Samsung wins legal appeal

Samsung can start selling it's Galaxy 10.1 tablet in Australia. The temporary ban is lifted, and Samsung can now jolly well sell it's tablets over the Jingling Xmas season. Surely, this will give a boost to Samsung's stock price.

But perhaps many Australians have already bought the iPad from Apple, and may not be in the market for another tablet.  We will have to wait to see how well received is the Galaxy 10.1  ;)

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for Galaxy Note to become more mainstream - a hybrid size between a phone and a tablet. Can it satisfy both types of usage pattern simultaneously ?

Ultrabooks

I saw a list of notebooks published at this Ultrabooknews site. It lists the "True Ultrabooks" and "Ultrabooks Alternatives" lists.

The definition of what an Ultrabook is :

• Sizing that enables ease of portability. 11.1″-13″ being the main target screen sizes. 1-1.5KG being the target weight.
• SSD Storage
• Fast boot, long standby, fast resume.
• Not a Netbook

My favourite would be Asus & Lenovo at the current time.  Samsung is also looking more attractive as time goes by.  What is your favourite Ultrabook?

Stock market on Black Friday

What a day on Singapore's Stock market. With the STI index down 23.5 points (2652) are the time of writing this block.

Germany just came online not long ago and is at +15. The only green line on the board.

The quest for publication

Blogs are fine for rumblings and adhoc "tweet"-ing of stuffs we like on our blogs.  But blogs do not have the feeling that magazines usually invoke.  Something to do with the feeling of the flipping of the paper in your hand.

With the introduction of tables and mobile eReaders today, e-Magazines are starting to flood through to everyday consumers.  With the digital age, creating a magazine is no longer the sole proprietary rights of the professionals.  You and I can also create our very own e-Magazines for relatively low cost thanks to digital tools and services that are available today.

I've been just toying with the idea of creating such a "magazine" just for the fun of it.  My research showed that I may need the follow software tools to fulfill my desire :

1.  Photoshop - for manipulating images for the publication
2.  InDesign  -  for creating the eMagazine by exporting to ePub format or PDF.  The newer version 5.5 can even publish to iPad or mobile devices. Cool

3.  A repository to put my publications and to deploy to my fans and followers.  I have just started to look at Scribd and Issuu.

My research stopped here for now... I would like to poll to see what is everyone else doing out there... Are there better or cheaper tools ?  Leave a comment please.

Google Chrome

Move aside Internet Explorer and Firefox. Google Chrome's popularity is growing rapidly. It's speed at which it renders and execute flash games on Facebook such as FarmVille or Cityville is an order of magnitude faster than IE or Mozilla.

Even if you are not into Facebook games, the web store where you can download and run various productivity and creative apps (not just extension) is an interesting proposition.

One such Chrome app is called devianArt. Kind of a doodling tool. Way cool for something that's free to use.

Bangkok Floods affecting prices of HDD

The severe floods that plague Thailand had affected many businesses/manufacturing there. Companies with less outsourcing that is based in Thailand are ripping the benefits of competitors who are affected gaining more business - selling goods at higher prices since there is now a shortage.

For the Hard disk drive business, precision parts within the HDD from various HDD manufacturers may come from the upstream suppliers who are affected by the floods.

 In Singapore, we are noticing that internal SATA HDDs are selling at the shops for double the price compared to pre-flood prices.  So building a system right now will be more expensive thanks to more costly HDDs.