So you have ripped apart your DHL package and started messing around with your spanking new Nexus One from Google.

Wait a second, I hate to spoil your party, but this “Superphone” needs a lot of extra fiddling with for you to get the absolute best out of it. For example, getting MMS to work with it – especially on StarHub – is still something of a mystery to many users. Trying to call someone requires you to scroll through the Contacts list.

Well, we don’t want that! After playing with my own Nexus One for over a week, I’m glad to have found ways to get around these little irritating moments in an otherwise excellent phone.

Here’s an all-in-one guide to get you quickly off the blocks:

Seagate was given a bloody brusing at the hands of the dismal economy last year. In Q1 2009, the HDD (hard disk drive) market took a steep nosedive and plunged almost 35 per cent.

It sent the industry into shock, and Seagate was badly affected. Not surprising, since most of the hard disks in the world are made by a few players like Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Samasung and Toshiba, of which the first two have the lion’s share.

“Imagine 40 million units wiped out in one quarter,” said Banseng (BS) Teh, sales/marketing VP and managing director of APAC, Seagate at their media update today. “It was the most disasterous quarter for disk drives ever.”

According to him, even during the previous tech recession in 2001 the 31-year old company never saw negative growth — at worst it was almost flat — but the market never shrunk, like it did last year, -1.4 per cent globally in 2009.

I was just gushing down a bowl of extremely salty French Onion soup at TGIF near the Marriot Grand Hotel in Moscow where I am staying when I saw Jobs flashing the iPad in some Russian news channel. That was enough for me to spend the next 90 minutes watching Job’s keynote.

Two things struck me from the iPads launch today:

1. Apple is really going into a closed lock-down system.

   The iPad will be utilising Apple’s new 1GHz processor (Apple now totally owns the hardware and the OS).

   It also launched iWorks (competitor to MS Office) for US$9.99 for each of the spreadsheet, presentation and word processor software (called numbers, keynote and something else I cant remember) It also launched iBooks – an e-book reader and store.  With App Store and iTunes Music Store,  now Apple also owns the software and services platform.

   Apple struck a deal with AT&T for adding 3G at US$29.99 per month for unlimited access. So like the iPhone, you are stuck again with a specific telco. And my guess is the two will work together to lock-in consumers and share the money.

   It looks like the Apple way is increasingly becoming a closed, lock-down system. I dont like lock-down systems and it sure makes Microsoft (who only controlled the OS and the apps and tried with the browser) look like an angel in comparison.

2. Is the iPad simply a glorified smartphone?

   Yes, it did look cool watching Jobs spin the thing round, but what exactly is the Apple 1GHz processor? Early rumours are swirling that it is simply one of the many 1GHz ARM processors (ARM licences its processor tech to people like Nvidia and Qualcomm to make smartphone processors) around. The same architecture that powers the Google Nexus One smartphone. But can it be powerful enough to support a mini-laptop? In case you are still wondering why the iPad does not support the ability to run multiple apps at the same time, perhaps this is the answer!

Talk about mobile TV brings me back many years – maybe as many as five years – when the first 3G phones came to town in all their bulky and overheated glory. Who can forget how pixelated and jerky the mobile TV or videos were when they were demo’d on these early 3G wonders?

Thus, seeing StarHub launch its new mobile TV offering today reminds me of how far we have come in mobile phone technology.

It’s no wonder StarHub’s new CEO Neil Montefiore, facing the media for the first time in his new role, kicked off the launch today by stressing how much things have changed since those lousy mobile TV programmes of old.

Phones today, he notes, are faster and smarter. Networks too, are keeping up with bandwidth over the air. And finally, the content is appreciated now  – young audiences are no longer averse to watching news or sports on the small screen.

What do StarHub have on offer then? Essentially 24 channels – including CNN, Disney and TVBJ – will be viewable on the small screen for just $1 a day. If you like what you see and want to view it everyday, there’s a $25-a-month subscription that you can sign up for.

Just a day after we got our claws on the Motorola Dext, we managed to slime up the screen of an upcoming Motorola Milestone with our first hands-on with the much-awaited Android 2.0 phone.

