Rest in peace, moonwalker.

On the day when an iconic part of music died, I dug out Off The Wall and Thriller from my record stash, cued them up and listened for hours – something I had not done for years.

And I marveled at the purity and joy of the music created and delivered by young Michael Jackson back then.

Those were exuberant days for MJ. His music blended R&B hooks, clever pop, daring rhythms, emotional and extraordinarily beautiful singing, funk, disco and rock, and yet all of that delivered free of schmaltz.

I wore out my cassette tapes of those two albums while listening to them constantly over my dad’s old Philips receiver boombox at home. I bought the records later, and then replaced them with ceedees. But those were the only two MJ albums I’ve ever bought. His later albums, from Bad onwards, had – to me – lost the addictive grooves, joyfulness and sense of whimsy that made MJ so endearing.

It has been saddening, over the years, to see the bizarre circus that has become the life of a one-of-a-kind talent whose music brought joy to so many. I treasure MJ’s music and it has been one of those few markers that would immediately transport me back to the pleasantness of my primary and secondary school days.

The first MJ track I heard was One Day in Your Life, from his 1975 album Forever, Michael. What a sweet track that was. Then I discovered Off The Wall and lapped up the electrifying Jackson-penned Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough, and also the haunting She’s Out of My Life. Off The Wall remains my favourite MJ album, followed by Thriller.

Thriller is perhaps the last joyful album by Jackson.

Chroniclers will write about the amazing run of number one hits, the moonwalk, a world-record 750 million records sold, the nose job and a life spent trying to recreate a lost childhood. For those who loved his music, the indelible memory will be one of happiness that his music had brought us.

ps: there have been so far many performance tributes to MJ all over the world and in cyberspace. But I thought this old YouTube post, of young Sungha Jung playing Billie Jean, would make a great reminder of how timeless and beautiful MJ’s music was and how it continues to relate to the newer generation.

What do you gain by upgrading from a pair of $100 earphones, say my trusty Sony MDR EX85LP, to a pair of cans worth some $2,200, like the Sennheiser HD800? To picky ears, things to watch out for are many, including such aural qualities as warmth, punchiness, frequency extension, detail, soundstaging and, well, you name it, the audiophile lexicon is a very large one.

To me though, there are two crucial qualities, and they are – if you allow me to indulge in more audiophile jargon – timbre reproduction and air.

Having the right timbre, simply put, means sounding right. For instance, the percussive tap of each grand piano key ringing true with sumptuous overtones. Or the singing human voice having body, bite and breath. Of course, naturalness does not tend to excite, and hence top-end headphones may be underwhelming at first. But they reward with an unfatiguing sound and long-term listening pleasure.

Air is unmistakable when you hear it, but not apparent when it is missing. It is a feeling of a large aural vista that extends beyond your ears and inside your head.

I was certainly underwhelmed when I first listened to the new Sennheiser HD800 headphones at its recent local launch. This pair of loftily-priced cans certainly sounded better than my well-worn $100 Sony earbuds, but I wasn’t sure, halfway through the first CD, that the differences were worth two grands.

As I listened to more CDs, however, it became clear that they just might be, because the HD800 is one of the most accurate – and natural sounding – pair of headphones I’ve heard. The fact I didn’t enjoy all the CDs in the listening booth was not because the cans sounded bad, but because the source material had changed – and the HD800 simply played it like it is.

The HD800, though, seemed to lack air. Perhaps the demo cans weren’t run in yet, or perhaps the Lehmann headamp or the T+A CD player are to blame in the synergy stakes, but the HD800 sounded a tad shut in to me compared to, say, one of the top-end Grado cans I’ve heard in the past. My Sony buds are, of course, way behind on this count.

I enjoyed the HD800s in that short stint, and certainly the demo. Kudos to the Sennheisser team in Singapore for the thoughtful set-up of the listening session. There were two tastefully spot-lit glass cube listening rooms laid side by side. In it are a fluffy comfy chair each an arm’s length away from the cans, which were tethered to a top-notch German-made T+A CD player and the well-regarded Lehmann Audio Black Cube Linear headamp, and with a wide selection of CDs to pick from, of which many were from the excellent European Stockfish Record label.

I could live in there.

ps: Do read my friend Chris’ earlier take on the HD800 at our sister siteMusicgoondu.

We are one year old!

This tech blog, hatched from an innocuous discussion between a few of us grumpy tech scribes bitching about life over a Bishan Junction 8 Crystal Jade dim sum lunch, has ticked into its second year this month and we are still loving every minute of it.

Its been a terrific learning experience for all of us, and frankly, we have been astonished by the spritely life Techgoondu has taken, the fun – and angst – we’ve had blogging through this platform, and the heartening responses from you readers who have obliged us invaluable eyeballing time and thoughtful comments over the past 12 months.

Thank you all!!

