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. …

Here’s a secret. Normally you need to have an online ST subscription to read the full length of ST articles online. Those that you get to access for free are usually only short snippets of the full version.

But there is Red Nano. (rednano.sg) Red Nano is SPH’s (the media giant which owns ST, BT, TNP, Zao Bao, etc) search and directory service which lets you view any SPH news article that was published in the last 12 months and any reviews of products with no time limit. The articles will appear under Red Nano’s archives a day after the news went to print. If you search for it on the day itself, you will be directed to say straitstimes.com. Once you are out of Red Nano, you cannot view it for free.  Unfortunately, Red Nano needs some training to learn how to use it this way. Here’s how to do it.

…

Singapore’s Ministry of Health has sent expired Tamiflu supplies to the general practitioner’s in Singapore.  Tamiflu, which comes in boxes of 10 pills each, is the anti-viral drug for the H1N1 flu. According to the report and to my own sources as well, these Tamiflu meds hve expiry dates of 2007, and was manufactured in 2003. MOH has added a sticker that says that these meds can be used beyond their shelf life – to 2010.

MOH’s circular to the GPs say this:

“We would like to assure you that the extension is with the approval from the manufacturer (Roche), U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and our Health Sciences Authority. This extention  is  made possible due to our stringent conditioning and maintenance requirements in our storage facilities. The efficacy of the drug is not compromised in any way and is fit for usage.”

Straits Times has done really well to get doctors to give their response. 

Dr Wong Tien Hua, a general practitioner in Sengkang, said an expiry date can vouch for a drug’s effectiveness only for that period. ‘If it is past the expiry date, the effectiveness of the drug might not be good,’ he said, adding that someone with the H1N1 virus might take longer to recover if given ‘expired’ medication. (from ST)

Agreeing, Dr Vincent Chia, deputy director of Healthway Medical, said although it is a national stockpile, the onus will still be on the doctor to explain to patients. ‘Tamiflu is not without its side effects…so when that happens we won’t know if it’s because the drugs are expired or because of the side effects,’ he said. (from ST)

For the full story, go to ST.com here, if you are not a subscriber use red nano here.

For years, Apple fans have lambasted Windows for being insecure (which is true) while boasting that their own Macs “had no viruses.” It’s not that Mac had no vulnerabilities, its market share was just too small to make it worth the hackers’ time. But with iPhone and ipod Touch now taking over the world, it is only a matter of time before the viruses will appear.

What is interesting about the iPhone 3.0 OS is that while it is free for iPhone users, iPod Touch users like me ( I only bought it because I thought my wife would like it) have to pay US$9.90 for 3.0. Now 3.0 has a host of nifty features which in Apple’s principle justifies charging users for the update.

Of course only Apple gets away with this rubbish, charging users for updates to the operating system of their machine as they have done with Mac OSX for years with fancy Big Cat names to updates. Imagine if Microsoft  charged for Windows Vista Sp1 – the world would probably descend onto pandemomiun.  …

Yes, the star were there – Pierre Png, Flying Dutchman, Andrea D Cruz, Dick Lee and some magician called Cyrus from Japan.

But for me, this was the worst phone launch I have attended this year. The media invite says 4pm, so I reached there at 4.15pm. But the doors were closed and like many other tech journalists there, we had to wait like idiots while Sony Ericsson got ready to start.

At about 4.45 pm, the celebrities turned up while the local tech journalists,  who were basically ignored by the PR minders, went to buy their sugar cane at the nearby hawker stalls and at Pacific Coffee at Red Dot Museum, waiting for the damn show to start. …

Samsung Jet

Samsung launched what it calls a phone that is “smarter than a smartphone” at a press event earlier today. This is the touch-screen  Samsung Jet, which boasts of some interesting features including:

Speed – 800 MHz processor
Graphics – 16 million colours in a 3.1-inch AMOLED display
Web – Dolfin web browser lets you view up to five web pages at the same time. Multi-tasking capable
Video – supports DivX, Xvid and H.263/4

Other Specs – HSPDA 3.6 Mbps, 5 Mega camera, 30fps video recording, music player, MS Exchange Active Sync, A-GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 1100 mAh battery
…

Microsoft, as you may have heard, is launching a new search engine called Bing.com. What a horrendously silly name. Now I know why.

Dr Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group just explained 5 mins ago in a worldwide press conference call that the word Bing comes from two Chinese characters – bi and ing (sorry my hanyu pinyin is crap) and that together the two words mean “to be very certain in your answer.” They also want to make bing into a verb!

Microsoft’s strategy to fight Google? It says it’s by building loyalty with users by winning them over one at a time.

Differences vs Google and Yahoo – three key areas:

>>Delivering of best results: type in UPS, and you will get back an UPS link and tracking application, type BT and you get back a customer service number.

>>Bringing new level of organisation: type Bill Gates, you see his pictures, video, speeches,
going deep in four verticals – shopping, travel and local (one more i missed, maybe food?)

Thus the technology approach is more focused on the intent of the user, that is, according to Microsoft, to bring search to “new frontiers”, and to give more satisfying results to users.

Cryptic Studios – the makers of City Of Heroes – is back with Champions Online, an MMOG where your hero is a superhero. I managed to get onto the beta and have played for a few hours. So far, the game looks pretty cool.

Unlike COH, you don’t have to stick to a class – like a tank or a dps type – you can choose from a whole range of skillsets from fire to ice to dual swords to pure might to sorcery and more.

You will probably have a base skillset, say like ice, but there is nothing to stop you from choosing secondary skills from might and more. Each hero also gets to choose a travel power – from super jump to flight to teleport and more.

What is really interesting however is the likelihood that this game will be a cross-platform MMOG. The PC version is scheduled to launch June 14 and there are signs that an Xbox LIVE version is on the way. …

Two weeks after IBM decided against buying Sun, Oracle announced just hours ago it has sealed the deal to buy Sun. Oracle will pay US$9.50 per share of Sun, 10 cents per share more than what IBM had offered. I knew something was up when I got a late SMS from Sun’s PR to attend an urgent conference call. Wow, this really came out of the BLUE,  pun quite intended.

Electronic Art’s new game is basically Magic The Gathering Online turned into real-time-strategy and is a fantastic game. But it has one HUGE problem – there is a bug which makes you lose your virtual assets and currency. The problem becomes serious when you realise that the exchange rate is 1 battleforgepoint (bfp) = 2 singapore cents. So when I saw 1050 bfps disappearing from my account, it means I lost the equivalent of S$21.

In my case what happened was that I had sold an ultra-rare card called enlightenment for 1050 bfps. I saw the money going into my game account but when I relogged into my account, both the card and the 1050 bfp was gone! Turns out that I am not the only one and that there are at least five other chaps who have had different problems.

This things are not a problem when gamers raise a ticket to customer support to remedy the situation but going by what the forumers are saying, some have been waiting for over THREE WEEKS for this issue to be resolved but still no sight. The problem with this bug is that it has affected the confidence of many gamers to continue trading until they get a resolution on their first bug. I recently paid $80 for additional BFPs to buy more cards but unless Phenomic (the studio which developed the game) can get its act together, it will be losing some customers pretty soon.