From right: Mr. Yoshimoto Nagashima, GM for Olympus SLR Marketing; Mr. Masaomi Tomizawa, Section Manager, Electronic Device Dept.; and Mr. Antonio Lei, Marketing Director, Olympus Imaging Singapore.

VIEWPOINT: The team behind HardwareMAG.com will put up videos related to trends, technologies and companies with a focus on the South-east Asian region regularly.

Here, in our very first episode from the HWM ViewPoint series, we bring you a 5-minute segment where we met up with senior executives from Olympus and  had them demo to us the new PEN E-P1 Micro Four Thirds camera.

In a written interview which will appear in an upcoming issue of HWM magazine, Tomizawa-san said that the priority is to make the body of the E-P1 smaller. To compensate for the lack of flash, the company also developed a new engine called TruePic 5, which can take photos up to ISO 6400. Of course, the E-P1 also comes with a flash attachment as an option.

“We believe we have a new concept here; the E-P1 is neither a DSLR nor a compact. It’s a new generation kind of camera,” said Nagashima-san, during the interview.

On price:

The Olympus PEN E-P1 pancake lens kit (M. ZUIKO DIGITAL 17mm f2.8) will cost S$1,448 (US$994); the standard lens kit (14-42mm f3.5-5.6) costs S$1,298 (US$891) while the twin lens kit (14-42mm f3.5-5.6 and 17mm f2.8) costs S$1,598 (US$1097). The camera comes in either Black or White.

Anyway, here’s the exclusive ViewPoint video. Enjoy.

The Android-based HTC Hero was unveiled in the UK touting a new Sense User Interface.

SHOWCASE: IntoMobile.com has reported on the unveiling of the HTC Hero in the UK here and it’s currently generating a lot of Android buzz.

The HTC Hero is the latest Android smartphone from HTC, but according to the site, the real star is the new customized Android OS user-interface called HTC “Sense UI”.

If you’re familiar with the TouchFLO 3D UI in Windows Mobile-based HTC smartphones, then this is what Sense UI is to the Android-based HTC Hero. There seems to be high expectations that the HTC Sense UI will be the key catalyst for making the HTC Hero the best Android phone to hit the market.

Oh did we also mention it supports multi-touch inputs (other than the Palm Pre’s WebOS and iPhone 3GS’s iPhone OS)?

Anyway, words aside, here’s a video showing you how the HTC Hero’s “Sense UI” works. Check it out (click the link after to check out two other videos related to HTC Hero and its Android Sense UI).

A video presentation of what the Sense UI is going to feel like on the Android-based HTC Hero.

Read the rest of this entry →

T&A: In a blog post at Harvard Business.org, a study into the behavioral patterns of Twitter users based on gender has unveiled some very interesting results.

Based on data collected from a sampling pool of 300,542 users in May 2009, the study reveals that there are more female Twitter users than males (55 versus 45%).

According to a study on Twitter by Harvard Business, an average man is twice more likely to follow another man while a woman is only 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. However, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman.

According to the study, this is interesting, considering that on typical online social networks, most of the activity is focused around women (ie. men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, but women generally follow content produced by only women they know). Read the rest of this entry →

HP's new Mini 5101 has an integrated 2-megapixel webcam and 3 USB 2.0 ports.

SHOWCASE: HP has unveiled its top-of-the-line Mini PC called the Mini 5101. Featuring a sturdy, lightweight anodized aluminum display enclosure with a black, brushed finish, the combination of materials is an industry first for the netbook category.

The product has a spill-resistant keyboard (95% of a full-size QWERTY keyboard), comes with HP DuraKeys (a clear coat to keep the keys 50x more resistant to visible wear) and weighs from 1.18kg. Read the rest of this entry →

CORP TALK: Intel Corporation and Nokia have announced a long-term relationship to develop a new class of Intel architecture-based mobile computing device and chipset architectures which will combine performance in powerful computing with high-bandwidth mobile broadband and ubiquitous Internet connectivity.

Both companies will expand their longstanding relationship by developing a new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks, including collaborations to explore open source mobile Linux software projects, possibly for use in the Moblin and Maemo platforms. The relationship will also give Intel access to Nokia’s HSPA/3G modem IP license for use in future products.

The Moblin platform is an optimized open source Linux operating system for delivering visually rich Internet media experiences on Intel Atom processor-based devices while Maemo is a Linux operating system most popularly seen powering devices like the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet (an observation we talked about in a previous post here).

According to Intel’s official release, the companies expect many innovations to result from this collaboration over time.