One of the three newborns in the Nokia family of N series phones has the tag line Slide, Shoot and Share photos. As phenomenal as a tropical storm, the Nokia N70 never fails to release a strong surge of digital adrenaline to any one who lays hands on it.

I read an article in USA Today three weeks ago about a remote Indian village that offered wireless Internet access to its residents. The Akshaya center, as they are called, is a room with five computers hooked wirelessly to the Internet, which residents can use to surf the web, take computer literacy courses, and conduct e-commerce. After reading the story, I felt a tinge of envy for our own people here who deserve the same level of service from the government.

BBcode is what “forumers” (or people who often visit forums and post messages there) use to format their posts in a multi-threaded message board that is often used in different community websites such as Grabeh (http://www.grabeh.com/), Philweavers (http://www.philweavers.net), Hook-up (http://www.hook-up.ph) Pinoyblog (http://www.pinoyblog).

One of the areas given the least focus of a corporate I.T. structure is to have a solid contingency plan, a disaster recovery strategy or a business continuity blueprint. Companies normally ignore this important aspect until their I.T. infrastructure experienced some problems or downtime.

Seasoned programmers know that abends are never a good thing. You see, abend is programmer lingo for abnormal end such as when you work on a program for 12 hours straight and still it wouldn’t run as expected. Pair abends with series and you know that stopping now and reading the review on the latest cellphones would brighten your day more than reading through the end of this article. For abends and series and unfortunate all together in a sentence never lifted any programmer’s spirits. Add deadlines and status meetings and users and you know that this article will never end with happily ever after. As everyone knows, or as everyone of a certain age should know, happily ever afters are to fairy tales as automatic promotions and salary increases are to myths.

I attended the launch of the Alias MAYA 7 a few weeks ago, at Gilligan’s Island restaurant in Makati. I attended mainly to see the demonstration of the new features of the MAYA 7, which were numerous. Its improved integration with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator was one of my favorite features, and it is much easier now for users to import and manipulate Illustrator .EPS and Photoshop .PSD files with MAYA.

This blog's color theme is black and white, which is in complete contrast to the colorful Philippine festivals, sceneries and ruminations on local culture that the author Enrico Dee often writes about. Rightly so, Dee chose the domain name Byahilo if only to illustrate his passion for gallivanting around the country's more than 7000 islands. He also loves photography and that is why the site's dark design is interspersed with pictures of the country's sights and people. The blog's navigation keys confuses one at first because there are separate cursors for accessing the main content and the various add-ons. But what it lacks for in certain aspects, it certainly makes up for in terms of enthusiasm which blogger Dee has lots of. Despite the fact that he blogged only in November of last year, he has already entered Byahilo in the Philippine Blog Awards and the Philippine Web Awards. Byahilo was also chosen last September as the Pinoy Blog of the Week and now, this. Welcome to the musings of a call center agent:

The battle between who has the better next generation optical disk format is heating up with some companies supporting Sony's Blu-Ray format and other companies supporting Toshiba's HD-DVD (High Density Digital Versatile Disc) format.

Variety is the spice of life with cellphones as it is with food. After having our fill of Swedish meatballs, Korean kimchi, Finnish vorschmack (stew), and good ol’ American burgers, it’s time to try the Chinese classic combo of noodles and dumplings. And excitement was certainly on our mind as leading Taiwanese brand ASUS unveiled last week a trio of feature-packed phones for the Philippine market.

Since the dawn of the 21st century, we are already living in a world of high technology. All the present hi-tech gadgets made our world connected together as one. Life became less complicated, mobile, and wireless. But as a saying goes, miracles do have a price.

Bosch Security Systems introduces its Blue Line detectors – the company's latest addition to its line of commercial, residential and industrial intrusion detection products.

Canon introduces the PowerShot S80 it boasts of 8.0-megapixel resolution, the highest among Canon compact digital cameras. This means that larger-size prints can be made, even up to A3 size. Canon’s proprietary DIGIC II imaging processor accelerates processing speed, enhances color reproduction and improves autofocus precision. The PowerShot S80 can autofocus faster than the previous model, and enhanced exposure control has improved focusing in low-light conditions so images are sharp in situations where it was once difficult to focus.

