Lovers of e-books in Singapore are getting their own local e-book fix, after SingTel said on Tuesday that it was offering Singapore’s first e-book service. This service, named skoob, will allow Singaporeans to peruse and purchase e-books for their smartphones, tablets, and PCs.

Offering more than 39,000 local and international bestsellers at launch, it is the first e-book service to accept payment in Singapore dollars. E-books also tend to be cheaper than hard copy of books – SingTel highlights how a hard copy of John Grisham’s The Confession costs S$9 for an e-book rather than the S$17 offered at bookstores. …

Sony has unveiled two new photo frames in its S-Frame range today, offering for the first time Wi-Fi connectivity in a 7-inch frame.

The DPF-WA700 and DPF-W700, once connected, can automatically retrieve and display photos shared on Facebook. Users can also hook up to an existing email account and view photos through it. …

The time of USB 3.0 is upon us, and Sony has made its entrance into the new realm of digital storage by offering its first USB 3.0 flash drives, the new Micro Vault Q Series.

Clad in an aluminum casing, the Micro Vault also features a retractable USB connector to protect it from dust or damage. It also has a LED indicator for convenient checks on data transfer status.

When plugged into a corresponding USB 3.0 port, transfer speeds are significantly faster than USB 2.0 speeds, with Sony claiming a read speed of up to 120 MB/s. Current USB 2.0 read speeds fall between 30 to 42 MB/s.

The initial offerings of the Micro Vault flash drives will come in 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. Prices will be available when they are launched in November 2011.

Gamers and road warriors have some new toys to look forward to this November. Samsung has released their new Series 7 Gamer and Chronos notebooks into Singapore – just in time for the tons of new games coming this Christmas.

The Gamer is loaded with sick specs, beginning with an Intel i7 quad core chip with 8GB of RAM, up to 16GB.  More interestingly, it comes with one of the most powerful graphic cards on the market – the AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5 with DirectX 11 support.

As if that was not enough, Samsung also has added an extra 8GB to the notebook through its ExpressCache system, which effectively acts as an extra 8GB of flash memory on the motherboard, allowing for faster caching that translates into faster startup and application launch speeds. …

Sony Ericsson has come up with a souped up version of its popular Xperia arc, along with a slightly chunkier neo V, as part of a lineup of new camera-centric Android phones.

The Xperia arc S, an updated version of the large-screen Xperia arc, now comes with a faster processor but costs S$788 – considerably less than top models from HTC and Samsung which are closer to S$1,000 . The neo V, meanwhile, costs S$468 and looks likely to target the mid-end market. …

Media storage company SanDisk unveiled a whooping seven new products last Friday, including one which SanDisk hopes will innovate an entire line of products separate from its SD cards and USB flash drive lines. …

Going on the Internet is so important to its wired Gen Y users today that they rate it as something as essential and basic as air, food, water and shelter, according to a report released late last week.

A third of a group of about 2,800 youths told a survey conducted by networking vendor Cisco earlier this year that they considered the Internet as important as some of the most basic needs for survival. More than half of them said they could not live without the Internet, citing it as something that was “integral” to their everyday lives. …

Parallels Desktop will need no introduction to Mac users who use it to enjoy the best of both Windows and Mac worlds by running programs from the two different operating systems side by side on the same machine.

For them, and indeed many more Mac users, they’d be happy to hear that the latest, newly-minted version – Parallels Desktop 7 – now promises more than 90 new enhancements and features. Key among these is full integration with the latest Mac OSX Lion. …

Everyone’s favourite tough guy character Marcus Fenix returns in the wildly successful third-person shooter franchise that has consistently made it into Best-of lists for Xbox 360 games. Gears of War 3, with over one million global pre-orders, concludes the Gears of War saga that  started back in 2006.

First off, the developers have not changed what gamers have loved the most about the game. Gears of War 3′s single-player action remains functionally similar to Gears of War 1 and 2, with the remnants of Delta Squad shooting and covering their way against the Locusts baddies that stand in their way. …