Our three local telcos — SingTel, StarHub and M1 — often appear at every major IT show, but this year SingTel is conspicuously absent from Sitex. Sitex 2009, which is currently being held at the Expo, started yesterday (26th November) and runs all the way through the long weekend to Sunday (29th November).

Perhaps SingTel felt that their earlier Suntec Christmas Fair was sufficient, and thus didn’t want to have a presence at Sitex. Still, they are running promotions till end of the week even though they don’t have a booth.

IT shows are where the telcos and vendors roll out freebies to entice people to buy. And this year, the M1 booth is really aggressive with their marketing and freebies given. Compared to SingTel and StarHub, I feel that M1 just has that little bit more discount plus goodies being thrown around. For example, up to 50 per cent off their home broadband and mobile broadband plans, and “freebies worth over S$420″ — according to their marketing brochure — being given out for every package signed up. Some of the M1 phone offers even come with extra micro SD cards, Ez-link cards and grocery vouchers(!).

If you don’t care much about bundling your phone and broadband contracts with a pay TV option — i.e. StarHub’s Cable TV and SingTel’s MioTV — M1′s deals are worth taking a look at. Was tempted, but unfortunately, I’m still bound by contract to StarHub for about a year left, and no pay TV is not an option. So kaypoh look only. Ah well.

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Do you want an Asus Eee PC or an HP mini?

That seems to be the choice that Sitex shoppers are being asked to make by SingTel and StarHub, as the two broadband operators slug it out in an increasingly saturated broadband market.

Counting personal broadband services like 3.5G offerings, Singapore has a residential broadband penetration of 93 per cent.

What do SingTel and StarHub do then? Tie you in with ever more attractive deals, of course! …

Do check out Part I, Part II and Part III of Techgoondu’s coverage at Sitex ’08 if you haven’t, where Alf did a bang-up job covering most of the stuff. Here’s my additional two cents:

Sitex isn’t a show just for electronic gadgets it seems. I saw cars, handbags, exercise equipment, and even one booth selling spa treatments(!).

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Besides the usual TVs and laptops, there are other little bargains to be had at Sitex.

We seem to have forgotten that printers were once the thing to buy at these shows. Visiting the HP booth brought to my attention this nice little gem of a colour laser printer.

The Color LaserJet CP1515n costs a nice S$479 and comes with networking and 96MB of RAM for faster printing. Compared to a slightly cheaper S$379 LaserJet CP1215, this one seems a better deal with all the added features for a SOHO. Oh, and there’s free delivery for these colour lasers (they’re damn heavy, after all).

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Okay, on to the other Sitex show bargains on the first day.

One tempting deal comes from Samsung, which is selling its new 14.7-megapixel NV100HD camera for S$599, with loads of freebies thrown in. 3 x 4GB SD card, card reader, 5-in-1 cleaning kit, extra lithium battery, tripod, etc and etc, anyone?

This nifty little number (see below) also shoots HD videos and has a nice 28mm wide-angle lens. And it also has a handy 3-inch touch-screen as well. Besides the wide-angle option, this is a worthy update over and seems a better buy than Samsung’s own S$549 NV24HD, which comes with an older 10-meg lens but better 24mm wide-angle.

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The lelong has begun anew today, with the last of the quarterly computer bazaars being held at Singapore Expo.

What’s the lowdown on the best deals this year? Well, despite the economic downturn and Sitex being usually smaller than the other shows earlier in the year, the halls are chockfull of bargains for those looking for TVs, cameras or memory cards.

But first, make sure you get in early, and I don’t mean in the afternoon. …