A day before opening and as expected, the queue has begun outside Hong Kong’s first Apple Store that is scheduled to open tomorrow. But doesn’t look like a terribly crazy queue though.

So what are they queuing for? I’m guessing it’s for a chance to get one of 3,000 Apple Store HK T-shirts that they are giving out, and there’s a rumour that Apple CEO Tim Cook might be coming to town.

Oh, and if you want to meet the first to meet their Geniuses, better book a session now as the Genius Bar (located on the second floor) is open for bookings.

Hong Kong’s getting the real deal this weekend, and it comes in the form of huge Apple Store right smack in Central. And the curtains have literally come off. MIC Gadget has the scoop on that and has photos of … people taking photos of the store. Plus photos of the store.

At 20,000 sq feet spread across two floors, in one of the most expensive malls in Hong Kong – it sure sounds like a lot of money until you think about the US$7 billion in profits that the company raked in in a quarter.

Anyway, what CAN the average Apple fanboy/girl do at an Apple Store.

He/She could of course buy and learn how to use an Apple product. Get tech support from the beer-less Genius Bar. Sit in their many workshops to learn how to use their apps. And of course chat up fellow Apple fanboys/girls – where else would they rather be?

Oh but wait, can this be? Apple has JOBS in Hong Kong! No, not Steve himself, but salary-paying jobs. I can already hear the Magic Mice clicks and the frantic Magic Trackpad taps. They still have positions open – which leaves me wondering … have they already sucked up all the Geniuses in this Special Administrative Region?

No promises, but Techgoondu’s Hong Kong correspondent might just brave the Applemania this weekend to bring you some snaps of the madness.

So having spent more than two weeks with mine (a 16GB Wifi Galaxy Tab 10.1), here’s my take on it.

If you only have half a minute, my quick answer is it’s better than the iPad2 ONLY if you’re a power user, but you’ll be better off with an iPad 2 if simplicity is what you’re looking for.

And if you have a little more time, here’s why.

The Android 3.1 operating system plus Samsung’s customised user interface on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the most polished of all Android tabs that I have seen. But like all Android tabs, there is a myriad of options that are customisable. Excellent for the power user who wants to set everything from the intensity of the vibration to the huge variety of virtual keyboard inputs, but this translates to too many options for the user looking for simplicity.

Another common complaint about Android tablets is that they are laggy. Well, they ARE laggy if you put a whole ton of widgets on the “desktop” – imagine your tablet having to update your news, email, Facebook feed, weather, stock quotes etc at the same time.

The iOS on the iPad 2 is smarter in that it doesn’t let you muck around with adding tons of widgets – so you’ll have to switch from one app to another other, but in return, each app can use the full computing power of the tablet and hence when you turn it on, that one single app that appears on your screen works quickly. But on the Galaxy Tab, here’s the solution – don’t clutter the Tab’s desktop with tons of widgets! Keep it nice and clean like this and you’ll find it much nippier.

The Galaxy Tab also isn’t right up there with in terms of sheer computing power. Take a look at the benchmarks from AnTuTu. It even lags behind the Galaxy S II smartphone!

But that’s all a little academic as I haven’t encountered an instance where the tablet choked on any particular processing task.

It does have some lovely built-in apps out of the box, such as its YouTube app and Pulse, a news feed aggregator. And through its email client, it does sync with your work Microsoft Exchange server (even an old Exchange server like my workplace’s Exchange 2003).

But to get the extra mile out of your tablet, here are some of the apps that you might want to load right out of the box:

Dolphin HD browser – wondering how to go to the top of the page while browsing? You can’t simply tap at the top of the screen like in the iPhone/iPad’s Safari. But the Dolphin browser lets you draw an ‘up arrow’ gesture to get there. And that’s just one of the way it beats the stock browser. Oh, and should already know that Adobe Flash Player works on both the stock browser and Dolphin HD.

MoboPlayer – can’t view your usual video files in the stock media player? Try it in MoboPlayer. It should fix it. Full stop.

