Bought a new iPod/iPhone/iPad and looking forward to buying music for your new device? Local users have always been out of luck in that respect, as despite being the market leader for years, Apple has failed to bring its music download service to Singapore.

Now, a new software update to Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry PlayBook tablet will certainly be discord to Apple’s ears. The former has stuck a partnership with online music store 7digital to bring more than 9 million high quality MP3 tracks for Singapore residents to purchase.

The new Music Store app will allow users to search for songs, albums, and artists, as well as receive recommendations through a music discovery feature. Not sure whether a particular artist suits your tastes? The music store lets you preview tracks before plunking down the cash.

The cost of full albums on this new music store will range from S$8 to S$12, although users can also download just one or a few tracks if they don’t want the whole album.

However, the Music Store might be too little, too late. Although highly rated for its design and construction, the PlayBook’s lack of key apps such as a dedicated email client has hampered its early reception, especially when competing tablets running Android offers a full-featured experience.

Right now, the iPad sits at the top of the pile, commanding an impressive chunk of the tablet market share despite not having a music store.  Efforts by other computer manufacturers have failed to break Apple’s grip. The HP TouchPad, for instance, suffered a permanent price cut merely weeks after its launch.

But there might yet be a silver lining for RIM. A dedicated music store app is indeed a unique offering which could attract a select group of users. Currently, only the local telcos provide a relatively convenient way for their subscribers to purchase and download music.

22-year-old Luke Vijay Somasundram was one previous user of SingTel’s music service AMPed, but stopped because he found it wanting. “I didn’t like how the songs weren’t automatically added to my iTunes library,” he said. “Moreover, there was no clear to figure out how much the songs were costing me, or even if they were costing me anything at all.”

Somasundram welcomed RIM’s move to bring a dedicated music download app to Singapore. He added, “I’ve been waiting for years for the iTunes Store to be made available to Singapore but it looks like Research in Motion has beaten them to the punch.”

Nonetheless, it will be an uphill battle to unseat the iPad as the gold standard of tablet computing. Rivals like RIM can only hope to crawl back market share with these tiny differentiations in their products.

At its annual Worldwide Developers Conference this week, Apple unveiled iOS 5, the latest update to their mobile operating system. The update brings some interesting and long-awaited features to the iPhone and iPad. Strangely enough, although many of these features are blatant copies of existing functionality on other platforms, almost the entire blogosphere is falling over in praise for iOS 5.

I understand that the nature of the tech industry means building on one another’s work to bring the best feature set to consumers. Indeed, Apple has proven itself capable of refining existing technologies and paradigms and on occasion bringing additional functionality.

But this really is the first time I looked on an Apple presentation in disbelief: everything is so obviously culled from some other mobile OS or mobile app. Don’t believe me?

If you are hanging out with an iPhone and are eagerly waiting for iOS 5, which won’t land until this autumn, here are some of the most touted iOS 5 features you can get right now.

Notification Center

What’s coming: Finally. The iPhone’s current notification system, an intrusive pop-up window which interrupts whatever you’re doing, hasn’t changed much since the very first iPhone. With iOS 5, notifications present themselves as small, non-intrusive pop-ups that appear at the top of your screen for a short while, and poof, they vanish. A downward swipe from the top of the screen brings down a full menu of previously ignored notifications, which you can then dismiss at will.

Get it now! The new notification banner on the top of the screen is completely identical to Windows Phone 7’s style, save for some design differences. As for the pull-down notification menu, that’s Android’s idea through-and-through, and OEM enhancements have made Android’s implementation even more functional.

iMessage

What’s coming: A native instant messaging app that you can use to contact your other friends using iOS and iOS only. Group messaging, send pictures, contacts, etc., the works. Best of all, everything integrates into one thread for your reading convenience.

Get it now! Ever heard of the BlackBerry? Yeah, one of that age-old device’s key selling points is the BlackBerry Messenger. Or you could download various free texting apps like Kik Messenger, and Beluga, not to mention the venerable WhatsApp, which has been around for ages, and chat with your friends on Android and, soon, Windows Phone 7 (Mango) too. One of Mango’s most touted features is also integration of IM chats into your SMS stream!

Native Twitter integration

What’s coming: For some reason, Apple has chosen to integrate Twitter heavily into iOS, even though more people use Facebook. In Apple’s words: “Sign in once in Settings, and suddenly you can tweet directly from Safari, Photos, Camera, YouTube, or Maps.” We hope that suddenness won’t give anyone heart attacks!