From SMS to MMS and even mobile commerce, Filipinos have easily and eagerly embraced new developments in communications technology. Now, mobile-savvy Pinoys can get ready with 3G (short for third-generation), the next step in the global mobile revolution, following the advent of such cutting-edge technologies as GPRS (2.5G) and EDGE (2.75G).

The search for IT-Excellent SMEs is on!

Samsung Electronics introduces the SGH-D600 a new sleek slide-up phone to the European market. This phone will be soon launched to other Southeast Asia, Middle East, and African markets. The SGH-D600 received a favorable review from Technews, published on September 5, 2005.

A cooperation between Samsung Electronics’ Mobile Business and Bang & Olufsen has resulted in a unique mobile phone concept called Serene.

Sony Ericsson gives coffee drinkers more reasons to fill up their cups with Perfect Blends 2005, a special promo in partnership with the National Coffee Development Board. Over 200 coffee retailers and producers are participating in this year’s program.

No, this is not one of those schemes where you attend a seminar and then they tell you that you need X amount of money to apply for overseas migration. This is all about being geeky and moving away from the masochistic way of living your computing life with viruses, trojans and worms as well as the frequent reboots and blue screens of death (BSOD). Frankly, I just find it rather amusing that people can spend a lot of their time purging their computers of viruses, worms and trojans, various security holes, etc., but they find it difficult to learn how to use a more stable platform. Today, I will provide you with a glimpse of some migration techniques that I often recommend to my friends.

Now that Opera distributes their advert-free web browsers for free, it is a bit more difficult selecting the best browser for your day-to- day surfing. On the Mac, I have Safari (comes with Mac OS X), Firefox, Opera and Camino. Whilst there are other browsers available for the Mac, I prefer to use the ones that are available for free and in most cases, run in most major platforms.

Who would have thought that the day would come that we will see Windows Operating System running on a Sun machine? When we talk about Sun machines, the first thing that comes into mind is Solaris or Linux/Unix operating system. That no longer holds true with the recent announcement of Sun Microsystems AMD-64 Opteron servers. Sun Microsystems recently appointed WordText Systems Inc. (WSI) as its exclusive distributor for their Sun AMD-64 Opteron servers.

In a move that could possibly signal an early resolution of the brewing next-generation DVD format war, industry giants Intel and Microsoft chose to support the HD DVD format over its rival technology Blu-ray Disc. The world’s leading semiconductor manufacturer and largest software vendor have aligned their technical and marketing clouts with the HD DVD camp. After what the companies claimed to be an extensive review of the merits of opposing high-definition (HD) DVD formats, Intel and Microsoft came to the conclusion that the HD DVD format developed by the DVD Forum, and which counts Toshiba as among its foremost proponents, satisfies their criteria and delivers various advantages, such as PC and networked device interoperability.

Sun Microsystems Appoints WSI to push AMD-Opteron Servers

Question: Hi. Is it possible to use MS Outlook 2003 as my default e-mail browser to access my yahoo mail? - Nonoy Ativo

One of the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, Hon Hai is more commonly known by its brand name "Foxconn" recently launched their own line of computer products - motherboards, barebones, card readers, desktop chassis, and CPU coolers.

Siemens developers exhibited extremely thin, miniature color displays that can be printed onto paper or foil. And the displays can be produced at very low cost compared to LCD panels. The first displays will become available on the market in 2007.

Logitech announced that three of its products received a Good Design Award 2005, sponsored by the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization. The three Logitech products — a set of wireless headphones, a webcam and a computer mouse — were named winners in the product design category.

Yupangco Electronics Corporation (YEC) again brings you its annual sale of Audio-Video and Professional Audio Equipment from September 01 to October 15, 2005. Now, all clients will again have the opportunity to take advantage of CASH DISCOUNT and irresistible packages or world-renowned brands like APOGEE, CELESTION, SENNHEISER EVOLUTION MICROPHONES, SOUNDTECH, TANNOY and YAMAHA.