Turning one is as much a thrill as it is a time to reflect. To blog about matters that are close to our geek hearts has been our biggest thrill. Writing on a platform that’s a distinctly alternative one to what our day job presents has been equally rewarding.

Reflecting on what has been an eventful journey in the past 12 months, we loved how vibrant the Singapore tech scene has been, and the cool gadgets galore. We were absolutely delighted at how this part of the world has started to become the focal point and product launch pads of consumer tech big wigs.

It means we get to play with the cool toys with less waiting time (except the slow-as-molasses-to-arrive iPhone!).

Of course, with highs come also the lows and there have been hair-tearing moments at disappointing tech developments and missed opportunities.

So here are our personal high and lowlights of the past year as we blow out the candle on the Techgoondu cake:

Highlights in the last 12 months
Alfred singled out three: the death knell sounded by mainstream newspaper firms worldwide, Android phones landing in Singapore and the rise of mobile broadband services; Roland cheered the Singapore government’s plan to use ‘new media’ for next elections; and Aaron put on his business goggles and picked Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystem for US$7.4 billion.

Chi Loong said yay to the Unconference 2009 event and Singapore startup Gothere; while my pick for the brightest tech spark of 2008 is the rise of the mobile application and unlimited download online music stores.

On the newspaper death knell, Alf sez: “it’s been prophesised many times, but this is finally coming for daily newspapers as news has become a commodity. Print is not dead, but newspaper as a vehicle for news is.

“Androids landing in Singapore is the best news after the iPhone hype and years of Nokia domination. Here’s a phone that does so much – touchscreen, GPS, etc – without fanfare.

“Singapore’s broadband penetration shot past 100 per cent because of the surge in takeup of such on-the-go services. Prices as a result of competition have come down, while speeds have gone up, well, at least on paper.”

Roland: “Singapore government’s plan to use ‘new media’ for next elections is significant in that the people who run the country finally recognise that its not just anonymous, inflammatory blog posts out there.

“So what will they do beyond starting Facebook groups and adding new ‘friends’? Well, who cares? As long as more avenues are “allowed”, it’ll be easier to hear a wider diversity of views, and diss terrible rap videos.”

Aaron: “The Oracle-Sun deal marks Oracle’s first acquisition of a vendor with a significant hardware business. While this acquisition presents opportunities for further synergies between Oracle and Sun, there are also issues that could derail the effort. Oracle needs to balance the interests of its lucrative database business with Sun’s MySQL open source database product. That’s on top on the competing middleware products from both companies.”

Chi Loong: “Unconference 2009 is simply well run. It has great content, good overseas speakers and lots of interesting start-ups. Didn’t expect it to be that polished, but it was. Of all the start-up and web 2.0 events I’ve been to, this was the one that surprised me pleasantly the most. Kudos to the e27 folks for pulling this off. This is their 3rd year running this, and they are starting to show some traction.

“Gothere, which started last May, was not new when I talked to them, but this is a start-up I really like. One, because this map and directory service trashes everything out there – Streetdirectory, et al and don’t even get me started on Rednano. They have street level views, a mobile site, tracking for ERP, best times, cheapest fares, etc. Great service. Two, because the founders of Gothere are really nice folks.

“Plus they had lots of passion to keep it going, despite having no business model late last year – they just wanted to build a great service. Luckily they ended up getting noticed by LTA, who’s giving them business now.”

My two faves: the rise of Web-connected software and content stores, and buffet-style music downloading services. The app store space looks the next battleground for mobile vendors and will give smartphones wings. Nokia’s way of letting users pay for their app store purchases via operators is a pretty dandy move too.

The appearance of all-you-can-download music services here, like Nokia’s Comes With Music, Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow Plus and, recently, SingTel’s AMPed, are just terrific news for music lovers.

Top gadgets in the last 12 months
The Nokia E71 has been a standout phone for me, but has now been topped by the HTC Magic – no, wait, make that topped by the raft of upcoming phones with the Android platform. My next phone is in that raft.

Alf also chose the HTC Magic, together with the ATI Radeon HD4870x2 and Marantz PM7003 integrated amp.

Roland picked netbooks (“Vendors finally realising not everyone wants to take along the kitchen sink when you are on the move and more importantly, found a CHEAP way to let u always put a notebook in your bag without much thinking.”), and the Nokia E71 (“Best bang-for-buck smartphone out there in the past year, in a slim, svelt package”.)

Instead of gadgets, Chi Loong singled out his fave Singapore start-ups and services. They are Gothere (Singapore mapping and directions service), Phokki (digital art marketplace), 2359 Media (location based services), MakeAffinity (live robotics platform) and Dropcast (first made-in-Singapore Nintendo DS game). And not least, “for passion, gotta give it to MakeAffinity and 2359 Media – always pitching their hearts out at start-up events”.