IMO chat – instant messenger client that connects to almost any IM ecosystem that you can think of. Including Skype and Facebook.

And if you own a Synology NAS like I do, there are a few Synology apps that you’d want to load on your tablet to help you control your NAS – stuff like DS audio, DS finger, DS file and Synodroid.

So am I happy with my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1? Well, yes! And here’s a couple of reasons why.

All I had to do to transfer files between my computer and the tablet was to plug it into the USB port – no drivers, no software, no iTunes to install. I like.

Over here in Hong Kong, I can use Google Voice input in Cantonese to try to search for places where I only know how it sounds (but have no idea how it’s written) on Google Maps.

And Angry Birds is free. Enough said?

That said, I do have my iPhone to keep up with all the happenings in the iOS world.

And my search ended with the HiMedia (海美迪) HD600B-TV – which is a squarish looking do-it-all box that’s the localised-for-Hong Kong version of the HD500D-TH.

HiMedia HD600B-TV

A Hi what? Well, HiMedia is a Shenzhen-based company and my wife was surprised that I sprung for this made and designed in China product. Well, it certainly wasn’t its looks or its inspiring branding/model name that won me over. I guess it was its insides – the fact that it promised to plug right into my home network and save me time spent on installation and configuration, plus its price,  and the fact that I don’t have to ingest this made in China device, that led me to it. The lack of competition in this space also played a part – for while there are loads of digital media players out there (but practically all made in China too), few integrate the HDTV receiver.

Interestingly, one of the shops in Golden Computer Centre tried to pass off the HD600B-TV as a ‘fake’ and the HD500B-TH as the real thing but don’t be fooled – the HD600B-TV is the real local version – with a local distributor that will warrant it for a year.

No major complaints on the HDTV receiver side of things, except that compared to dedicated set top boxes, the HD600B-TV boots up slower. It takes about half a minute from the moment you hit the power button to the point where the HD signal hits your screen – still tolerable for me. Dedicated set top boxes start up faster but they wouldn’t let you just pull up your Electronic Programming Guide on the screen and choose the programme you want to record simply by highlighting the programme and hitting the “Enter” button.

Electronic Programming Guide - just select the programme you want to record and hit enter on the remote

Picture quality was good, audio was fine, and it switched channels fast enough. Recording (either onto a 3.5” SATA HDD that slots into it or a USB storage device – unfortunately, you can’t record onto a NAS) worked well enough, and saves the recording as a .TS file. Recorded picture quality was recorded in the same resolution as your video display mode – and generally just as good as the broadcast signal. However, the audio was a little softer and there doesn’t seem to be a fix for it besides simply turning up the volume a little more during playback.

Connects via UPnP to my Synology NAS

On the digital media player side of it – this thing plays every format you throw at it – at least everything that I have. To hook up to my NAS, it was plug and play via UPnP. I connected it via its 10/100 Ethernet port to my router and soon enough, it found an IP address on my local area network and I could see browse my files on the NAS through the UPnP menu. I was initially worried that playback of 1080p files might choke on the 100 Mbps (and not gigabit) port but they played just fine. You can also attach one of the approved Wireless N dongles to it and do away with the Ethernet cable altogether.

Compared to running a PC with XBMC or a Mac on Plex, this device was definitely not as flexible. For example, your subtitle files have to be in the same directory and have the same filename as your video file, and if you want music for your photo slideshows, you have to either put the music file into the same directory of the photos, or manually start playing the music first before switching to the photo slideshow.

The device had a couple of other nifty features, like a built-in browser to surf the Net but you’d probably need to hook up a keyboard for the experience to work out well. Surfing with a remote control just doesn’t cut it. It can also stream from YouTube and Youku via its built-in apps.

At HK$1460 (S$253), I could have bought a HD receiver and a digital media player separately, but I’d have missed out on the ease of recording that comes with the HD600B-TV and I really could live with one less switch to turn on, not to mention one less remote control.

