I’ve made a little photomovie using the i550. I don’t know why I can’t post it directly into WordPress so I have to do it via youtube. I apologize for the blurry quality of the illustrations - pen no good and artist lousy - and the abrupt ending. Still learning the ropes la.

Today is the end of the contest and I can go back to more regular stuff.

P/S : This is my first youtube posting. Another first, yeah!

Song by Lee Ann Rimes.

As I mentioned earlier, using the Samsung SGH i550 is like learning to drive a Jaguar after having rode a bicycle for the past few years. I’ve not explored fully its capabilities but based on my experience, I can give it a thumbs-up. It is a very cool phone, quite James Bondian if you please, except for its size. I’ve always wanted to get a more compact phone after owning a chunky one for so many years, but on second thoughts this may not be a good idea. A little phone will get lost in my handbag and it will take forever for me to fish it out from the cavernous interior of my bag which has a hundred other bric-a-brac in there. Besides, big has its advantages - its 2.6″ screen is a boon to squinty eyes.

I don’t have the expertise to review all the features of the phone and compare it with other phones. Suffice to say what makes the i550 stand out from many other phones are its :

1. WIFI

2. 3.0 megapixel camera

4. GPS

I absolutely love the WIFI feature. When the home computer and hubby’s laptop are occupied by the other family members and I wanted to check my mail or something, I could just log on from my phone. I don’t have to bully the kids into letting me have the computer for 5 minutes which dragged on to 15 or 30 more minutes. By the time I gave up my “5 minutes” the kids would be glowering and shouting “You said 5 minutes!” Great peace enhancer.

The built-in camera is also a boon. I don’t have to lug my heavy digital camera with me to functions. It’s so handy. The camcorder, recorder and video editor functions are so cool too!

Though I’m not adept at using the GPS (and I hardly travel anywhere), I foresee that this will be a very useful feature to have when traveling somewhere for family holidays. It’s also great for showing off to friends and family.

I’m impressed with the radio too. The sound quality is so clear. Last night while ironing the clothes I listened to the radio on loudspeaker mode. It certainly made the chore more bearable. I was so inspired I even did some mending after that!

Other plus points - big calculator (yeah, everything is big with this phone), big screen for viewing text, big keypad (raised for easier handling) etc etc.

Truly the i550 is a all-in-one gadget :  phone/radio/recorder/camcorder/camera/PC/calculator/compass/PDA etc etc.  A good tagline for it would be : Everything in one phone. For $1499.

It’s BIG in size and BIG in value.

I’m a Samsung SGH i550 phone. I’m big and black, yet sleek and sexy. My 2.6″ colour screen is the envy of many. I’ve seen lots of covetous stares thrown my way when my master, Sammy whips me out from his pocket. Wolf whistles, I’ve got my fair share of them too, usually from guys.

Sammy often mutters to me lovingly, “I don’t know what I’ll do without you, baby.” I’m embarrassed that he calls me baby but better that than honey-bunny.

To illustrate how dependent Sammy is on me, let me narrate the events of one day in my life.

As usual on that day, I woke Sammy up with my alarm at 6.00 a.m. He got ready for work and by 6.20 a.m. was out of the house and zooming along the highway. While stuck at one of the traffic lights which takes at least five minutes for him to get past, he checked his appointments on my calender. It was going to be a hectic day. He had to go to Ipoh for a lunch appointment with a client and then rush back to the office for a 4.00 p.m. staff meeting. He even had time to browse through an Adobe PDF document which he had saved in my memory. It was a contract for the client. He double checked some figures using my converter. I can convert many figures : currency, area, length, power, temperature, energy etc. I’ve seen eyes popping out when Sammy uses this feature to impress nerdy types.

When we arrived at the office, he went to the pantry to get a cup of coffee. It was still too early for breakfast. He usually eats at 9.00 a.m. The door of the pantry was open and he heard voices coming from it. It turned out that it was the accountant and the receptionist having a little rendezvous. He peeped in. Their backs were towards the door. Sammy quickly whipped me out and recorded the lovebirds in action using my camcorder. That little snippet may come in handy if the accountant decides to play office politics. Then Sammy retreated and cleared his throat loudly before he entered the pantry. By then the couple had pulled apart.

That morning I rang almost non-stop as clients kept calling Sammy. His friends too smsed him frequently, sending political jokes and MMS greetings (Valentine’s was round the corner). He was able to hit the road at 10.30 a.m. He drove his boss in the company car. Barely ten minutes into the journey, the boss asked Sammy to call his secretary. Boss has his own mobile but I suppose he wanted to act like the boss. Sammy was driving, so he gave a voice command for me to call Vivien. And I did. Boss was pretty impressed with me.

