Tech bytes for tea?

Once a quarter, half of Singapore converges on Suntec City or Singapore Expo to “shop till you drop”. I visited COMEX 2011 on its second of four days to take advantage of promotional prices and to stock up on IT gadgets and peripherals.

Visiting COMEX 2011 on Friday afternoon, the hope was to go in after the initial opening day rush crowd had petered out and before the working folks – who knock off work for the week at five – set in.

View from Level 6 of COMEX 2011. Combined panorama from 3 photos.

I like to think the ploy worked, though the marketplace was still plenty crowded.

I managed to park the car at Basement 2 of Suntec City itself and dived into the crowd on Level 6 at around half-past-three – shopping list in hand. I’d listed down beforehand the booth numbers of the vendors selling the stuff I wanted and studied the floor plans to work out an optimal route through the madhouse.

First stop was the Prolink booth where I bought the Prolink PKM-3810B bluetooth keyboard for my BlackBerry PlayBook. The guys at the booth wasn’t sure if it would be compatible with the PlayBook’s OS since it was built for Windows and they’d tested earlier that the keyboard did not play with Android. (Update: I’ve since tested the keyboard with an Android Tab and both worked together without a hitch!)

So I fished out the tablet and tested the display keyboard set. Amazingly both got connected without a hitch, so I became S$48 dollars poorer. And thanks to a cut-out coupon from the Straits Times, I saved S$8 from the original COMEX price of S$56.

My little haul from COMEX 2011

Since I was at Prolink, I bought a 3.5G USB HSDPA Modem for S$69. I was going to renew my home broadband subscription with SingTel. They’d offered a “free” modem for the mobile 1.5 Mbps on condition that I pay S$4 extra per month (if you use your own modem, you get the 1.5 Mbps and data SIM card for free).

Since that worked out to S$96 over the course of two years for the “free” modem, I figured I might as well purchase my own modem for less. Not a lot of savings, but I didn’t like the idea of being suckered into swallowing SingTel’s “free” modem offer.

Next stop was for an external 3.5” hard disk drive. The sweet spot for such storage disks is at 2 TB, and the cheapest 2 TB disk advertised was the Buffalo Drivestation.

But it’s no darn good if it’s sold out – the “it’s sold out but we have other models that you may want to consider” sounded all too familiar.

So I headed for Seagate and got myself a 2 TB expansion external 3.5” hard disk for S$120. Basic USB 2.0 with no frills.

Last stop was for a robotic maid. The golden retriever at home was driving us nuts with its beautiful golden fur – strewn all over the floor – and the cleaners only come in once a week.

So I checked out the two booths at COMEX selling robotic vacuum cleaners – iClebo and iRobot. I ended up carting home the latter after parting with S$898 for the Pet series iRobot.

On the way out of the lift lobby at the B2 carpark, I got waylaid by this guy who saw me lugging the iRobot box and wanted to know where I’d bought it from – while keeping the people in the lift waiting for him.

If looks could kill, we’d both have been dead a million times through.