For those concerned about audio quality, besides the RCA line out jacks, the HD600B-TV also sports a TOSLINK optical out and a Coaxial out, and while it has 2 USB ports, I’m not sure if it will work with a USB DAC.

On the whole, the HD600B-TV has worked better than I expected – then again, I must admit I had pretty low expectations to begin with, thanks to the fact that my previous set top box that went “kaput” was also proudly made in Shenzhen.

One of the questions I often get from friends coming up to Hong Kong is if stuff is cheaper here or in Singapore. In many cases, the answer is “not really” or “just a little” – but in the case of the Synology DS210j that I bought for my bro recently, it was a helluva lot cheaper!

At HK$1530 (which is about S$278 at 1S$:5.5HK$), you’d be paying almost 50% more if you bought one from Synology’s dealer in Singapore (Memory World) which has priced it at S$408. Plus according to the Synology forum (post dates back to 2007 though), Synology does provide international warranty.

So why the DS210j? Only the Qnap TS210J II comes close to the DS210j’s transfer rates, but is more expensive. The rest of the 2-bay NAS competition, like the D-Link DNS-323 are generally slower. Oh, and its DLNA compliant too, so fits in with the plan of adding those ‘media extender’ devices to stream video and audio later.

And so far, the DS210j – paired with 2 x 1TB Seagate ST31000528AS HDD – has proven to be a great buy. No nasty surprises – it runs quietly, was easy to hook up to the network and does what it’s supposed to do.

The installation process could have been a tad better documented though. During the initial install, the installation wizard asked for the latest firmware file to flash the NAS, which left me for a sec wondering where to find it. After digging through the install disc, it turns out that the firmware files were in a directory labelled “patches”. In any case, geeks need to stay on top of firmware revisions so I went on down to their website and found a version that was newer than that on the disc.

Mac users will also be happy to know that the NAS popped right up in the Finder (I’m on OSX10.5.8) – leaving nothing to muck around with.

So unless you want to venture the DIY NAS on FreeNAS route that Alfred had shown previously, the Synology DS210j is the best bang for buck in the RAID 1, 2-bay NAS scene – especially if you get it here in HK!

I thought so too – so I tried out the latest Google Mobile App‘s voice search feature on my Nokia E71 (which means the S60 flavour of the app).

The app is basically kinda like a one-stop-shop to quickly link to and search through Google stuff, so you will need a data connection (wifi or cellphone network), and the other mobile apps (Gmail, Google Maps etc) loaded if you want to fire it up from the above home screen.

If you enable its location-based function, it’s supposed to yield more relevant results. But it didn’t seem to do anything for me in terms of returning more relevant search results so I shut that feature off.

The above option is probably the most important setting to make your voice searches more accurate. But alas, while there’s “Indian English”, there’s no Singlish! How can like that? Die lah.

I mucked around with the British and American English options and found that you really do need to get your accents right. E.g. for word spelt “fast”, do you say ‘fahst’ or ‘f-ae-st’? And for Singaporeans with a mish-mash of accents, this might really get you thinking about your pronunciation.

Overall, the voice recognition was good – only if you spoke in phrases or sentences. Recognising single words remains a huge challenge and with all the exceptions in the English language, it really is no surprise that it choked over words like “flour”. I’ll go test it out some more on some American-English speaking friends but I’d imagine it will still struggle with single words.

Specifically on the E71, I think I’d still prefer to bash out my search term with the little keyboard. But on normal keypad-only phones, or for touchscreen phones with finicky virtual keyboards, voice search could be faster.

So if you have an Andriod (of course), BlackBerry, iPhone or S60 phone, give this app a go.

Oh, and when I said “techgoondu”, it gave me … “taekwondo”. So do you think it will recognise “shingz”?

That’s just what StarHub announced today, when it said that its current CEO Terry Clontz will be retiring in January 2010, and former M1 CEO Neil Montefiore has surfaced to fill his shoes – pending regulatory approval.

Earlier this year on Feb 1, Neil stepped down from M1 and its then CFO Karen Kooi stood in as acting CEO, only to be confirmed as CEO a little more than two months later.

