Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia are looking to run 4G services on airwaves that will be freed up when analog TV broadcasts are switched off in the region by 2020.

While the move is aimed at re-allocating precious bandwidth in the sky, the use of a common 700MHz frequency band in the region could enable travellers to easily “roam” with their smartphones and log on to local cellphone services to make calls or surf the Web. …

Source: Singapore White Spaces Pilot Group

Singapore may be taking a step closer to rolling out TV White Spaces, a new wireless technology that taps on the unused spectrum in broadcast TV frequencies, with new trials now being planned in four places.

The wireless technology will provide an Internet link to Sentosa, Gardens by the Bay, HDB estates and car dealership Eurokars Group, as the country seeks to find new use for old frequencies in its increasingly crowded airwaves. …

You can’t say the Singapore government is not tuned in to the latest technology trends, like Big Data.

This morning, Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said it would be releasing more data to the public, such as population data by regions, to spur “social innovation” and create greater “public value”.

Essentially, the government is crowd-sourcing the capabilities available in the open market by giving the raw materials – statistics – that it has in its data banks, he said, at an e-government meeting that kick-starts a week of large-scale infocomm events in Singapore.

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Toshiba was one of the first out with an Android tablet almost three years ago, and it wants to be back in the game now, as Android gradually eclipses iOS as the main tablet operating system.

Its new 10.1-inch Excite Write and Excite Pure tablets, out in Singapore from next month, show what a sea change Android tablets have undergone over the years.

Just how do they stack up against the competition though? We had a quick hands-on with the tablets earlier this week. …

Another day, another network upgrade by a Singapore telecom operator.

There was a time when subscribers didn’t care how a network was run, as long as they could make calls or get their e-mails on the go. Today, however, with users often upset over clogged-up 3G networks and spotty 4G coverage, telcos seem to have upped their game publicly.

The latest news comes from StarHub today. It will blanket 95 per cent of the island with its 4G signals in the next four months, joining rivals M1 and SingTel in providing nationwide coverage for the fast mobile Internet service.
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If this picture turned up in the mailbox on April 1, it might have been discarded as one of many Photoshop fantasies you see online every day.

Yet, Samsung’s Galaxy S4 zoom, basically a camera mounted on the back of its bestseller Galaxy range of smartphones, is real. …

Step into the PC Show this weekend, and you’d find fibre broadband prices that may make you wonder why you’ve been paying so much previously. The packages are not bad too, with various new TV options now being bundled together.

This is a huge change from just a few years ago, before fibre broadband was introduced. Then, only SingTel and StarHub played the field, with each competing on the freebies they gave out rather than on lower prices to attract users.

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If you’re looking for the latest in a gaming notebook at this weekend’s PC Show in Singapore, then Aftershock PC’s newest models sporting Intel’s new CPUs are surely worth checking out.

The homegrown company is showing off its X17S and X15S machines, which it says are the first in Singapore to have the faster, yet cooler-running processors. And they look slim and sleek – unlike most gaming notebooks. …

Samsung Galaxy S4 Active

Samsung’s pretty and slim Galaxy S4 now comes in a toughed-up version that promises to be dust- and water-resistant, which will suit outdoor lovers or those who have a tendency to abuse their phones.

The Galaxy S4 Active joins the ranks of the Sony Xperia Z, which also claims to be able to keep out dust and water. …

Various websites run by Singapore bloggers will stage a “blackout” this Thursday, 12:00 AM to 11:59 PM, to protest against the Media Development Authority’s (MDA) latest licensing regulations.

These regulations, which target websites that report on Singapore related news at least once a week, and attracts visitors from 50,000 unique Singapore IP addresses every month, will require online news sites to put up a S$50,000 “performance bond” and to remove any content found to be in breach of MDA’s standards. So far, MDA has identified ten websites that will have to comply, including Yahoo! News Singapore. …