When we got into Ipoh, Sammy used my GPS function to locate the client’s office. He had moved to new premises since their last visit. Not only was I able to show the map leading to the office but I was able to give audio instructions too. Boss was almost drooling with covetousness now. He kept holding on to me.

Well, Sammy and boss got to the appointment on time. The client had ordered pizza lunch and they worked through their meal ((boss complained to Sammy later, “I can’t believe we’re eating pizza in Ipoh! Ipoh! of all places!”) During the return journey, boss kept asking about me. What are my features, how to use this function or that etc etc. He was particularly impressed with the GPS and Google Maps as he didn’t have a good sense of direction and was wont to lose his way around.

When we reached the office, it was 3.30 p.m. Sammy’s sister texted him : Don’t forget about dinner tonight. 8pm at Restaurant XX. Gosh! He had forgotten about it. It was her fifth wedding anniversary. There was no time to grab a gift for her. He decided to use my Video Editor to make a photo movie for her as a stop-gap present. He had lots of pictures of his sister and brother-in-law in my image gallery. He strung together a collection of photos taken of them at family functions (using my 3.0 megapixel camera) and inserted her favourite song, Celine Dion’s Because You Loved Me from my music tracks. (As he had only owned me for several months, he had earlier transmitted the photos taken with his old camera phone using blue tooth but of course the quality is inferior to mine). Sammy managed to do this in 15 minutes before he dashed for the staff meeting at 4.00 p.m.

The meeting ended at 4.30 p.m. and just when Sammy was about to reply his emails on the computer, the system hanged. While the MIS department worked on the problem, he was able to use me to respond to urgent mails. Fortunately the wifi in the office was working. “What would I do without you, baby?” he muttered as his fingers flew over my keypad.

Sammy went straight from the office to his sister’s dinner. She was so touched by the photomovie that she cried. Women go for this sort of romantic stuff. Of course Sammy used my camcorder and camera function extensively throughout the dinner to record goofs and highlights like the time when his brother-in-law dropped the fish head into his bowl of soup and it splattered soup all over his shirt. I was passed around from person to person. Though they’ve seen me at other family get-togethers, they still couldn’t keep their hands off me. Everyone was taken by my blue track ball which makes my navigation so easy.

After the dinner, Sammy had a nasty surprise. His car had been broken into and the car radio was stolen. His Plustag was gone too. He made a report at the police station before driving home. Of course I was there to give him what he needed.  I have scores of songs which he has added to his playlist and he could listen to my radio by inserting the headset.

“I don’t know what I’ll do without you, baby,” Sammy muttered as he hit the pedal while songs from Hitz.fm blasted from my loudspeaker.

Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps is the famous book written by Allan and Barbara Pease. There is universal truth in the eye-catching title, and scientifically proven too. For now let’s chuck the first part of the phrase aside and concentrate on the second part.

Men, don’t pull out your hair when your other half asks you for the umpteenth time to draw a detailed sketch on how to get to Lot 10 complete with landmarks, road names and traffic lights. And don’t just hand them a KL map and say, “Nah! Use this!” It won’t work. Here’s why :

There is a reason why many women (not all! but many) have trouble reading maps. The brains of men and women function in markedly different ways, which means they really do think differently, according to researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the University of New Mexico.

The human brain is composed of two types of tissue–gray matter and white matter. While men and women have about the same amount of gray matter and white matter, men appear to use more gray matter, while women use more white matter. Before we proceed further, it’s important to note that while the two genders may think differently, this does not affect their intellectual performance or overall intelligence.

The study: Using magnetic resonance imaging equipment, the researchers performed a series of brain scans on 26 female and 22 male volunteers, all of whom were in good health and had no history of brain injury. The average IQ scores of the two genders were similar. The brain scans occurred while the volunteers carried out tests designed to assess their general intelligence.

The results: The human brain–male or female–is composed of about 40 percent gray matter and 60 percent white matter. When given intelligence tests, men used 6.5 times more gray matter than women, while women used nine times as much white matter.

What is the difference between gray matter and white matter? Gray is central to processing information and plays a vital role in aiding skills such as mathematics, map-reading, and intellectual thought. White matter connects the brain’s processing centers and is central to emotional thinking, use of language, and the ability to do more than one thing at once. Because women use less gray matter–critical to map-reading–they tend to have more difficulty with this skill than men.

“This may help explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing, like mathematics and map-reading, while women tend to excel at integrating information from various brain regions, such as is required for language skills,” co-study author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico told the Daily Telegraph. “These two very different pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests.”

This isn’t the first study to assail women’s map-reading skills. Previous research has also shown that women have weaker spatial awareness than men, which makes it more difficult for them to read maps. But women outshine men when it comes to vocabulary. In childhood, girls’ vocabulary develops more quickly than that of boys; by adulthood, women can speak 20,000 to 25,000 words a day compared to a man’s 7,000 to 10,000.