Now Neil, whom Terry has known “on a professional and personal level for ten years”, will take the reins of the number two telco in Singapore – a position which he probably wanted M1 to reach during his tenure.

Will this fuel further speculation of consolidation in the local telco scene? You bet. StarHub and M1 were already partners in the Infinity consortium, which put in a failed Netco bid in the Next Gen NBN project. And M1′s fixed broadband service essentially rides off StarHub’s cable modem infrastructure.

And if being pals doesn’t work out, StarHub can have the dirt on M1 – where they are good, and where they can hit it hard.

StarHub, 1 – M1, 0.

• You can move your business fixed line to a mobile and not miss any calls without the need to subscribe to call forwarding.
• Stop paying for your monthly fixed line fees just because you feel nostalgic about the number – port it to a prepaid mobile number.
• Going from fixed to a prepaid mobile might actually lower your phone bills if you’re an extremely infrequent voice user.

I’m sure there’ll be more scenarios and benefits, but unfortunately, this is expected that it will take a while before the fixed line carriers here actually let you do it, as the regulator’s left it to the telcos to sort it out commercially.

And I can’t think of too many reasons why the fixed line folks here would be wanting to open the floodgates to the fixed line exodus, but hey, at least they can start the conversation on how they want to do this and work out fixed to mobile migration options.

Now that’s what I call true number portability.

Meanwhile in sunny Singapore, can someone tell me where we are on our quest for telco liberalisation and true number portability? Since the implementation of “full mobile number portability” in 2008, I still can’t port my post-paid mobile to pre-paid *sigh*! Worse still, a review on number portability doesn’t seem to be on the horizon!

A touchscreen with a tactile keypress. That’s probably the most strikingly unique feature about RIM’s first touchscreen device – the BlackBerry Storm … aka its 9500 series.

The concept of its “SurePress” touchscreen certainly sounds good … on the screen – a capacitive touchscreen that you can not only tap, double tap, flick and drag your finger on, but also click on.

Click on a screen? Hmm. But will it make typing faster and easier?

While the idea of a clickable touchscreen sounds great, in reality, it didn’t quite click with me. The touch and tap aspects of the screen were great – you could highlight, copy and paste, swipe your finger to scroll etc. But when it came to typing, which I’d imagine you’d do a lot of on a messaging-centric device like a BlackBerry, that’s when the idea of a clicking screen started to come apart. First, it takes some effort to click the screen – more so than needed for a light tap on the touchscreen. And closer to the edges of the screen, the clicks needed even more effort. Will it have worked better if the screen required less effort to click? I think not.

So with all those milliseconds more that you need to click to type on the Storm’s screen, it simply ended up taking more effort – and slower than a plain old touchscreen. Sure it felt good to be able to click, but it didn’t add any speed or accuracy. And speedwise – it certainly was no where near typing on a qwerty ‘chicklet’ keypad like that on my Nokia E71 or the “normal” BlackBerries like the Curve or Bold. If you’re a real (not virtual touchscreen) qwerty keyboard user like me (Treo 650 to iPhone for a while and back to Nokia E71), forget about the Storm. There’s no way you could get used to this.

While I had no love for the keyboard, hiding the virtual keyboard really showed off the Storms big and bright 3.25″ screen.This is where it really goes one up on the competition. Sporting a HVGA+ (did they just invent this display “standard”?) 480 x 360 resolution screen like that on the BlackBerry Curve 8900 (which is higher than the 480 x 320 on the BlackBerry Bold) the large and high resolution screen made watching vodcasts and other videos truly practical on a screen this size.

You’d have thought that the combination of a nice big display and a touchscreen would have made surfing on the Storm a great experience. Unfortunately, the built-in browser is a little clunky and slow in rendering pages. I often ended up with “Requesting script” and “Running script” messages at the bottom of the browser – it just doesn’t seem to handle scripting well. However, it did make using Google Maps a joy – reiterating the fact that it was the slow browser that was spoiling a potentially good surfing experience.

