BlackBerry phones are cool. How they handle email is still the best in the market. BlackBerrys have fab qwerty keyboards, an intuitive interface and excellent battery life. And that free-spinning micro trackball is just a blast. And Research In Motion’s (RIM) newest BlacBerry, Bold, is the first 3G BlackBerry (correction: actually, it is the first 3.5G BlackBerry; RIM had 3G phones before this) and the best PDA phone yet from the Canadian company.

Bold was to be my next mobile phone.

I saved up for it, but eventually got tired of waiting for it to show up in shops here. I got the Nokia E71 instead. Others have gotten the iPhone and the HTC Touch.

But at last, RIM confirmed that Bold will be in Singapore by this month.

But might its launch success be stymied because many consumers here have already had their fill of gee-whiz PDA phones in the past two months?

With the E71 and Touch making grand splashes to doting reviews here earlier, and Apple’s iPhone finally landing in Singapore last month to irrationally long queues, what kind of response will Blackberry’s first 3G phone draw when it finally lands here?
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I’ve ditched iTunes, finally.

Finally, I’ve found a media player application that is quicker and better than Apple’s nice but increasingly bloated app to manage my 10k+ and growing song list.

MediaMonkey is my new favourite application for playing digital music through my music rig. And its free to boot.

This elegant app has plenty going for it: playback support for the Apple Lossless Encoder format, encoding support for the open source Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), a fab interface where album covers are displayed in a thumbnail grid format that makes browsing one’s music collection so much more intuitive, and – perhaps most importantly – the fact that MediaMonkey is nimbler than iTunes when it comes to managing huge and growing music collections.
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How do you refine a piece of software that everyone has been using since the Internet arrived on home computers in the mid 1990s?

The answer, as Google will tell you, is to make it smarter and slicker. Its Chrome browser, launched on Tuesday, promises to give people the information they need faster and also offer a more intuitive interface.

An answer to Microsoft’s recently announced Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, it has some of Microsoft’s nifty new features, as well as the appeal of being “alternative”.
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