Singapore is so small that if you don’t know how to get around town, you really shouldn’t be driving around much. That was my response to in-car GPS kits in the past, being the smart driver that I thought I was.

Then I started using Google Maps on my Android phone to start getting around town. I realised the suggested route sometimes helped me rethink how I always went around town – it often got me there without me testing out routes and missing a turn to a building’s car park, for example.

Thus when I placed the TomTom Go 2050 in my car a few weeks ago, I was more than happy to hear a friendly female voice tell me how best to get from, say, Takashimaya shopping centre to Alexandra Road.

The first thing that impresses you about TomTom’s in-car GPS is the easy click mount. Instead of just “pasting” a big piece of rubber on your wind screen, TomTom’s mounting system lets you screw it tightly down as well. It’s as solid a mount I have seen.

Then there’s the screen. The 5-inch display on the TomTom Go 2050 is bright, sharp and simply a joy to use even in sunny Singapore. During my tests, there was no question of a washed out screen even on bright afternoons.

The capacitive touch screen is also generally responsive when you tap on the large touch-friendly menus or pinch and zoom in and out of maps. Just don’t expect the same level of smoothness as your smartphone, of course. Thankfully, that’s not that much of an issue as most times, you’d just be tapping in your destination name or postal code.

How useful are the Southeast Asia maps? I only managed to drive around in Singapore and I’d say the unit tracks pretty accurately and speedily – once it is logged on to a navigation satellite, there is little lag in telling where you are and giving the right instructions. It works even though Singapore’s roads often include multiple turn-offs close by and are hardly the simpler, grid-like system, say, in New York City.

For folks driving through city traffic, it helps too that the TomTom unit comes with the company’s IQ technology that smartly takes the inputs of fellow drivers – taken when they sync their units – to estimate where the usual bottlenecks are.

The only issue I have using it in Singapore – and this probably stumps other GPS units too – is the constant changes on Singapore roads. It’s just so hard to keep track of the changes because roads are often dug up, filled up and soon dug up again for laying cables, road diversions and other works.

I was at the busy Upper Serangoon junction near Macpherson a few weeks ago and the GPS did not offer the right directions. The reason: the lanes seemed to have changed, which is not surprising, given the amount of works that have been going on for months now.

If there’s something I think the TomTom Go 2050 can improve on, it’d be the time taken to locate my position via a satellite link. Driving out from my apartment building’s basement car park, I had waited up to a few minutes for the GPS unit to get a signal and start finding the location.

If you are turning out from a shopping centre onto busy Orchard Road, you’d better have instructions ready before you commit to a wrong turn and end up paying unnecessary road toll.

Still, I’m generally satisfied with the TomTom Go 2050. Though it’s not quite cheap at S$399, it’s literally plug and play and does the job admirably. It’ll be a useful companion to have on a drive to Malaysia. Even when you’re driving overseas, you can download the latest travel maps so you can drive, say, in Margaret River in Australia with more confidence than the old, outdated GPS units provided by the rental companies.

Google Street View has been expanded in Singapore to include panoramic views of the city-state’s iconic and heritage sites.

According to a media statement Tuesday, Google said the new sites were chosen by Singaporeans in a poll jointly organised with the Singapore Tourism Board, where respondents indicated locations they wanted to see on Street View. These include the Singapore Flyer, Haw Par Villa, Fort Canning Park, One Fullerton, Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve, Kampong Buangkok and Kampong Glam.

The new images, collected by a Street View trike, allow a viewer to intimately explore the nooks and crannies of popular spots in Singapore. The trike is a mechanical masterpiece comprising three bicycle wheels, a mounted Street View camera, and a specially decorated box containing image-collecting gadgetry.

The trikes are similar to Google’s Street View cars for collecting street-level imagery but is specially designed for venturing into places that are less accessible by cars, such as historic landmarks and coastal paths.

To assuage concerns over privacy, Google has gone to lengths to safeguard privacy while allowing users to benefit from this feature.

“Street View only contains imagery that is already visible from public roads. And in the case of the partner program collections, we have permission from the landmark to drive and collect imagery. Street View also uses technology that blurs both faces and licence plates,” the search giant said.

“In addition, any user can easily flag images for removal that he or she considers inappropriate by clicking on ‘Report a problem’”

Street View was launched in Singapore in 2008 and is currently available in more than 30 countries and 100 metropolitan areas worldwide, including large areas of the U.S., Australia, Japan, France, Italy and Spain.