Sourced from here.

Why am I bringing up this? When I got my hands on the Samsung i550, I was excited to find out that there’s GPS and google maps on this phone. Though I don’t travel out of Klang that often, whenever I do, I’m bound to get lost when going somewhere unfamiliar. I can manage to lose my way even in familiar areas, what else when navigating strange places.

I played around with the i550’s superb GPS facility but really can’t make head or tail out of it. It’s not my fault. It’s just the way my brain has been wired. Samsung got it right in this instance. They marketed the i550 more as a man’s phone and as far as the GPS function is concerned, they’re spot on. My husband on the other hand, will be more at ease in using the GPS. He’s a very good map reader. But my vocabulary is better than his.

Cost of goods and services are on the rise. Everything is more expensive these days. Buns you buy from the roti man have shrunk. Chocolate coating on your favourite doughnuts has become thinner. Rice no longer retails at less than RM20 per 10kg bag (if they are, they’ll be snapped up in the twinkling of an eye.) In short, your money can buy less things compared to say, two months ago.

What’s a desperate housewife to do? Here are some doable measures to tighten the belt.

1. Eat less rice. Now’s the time for the overweight to shed some pounds. Ration rice intake, no more than one bowl per person. To make the kids eat less, give them sweets to munch on half an hour before meals. Guaranteed to make them lose their appetite. Not more than one sweet each, or you may spend more on confectionery instead of rice.

2. Plant your own vegetables in your garden. If you don’ t have a patch of soil to call your own, plant them in containers such as large styrofoam boxes. Not only are you helping to save the environment by putting the non-biodegradable styrofoam to good use, but you’re also doing yourself a favour as you won’t be spraying generous doses of insecticides on the plants. Use natural fertilizers : collect urine from the kids for the vegetables and if you’re up to it, their stools too for extra healthy foliage. Use a disposable face mask to help you breathe more easily during the fertilization process.

3. Switch off lights/fans which are not in use. This is so commonsensical but hard to practise for some people (like me - I don’t like stuffy dark rooms as they’re so depressing). Collect fines for lights/fans not switched off when not in use to help pay the electricity bill. When the weather gets too hot and you’ve got to have the air-con on in order to sleep well, cram everybody into one room.

4. Limit grand meals to once a week/month/special occasions. You don’t need to gorge on good food everyday. Simple food is good for the body too. You can eat eggs/baked beans/spinach for lunch and long beans/a small kembung fish/tofu for dinner without adverse effects. You won’t suffer from malnutrition on such a diet, though you might get withdrawal symptoms from goodfooditis if you live on simple meals for 30 days consecutively. But look on the bright side. Goodfooditis is nothing compared to eating mud cakes which the poor Haitians had to resort to in order to stave off hunger. We’re still a blessed lot here.

More later, if I’m up to it. Rising prices are giving me the eggs, oops aches (eating too many eggs - only 30 sen a piece, still cheaper than one piece of chicken lor). Any you’ll like to add?

Finally, the guide to the non-fiction list is out. Fiction was out two weeks ago. The fact that non-fiction was only published two weeks later and the title itself, “As good as fiction” makes me think that non-fiction is the poor cousin to glamourous fiction.

Check out this go-getter contender in the fiction category. I think she may make a good politician one day. She’s telling everyone to vote for her. Not only that, she sms-ed me to say she’ll vote for me

I was comparing the Samsung SGH i550 with no. 1’s newly acquired Sony Ericsson K530i.

“So, what’s the big difference between the Samsung phone and yours,” I asked.

“The 3.0 camera and the GPS of course,” he said.

Indeed, the 3.0 megapixel camera is the feature I treasure most in the i550. As I always carry the phone with me wherever I go, I don’t have to worry about missing a good photo op. For instance, immediately after I baked my first batch of cinnamon rolls, I snapped a pix of it. I didn’t have to go scrambling to get the digital camera from the drawer upstairs. That’s no. 4 scraping the bottom of the tray for yummy crust.

The second photo shows my niece hamming it up for the camera. After a family dinner on Sunday, she asked to play with my phone. The kids crowded around to see the phone with the cool track ball. Gasp!! My status has been elevated as the owner (albeit temporary) of the coolest phone in the entire extended family. Before this, I was at the bottom rung. Even my 13-year old niece had a more “keng” mobile phone.

Postscript : One more feature that no. 1 forgot to mention : he doesn’t have the WIFI that the i550 has. Hehehe, that’s three up on him.

At first I was very gung-ho in blogging about the Samsung i550 phone but looking at other bloggers’ postings such as the Phone Lover’s, I realize that competition is very keen. This guy is so comprehensive in his evaluation of the phone! He didn’t call himself a Phone Lover for nothing. I feel like throwing in the towel already. Let him win the phone lah while I continue to sleep in my comfy bed. And when the i550 alarm wakes me up to send the kids to school, I’ll just hit snooze and go back to wallowing in the thought that the phone is flying away from me on the Phone Lover’s blogging carpet. Boo-hoo, oh misery.