Get it now! In Android, you can integrate almost anything you wish to integrate, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Google profiles, and more! Some additional contact and sharing integration for Twitter and LinkedIn has also been already announced for WP7 Mango.

Camera

What’s coming: In iOS 5, you’ll be able to access the camera app right from the lock screen. Plus, you’ll be able to use the volume-up button to snap pictures, making those self-snap moments infinitely easier. An app called Camera+ tried to implement this feature into their app in the past, but was blocked by Apple. I guess now we know why. Also, double tapping the home button when the screen is sleeping launches the camera immediately.

Get it now! Physical camera buttons have been a staple on feature phones since Nokia 7650, and it’s also an OEM requirement on Windows Phone 7. You can also launch the camera when a WP7 phone is sleeping and snap pictures without unlocking the phone.

WiFi sync

What’s coming: Tangle of white iPhone cables got you down? iOS 5 comes with Wi-Fi sync, which lets you transfer content from your computer to your iDevice without physically connecting them. Even better, Apple has removed the requirement that you connect every new iOS device to a computer to activate it!

Get it now! Android and Windows Phone 7 can sync wirelessly out of the box, and I never saw the need to connect my previous Android device to my laptop at all.

Multitasking gestures for iPad

What’s coming: Am I the only one who thinks the multitasking gestures for the iPad looks eerily like what Microsoft showed off for Windows 8 just last week?

Get it now! OK now I’m just cheating, sorry. Windows 8 is projected to be released in 2012, sorry, folks!

So there you go, several high profile iOS 5 features already in existence, as long as you can bear to break out of Apple’s ecosystem. I’m also pretty sure I missed out some other “copycat features”, so share your comparisons in the comments!

Apart from its brand new BlackBerry 6 OS, the Bold 9780 looks like the twin brother of the Bold 9700.

When I first saw the Bold 9780, I was hard-pressed to find anything new in this latest BlackBerry number.

The only differing trait is its black trimmings along the edges of the phone. The Bold 9700 shares the same fittings in chrome.

The Bold has everything going right in a qwerty form factor, including a compact body and a much acclaimed keyboard.

Compared to the Blackberry Torch’s flat keys, the Bold 9780′s raised keys are more responsive with good tactile feedback.

Typing on the Bold 9780 beats punching letters on a touchscreen. I was also typing faster with fewer typos on the Bold than on an iPhone 3GS.

On the small 2.4-inch display, which is a pleasure to use with its vibrant colours and razor-sharp text, you have scroll quite a bit with the optical track pad to read long e-mail and text messages.

Browsing the Web on a long commute gets tedious, especially if you are used to generous screen estate on devices like the HTC Desire HD.

Beneath the hood lies a 624MHz processor with 512MB of memory. Overall, the BlackBerry OS 6 feels speedy while navigating the menu and running several apps in the background.

I won’t go into the details of BlackBerry OS 6, which I’ve covered in an earlier review of the Torch 9800. However, fitting a non-touchscreen device like the Bold 9780 with an OS that better suits a touchscreen phone like the Torch means you have to scroll extensively with the track pad.

For example, to view incoming messages on the Torch 9800, you simply tap on the e-mail icon on the notification bar. On the Bold 9780, you have to reach for the bar and click on the track pad to dig into your mailbox.

Bottomeline: With a tried-and-tested design, the new Bold is obviously aimed at existing BlackBerry users, not the iPhone and Android crowd.

But there is little reason for current Bold 9700 owners to upgrade – unless you want the BlackBerry OS 6 badly and a five-megapixel camera. At some point, RIM needs to come up with a touchscreen version of the Bold to standardize the BlackBerry 6 OS experience across all its devices.

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.

The panelists were:

• Manish Ladha, head of mobile services for consumer and online at Microsoft
• Winston Goh, product marketing manager for Samsung’s mobile phones division
• Turochas ‘T’ Faud, director of business development of Skype, Asia Pacific
• Alex Tan, deputy director of product development at M1

It was a diverse bunch on stage — there was a telco, a mobile handset maker, a software platform company, and an online services company represented — but the questions that were asked by the audience were equally diverse and intriguing.

