When some Microsoft folks recently asked me how users and techies felt about its upcoming Windows Phone 7 OS, I told them “you’re lucky to still be in the news”.

Until the past few weeks, when favourable first-looks of Microsoft’s totally rebuilt smartphone OS came online, the only OSes that anyone was talking about were Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

For an example of how fast a dominant OS can fall in interest level, look at Nokia’s Symbian OS that now powers most of its phones, as it transitions to the more advanced MeeGo. Who thinks anything great of Symbian now?

And compared to Nokia, Microsoft was worse off a few months ago – it only showed glimpses of what Windows Phone 7 was about at February’s Mobile World Congress and nothing more.

So, it was with a bit of surprise when I saw how well Windows Phone 7 was built, during a hands-on preview at the Microsoft offices here in Singapore last week.

Having lost crucial market share to Android and iOS, Microsoft has clearly done the right thing by building its new OS from ground up. Gone are the clunky “halfway house” touch offerings on Windows Mobile 6.5. Absent too is any lag that you get while moving around menus. In fact, pretty animations accompany most actions – without slowing things down.

In a turn of affairs, SAP announced this week that it would not contest the liability of TomorrowNow for downloading proprietary, copyrighted software products and other confidential materials used by Oracle’s support organization.

In 2007, Oracle filed a lawsuit against TomorrowNow, a now defunct SAP subsidiary that offered maintenance and support services for Oracle software at a much lower cost than that provided by Oracle. SAP had said then that it will aggressively defend the claims made in the lawsuit.

On Thursday, SAP said that it will accept financial responsibility for any judgment awarded against TomorrowNow, despite the fact that SAP was not involved in TomorrowNow’s service operations and did not engage in any of the copying or downloading alleged in Oracle’s complaint.

Over here in Hong Kong, all you need is a high definition (HD) set top box (that’s of the DTMB standard) and you can receive free HD broadcasts – so you can watch your TVB serials in full HD glory. When my freebie HDTV box literally went out with a pop, I went about looking for a digital media player that would be able to stream music, photos and videos from my Synology DS210j network attached storage (NAS) AND integrate the HDTV receiver into a single box.

And my search ended with the HiMedia (海美迪) HD600B-TV – which is a squarish looking do-it-all box that’s the localised-for-Hong Kong version of the HD500D-TH.

HiMedia HD600B-TV

Two bungling engineers and a faulty cable brought down Singapore’s biggest bank DBS — all of the ATMs, internet banking — for about 7 hours last month on 5th July.

Or so that was the narrative painted by the Straits Times two days ago on Thursday that it was all due to human error. (There’s a far lengthier version in the printed Straits Times version than the gimped version online). The big headline inside the paper on page four was this: “It was definitely a human error”.

Really? Is that the best narrative that explained why the system crashed that day? Everything was due to “human error”, and two “bungling” IBM engineers were to blame?

If Singapore’s biggest bank could so easily be brought down by “human errors”, then I find it genuinely shocking. Surely IBM’s 10-year S$1.2 billion outsourcing contract — about S$120 million per year to maintain the IT infrastructure — details a stringent process for disaster recovery?

Doesn’t DBS and IBM have SLAs that spell out how IT failures should be recovered from, with a detailed escalation process? And seriously, a single misplugged cable can bring down your entire storage system? I don’t buy this at all. You’re not talking about a start-up servicing a bank; you’re talking about a maintenance contract deal worth millions.

Thus, the main point is not about “human error” — a totally wrongheaded slant that ST took, in my opinion — but the fact that DBS’ business process screwed up along the way. Yes, human error may have started this, but the recovery process screwed up and failed to kick in.

The blow-by-blow account of how engineers triggered this failure is not interesting. What’s interesting would have been how and why DBS’s disaster recovery process failed to kick in.

Starcraft II, the much-sought-after sequel to the 90s real-time strategy hit, sold more than 1.5 million copies in the first 48 hours, placing it as one of the biggest PC games this year, though it is still some way off the all-time big hitters in video games sales.

SingTel added Justin Timberlake, Jay Chou and a number of other Sony Music artistes to its AMPed mobile music download catalogue last Wednesday, boosting the number of tracks on sale to its users to over 1 million.

The 150,000 new tracks will be accessible to more than 70 different mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone and Android numbers such as the Samsung Galaxy S and Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.

Why I wanted to post this piece of news, despite missing out on it last week, is the fact that SingTel has pressed ahead when other music stores that employ DRM (digital rights management), such as Soundbuzz, died a long-overdue death in the past couple of years.

Hitachi celebrates 100 years as a company this year, and I was invited to Japan to attend their annual uValue event, where they had some fanfare for this occasion. This year the event runs from the 22nd to 23rd July at the Tokyo International Forum (near Roppongi).

One thing I learnt from the uValue event is that Hitachi is a sprawling technology conglomerate that spans many divisions: from IT and telcos, to transport, to consumer devices.

Yes, I know they are a high tech company that builds computer and consumer electronics, but I didn’t know they also build train systems, elevators and nuclear power plants.

The company generates US $100 billion in annual revenues and it’s the third largest high-tech company in the world in terms of revenues, behind Samsung and HP.

Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Asus showed off a number of new notebooks featuring Bang & Olufsen’s Icepower audio amplification technology at a glitzy launch party here today.

The audio technology, which has been the talk of audiophile circles because of its use in a number of highly-rated power-efficient amplifiers, promises improved sound over existing laptop offerings.

Icepower will come in a number of Asus’ N-model laptops as well as its top-of-the-range NX90 Multimedia Notebook. There’s a reason why it’s called that, instead of a laptop, because you’d not want to place this 4.8kg machine on your lap (a small bag of rice weighs 5kg).

Starhub has quietly introduced a “redirection service” that takes MaxOnline broadband customers to a Yahoo search page if you happen to enter an invalid URL in your browser. Prior to this, you would typically get an error message from your browser telling you that the invalid domain’s server cannot be found.

According to a Starhub FAQ list, the service does not track individual Internet usage patterns. The service “simply redirects queries to non-existing domain names to a useful search results page instead of a cryptic error message page or browser-defined page”. Users can also choose to opt out of the service at a preferences page.

What Starhub is effectively doing is DNS hijacking, a controversial practice that has led to security breaches by hackers. Some ISPs in the United States have had their users open to cross-site scripting attacks due to lax Web programming techniques by some search partners.

In 2003, Verisign also directed users to paid search results, a move which led to an investigation by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Among its findings, ICANN noted that DNS redirection “disturbed a set of existing services that had been functioning satisfactorily. Names that were mistyped, had lapsed, had been registered but not delegated, or had never been registered in DNS were resolved as if they existed.

“As a consequence, certain e-mail systems, spam filters and other services failed resulting in direct and indirect costs to third parties, either in the form of increased network charges for some classes of users, a reduction in performance, or the creation of work required to compensate for the consequent failure”.

As the World Cup got underway last month, I finally succumbed to a long-suppressed itch to buy a new TV – one that could be mounted on the wall to free up my TV console and one which provided better contrast and clarity over my entry-level Full HD screen.

Thus began a long afternoon at Audio House, where I tested and re-tested several TVs, changed my mind a few times, before finally settling on a 55-inch Samsung C7000 (UA55C7000WM).

The C7000 is part of Samsung’s new Series 7 entry-level 3D LED TVs and it comes with your usual array of Internet-based features, such as the ability to watch YouTube (over a wired Ethernet link or optional Wi-Fi dongle).

More importantly, for me, the C7000 provides excellent contrast and smooth, natural motion.