You may want to check out Alf’s review on the Satio if you haven’t read that, as the Aino phone is a sister phone to the Satio and some of the bundled apps are similar.

Sony Ericsson just released a trio of phones for the Singapore market on October 24th, with Satio being the high-end one (S$1,098), Aino the mid-end one (S$858), and Yari the lower-end one (S$548). Prices listed here are the recommended retail price without any contract with a telco.

I had the opportunity to play around with the Aino for about two weeks, and like Alf’s take on the Satio, I have mixed feelings about it. I like various aspects of the phone, but other parts of this slide phone irritate the heck out of me.

…

It was first called the Idou, when unveiled earlier this year at the 3GSM Mobile World Congress cellphone show. Then came the name change to Satio, and the world-beating specs: 12-meg Cybershot camera, 3.5-inch screen and a new Symbian S60 OS with touch UI.

So, after such a long wait, how does this much-touted flagship smartphone from Sony Ericsson feel in the hand? After testing it for a week, I’d say it’s a mixed bag. So much of the Satio is so desirable – the beautiful screen, for one; yet, much of this same shiny handset is also annoying. …

In an age when stupid restrictions from content owners prevent you from watching what you want on the Net because you are not in the right “geographical region”, it’s great to know pop group U2 is streaming its concert from the United States live on YouTube.

If you are reading this now on a Monday afternoon in Singapore, the concert is going on live at the Pasadena Rose Bowl in California – the scene of many a great concert, including my favourite ’80s band Depeche Mode.

Can you believe this:

• This is U2 and it’s free
• This is a live concert, so you are joining the 90,000+ who are watching it live at the Rose Bowl, interacting through Twitter or the comments page
• The quality is great – not  your usual YouTube stuff, but well streamed and buffered to ensure smooth and sharp images …

Usually, we don’t publicise events for companies. But tomorrow being the release of one of the most anticipated Windows versions in years, we’d have to tell you about a fabulous deal tonight at the midnight launch of Windows 7.

The deal: S$77 for the upgrade edition of Windows 7 Home Premium. The usual price is at S$219. This, of course, comes with a catch. You have to be the first 177 in the queue by midnight.

If you’re late, you can still buy it at S$147 tonight. The catch here: you have to sign up for a Challenger Superstore membership (S$27).

As you’d guessed by now, this is happening at Challenger Superstore at Funan DigitaLife Mall – the site of the several Windows launches of years past. …

Hot on the heels of testing the HTC Hero Android phone, I took a spin with the new Acer Windows Mobile 6.5 touchscreen phone and I can quickly summarise it – it cannot make it lah, seriously.

Why?

(1) Not only is 100-200 apps in its Marketplace pathetic compared to the thousands in iPhone and Android, the worst is that I tried connecting to it 10 x thru Wi-Fi and 3G and all I got was an error msg that says servers might be busy. Oh God!

(2) In the world of Android, and I suspect iPhone too, everything syncs in the background. Gmail on Android was like Blackberry Push mail without paying a cent – your mail gets updated in the background in seconds after it is sent or received. With Gmail on Win Mobile, it still had a schedule that asked me how long did I want to set the send & receive mail? SEND & RECEIVE??? Wake up Redmond, its push mail now, and no it’s not Blackberry I am talking about. …

After four years since its inception, Project Fusion, Oracle’s next generation suite of enterprise applications will finally be ready to enterprises in 2010.

At the closing keynote of this year’s Openworld conference which saw about 50,000 attendees throng the city of San Francisco, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the code base for the Fusion applications is ready, and customers have begun testing the products.

According to Ellison, Oracle will continue to support J.D Edwards and PeopleSoft applications under its Applications Unlimited program, along with its lifetime support policy.

The first version of the brand new Fusion Applications, built from the ground-up with its own technologies and those acquired from other companies, will include Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Sales and Marketing, Supply Chain Management, Project Portfolio Management, Procurement Management as well as Governance, Risk and Compliance. …

Techgoondu will be livecasting Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s closing keynote roday around 6.30am SGT. Ellison is expected to share more details on the state of technology, right after an address by Infosys CEO S. Gopalakrishnan. Stay tuned!

Update: If you didn’t manage to catch the livecast, we have a recorded video of Ellison’s closing keynote, featuring a guest appearance by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who hailed technology as the solution to the climate issues facing us today.

With more workers Twittering and connecting with one another through Facebook and other social networking sites, it is hardly surprising that enterprise technology vendors are starting to notice the potential of social media in business applications.

I caught up with Anthony Lye, Oracle’s senior vice president for CRM products who shared about the company’s Social CRM products that integrates the social networks of sales reps into existing CRM systems. The portfolio comprises the Oracle Sales Prospector, Sales Campaign and Sales Library, which allows sales reps to share information with one another, seek out sales leads by combining external information sources with internal customer data, as well as manage sales campaigns.

“Customers want to talk to other customers and these conversations are happening in Facebook and other social media,” Lye said during a media briefing at Oracle Openworld 2009. “It’s important for enterprises to listen to these conversations and take action.”

What social CRM does is to expose the structure of customer relationships within the CRM system through conversations. “For example, if I sell to telco A, can I see what telco B, C and D are buying, because people usually buy what others are buying.” …

Techgoondu caught up with Ron Weiss, Oracle’s director of product management, on the business value of Exadata, which combines storage, Oracle database and servers in a single hardware appliance. Oracle claims that this set-up improves database performance, particularly in datawarehousing and online transaction processing where on-the-fly responses to database queries are paramount.

In this video, Weiss also shared his views on the upcoming “Exadata killer”, dubbed the DB2 Pure Scale by IBM, which also happens to be a Gold sponsor of this year’s Openworld confab.

In the world of enterprise technology that has become dominated by an increasingly smaller pool of players, company leaders often swing between taking potshots at their rivals and singing praises next.

When Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Scott McNealy slammed Oracle for its software pricing policy in 2004, he probably would not have known that five years later, his legacy now lies in the hands of Oracle, the enterprise software behemoth that has now cast its sight on IBM with the Oracle-Sun merger.

During the Oracle Openworld opening keynote, which was clearly aimed at reassuring Sun customers over the future of their investments, McNealy expressed confidence that Oracle would take care of his legacy. “Our technology will find a nice home,” he said, adding that Oracle will continue to innovate on the Sparc and Solaris more than what Sun is doing now. …