The ASUS Transformer Prime is an excellent piece of kit, and the Transformer Pad Infinity even more so, but those looking for a more budget-friendly “Transformer” can now satisfy their tablet desires with the Transformer Pad TF300.

Unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in February, the new tablet will be available in Singapore from mid-May. …

Credit: Barry Soon

Here’s a 7-inch tablet that will wow you without burning a hole in your wallet – as long as you accept that it’s not an Apple, Samsung or Motorola, but an Ainol product.

While tablet geeks may have heard about the Chinese electronics maker being the first to make an Android 4.0, or Ice Cream Sandwich, tablet late last year, most consumers in brand-conscious Singapore are probably not even aware of the Shenzhen-based Ainol.

Yet, one of the most appealing tablets now on the market is drawing the crowds in at Sim Lim Square, where the 7-inch Aino Novo 7 Aurora is on display to curious, surprised shoppers. …

Everyone’s talking about the new quad-core phones launched in Barcelona this week at the annual Mobile World Congress show, but what if you needed a replacement right now for an ageing phone? The Motorola Atrix 2, out today in Singapore at a relatively modest S$699, could be worth considering.

It’s packed with what you’d expect – a 4.3-inch screen, dual-core 1GHz processor, Android 2.3.6 operating system, a nice 8-meg camera and some of Motorola’s useful add-ons like MotoCast, which lets you easily stream movies and view pictures stored on your PC while you are out and about. …

The Nintendo 3DS not the handheld gaming console of your choice?  Take heart, for Sony’s newest handheld PlayStation Vita will be heading over to our sunny shores on February 22, in less than 2 months’ time.

Retailing at S$399 for the WiFi-only version, the PS Vita will be accompanied by 27 launch titles, including Uncharted: Golden Abyss and FIFA Soccer.  However, the connectivity-junkie will have to wait longer for the 3G version, as there is no word on when that will be released.

The price is definitely quite surprising, given the challenges that the 3DS faced at a similar price point. But unlike the 3DS – which is too similar to its predecessors to generate a high-level of excitement – the PS Vita is a completely different beast that previous PlayStation Portables. …

Motorola is putting up a lighter, more powerful follow-up to its Xoom tablet for sale here in Singapore from today, but with a rather hefty price of S$978.

The new Xoom 2, which will come with both 3G and Wi-Fi, sports a 10.1-inch screen and a faster processor, but will run only on Android Honeycomb (3.2) for now. It should likely be upgradeable to the newest Android 4.0 later in the year, if Motorola Singapore follows the practice of its US headquarters.

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I’ll be honest. I wasn’t crazy about the Galaxy Note when I first saw it a few weeks ago at Samsung’s big show-and-tell in Jakarta. The 5.3-inch screen makes it bigger than most phones (the Galaxy S II has a 4.3-inch screen), yet is smaller than the most petite tablet, like the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab.

Samsung’s new gizmo also uses a stylus in addition to the usual finger gestures that you can use to interact with the Android 2.3.5 OS (upgradable next year to Android 4.0). Now, where have we seen a stylus before? Yes, in the HTC Flyer, a slightly larger tablet, which didn’t do fantastically well.

Then there are other “middle of the road” devices like Dell’s Streak, which was well-made but didn’t win over enough fans, some of whom must have been confused by its “hybrid” nature.

And now, here we are with the Galaxy Note, which is cosmetically, a larger version of the popular Galaxy S II. What I think is crucial to its popularity in recent weeks, as I’ve heard from sources, is that it has come at a time when the screen sizes of phones have themselves increased from the iPhone’s 3.5 inches to 4.7 inches on the HTC Sensation XL, for example. …

The Galaxy Nexus, the first of many phones bearing Google’s latest Android 4.0 operating system, will hit the shelves in Singapore in January 2012, to the delight of Android fans who have waited a long time for a new Google-branded device.

Though it won’t make it in time for the holiday season, the Samsung-made gizmo will come with all the goodies on the “Ice Cream Sandwich” OS that were unveiled in Hong Kong about three weeks ago. Among these: a face recognition feature that unlocks the phone by detecting a user’s face, and updated Gmail features.

However, all the bells and whistles will come at a cool S$948, said Samsung at a regional media event.

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Gamers and road warriors have some new toys to look forward to this November. Samsung has released their new Series 7 Gamer and Chronos notebooks into Singapore – just in time for the tons of new games coming this Christmas.

The Gamer is loaded with sick specs, beginning with an Intel i7 quad core chip with 8GB of RAM, up to 16GB.  More interestingly, it comes with one of the most powerful graphic cards on the market – the AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5 with DirectX 11 support.

As if that was not enough, Samsung also has added an extra 8GB to the notebook through its ExpressCache system, which effectively acts as an extra 8GB of flash memory on the motherboard, allowing for faster caching that translates into faster startup and application launch speeds. …

After weeks of speculation, Amazon has finally unveiled its new Kindle Fire, a 7-inch tablet that will help sell its e-books and streaming movies and, according to experts, be the toughest rival yet to Apple’s iPad and iPad2 tablets. The main reason: its US$199 price tag. …

After wowing crowds at the CommunicAsia show in June, Nokia’s “all screen” smartphone is coming to a shop near you as probably the only one to run the Meego operating system.

The 16GB version of the N9 costs S$799, while the 64GB model will go for S$899 at all three telcos here – SingTel, StarHub and M1 – with “attractive” operator subsidies, according to Nokia Singapore today. It comes in black, cyan and magenta. …