For example, Dionne Phay from Navteq, a mapping services company, wanted to know what the panelists thought about location based services (LBS). Manish from Microsoft was bullish on potential advertising revenue, whilst both Winston (Samsung) and Alex (M1) cited regulatory issues with various different governments. Alex said that although M1 saw more LBS being sold, LBS business models based on ad revenue streams were still low for now.

Another interesting question from the floor was pitched at M1 and Samsung: Which mobile platforms should start-ups look at first?

The questioner cited the difficulties start-ups have in terms of limited manpower. Given the lack of resources, it may be better to focus on one platform rather than allocating one or two developers per platform, and “being spread too thin” amongst the Apple iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and other platforms.

Both M1 and Samsung gave interesting answers. Basically, it was “sign a NDA” with me and then we’ll reveal stats about the markets and industries that can help you decide where to focus your energy on.

Winston from Samsung also cautioned about looking just at statistics. Past results are not predictors of future events, and sometimes gut feel and making a bet you believe will pay off is more important, he said.

For example, when Samsung Mobile launched the Omnia in Singapore in 2008, many people felt Samsung was crazy to spend so much money to market a high-end phone. The marketing research had pointed that the Omnia was not a mass market phone — it was catered to power users — and money should go to mass market models instead.

Instead, Winston and his team stuck with the Omnia because they believed it was a good phone. And in the end the Omnia outsold every other Samsung model in Singapore that year, vindicating their marketing spend.

Winston also advised developers not to just look at high-end phones that require lots of data usage and ignore the low-end ones.

“You’ll be surprised at some of the revenue streams coming in from GSM applications,” he said.

I thought so too – so I tried out the latest Google Mobile App‘s voice search feature on my Nokia E71 (which means the S60 flavour of the app).

The app is basically kinda like a one-stop-shop to quickly link to and search through Google stuff, so you will need a data connection (wifi or cellphone network), and the other mobile apps (Gmail, Google Maps etc) loaded if you want to fire it up from the above home screen.

If you enable its location-based function, it’s supposed to yield more relevant results. But it didn’t seem to do anything for me in terms of returning more relevant search results so I shut that feature off.

The above option is probably the most important setting to make your voice searches more accurate. But alas, while there’s “Indian English”, there’s no Singlish! How can like that? Die lah.

I mucked around with the British and American English options and found that you really do need to get your accents right. E.g. for word spelt “fast”, do you say ‘fahst’ or ‘f-ae-st’? And for Singaporeans with a mish-mash of accents, this might really get you thinking about your pronunciation.

Overall, the voice recognition was good – only if you spoke in phrases or sentences. Recognising single words remains a huge challenge and with all the exceptions in the English language, it really is no surprise that it choked over words like “flour”. I’ll go test it out some more on some American-English speaking friends but I’d imagine it will still struggle with single words.

Specifically on the E71, I think I’d still prefer to bash out my search term with the little keyboard. But on normal keypad-only phones, or for touchscreen phones with finicky virtual keyboards, voice search could be faster.

So if you have an Andriod (of course), BlackBerry, iPhone or S60 phone, give this app a go.

Oh, and when I said “techgoondu”, it gave me … “taekwondo”. So do you think it will recognise “shingz”?

A touchscreen with a tactile keypress. That’s probably the most strikingly unique feature about RIM’s first touchscreen device – the BlackBerry Storm … aka its 9500 series.

The concept of its “SurePress” touchscreen certainly sounds good … on the screen – a capacitive touchscreen that you can not only tap, double tap, flick and drag your finger on, but also click on.

Click on a screen? Hmm. But will it make typing faster and easier?

While the idea of a clickable touchscreen sounds great, in reality, it didn’t quite click with me. The touch and tap aspects of the screen were great – you could highlight, copy and paste, swipe your finger to scroll etc. But when it came to typing, which I’d imagine you’d do a lot of on a messaging-centric device like a BlackBerry, that’s when the idea of a clicking screen started to come apart. First, it takes some effort to click the screen – more so than needed for a light tap on the touchscreen. And closer to the edges of the screen, the clicks needed even more effort. Will it have worked better if the screen required less effort to click? I think not.