Aaron propped up Google Chrome: “You have to love this Web browser for its speed and simplicity. Search Google from the address bar, incognito browsing, and thumbnails of most visited site – it’s been a while since we got excited by a browser.”

Disappointments
“StarHub winning the NBN OpCo seems like an industry-centric piece of news for the telecom world, but it also formally signals the end of any hopes of a foreign telco owning key infrastructure here and challenging the SingTel-StarHub duopoly here,” sez Alf.

Roland cried foul with the “full” mobile number portability initiative in Singapore “because, while mobile penetration in Singapore shoots past 130 percent, its got a half-baked number portability solution that doesn’t let you port between prepaid and postpaid numbers, and vice versa. How full-ish is that?”

Aaron: “The iPhone 3G S. Apple can do better than coming up with a souped-up iPhone on steroids. A longer battery life, MMS and a 3-megapixel camera are not things to shout about. How about a change in form factor?”

Biggest letdown for Chi Loong was Warhammer Online. “I tried desperately to like this game. No, make that love this game. I love PvP, and when a realm PvP match gets going, it’s incredible. Unfortunately, this is not enough. It had so much potential, but a small player base spread out over too many factions and quests (6 factions in all), balance issues, lag problems, polish issues (e.g. non-existent crafting) were too much to take.

“Sorry, Mythic. I re-subbed once, but I got so bored I went back to playing Guildwars – a game I never left ever since I quit WoW.”

My biggest peeve is the flipside of my pick for highlights: online music stores. Don’t get me wrong, I love the inroads being made in the past year, especially by vendors which dared to offer unlimited song downloads, but those dicey compressed sound quality issue and restrictive digital rights management schemes will always be major bugbears for such services until they are banished for good. Dare we hope the next 12 months will finally bring pervasive DRM-free music to the masses?

Philips GoGear Opus

Philips may not be on many portable gear head’s shortlists of brands when it comes to buying a new portable music player, but its new model’s support for FLAC could swing a few votes its way.

The GoGear Opus is one of a slew of new releases by the Dutch electronics giant in Singapore today, and the only one in that bunch – as well as one of the few in the market – to supprt Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), an open source lossless compression standard that more than a few discerning listeners have told me is sonically a tad better than rival codecs like Apple Lossless and WMA lossless (although I can’t really discern those differences – all lossless codecs sound as good to me).

A rival to Apple’s Nano in terms of features and price, the decidedly chunkier Opus has a larger screen real estate compared to the Nano (2.8 diagonal inches vs 2.0-inch) but also costs slightly more ($339 vs $328 for the 16GB version; $299 vs $248 for an 8GB version).

The Opus comes with a built-in audio recording function, which is lacking in the Nano, but it lacks Nano’s motion-sensing feature that automatically flip-flops screen displays from portrait to landscape. The Opus arguably offers better sound off the bat, thanks to its sound-sealing earphones, which appear to have a sonic edge over Apple’s bundled conventional ear buds.

But it is the Opus’ support for FLAC that will excite open-source software inclined audiophiles – although its 16GB flash memory capacity means you can only carry 50 or so albums’ worth of lossless music at any one time.

Alongside the Opus, the other new Philips music and video portable players launched are the Aria ($229 for 8GB and $189 for 4GB); ViBE ($169 for 8GB and $149 for 4GB); the diminutive Spark ($129 for 4GB and $109 for 2GB); and the Shuffle-lookalike Mix ($119 for 4GB and $79 for 2GB).

First, there were the Apple iTunes Store and Amazon.com’s MP3 downloading service. Then mobile phone giants like Nokia and Sony Ericsson waded into the online music selling fray. Now, search engine vendors Yahoo and Google are gate-crashing this ever-burgeoning party – with a bang.

On Monday, Yahoo announced it has refreshed its music service to encompass a bigger ecosystem with external online music providers like Apple, collecting a fee with every referral, according to Reuters.

New York Times over the weekend reported (screenshot above from the article) that EMI, Warner Music, Universal Music and other big wig record labels will be working with Google to offer free downloads of music in China.

NYT reported that “record labels say that instead of earning money from each download, they will share advertising revenue with Google’s partner in the deal, a Chinese company called Top100.cn.”.

The Google deal is somewhat surprising news, on two counts: first is the adoption of a still protean advertising model by typically conservative record companies; and second, that they would be doing so in one of world’s hotbed for, shall we say, unrestricted content distribution.

But still, it ultimately spells be good news for music fans if vendors and could make this work for all involved, not least the artistes themselves. For Google, it seems like this is just another means of eyeball grab – since local search engines like Baidu still hog the lion’s share of web traffic in China.

There are 4GB worth of reasons to love Apple’s new and very small iPod Shuffle. But there is one reason why I don’t – lack of controls on the player.