Still, I have an obligation to perform. Samsung didn’t loan me the phone for one month with no strings attached. Let me display some of that string here.

I’ve always owned chunky phones, first the hand-me-downs from my brother, then my own Nokia 3315. So I always thought to myself that the next phone I get will be a cool, handy little gadget. My youngest brother once owned such a small phone that it could be strapped on to his wrist like a watch.

Imagine when I first got my hands on the Samsung SGH i550. It looked as big as my Nokia though it was much slimmer. Bleh, I thought. In the looks department, it doesn’t score very high marks indeed. But what it lacked in appearance, it more than made up for with its functions.

What I really like about it is the big screen. (I’m not a technophile, so I won’t be spouting all those jargons that Phone Lover and others of his calibre use. The others were talking about Symbian this and Symbian that which the i550 has. Say what, when I first heard the term : simian as in monkeys? I googled the word and discovered explanations such as this. I’m still a bit woolly about it though.) Back to the screen. Not only is it big but it is in full technicolor! When you have eyes that have to squint and hold reading material at arm’s length in order to read it, believe me, this colourful screen is a sight for sore eyes.

Two of the features in its Organiser that I really like is the calculator and calendar. The calculator mode (sorry, I haven’t figured out how to reproduce screen shots here - I’m no Phone Lover, okay?) has a keypad like a regular calculator. Instead of pressing one key countless times to access the different functions like addition, multiplication etc (as in regular phones), all you have to do is to scroll the trackball to the required function and press it. It’s really nifty.

You know those little calling-card size yearly calenders that companies give out for free? The print is so tiny that you need a magnifying class to decipher it. That’s why I like the i550’s calender. It is so clear and readable. Of course, it’s more than a calender. You can use it to manage your appointments too. Sure, other phones can do that too but the i550 wins in terms of size. Big is better as far as I’m concerned. Big screen and big print means big in readability which is a great deal when you get to my age (my friends say I’m in denial in refusing to wear reading glasses).

That’s it for now, folks, to pacify the Samsungites and the Mobile Worldlings.

I posted an entry at my other blog at mumcentre.com.my which I think you might like to read. This drama happened outside no. 2’s school. No one has got hurt, yet.

Whenever I visit bookstores, I like to check out their best seller lists to see if my book has made it to the charts. When Honk! If You’re Malaysian was first released, I always made a beeline to the spot where they put up the poster. Actually, I still do.

About two weeks after Honk’s release, I was at MPH MidValley and discovered to my elation that it had topped the chart at number 1. I was practically jumping up and down with joy. I desperately wished then that I had a camera phone to snap a picture, but I didn’t. So I did the next best thing. I asked a passer-by to snap the photo and email it to me. Unfortunately, the guy was busy and later he couldn’t find the cable or something. Eventually I had to ask the bookstore personnel to snap a pix and email it to me. The trouble I had to go through to get a photo of the chart!

With the Samsung SGH i550 which was loaned to me, my days of bugging strangers and bookstore staff with handphone cameras are over - at least for a month. The i550 comes with a 3.0 megapixel camera and it’s easy to use too. I just press the button at the side of the phone or roll up the track ball (like what they have on laptops) to activate it. Best of all, the quality is good, as you can see from this photo.  I just need to train my hands to keep steady.

This is Popular’s March best seller chart. Honk! made it to no. 7 of the non-fiction category after being out of it from December 2007 to February 2008. In 2007, it acquired P.R. status there for 9 months. Perhaps the Readers’ Choice contest will help it stay on top a little while longer.

April 23 is World Book Day. Go celebrate with Bookxcess in Amcorp Mall. I’ve bought some books from there before. They’re really cheap : brand new paperbacks are going for RM19.90!  Happy reading.

Popular has nominated twenty best selling local books to vie for the Star/Popular Readers’ Choice Awards. Readers get to choose their favourite titles and if their ranking matches the final tally, they get to win a prize too.

Get your voting form from The Star - Tuesday and Sunday editions.

Last Sunday, Starmag ran a guide to the fiction titles. I hope the non-fiction list will be out this Sunday. Watch out for it.

I’m glad that in the non-fiction category, Adibah Amin’s As I Was Passing and Yvonne Lee’s The Sky is Crazy made it to the list too with Honk! If You’re Malaysian. In a sense, Adibah is my mentor, in a passive way. I used to read her Sri Delima’s column back in the seventies. Yvonne is my mentee. I’ve watched her break into print and author a best-selling book. She has taught me quite a few things too, especially in matters pertaining to book PR.

I think it’s great that mentor-me-mentee are all in the fray.