Gamers who have been looking out for the 3G version of the Playstation Vita will be happy to hear that SingTel will be selling it in Singapore from April 14 with a mobile broadband contract, and with a discount for those who sign up.

The much-awaited 3G version of Sony’s latest handheld console will go for as low as S$99 if you sign up for a S$40-a-month subscription that comes with 50GB data delivered at 7.2Mbps. …

Not everyone checks up the specs on the new Apple iPad before buying the shiny toy, but for those who do, they will find an interesting entry in a section called Wireless and Cellular.

Not only is there mention of the touted “4G” or LTE (Long Term Evolution) speed upgrade, which supports the 700MHz and 2,100MHz frequencies, but the iPad can also log on to older networks running UMTS/HSPA/HSPA+/DC-HSPA in four other frequencies. And get this, the new iPad also supports GSM networks in the good old 800, 900, 1,800 and 1,900MHz frequencies as well.

Confused already? That, by the way, is just for the AT&T model in the United States. Also listed on the Apple website is a Verizon model, which supports LTE all the same, but “falls back” on a different older network called CDMA EV-DO, along with the rest of the other cellphone network technologies, if LTE is not available.

Nobody but geeks used to care about the alphabet soup here, but as more LTE devices hit the market this year, as the iPad did this weekend, this fragmentation of wireless network technologies is becoming a huge problem for device makers and users alike.

LTE was meant to unify these disparate technologies evolved over the years, but with 38 different frequencies expected to be rolled out around the world, the new technology is adding to the problem instead.
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The rapidly heating up broadband wars in Singapore crossed an important mark this week, when the Big Three telcos all dropped prices for the benchmark 100Mbps service under S$50 a month.

SingTel, StarHub and M1 began a new phase of competition at the IT Show running at Suntec City, hoping to lock in as many subscribers as possible as the country’s next-gen fibre network nears completion in June this year.
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Ask any young woman in Singapore where she can get affordable clothes from indie sellers online, and she’ll most likely point you to a blog hosted on Livejournal. The blog/journal website blossomed around five to six years ago as a popular space for young people to experiment with e-commerce, most commonly the sale of women’s clothing.

About 50,000 of such blog shops and millions of dollars in transactions were enough to catch the attention of Livejournal’s parent company SUP Media, which launched a dedicated Singapore portal last year. But even so, the website lacked built-in e-commerce features, and users paid for their purchases through third-party services like PayPal or the local iBanking services.

That’s all about to change. With the launch of LJCheckout a couple of weeks ago, blog shop owners now have the option to integrate a full-fledged e-commerce system into their blogs. …

Yet another service provider has come up with fibre broadband plans without the usual two-year lock-in period, in the latest sign of competition heating up in Singapore.

ViewQwest today said it would sell its high-end plans without having users sign a contract that ties them down. If they pay S$95.95 a month for a 200Mbps plan – or other more expensive plans – they can choose to switch to another telco any time they wish, according to a release the company sent out this afternoon.
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The fibre optic cable may have reached your home, but when you try signing up for one of those speedy fibre broadband services that your friends have been talking about, you are told to wait several weeks or even months for the link to be “turned on”. The reason: the company rolling out the fibre can’t cope.

Though Opennet is meeting its deadline to connect up 95 per cent of Singapore by mid-2012 – it was at 86 per cent in January – it is finding it hard to keep up with the demand of customers signing up en masse during the quarterly IT bazaars, where prices for these services are often slashed.

Opennet may have the cable hooked up to homes and offices, but it still has to “turn on” or activate the switches at the base of a high-rise building, for example, to send the data through.

And that is the problem that the government regulator now wants to solve by making Opennet turn on more connections each month. Yesterday, it proposed a number of changes for Opennet, in a move that could accelerate the takeup of these faster and often cheaper broadband services. …

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. …

Consumers signing up for fibre broadband services in Singapore got one more alternative to the big three of SingTel, StarHub and M1 earlier this week, with the entry of MyRepublic, an upstart that promises to sell services based on what users do online, instead of  simply promising top speeds.

A S$69-a-month package, for example, will target gamers and offer a “low latency experience” for those who connect frequently to, say, the World of Warcraft servers worldwide to get their role-playing game fix.

The new service provider also offers online tutorials and exam preparation tools for Primary 1 to 6 as part of its S$89“Tutor” fibre broadband package, to attract parents who want their kids to go beyond the standard curriculum in school.  …

When the going gets tough, business will often cast their eyes on the next big thing to boost the bottomline.

The current hype in IT happens to be cloud computing, with nearly every player — telcos, data centre providers, software makers and IT consultants — jostling for a slice of the pie.

It almost seems like a gold rush, except we’re dealing with services powered by electrons that traverse fibre cables at the speed of light.

This week, web hosting companies, a segment of the IT industry whose margins are known to be razor-thin, gathered in Florida to hear about Parallel’s delivery platforms that promise to help them different themselves from the pack. …

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. …