In making the new Shuffle so small, Apple’s designers decided to ship some of the heft to the earphones – smart, really. The new Shuffle relegates crucial controls like volume, song selection and play functions to a captive control strip attached to Apple’s earphones.

So you are pretty much stuck, unless other earphone makers start making earphones with Shuffle controls (Monster has already said it will roll out a series).

I don’t know about you, but having owned at least half a dozen iPods since shelling out for the original 5GB mechanical scroll wheel grandfather back in 2001, I’ve never found Apple’s bundled headphones to be as good as what’s out there, and have always promptly replaced them as soon as I got the iPod.

I’ve not yet try the new headphones on this Shuffle, so they could well surprise me, but Apple’s track record doesn’t give me confidence.

I’ve owned two Shuffles so far and the first generation model is still my favourite.

I love the way it plugs into the USB port sans cable, and its garage cool look. The lack of polished bling is just dandy with me. The song navigation controls, because they sit at the end of a long stick, makes activating them very easy, as your fingers have a hand-hold to grip firmly, much like using a remote control.

To me, this model is still the most ergonomic iPod that’s ever made by Apple for exercise nuts, especially if you, like me, am an inveterate track changer. It is simply a great runner’s iPod.

So Apple, how about refreshing the form factor of the first-generation iPod – with an 8GB capacity, perhaps? After all, it is only twice as big as the new Shuffle.

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.

My brief hands-on encounter with the HTC Dream left me impressed. The Dream’s operating system by Google – called Android – feels zippy and intuitive, while the phone’s keypad feels, well, nearly as good as my Nokia E71. The touch screen is nicely responsive, and the Dream’s form factor, while bulkier than the average candybar smartphone, including the E71, is still comfortably pocket-able. The Android’s notable extended home screen, too, is no gimmick, effectively tripling the real estate of the phone’s desktop area.

Furthermore, the doing away of a qwerty keypad means that the next wave of Android phones will be even svelter than its G1 brethren, and closer in demeanor to the iPhone.

My beloved and well-worn Nokia E71 now has a pair of bigger and smaller siblings. The Finnish phone maker yesterday did a glitzy catwalk launch of the E75 (left in the picture above) and E55 (right), which also saw the unveiling of other new phones, at the swanky club Zirca (the former Ministry of Sound). Nokia held the Singapore launch in conjunction with its new product unveiling at the Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona this week.

Here are my 2 cents on both models after a hurried hands-on session at the event:

Heavier and chunkier, though smaller in girth, than the E71, the E75 is comfortably one of the sveltest slider smartphones phones in the market. What I like: the 3.5-mm headphones jack, the motion-sensitive screen that pivots when you turn the phone’s orientation between landscape and portrait, and the fact that it is essentially an E71 on steroids.

What didn’t float my boat was keeping the screen size the same – 2.4-inch, 240×320 pixels – as the E71 despite the bulking up. Really, Nokia, why? Okay, you get a more spacious keyboard, but the E71 is already dandy in that department. So the payback for the extra bulk is for the numeric keypad and traditional phone styling.

The skinny E55, on the other hand, comes with the same screen size as the E71, as well as a 3.5-mm headphones jack, despite losing weight and being smaller.

The other big difference between the E55 and E71 is the half-qwerty keyboard. The E71′s 10-keys across and 4-keys down qwerty keypad is now halved width-wise, into a 5-keys across and 4-keys down keypad in the E55. There are two letters for each key. Press once for the letters on the left side of the button, and twice for the right. Unfortunately, my short time fiddling with this not-qwerty qwerty keypad is filled with typos from I guess my unfamiliarity with the scheme, as well as with the flat and tiny keys. Practice could make perfect – or not, for those with not-so-slender fingers.

For the more ham-fisted, the predictive text option (for both the E55 and E75), should make text input easier.

Both the E55 and E75 comes with a new, swankier interface – headlined by Nokia’s new email application. And both phones now feature flatter input surfaces, as opposed to the bumpy keys of the E71. While the new contact points look more chic, I still prefer the old bumps, which make typing more tactile.

So which Nokia will Goldilocks choose?

The differences in sizes and weights are not dramatic between the three bears, er, phones. The E75 is around 5mm thicker than the 10mm-thick E71, and a smidgen (12g) heavier. And it is actually 2mm shorter and 7mm narrower than the E71. This makes it one of the smallest (if not among the lightest) slider smartphones in the market today.

The E55 is wee longer (2mm) and slightly narrower (49mm vs 57mm) than the E71, while keeping to the same screen size. Most notable, however, is the weight-savings: 98g vs 127g. Shaving 30g off does not sound like much, but it is: the E55 feels noticeably lighter than my E71, which is already an insanely pocketable smartphone. I like!

Appetites whet? The wait for both phones won’t be long. The Nokia E75 is expected to ship in March while the Nokia E55 is expected to ship during the second quarter of this year.