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.

With folks like Sony Ericsson and Nokia doing their thing outside of CommunicAsia, what new gadgets can you see at this year’s show?

Well, Samsung seems to be the brightest light at the show here. I’m particularly intrigued by the Galaxy Beam, which looks a little like a Galaxy S with a bit more heft in the shape of a small projector. Yes, you heard right, this little guy doubles up as a projector to screen your presentations.

Back to life with the Android Xperia X10 and X10 mini launched early this year, Sony Ericsson has just unveiled the Xperia X8, an “in between” member of the Android Xperia family that it promises to be “affordable”.

The “mid-tier” touch-screen device looks essentially like a smaller X10. It has a 3-inch screen, 3.2-megapixel camera and 3.5mm audio jack – all the basics of a multimedia phone for youngsters.

Out in selected markets in Q3 this year, the X8 comes in five colours, including white and pink

Nokia gave the media a first-hand look at the upcoming Nokia N8 this morning, as it kicked off its usual pre-CommunicAsia show this morning with its Connections event.

After playing with the phone briefly at the media event, I’d say my impression of this nifty little number hasn’t changed from when it was unveiled two months ago.

Without a doubt, the hardware and multimedia are great, but the Symbian OS, even in its latest version, is not as attractive as Android or iPhone OS.

Just three months after launching the Milestone with StarHub, Motorola has released the updated Milestone XT, a souped up, no-keyboard version of its highly-successful Android predecessor.

We got a quick hands-on yesterday and came away mostly happy with the update. The first thing you’d see is the less “corporate” look. Silver-rimmed and without a slide-out keyboard, the XT is aimed at the more “casual” user who doesn’t need to text or e-mail as much.

Trust Adobe to hold a regional briefing on Flash on the day the Apple iPhone 4 was launched. The date, of course, had added significance now that Steve Jobs and co. have decided not to support Flash at all in any of its iPhones or iPads.

Despite that, Adobe predicts that 53 per cent of the more than 300 million smartphones to ship by 2012 will sport its Flash software to show off multimedia websites on the small screen. Currently, only 9 per cent of the less than 50 million smartphones have Flash.

This is a daring prediction, given that only a small number of Android Froyo 2.2 handsets – mainly the Google Nexus One – support Flash on the go. Other Android handsets such as the Motorola Droid/Milestone and HTC Desire are being updated in the coming months.

Firstly, a big thank you to all the fans and supporters of our scrappy little blog here.

Thanks to all the attendees who took the time and effort to come down to Techgoondu’s first indepedent and wireless event UNWIRED last Thursday 27 May at the Singapore Management University.

Time for a little shameless plug here.

Organised by chief goondu Alfred Siew, the event was a success due to the excellent crowd and overall quality of speakers. Registered attendees numbered over a hundred-odd, and there were lots of friends from both media and PR in attendance. For a first-time event that no one had heard of a month and a half back, it certainly met and exceeded some of our attendees’ expectations.

Said Daniel Goh, PR and media manager at Samsung Asia, and owner of the excellent start-up blog YoungUpstarts: “I’m quite surprised with the crowd. They actually asked a lot of questions!”

There were so many questions being asked that time overran on many of the sessions on that day.

Alf will probably add on a blog post on this baby of his, but I thought I would do a quick wrap-up of the “Mobile applications: the future driver of wireless technologies?” panel that I moderated.

Availability: 9th April 2010, via all three telcos SingTel, StarHub and M1, and all authorized resellers
Retail Price: S$748 (including GST), without plan
Quick highlights: Windows Mobile 6.5.3 phone, 3.2 inch HVGA 320×480 screen, 5 megapixel camera
Full Specifications: You can find it on HTC’s site here

In essence, it is a clone of HTC’s HD2, but shrunk down into a smaller form factor.

“It’s a ladies phone,” said Kathleen Goy, HTC’s Singapore marketing communications manager at the media launch of the phone today. HTC’s customer feedback showed that some — especially women — felt that the HD2, with its 4.3 inch screen, was too “clunky and large”.

So, in a bid to sexy up the phone for women, the screen size was shrunk so that it fits comfortably in petite tote bags and jeans pockets.

The internet is abuzz with Apple’s lawsuit today in the US, claiming that HTC has infringed about 20 of their patents. Gizmodo has an excellent breaking story of this, and they quote responses from both the Apple and HTC camps.

If successful, Apple’s action will get HTC’s phones banned — both Androids and Windows Mobiles — from being sold in the US, and be awarded “treble damages” and “interest at the maximum rate allowable by law”. Going by the list of patents Apple is whacking HTC for, it sure sounds like a hit job. It’s a big middle finger to the mobile phone industry not to mess with Apple, which had already tussled with Nokia in lawsuits late last year.

Not going to rehash the newspoints that you can find covered better elsewhere, but just some quick comments of my own.

Apple did shake up the mobile phone industry when it debuted with the iPhone in 2007, which birthed the touch phone genre. I can’t even remember when was the last recent phone I reviewed that was not a touch phone, so for this we have Apple to thank.

But of course the rest of the mobile manufacturers fought back, and this led to a flourishing touch phone market. End result: More choice for consumers, and Asian brands like HTC and Samsung are doing well in the touch phone space.

So of course Apple nips it in the bud by throwing roadblocks at the competition, namely number two (Nokia) and three (HTC). And with Android gaining fast ascendance, whack the phone manufacturer, i.e. HTC, which has rolled out the most Android phones thus far. Doh!

What these lawsuits will do: Not very much, I predict. Even if Apple gets its way, the US is not the only phone market in the world. In Asia alone, mobiles are huge, and we have two of the world’s most populous nations — India and China — in our patch.

NETS, the Singapore electronic payment vendor, just launched their iNETS mobile service, in which you can pay your bills via your mobile phone in Singapore.

The story was covered by quite a few of the main papers in Singapore, like the Straits Times, Today, and My Paper, as this story broke yesterday.

What struck me when I read the story in the Straits Times is that the iNETS mobile payment platform supports “all mobile phones save the iPhone and the Android platform”.

When I read this, I almost fell out of my chair thinking: Errr, aren’t these some of the more popular platforms? And Android phones will definitely be set to grow in the market this year, with the Google Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy Spica, and Motorola Dext already out since February with more to come.