The service provides 360-degree street-level images in Google Maps to allow users to view and navigate through historic buildings, parks and gardens. In areas where Street View is available, you can see the images on Google Maps (on a PC or an Internet-enabled mobile) by zooming into the lowest level, or by dragging the orange “Pegman” icon on the left-hand side of the map onto a blue highlighted street.

Singaporeans are a cellphone-crazy lot. Even while on vacation, most will remain tethered to their smartphones, checking in from obscure locations to earn bragging rights and lapping up tips left behind by others. In this week’s app round-up, we review our favourite travel apps that will let you tap into all kind of information on the road.

Triposo, available from iTunes App Store, Android Market and Windows Phone Marketplace (Bangkok Guide only)
Move over Lonely Planet, there’s now an app developed by former Googlers that promises to give printed travel guides a run for their money. Developed by Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga, Triposo uses an algorithm that mixes, mashes and annotates free content from Wikitravel, Wikipedia, World66 and Openstreetmap to distill travel guides. Not surprisingly, its technology is similar to how search engines work, from crawling, parsing and matching content to relevance ranking and organising the data. If you are curious about how Triposo guides are put together, read a detailed explanation here.

For now, the Android version of the app has over 50 guides available for download, compared with just over 20 destinations for the iPhone and iPad apps. Once you fire up the app, search for guides to download based on continent, distance from your current location and from an A-to-Z listing. While some guides for cities like Bangkok are comprehensive, others are not. The Singapore guide, for example, only lists a handful of sights – albeit lesser known ones like the Poh Ern Shih Temple – that are strangely grouped under Symphony Lake at Botanic Gardens. The Night Life section is also skimpy, with Harry’s Bar as its only entry.

Wikitude, available from iTunes App Store and Android Market
Nominated as one of the best augmented reality (AR) browsers in 2010 by Augmented Planet blog which also organises conferences on the subject, Wikitude takes AR to its full potential by gathering information from sources such as Wikipedia, Twitter and Panoramio that have been tagged with location-based data. So, if you are standing in the middle of Orchard Road, use the app to get a run-down of the shopping belt’s history, malls, discounts and Twitter conversations in the area.

You can only select one source at a time, and view the relevant results represented as bubbles in the camera view. To read, say a Wikipedia article on Orchard Road, just tap on the Orchard Road bubble. But what happens if there are too many bubbles clustered on the camera view? In this case, switch to the map view to display the results on Google Maps, or list view to see the results as a list. For now, Wikitude remains a “consumption-based” app for perusing information contributed by others. Down the road, its developers should consider letting users contribute their own content by deepening the integration between the app and its data sources.

Trip Journal Lite, available from iTunes App Store and Android Market
Keeping a travel journal may sound a little old school to some folks. But decades later, a trip journal may well be a reflective record of your thoughts, experiences and memories for your posterity. Trip Journal is a nifty app that lets you trace your travels, pen notes as you stop at each point in your journey and snap images along the way.

Your can archive and share trips with others by exporting them as KMZ files to be viewed in Google Earth. Each KMZ file includes your trip route, photos, notes and checkpoints in the journey. There is a Facebook and Twitter export feature, too, that lets you send photos to Facebook and post your current location on Twitter. The app also includes a compass for finding your way around. As with all technology products, things get obsolete quickly. To ensure the memories are preserved, it’s important that the KMZ format that comprises the open-standard KML file and accompanying files like images, will continue to be supported by future software.

SGTaxi, available from Windows Phone Marketplace
SGTaxi is an amazing app that lets users book a taxi through the local SMS service with an elegant and intuitive interface. The app lets you save your most frequently-used locations and the ability to book a taxi with just one tap. For the privacy advocates out there, there’s also the option to not save your location at all, and manually enter them every time you want a booking. Made a booking that you don’t need any more? You can also cancel them from the app. SGTaxi currently only supports Comfort and SMRT taxi bookings. – Raymond Lau

iChangi, available from iTunes App Store, Android Market and Windows Phone Marketplace
Our Changi airport is no doubt one of the best airports out there; any Singaporean can attest to that. To top it off, Singapore is a small place and visiting the airport just for fun is a viable option. You can search and track flights for both arrivals and departures, and check out the shopping and dining options in the airport. The app also updates itself with latest airport highlights, such as the Angry Birds Finnair flight, or promotions like the ongoing $10 set lunches. General information about the airport, such as inter-terminal transfer, directions to and from the airport, and customs information, are also available in-app. - Raymond Lau

