If you are signing up or renewing a broadband, mobile or pay-TV service these days, the questions you face can sometimes be rather daunting, given big changes – mostly positive – that have shaken up the telecom market in the past few years.

Who has the best broadband deals in Singapore? Who has the best bundled “triple play” deals with all three services packaged nicely and billed in a single envelop? And, of course, how do I switch all my plans over to one operator?

Answer these questions well and you could be on the way to substantial savings by buying wisely and also enjoy the convenience of having fewer bills from so many operators.

About four years ago, I’d have told you, if you watch live football, the choice was simple: go for StarHub, because it had the fastest (cable modem) broadband, per-second billing for its mobile services and of course, the crown jewel – English Premier League (EPL) on its cable TV channels.

But things have changed so much in the past few years that consumers are sometimes spoilt, perhaps even confused with choice.

Fibre broadband has truly given users better deals – S$39 a month for an unheard of 100Mbps, for starters. The upcoming three seasons of the EPL could well be shown on both SingTel and StarHub, and possibly even M1, thanks to Singapore’s new pay-TV rules. And let’s not forget number portability, which lets you keep your mobile number while switching telcos.

With so many changes in the past few years and more upcoming, what should you be aware of when you next sign up for those two-year contracts? Here’s a little guide, gleaned from my own experience buying these services. …

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the Google phone that had fans waiting for months, is finally here in Singapore this Saturday with a small bonus – it will come in both black and white.

The first model here to sport the new Android 4.0 OS out of the box, the top-end phone had been delayed from its original January launch, missing both the Christmas and immediate post-Chinese New Year buying sprees.  …

Nokia Singapore is rolling out the Belle version of its Symbian operating system for 12- to 18-month old phones like the N8 and E7 from today, showing that it has not forgotten users who have yet to abandon the “burning platform“.

Recently unveiled on new models like the N700, Belle comes with improvements like bigger live widgets and promises a smoother, faster interface than the rather outdated experience on previous Symbian editions. …

Rara.com, yet another streaming music service, was officially launched in Singapore just about two weeks back.

The music service offers ad-free access to more than 10 million tracks, and will initially be offered at a rate of S$0.99 (for web) and S$1.99 (for web and mobile on the Android platform) per month in Singapore.

After three months, the price point will jump to S$4.99 per month for web and S$9.99 per month for web and mobile respectively.

Take a look:

My initial reaction was: meh. I’m not really impressed after I visited the site.

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It’s hard to fault Nokia for the good work that has been put into the Lumia 800.

With a unibody polycarbonate shell, an AMOLED display and an eight-megapixel Carl-Zeiss lens, Nokia’s comeback phone is up against the top smartphones in the market, such as the iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy SII. …

Cellphone users in Singapore can expect extended coverage in buildings, on roads and when travelling in an MRT train underground, when stricter rules on 3G coverage unveiled today by the government regulator kick in as soon as April 2012.

Following a number of high-profile network outages last year, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) today spelt out the new rules, which will include 85 per cent coverage for each building here. Currently, telcos only have to cover 85 per cent of “public access areas”.

For commuters, the coverage will now include all road and MRT tunnels as well as the CTE by 2015, extending from the previous requirement of 95 per cent across road and MRT tunnels tested. In all, about 99 per cent of the outdoor space on the island is to be blanketed by 3G signals. Previously, the requirement was only 95 per cent across all roads.

And each time any of the three telecom operators here – SingTel, StarHub, M1 – fails to meet one requirement, they can be fined up to S$50,000, instead of the previous “slap on the wrist” S$5,000 per indicator per month.

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Symantec has discovered over a dozen apps with malicious code that could cede control of your smartphone to perpetrators.

In a recent blog post, the security company said the apps, which are hosted on the Android Market, can be used to propagate a “bot-like threat that can receive commands to carry out certain actions, as well as steal information from the device”. …

With the Evernote and Skitch add-ons, features that were once available through separate apps can now be accessed directly through the Dolphin browser. …

Android might not be the smoothest of mobile operating systems – I’ve seen it slow down even on dual-core chips – but that’s all about to change with the ASUS  Eee Pad Transformer Prime and its brand new quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor.

A brief hands-on I had earlier in the week revealed that it truly is a sea change in the responsiveness of Android, even more so than the Sony Tablet S, which until now is the smoothest Android tablet I’ve tested. With a whole range of goodies packed into this tablet, the Transformer Prime is easily the best Android tablet on the market right now.

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