So with all those milliseconds more that you need to click to type on the Storm’s screen, it simply ended up taking more effort – and slower than a plain old touchscreen. Sure it felt good to be able to click, but it didn’t add any speed or accuracy. And speedwise – it certainly was no where near typing on a qwerty ‘chicklet’ keypad like that on my Nokia E71 or the “normal” BlackBerries like the Curve or Bold. If you’re a real (not virtual touchscreen) qwerty keyboard user like me (Treo 650 to iPhone for a while and back to Nokia E71), forget about the Storm. There’s no way you could get used to this.

While I had no love for the keyboard, hiding the virtual keyboard really showed off the Storms big and bright 3.25″ screen.This is where it really goes one up on the competition. Sporting a HVGA+ (did they just invent this display “standard”?) 480 x 360 resolution screen like that on the BlackBerry Curve 8900 (which is higher than the 480 x 320 on the BlackBerry Bold) the large and high resolution screen made watching vodcasts and other videos truly practical on a screen this size.

You’d have thought that the combination of a nice big display and a touchscreen would have made surfing on the Storm a great experience. Unfortunately, the built-in browser is a little clunky and slow in rendering pages. I often ended up with “Requesting script” and “Running script” messages at the bottom of the browser – it just doesn’t seem to handle scripting well. However, it did make using Google Maps a joy – reiterating the fact that it was the slow browser that was spoiling a potentially good surfing experience.

Another area which the Storm could do with improvements is the lag in the operating system. It’s like the OS was trying to play catch up. Some times after unlocking the screen it will need an extra few seconds to get back into application where you last left it at. You still could get to your applications with a little patience, but you’d certainly not describe the experience as nippy.

But all this brickbats aside, this Storm must be every telco’s dream device. It does a great job with the multimedia experience (audio, video) – which suck up big packets of data – but it doesn’t let you do that for free as it does NOT have a Wifi connection. Probably one of the only messaging smartphones without a Wifi connection, this leaves you only with its HSDPA/3G connection for data access. Which means if you don’t have an unlimited data plan, or a boss paying for an unlimited data plan, you should just forget about it.

Even if I had an unlimited data plan, I ran into another problem. I get a spotty signal at some corners at home and the data connection sometimes switched back to a slower EDGE connection. Now what CAN you do about that? Ask the telco to put in another base station? But even with a good HSDPA connection, the connection’s still slower than Wifi – and why would you want a slower connection in a new phone?

And if you’re into video calling, you better take note that there’s no secondary camera (the one that faces you) on the Storm.

The few days with the Storm did make me miss the touchscreen experience. I’m convinced touchscreens are great – even many digicams come with touchscreen LCDs. Which brings me to the question of what makes it so difficult for all these non windows smartphone makers to come up with something with a touchscreen AND a real qwerty keyboard – something like an updated Treo 650? Now I’m imagining a BlackBerry Bold with a touchscreen – that would be close to perfection! HTC does churn out a nice range of smartphones with touchscreens and a qwerty keyboard but they run Windows Mobile and that’s another story for another day.

So after a few days with the BlackBerry Storm, on loan from the good people at RIM in Hong Kong, I concluded that I’m riding out this Storm.

No pricing available yet from the telcos here – they’re taking pre-orders for now. “Water goods” or parallel imports of the Storm are going for about HK$3,500-3,800.

While it’s not yet officially launched here, parallel import versions of the Storm (some which are Vodafone labelled) are surfacing at about HK$4,000 or less. Just do a Hong Kong Yahoo Auctions search for it here. Or if you’re here, go check it out at the (in)famous cellphone/computer malls.

I’ve only managed to have a cursory touch and feel of the Storm which belongs to one of my colleagues and my initial immediate impression was that it really had some weight, and it feels kinda chunky. Specs put it at 155g – the iPhone 3G weighs in at 133g so that explains it.

Its much talked about ‘tactile’ touchscreen does indeed seem to work pretty well and the big, bright 3.25 inch screen should make it THE multimedia BlackBerry. And they thoughtfully included a ‘normal’ 3.5mm audio jack.

But since unlimited data here still ain’t cheap, I think its lack of Wi-Fi will leave it in the hands of folks who have their companies pay for their unlimited data BlackBerry lines.

The BlackBerry Bold has landed here in Hong Kong. Well, at least some of it cos Smartone-Vodafone is allowing pre-orders here and PCCW Mobile has launched it here.

I’m excited. GPS, Wifi, HSDPA, Qwerty keyboard, 480×320 screen resolution – this is possibly THE device that can replace my aging Treo 650. Now let me go find out the price of this thing.