Kayak flight & hotel search, available from iTunes App Store, Android Market and Windows Phone Marketplace
For those not familiar with Kayak, it’s an online service which lets users search and compare the prices of flights, rental cars, hotels, cruises and travel packages across hundreds of travel sites. Booking can also be made directly through the app. Plus, if you fly frequently, Kayak lets you track flights and manage your itinerary right from within the app. And it doesn’t hurt that Kayak is a beautifully designed app with great transition animations. On the downside, the app is not completely localised: prices are displayed in US dollars, for one. - Raymond Lau

Kyoto NouryouYuka, available from Android Market
Sure, you can look up Tripadvisor and find a restaurant in Kyoto, but you’d realise that 1) there are many reviews in Japanese (because it’s popular to domestic travellers as well) and 2) the information is often not up to date.

One app that I turned to when I was in Kyoto earlier this year was the English-based Kyoto NouryouYuka, which I stumbled upon while searching for a localised app to show me some nice places for dinner, complete with the standard information like address, opening hours and perhaps even a nice picture or two of the place.

Besides letting you search up a restaurant quickly, this app also has all the useful buttons that give you one-touch access to call the restaurant and even to call a taxi easily. It really helped us when our taxi driver was lost in one of the side streets of the wonderful Japanese city and could not find a restaurant where we had made a dinner booking at. He could easily just speak to the restaurant staff because we first knew how to call the place with the app!

This wonderful app even lists the restaurants according to the cuisine they serve. There’s Japanese, of course, then “Kyoto” which signifies that an eatery serves the city’s famed cuisine, and even French, for when you feel like something different while on holiday there. – Alfred Siew

Hotels.com, available from Android Market
This is the mobile app to one of my favourite online hotels booking sites. Why do I use Hotels.com? It’s almost always one of the cheapest – along with Expedia.com – and has access to more than 130,000 hotels in 200 countries.

Like many other hotel booking apps, this lets you search for a place to spend the night in and book the hotel right on your smartphone. There are also reviews and ratings from fellow travellers, so at least you get a preview of what others have experienced.

This app is excellent for those who travel without their laptops and use their smartphones to do everything on the go.

I say this especially for folks who often forget to bring hotel vouchers or confirmation letters with them – some places still require that besides your passport. This app lets you access your reservations with your phone so that at least you can bring up a confirmation screen to show to the front desk staff and get checked in quickly. Handy, especially after a long haul flight. – Alfred Siew

Microsoft is partnering with Dell to build a green data centre that will power Bing Maps‘ suite of geospatial imaging applications. The centre is located on the grounds of a Microsoft facility in Boulder, Colorado.

Dell claims that the new data centre is highly efficient in energy consumption, thanks to a cooling system that uses air with evaporative cooling technology to achieve a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of as low as 1.03.

PUE is a measure of how much of power is used by computing equipment, sans power consumed by cooling systems and other energy overheads.

As a guide, a Yahoo data centre in Lockport, New York, built using a chiller-less data centre design known as the Yahoo Computing Coop, has a PUE rating of 1.08.

In building the data centre, Dell said the challenge was to design a “modular outdoor solution” that was optimised for power, space, network connectivity and workload performance.

Roy Guillen, vice president and general manager of Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Group, said: “In working with Microsoft, we’ve been able to produce a highly innovative and cost effective microsite to house their world class imagery offerings”.

Brad Clark, Microsoft’s group program manager for Bing Maps Imagery Technologies, concurred.

He said that the company’s goal was to push technological boundaries and build a no-frills high-performance data centre to deliver complicated geospatial applications that can ‘quilt’ different pieces of imagery into a cohesive mosaic for its users.

Bing Maps differs slightly from its closest rival, Google Maps. Besides touting satellite and aerial imagery, Bing Maps has a Bird’s Eye view that lets you visualise how things would look like from a low flying aircraft. Its Streetside feature is similar to Google Streetview, though Microsoft does not seem to have captured street images of Singapore.

This Android-based gadget works as promised, offering good estimates of the distance you need to cover before the next turn. It also suggests alternative routes if you fail to make a turn. While you can set trip preferences based on time, distance and road features to avoid, like most car GPS units, the A50 takes you on a longer route on some occasions.

