Gin already wrote a post on Nokia’s “Comes with Music” launch in Singapore today, but I’ve a few additional pictures and prices for readers.

Nokia 5800 Xpress (courtesy of Nokia)

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
Estimated retail price: S$798
Availability: From 28th Feb 2009, Saturday (tomorrow)
Colors: red and blue, with silver-black from mid-March
Specs and features: Pretty standard for a mid-range touch phone. 3.2 megapixel camera. 3G, HSDPA and Wi-Fi. Comes with built-in A-GPS. Free 8GB micro-SD card. For all the specifics, go to Nokia’s product pagehere.

But I totally agree with Gin and Alf that the key differentiator is the “Comes with Music” service by Nokia. Brilliant tactical move by the handset giant. Basically, it allows users unlimited downloads of tracks from Nokia’s music store for one year. According to Nokia, they have about four million tunes in the store. Operator charges are of course separate. Singapore is the first country in Asia to run this service; it was first launched in UK last October.

$138 for a brand new Nokia 5800 Xpress Music touchscreen phone plus one year’s subscription to Comes With Music – Nokia’s new unlimited music downloads service from over 2 million tracks at the Nokia Music Online Store.

That’s the deal that StarHub is putting at the table for users who sign-up at tonight’s midnight sale at Plaza Singapura. To get the special $138 however, you need to sign-up for a 2-year mobile phone plan and an old phone which has a trade-in value of $200.

The ad in The Straits Times says that the usual price of the phone is $538. I need to verify with StarHub on what this means but if it means I can now pay $538 for 5800 Comes With Music, it’s an absolutely gorgeous deal.

Interested in free publicity? Techgoondu is organizing a “Meet the Techgoondus” session next month on March 10th (Tuesday) for tech startups in Singapore.

The reason we’re doing this is because start-ups make for great stories but often they don’t get enough notice. Also, it’s a fun way to build a bottom up grassroots tech community in Singapore.

First, a group picture of who we are. Wanted to find a way to tag individuals, like in Facebook, so I used Phlook. For those that have not heard of them, Phlook is a pretty cool Singapore-based social platform start up that allows you to manipulate and share photos.

Use the “notes” function in the sidebar to see the tagging.

A photo of the Techgoondu folks in our last meetup where this idea was hatched. Unfortunately, both Roland and Stephanie are missing.

This piece of disclosure by StarHub CEO Terry Clontz, which I wrote about in an article in the Business Times on StarHub’s fourth quarter results earlier this month, seems to have gone unnoticed, so I am hoisting it up again: Google G2 phones – the qwerty keypad-less guise of Google’s open source operating system-based phone – could be in Singapore by June.

Besides StarHub, MobileOne is also thinking second-generation when it comes to Google’s shiny new toy. Earlier this month, the Straits Times reported that M1 was talking with HTC about bringing in the vendor’s G2 phones “soon”. That phone might well be the HTC Magic (pictured above), which the Taiwanese smartphone vendor unwrapped at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month.

There is no news yet from SingTel, which launched the G1 HTC Dream phone in a glitzy affair here last week, on its G2 phone launch schedule.

Yes. you heard it right. Even if you are playing a single player campaign or a 1vs1 skirmish against the computer. You need to first launch Steam and log in to Steam for the game to even launch. And this is not just for initial activation, but for subsequent plays. So when I tried to run the game without logging into Steam, nothing happens at all. The game doesn’t even launch. I log into Steam and the game loads.

It’s quite obvious what these guys are trying to do – they are trying to fight piracy. But they end up alienating the users. I have played RTS since the first Dune 2, and I have never had to go online to fight against the computer. In fact, I have never played a PC game that requires me to do this, unless it is an MMOG like World Of Warcraft.

I understand that piracy is really killing the PC business, but in an environment where console games are outselling PC games (revenues for console games are about 8x more than PC games worldwide) and beating the shit out of them, you don’t want to make you legitimate PC gamers angry.

And what about selling to the countries without much of a Net penetration? Or have they given up on these countries altogether?

Update: Some forumers are asking if this will work if Steam is running in offline mode. I will try that tonight. Another issue is whether you need to have a Windows Live account logged-in to play. Will also test that tonight. But having played this game for about 6 hours, I do like it a lot.

Amazon recently released the second generation Kindle ebook reader that offers more storage and a slimmer design. There’s a text-to-speech feature that reads out books, magazines and newspapers to you, and a better screen that now boasts 16 shades of gray.

As a reviewer of tech gadgets over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate the importance of good design and the Kindles still don’t cut it in the design department. I owned a Kindle while I was in the U.S. more than a year ago, and while there’s no doubt it offers lots of convenience – volumes of books in just need one device – it is not sexy like an iPod or PSP.

I’ve since sold my Kindle, because I can’t download ebooks over the air in Singapore (for that, the Kindle uses Sprint’s EVDO network). Yes, I could buy stuff from the Kindle store and transfer those over via USB, but that means I’m missing out a whole lot on what the Kindle stood for – the convenience of getting books and the New York Times delivered over the air.

Want the power of Intel’s Core i7 CPUs in a small “shoebox-sized” PC chassis?

One new motherboard to consider may be Asus’ Rampage II GENE, a “small brother” of the no-holds-barred Rampage II Extreme motherboard, which I used in my own watercooled PC as well as Digital Life’s Dream PC 2008.

The Rampage II GENE is a micro ATX board with the same Intel X58 chipset, and tri-channel DDR3 support. More importantly, it will support both Nvidia SLI and ATI Crossfire dual-graphics modes. That lets you squeeze two graphics cards onto a small shoebox PC – cool!

I’m not sure how you’re gonna dissipate the heat of two giant graphics cards in a rather tight shoebox PC, but at least this board lets you try!

Ever wanted to turn your photos into pop art? As a personalized gift to be printed on a T-shirt or mug?

Singaporean start-up Phokki allows you to do just that. All you need to do is browse for a styling option, submit your photos, and you’ll get the art in your email in-box within three days.

Below are some examples:

Illustration example (courtesy of Phokki)

We hate to eat our own words.

Unfortunately, in this case, we have to. Techgoondu is off creative commons, an initiative I pushed for a few months back.

Even though many of us here at Techgoondu champion creative commons, after talking to some lawyer friends we realized that we can’t follow it to the letter.

In spirit, everything I wrote remains true — I believe that some forms of content should be free, and many of the Techgoondu posters do as well.

However, in practice, with content mashed-up from sites and vendors (e.g. photos of mobile phones, etc.) that are not under creative commons, we can’t offer our content under this license.

Legally, it exposes us to the liability of being sued even though we’re not for profit. Seeing that it is exceedingly difficult to run a chapalang tech news blog site with the freshest, kookiest stories for our readers with a blanket creative commons restriction, we have decided not to run with it.

Even though we could offer our analysis and stories for free re-distribution, without pictures and other content we take from others, we’re doing a disfavour to our readers. Apologies to all creative commons fans out there.