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.
Walking around the show, I noticed more of the touch screen PCs being touted by vendors than half a year back. Prices have also fallen about one or two hundred dollars since then. For example, the entry level HP TouchSmart is about S$1,699 compared to S$1,799 earlier in June this year. Compared to the Acer and Dell touch screen PCs, have to say that the HP touchsmart series still has one of the nicest looking form factors.
A slight aside here. The touchscreen PCs probably is better pitched towards kids, as adults like me find it quite cool but not really necessary. The best non-trivial use of a touchscreen PC I’ve seen so far was at a Montessori playschool, where the kids were doing “finger painting” and learning to write Chinese characters on the screen. Bundle the touchscreen PCs with education tools or games that uses these tracing movements, target the parents, and then the whole touchscreen PC proposition suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Every IT show I go to, I always look out for memory card prices, and this time is no exception. The 16GB micro SDHC card has fallen since June from about S$70 to about S$50 (8GB and below have remained the same in price), so if you’re looking out for a micro SD card, the 16GB is probably the mid range one with the best price for value.
Speaking of price for value, I picked up a Western Digital 2.5-inch 750GB portable hard disk drive for S$179. The 1TB one is about S$249, whilst the 500GB one is S$135, so the 750GB is good value for money. The cheapest portable hard disks I saw were the 320GB ones from Imation and Iomega at S$89, but they didn’t sell drives bigger than 500GB (at $119).
Lastly, I finally got a brand new desktop — the mid-ranged value-for-money Dell Inspiron 545 — to replace my cranky and dying old one. At S$1,299 it had pretty decent specs that fit my budget. This Intel Core 2, 2.5Ghz Quad processor desktop came with a 1TB hard disk, a decent 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT220 card, and 23-inch full HD widescreen monitor, besides other freebies like a wireless keyboard and mouse. Worth a look if you’re looking for a mid-range PC that’s not expensive, yet has decent specs.