Garmin’s software also integrates Google Street View for those who want to peek at their destinations, including locations of bus stops, taxi stands and carpark entrances. Until GPS devices can direct drivers to building carparks, which may be on a different side of the road from where you’re coming from, I’ve been relying on Street View to suss out carpark entrances at unfamiliar places.

The software, which includes a list of events and makan places at your present location, has various navigation voice settings to suit your preferences. You can choose a male or female voice in American or British accented English, or opt for Malay and Mandarin voice-overs.

Design-wise, the nuvifone is sleeker than the earlier nuvifone A10. It’s thin enough to slip into your pockets without causing a bulge, and offers sufficient screen estate for viewing maps and reading e-mail messages. The 3.5-inch, 320-by-480 pixel display isn’t as sharp compared to high-end smartphones like the HTC Desire HD.

Besides the standard Android buttons, the A50 includes a directional button that seems redundant on a smartphone with a touchscreen. Sure, there are folks who prefer to run through a phone menu using physical buttons, but on a touchscreen phone, how many will do that? It’s certainly faster to click on a link or menu item with your finger than to scroll down a laundry list of items before selecting the right one. A larger screen in place of the directional button would have been a big plus.

The A50 runs on the Android 2.1 operating system, which slows down when you run too many apps in the background. Sometimes, I would be greeted with a blank screen for a few seconds while waiting for a background app to load.

Understandably, it takes a while for Garmin-Asus to keep up with the latest flavor of the Android OS because the nuvifone uses an extensively customized Android system with refreshing icons and a beefed up menu interface. Hopefully, the speed bumps can be flattened once the phone gets upgraded to Froyo or Gingerbread. The device would also benefit from more RAM – the A50, strangely, has just 256MB of RAM compared to 512MB on the older A10.

The A50′s three-megapixel camera captures images with a good level of detail and up to a resolution of 2,048 by 1536 pixels, though colors look washed out. With a maximum video resolution of just 320 by 240 pixels, video clips appear pixelated and lack detail.

Bottom line: While the Garmin-Asus A50 is an excellent GPS device that offers turn-by-turn directions for motorists, it trails other midrange smartphones in performance.

Get rewarded for running in Singapore. No payments, no onerous marketing sign-ups. Just put on your jogging shoes and run.

If you like to run, or better yet, you want to get some motivation to get fit, simply sign up at local non-profit site Liverun.sg and use their iPhone app to track your runs.

I had the chance to interview Liverun.sg founders Jeffrey Chan, 27 and Ignatius Ong, 28 on the craziness of running a pure non-profit(!) site exhorting Singaporeans to run.

“Yeah, many of our friends thought we were mad when we started up the site,” said Jeffrey wryly.

The idea for the site came last year in March 2009 when the two idealists and run enthusiasts were dreaming up fun projects of what they could do to improve the world and were passionate about.

Ignatius, who was then working at ST Electronics, always wondered why it was so difficult to get people to run.
“I used to orgnanize runs but people didn’t want to go,” he said. “No motivation.”

So they surveyed their friends to brainstorm what is the best way to reach out to couch potato Singaporeans and hit upon the idea of an iPhone application tied with a rewards scheme.

But that costs money, and even dreams need to take a backseat to pragmatism. So the idea was shelved for a while whilst the two left their jobs to start-up their own web and mobile application design company, also named Live Run.

This year, with their bread-and-butter issues taken care of, Jeffrey and Ignatius decided to go back to their original dream and put together a site to get Singaporeans off their asses and running.

Run, Singapore, Run

Even though it was just soft-launched in October, the site has currently gained 500-odd members. The Liverun.sg founders hope to gain 1,500 members by the end of this year.

Running the project costs around S$10K for a year, said Jeffrey. By leveraging their business contacts, they hope to defray the costs through merchant tie-ups and giveaways.

For example, they are tying up with Velocity — Singapore’s first sports-themed mall, which is situated at Novena — in December to launch a run lab of sorts, and they hope to get them to sponsor vouchers.

To me, a non-profit initiative like this would be an ideal tie-up with our Health Promotion Board (HPB), which is a Singapore government agency that looks at healthy living in Singapore. Of course, the duo tried this route, but whilst they are waiting for bureaucrats to say yes, they decided not to wait.

