vibrate mode • Stylus • Keyguard • 2.5 mm headset jack supports stereo audio • customizable side button To be continued... Tags: Treo Palm Smartphone

Thumbs up : DiGi

Today DiGi unveiled a new range of postpaid plans, which basically means lower rates all around. All their postpaid plans now work on a "one nation one rate" basis, with call rates from 15 sen per minute. The monthly fees have been reduced and high usage customers may even have their monthly fees waived. They have even thrown in free value added services and lowered the itemized billing charge. How will the other telcos top this?

My gadgets : a new trio of goodies

Previously, I mentioned wanting a palmOne Treo 650 smartphone. A few weeks later, my neverending quest for mobile productivity nirvana has brought me new toys and a lighter wallet. I've had a fantastic first week with my Treo, and a review will be up soon. Being a Digi postpaid subscriber, I signed up for the unlimited GPRS/EDGE package. It costs RM99 (US$26) per month. The typical speed is around 85kbps, so that's not bad. I also bought myself a replacement iBook. My old iBook (600MHz G3, 2002) was replaced by a brand new one (1.2GHz G4). Most people did not notice the change, of course, since they are more or less identical in appearance.

For some, this might be your idea of heaven...

Haagen-Dazs is offering an ice cream buffet at most outlets in Kuala Lumpur. It's very ... tempting.

Fav Links : Alien Loves Predator

Ever wondered what would happen if you put the lead characters from Aliens and Predator in a sitcom? Well, neither did I. In New York, no one can hear you scream. Far better than the movie. Watch out for "guest appearances". Get your fix every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.