Another area which the Storm could do with improvements is the lag in the operating system. It’s like the OS was trying to play catch up. Some times after unlocking the screen it will need an extra few seconds to get back into application where you last left it at. You still could get to your applications with a little patience, but you’d certainly not describe the experience as nippy.

But all this brickbats aside, this Storm must be every telco’s dream device. It does a great job with the multimedia experience (audio, video) – which suck up big packets of data – but it doesn’t let you do that for free as it does NOT have a Wifi connection. Probably one of the only messaging smartphones without a Wifi connection, this leaves you only with its HSDPA/3G connection for data access. Which means if you don’t have an unlimited data plan, or a boss paying for an unlimited data plan, you should just forget about it.

Even if I had an unlimited data plan, I ran into another problem. I get a spotty signal at some corners at home and the data connection sometimes switched back to a slower EDGE connection. Now what CAN you do about that? Ask the telco to put in another base station? But even with a good HSDPA connection, the connection’s still slower than Wifi – and why would you want a slower connection in a new phone?

And if you’re into video calling, you better take note that there’s no secondary camera (the one that faces you) on the Storm.

The few days with the Storm did make me miss the touchscreen experience. I’m convinced touchscreens are great – even many digicams come with touchscreen LCDs. Which brings me to the question of what makes it so difficult for all these non windows smartphone makers to come up with something with a touchscreen AND a real qwerty keyboard – something like an updated Treo 650? Now I’m imagining a BlackBerry Bold with a touchscreen – that would be close to perfection! HTC does churn out a nice range of smartphones with touchscreens and a qwerty keyboard but they run Windows Mobile and that’s another story for another day.

So after a few days with the BlackBerry Storm, on loan from the good people at RIM in Hong Kong, I concluded that I’m riding out this Storm.

No pricing available yet from the telcos here – they’re taking pre-orders for now. “Water goods” or parallel imports of the Storm are going for about HK$3,500-3,800.

Went to the first ever WordCamp Hong Kong today and the highlight for me was certainly hearing from the founding developer of the WordPress platform Matt Mullenweg, which this site – and millions of others – run on.

Affable Matt took the WordCampers, which I’m guessing numbered around maybe 50, on a journey back through time – from how he started working on it and ending off a little into the future – with features request for the next version of WordPress. But there was much more.

It was a thought provoking session for me and here are some quick points that were gleaned from him, which might also spur some of your thoughts.

- Open Source is the future of all software.
- It’s about freedom (to use, share and change software).
- Getting comments on blogs means more than just readership. Readership is what comes with it. Readers could simply be people who show up at your house, drink all your beer and leave.
- The model of everyone going and logging into the same social networking website is “waning a bit”. After all the Internet is about de-centralisation. So maybe that’s where BuddyPress and the like come in – everyone can start their own social network and connect them.
- The future of blogging is multi-modal.

There are lots more little nuggets of stuff which I’ll try to organise and put together a little later, along with more thoughts triggered by the talk from the other folks today.

In any case, here are some of my photos from Wordcamp HK. There are plenty of other (better?) snaps on Flickr. And props to the folks who organised it.

So what about WordCamp Singapore? Firstly, WordCamps are driven by the local community – that means WordPress users in Singapore will need to drive  it (finding a venue, $$$/sponsors etc to help make it happen). Here’s where I think I’d be happy to help make it happen in SG – and I think I’d be able to round up my fellow Techgoondus here to help too.

But I spoke to Maya – “Anti-Chaos Engineer” and one of the key folks at Automattic who help make the WordCamps happen – and it seems like they’ve done quite a few locations in Asia this year (Thailand, Indonesia, China, Hong Kong and coming up, Japan) so unfortunately it seems there aren’t any plans to be back in this part of the world, at least for the rest of this year.

Nonetheless, do you guys want to see a WordCamp Singapore? Shout and leave a comment below. Maybe if there’s enough of you, Matt might find a reason drop by.