With many popular running mobile applications already available like Run Keeper, how would Liverun.sg compare?

The answer is that they can’t be compared fairly because the apps serve different purposes. Run Keeper is a professional tool for tracking your runs and the Liverun.sg is a non-profit site that aims to get Singaporeans running by giving freebies.

“We know of runners who use a variety of apps, so feel free to use both,” said Jeffrey.

Whatever it is, the site will be deemed a success in the eyes of the founders if they get Singaporeans out there and running.

Emails like this one from Rdmacalindong, whom Jeffrey shared with me, is the kind of feedback the two love.

The email says: “Goodluck to you guys! Im really looking forward to using LiveRun app.. This is my best motivation ever! =)”

Firstly, below are some YouTube videos that the scrappy Gothere guys have put up on the Interwebs to explain what their app is about:

Basically it’s a front end client app on iPhone that extends their already popular Gothere.sg site. I’m don’t own an iPhone (I have a HTC Desire and am on the Android platform), but in the preview session that Junhan demoed the app to me and a few other work colleagues on the iPhone 4, I found the app to be excellent.

Everything that I liked about Gothere.sg — various driving public transport suggestions + estimated costs (e.g. avoiding ERP gantrys), trip summaries, smart autocompletion of search locations, etc. — had been shrunk down into one portable app. And the best thing is that the price point of S$1.99 for the app is something that is very affordable.

Clouds on the horizon

And now for the sad part: The Gothere folks are only using this iPhone app to defray their server costs to keep the site up and running. With about 100,000 page views per day, their server costs do cost a bit. Plus the Gothere app is very localized to the Singapore market, which is not huge (about 400,000 iPhone users), and as a likely one-off purchase, it wouldn’t be a huge long term revenue.

Some of the founders of Gothere have now transitioned to a totally new business in developing applications for the iPhone platform.

“We need to survive,” said Junhan ruefully when I asked about their situation and their move from the mapping business to iPhone apps.

I’ve always been an unabashed fan as I like the genuine and scrappy folks at Gothere, but their lack of a viable business model worried me in the past.

And unfortunately, ever since big behemoths like Google maps entered Singapore, it has made the mapping business a really hard one to compete in. It’s an inherently unfair fight of four guys vs. a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Well at least the Gothere iPhone app seems to be a good idea, and there seems to be a decent amount of buzz in the social media space about their app. Hopefully it should bring in some revenue for the folks who worked on Gothere.sg for so long. They deserve it.

There has been quite a bit of talk over the new public transport distance fare calculations that have been put in place in Singapore since July 3rd.

There have been the usual government overtures that in general people pay less and the system is fairer under the new distance fares.

From the opposite camp, irate citizen bloggers claim that this isn’t true at all.

I find the official LTA fare calculator a pain to use, so if you’re interested in how much more (or less) you’re paying, go use Gothere’s mapping and directions tool. I use Gothere often to get directions, so the extra functionality is just groovy.

Thanks to this post on DK’s blog, from which I first came across this!

Hmmm. Gothere folks, if you’re reading this, perhaps with your data collected on searches done by Singaporeans you can probably do a good estimate on the question everybody is dying to know: Are Singaporeans paying more or less for transport under the new system?

If you send this in to the various local media, I’m certain they will love to know!

Availability: 27th March 2010, via M1 and StarHub, and all authorized resellers
Retail Price: S$638 (including GST)
Quick highlights: Windows Mobile 6.5.3 phone, comes bundled with preloaded navigation from Garmin and Tele Atlas, 3.5 inch WVGA 480×800 screen
Promotions: Consumers who purchase the Garmin-Asus M10 smart phone between 27th March to 2nd May 2010 can get a car kit at a discounted price of S$65 (usual price S$78)

Garmin and Asus made a big splash today at their media event for their upcoming launch of the M10 phone in Singapore.

Now Asus is better known for their range of netbooks and graphics cards, but they have been trying to break into the smartphone market for at least two years. I haven’t been really impressed with Asus smartphones I’ve reviewed in the past as I found that both interface and form factor wise were just so-so.

But the Asus folks believe that this phone is a breakout one that will be lapped up by consumers. Benson Lin, vice president and general manager of Asus’ personal mobile devices business unit, believes that their phone will do very well against the competition, like the upcoming HTC HD mini (also a Windows 6.5.3 phone) and HTC Legend (Android 2.1).

