For those who are oblivious and who haven’t read any print or online material that possibly has an association with it, it is easy to think that the EX300 is a new gaming notebook from MSI’s camp. Such a perception could come to mind, taking into account that many of us are pretty much familiar with the “flashiness” of gaming notebooks these days.

Barely a month after getting our hands on the WD TV, our friends from Western Digital recently brought in a few new goodies from their stable, which included the My Passport Elite, My Passport Studio, and My Book Mac Edition.

Shure has long made its name in the most demanding of professional studios, and the company has always applied itself to the same level of quality and performance in its consumer line. One of the best examples of their successful consumer series is the Shure SCL2, successor of the very popular E2.

Defying the general perception of a “slow” year and the perceived need for caution and consolidation, Gateway is pushing ahead with their Philippine launch entitled HotSpots [Revealed], and it’s not just a single product that’s being introduced, as the HWZ boys saw last February 24, 2009 at the Renaissance Grand Ballroom.

Where does this Gateway lead to?

The tech market is replete with stuff that you wouldn’t normally place under the “required” column in your “to buy” list. Yet somehow, many products end up as must-buys even if they don’t have the same importance as say, a stick of RAM or a new display. The newest entry into my “to-buy” list is this neat little device from Choiix named the Mini Air-Through Notebook Cooling Pad, which is designed for netbooks with LCDs 7" to 10"in size.

Choiix is an off-shoot of the well-respected Cooler Master company.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 describing the recording studio professional or serious sound connoisseur, I would probably rate myself a 3 or 2. I’m not proud to admit it, but I have as much musical taste as a sorbetero hawking his new macapuno flavor (that is to say, Häagen-Dazs versus dirty ice cream, like YouTube audio versus 192 kHz/24-bit DVD-audio seems to be the same to both my ears and to my palate). Fortunately, the Ozaki WoW WR580 does not require copious amounts of listening talent, as this product, from its marketing, specifications and its appearance, scream “bass” loudly and without consideration to whether you prefer macapuno to ube.

You have to wonder if there's a little bit of cross-genre marketing going on here.

Getting handed the Edimax nLite Wi-Fi device one day, I was expecting to write about a small peripheral that would extend my Wi-Fi range, and not much more. Such was the size of the device (not much bigger than half a regular USB flash drive with a 3 dBi antenna attached) that it did not occur to me that the Edimax was a whole Wi-Fi dongle in and of itself. The Edimax EW-7711UAn Wireless nLite High Gain USB Adapter has a mouthful of a name, a bunch of features, all in just a fraction of the size of a traditional wireless adapter.

Aiptek is going up a steep incline in trying to wean consumers off their image as producers of budget imaging devices. First gaining fame with their line of pistol-grip type web-cam quality videocams, they’ve sent us one of their newest products for review, and lo and behold, it’s now a more standard, horizontally-oriented  videocam, and now sports a neat gold-and-black “HD” logo.

The Aiptek name has long been connected to the chintzy but affordable.

The many electric conveyances I’ve posted in this blog have so far been essentially regular petrol car-bodies with a lot of batteries under the floorboard (not to downplay the hard work that’s gone into these machines), but many manufacturers, including Michelin, seems to have realized that there’s a lot more innovation to be done with the concept of electric-powered vehicles. Michelin and Valeo, French automotive companies (Michelin being the tire company and Valeo an automotive engineering ) have agreed to work together to develop electric and rechargeable hybrid vehicle systems, including the pictured “e-wheel” system.

That's what I call an all-in-one package.

Freecom is not a name most Filipinos are familiar with, but the company is seemingly aiming to change this – they are starting to show up in local news items and have sent some notable publications some of their products for testing and demonstration purposes – one of these publications is our very own HWZ. We have with us two products, namely the Mobile Drive XXS and the succinctly named Tough Drive, both rubbery portable 2.5” hard drives.

A lot of good things happen when you get down to the essentials. Clean out your clutter, and you get more work done. Take out the non-functional fins and extravagant, swoopy bodywork of earlier cars, and you get modern vehicular design that’s sleek and sexy. Distill barley, or hops, or some other boring grain – and you get the best liquid consumable ever invented. And when it comes to cellphones, the same thing applies many times over – as demonstrated by the LG KC910 Renoir.

We tech editors are sometimes so easy to impress. The first thing we noticed when we received the Epson TX600FW for review was the neat tilting control panel / LCD display planted right on the front of the device. “Oohs” and “aahs” greeted the printer when it tilted up its button-laden control panel ala’ some movie prop from the main deck of the Starship Enterprise. Adding to the amazement factor were the buttons of course – the more buttons there are, the happier we tech-happy editors can be.

The relentless advance of convergence makes this LCD-toting All-in-One a viable and affordable purchase.

Leave it to HP to produce an event even more boisterous than most US presidential inaugurations. HP’s Imaging and Printing Group, commonly shortened to IPG, held their first ever “Big Bang” event locally following the regional success of said event. Befitting the title of the occasion, a total of 19 different imaging machines were present to wow and titillate the assembled guests, one of which is the very first wireless HP printer in the Philippines. “Big Bang” indeed.

Not expecting much from a printer launch, we were nonetheless pleasantly surprised.

It’s sometimes hard to retaliate when your opponent is tongue-in-cheek in its opposition, coupling its activities with a large measure of humor. Or so it seems with the intrepid manufacturers on the Chinese mainland. We don’t know who they’re trying to bamboozle with their newest “Sumsang Omnia”, but one thing’s for sure: I wouldn’t put it past a tech geek to crack a grin upon reading or hearing this product’s name.

Spot the difference! Winner gets to take home a smaller dose of sarcasm on your way to the end of this article.

Relatively fresh from the purchase of an Omnia smartphone just 3 months previously, I felt I had enough of an education in high-end phones in general and touch-screen phones in particular to be able to tell whether a cellphone had some enterprising and iinovative stuff to offer a common cellphone consumer. Thus once I got my hands on Nokia’s 5800 XpressMusic and browsed through some of its capabilities, I could immediately tell that this phone was going to be a hit, regardless of the many negative nitpicks you could skim off the net regarding its features.