Yes, folks, the slide-out keyboard gizmo touted as a step up from the Dext is coming to Singapore within the next couple of months from StarHub.

How do we know? The phone was put on demo today at StarHub’s launch of its new mobile TV service, and the much-awaited Moto Milestone was among a list of devices that will roll out with the service the latest by March.

Whether or not StarHub has got an exclusive deal on this device, the folks here today were pretty coy. But it’s interesting that SingTel, while launching the Dext yesterday, mentioned nothing about rolling out the Milestone themselves.

We also don’t have any pricing details for now. But we can say, from a quick hands-on, that it will be one of the few phones that can really challenge the current “it” phone – the Google Nexus One.

My first impression is that Motorola’s Milestone is a well-made phone, in the sense that the feel is solid. The keys also seem like they can take a pounding from compulsive SMS and e-mail users.

A nice “plugged in” social media phone. That’s how I’d view the new Motorola Dext, which is being put on sale by SingTel  this Saturday (Jan 23).

One of Moto’s “comeback” phones featuring the now-hot Google Android OS, the Dext comes with a slide-out Qwerty keyboard as well as an ample 3.1-inch screen offering a not-too-shabby 320 x 480 resolution.

SingTel is the first to bring the phone to Asia, as part of an exclusive deal with Moto that will last at least six months. According to Spiros Nikolakopoulos, Motorola’s vice-president and general manager for Asia Pacific and international distribution, this exclusivity can be up for renewal.

This means SingTel will have, for a while, one of the best Android devices, sans the Google Nexus One, of course.

What of the hands-on experience? First off, the keyboard, with the “popped up” keys, are easy to type on, especially if you really don’t fancy learning how to type SMSes on an on-screen keyboard.

You may have heard of Intel’s new 32-nanometre Core CPUs (codenamed Clarkdale and Arrandale), when they were launched as part of a big CES bonanza last month.

But seeing these “mainstream” processors, especially with their new onboard graphics power, in action is another thing.

At a road show here at Dempsey Road here yesterday, the Intel folks in Singapore showed off systems running the dual- and quad-core Clarkdale chips for desktops, as well as the dual-core Arrandale chips for notebooks.

The big promise on these mid-end chips, which come in mobile, desktop and embedded formats, is the HD graphics capability onboard. And I was quite surprised by the performance.

What’s an anti-virus security software company like Trend Micro got to do with clouds?

Well, they believe that the next big IT disruption will be cloud computing. Moving into security for clouds is thus a necessary evolution path for the 21-year old software security company.

After their Asia Pacific media day conference in Macau today this point was made really clear. Let me explain.

Customers rightly expect the software they’ve bought to just work. Security should be baked into the product rather than bolted on as an additional cost. The good news is that we’re moving towards this trend, e.g. operating systems bundled with anti-virus and firewalls, etc.

Tired of pesky relatives asking when you are getting married or having kids during Chinese New Year? Turn on the karaoke at home, with a new on-demand service that StarHub is delivering soon over its cable set-top box.

For just S$4.50 a day, you can sing to your heart’s content – or get your relatives to stop discussing your personal life – while they are gathered at your place over CNY. If you like it so much, you can also sign up for a S$10-a-month subscription and sing all you want at home.

The new service, called KaraOK!, is not StarHub’s first foray into home karaoke. But this version coming online on January 18 will offer on-demand access to an eventual 30,000 music videos in various languages.

Scenic sightseeing tours – not tanks making minced meat out of hapless civilians – are the results you will find if you do an online search for “Tiananmen Square” or “Tibet” while in China.

Propaganda, not reality, is what you get when looking for information behind the Great Firewall of China, so goes the Western view of China’s Internet censorship regime.

Thus, Google’s threat today to pull out of China altogether and to provide a search that is unfettered by the communist government’s censorship regime, has been greeted by some Western commentators as a good thing for freedom of speech in the awakening giant.

Question is: are things that simple? Dig deeper and you will find that this story of Google versus China has a lot more questions than answers.