Here are his reasons:

• It’s one of the most value-for-money smartphones in the market, packing in great specs at low cost.
• It’s got one of the biggest screens in the market, a 3.5 inch 480×800 WVGA display, which is always a nice bling factor.
• Battery life is touted to be pretty long with its 1500mAh battery.
• Pretty good memory and storage specs: 512MB RAM and 512ROM, and a 4GB eMMC flash memory.
• And of course, the navigation application tie-up with Garmin and Tele Atlus, which Asus claims is exactly similar to the Garmin 1460 PND (typical Singapore retail price S$449). Consumers of course get it for free in this phone.

Having had a very successful launch in its home country Taiwan, Asus believes that this phone wil be extremely competitive in the Singapore market, and Benson expects that it will be one of the best selling Windows Mobile phone for 2010 Q2.

My take and a quick commentary:
I think price-for-specs wise, the phone definitely has merit. I didn’t get a chance to play with the interface of the phone, but form factor wise it seems decent.

The phone also does seem like it will appeal to those who need a good navigation device cum phone. Asus claims that their GPS and navigation software takes an average of about 33 seconds to get the first GPS fix, compared to other phones who typically take about two to three minutes. They also claim that the M10′s interface is designed to multitask, and you can both make and take calls whilst using the navigation applications.

With Garmin and Tele Atlus’ software inside, the phone is a more robust navigation device than using a free tool like Google Maps. For example, it has routing algorithms that can suggest new places to park your car if the one you’re going to is full.

However, navigation is just one application, and any smartphone needs to do more than just that of course.

Said Aloysius Choong, IDC’s research manager who leads APAC mobile devices research, who was at the event: “Nowadays smartphones are also moving towards social networking and connecting people. The platform may be more important than phone features.”

For example, Google Maps may be less feature rich, but it also bundles in things like location-based social networking (Foursquare). An android phone also provides easy integration with GoogleTalk and Gmail. iPhone has gained such a huge market — Apple has overtaken Nokia to become Singapore’s top selling smartphone vendor in Q409, according to Aloysius — in part due to the great number and quality of apps in the iPhone App Store. And Windows Mobile get plus points when it comes to being able to work with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.

At least for me, the fact that the M10 is a Window Mobile phone is more important than the nifty navigation features or even some of the specifications of the phone.

Yes, I am talking about Nokia’s Booklet 3G, the cellphone giant’s first mini laptop. If you needed the surest sign of the convergence between smartphones and laptops, details of Nokia’s new gizmo are it.

Unveiled hours ago, the 1.25kg Booklet 3G will feature the usual compact screen (a 10-incher here) first made famous by the first netbooks in the shape of Asus’ Eee PC. Nokia’s small machine will also feature an Intel Atom processor and run Microsoft Windows – standard fare now in netbooks.

So, is this another “me too” product from Nokia, long after the first two waves of netbooks have come from Taiwanese electronics makers and then “A-brand” PC makers?

The main difference I can spot is that the device will come with A-GPS as well as HSPA built in. Both are great in expanding the “connectedness” of netbooks, which until now, have just been low-cost PCs for surfing on the go.

To add to this, there is Nokia’s Ovi suite of software and services thrown in, but I’m not sure the PC crowd really need to use Nokia applications on a laptop other than Music Store. The question here is how compellingly the apps are integrated into the experience for a mobile user.

Interestingly, too, the Booklet 3G comes in an aluminium case. Sure, it’s lightweight. But unless you get really thick aluminium sheets, the metal is not the hardest around and could bend and warp. We’ll have to see the actual unit to be sure.

The most interesting question is why Nokia is doing this. All its previous adventures into new areas – from the ill-fated N-Gage “game deck” to services like Nokia Maps and Music Store – have been about selling more phones.

Sure, the Booklet 3G will sync “seamlessly” with Nokia phones using Nokia’s apps, but surely, I can sync my Windows Mobile phone just as well since the mini notebook runs Windows.

Many questions remain, like how much it will cost and when it will hit the shelves. We’ll have them answered next month when more details are unveiled at a Nokia show-and tell.

One thing’s for sure now: if the Booklet 3G costs as much as a full-powered laptop – that is, upwards of S$1,300 – it will have a tough fight against the likes of Asus UX30 and HP Pavilion dv2.