I have been reading up a lot on technology news because of a portal that I am taking care of. And I am quite fascinated with the stuffs that are invented, even though some may never see the light of day. And even if these products are manufactured and released into the market, I doubt that I could ever afford them.

But it’s nice to see how some people’s minds work. Like this printer that could print scents that has been invented by the Japanese. it must be something in their education system that make Japanese an innovative lot, don’t you think so?

The funny thing is that although I read through the news article a couple of times, I still do not get how it is done. I only know that is product is a modification of a Canon inkjet printer, except that this printer that prints scents does not use ink. It shoots jets of scented fluid onto a sheet of paper. I wonder if these scents could mix and what kinds of scents are available. LOL

I have been travelling a lot over past few months since February and I am thinking of lightening the load of my backpack. because of the nature of my work, I have to take along my notebook wherever I go and because of security concerns, I try not to use public computers or even unsecured internet connections.

My friend, who owns a Samsung Galaxy S, told me that I should just get a Galaxy S too but I have tried it out and don’t feel like it’s a work tool but more like an entertainment device, like what the iPhone is to me.

So I’m thinking maybe I should get a tablet. Working on it would probably be a lot slower than notebook but it would probably be almost the same speed as working on the netbook because of its processor speed. However, a tablet would be something different that I could also use at home.

But then when I think about it, I could be better off getting a really thin, lightweight but full-fledged notebook. It would surely serve me the best, though it’s not as fancy as a netbook and certainly not as eye-catching as a tablet.

A friend, who lives about 300km away from me, has a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone. Every time I visit his city, I get to sit down and meddle with his Galaxy. While he has been raving about the phone, I find that Android is still rough around the edges. There are still many things that don’t work though it also has many advantages.

One thing is that I wasn’t able to capture a screenshot. I have an Apple iPhone and a Nokia smart phone and this comes naturally to both phones. I love to take screenshots of apps since I am a blogger and I love to take screenshots of interesting webpages or jokes and then email them to friends. With Android, I am not able to do this easily.

Also, the other day when I met my friend, I purposely logged on to my Facebook account from his Galaxy to see if I could play my Facebook games. While we all know that the inability to run flash is a major setback for Apple iPhone, the Galaxy also couldn’t run a lot of flash based Facebook games, to my disappointment. My friend told me that the coming version will be able to handle flash better. So I guess I should wait?

The Apple iPad landed on Chinese shores this morning, where only the wifi model is sold. According to reports, the 3G model will come later. I seriously cannot understand why Apple has to make life difficult for everyone and not bundle wifi and 3G in one same model. People in the East mostly are subscribed to 3G because our cities are not as well connected by wifi as in the West.

However, many of our homes do have wifi and this means that when we are at home, we will be using wifi and when we are out and about, we will connect to the internet by 3G. See, we need only ONE device. Sure you can say that wifi model is cheaper but if you only have ONE model that offers both connectivity, people wouldn’t be able to compare prices, right?

Although many Chinese braved the rain to get get their hands on the first iPads to land in China, it feels quite dumb of them. Why would they want an iPad, a wifi model at that, NOW, then the new model is coming out in a few months’ time? And you know this model lacks so many standard features, namely flash support and a camera!

Google has announced in a blog post that there were ten million calls made in the first week of the launch of Google Voice in Gmail. The first day saw one million calls made. Currently, Google Voice in Gmail allows users to make voice calls to USA and Canada for free. Although I haven’t seen anywhere written how many minutes users have in their account, I don’t think that users have unlimited call credits. From my own account, I see that I only have 10 cents. I didn’t even bother to install the app.

Making phone calls PC-to PC is not something new but what I would like to see is a more reliable, free, mobile-to-mobile call service much like Skype and Fring but my own experiences tell me that these services are not that reliable and most of the time, it’s like talking to a robot on the other end.

On another note, Google Voice in Gmail makes me wonder what happened to Google Talk’s VoIP service. I have never used it before but I do wonder why someone would want to log into their Gmail account from the browser to make a call when they could close a window and make calls via a desktop application if only Google would expand the feature to not only voice with our Gmail contacts.

Last month, I bought a Nokia E72 hand phone for my father for his birthday. My father is not good with smart phones like he is not good with computers. He uses them, the basic features, but then I have to set up EVERYTHING for him.

My father has a Gmail account so I thought that it would be a breeze setting up an email account for him on the phone. I noticed that by creating a mailbox, we have a few webmail providers to choose from, including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Mail.

After a few days, my father informed me that the Gmail isn’t working and that he couldn’t retrieve email, and if he could retrieve it, he couldn’t open it. Heck, sometimes it wouldn’t even connect.

So I checked on the internet and found that this is actually a problem with Nokia E72 and that the email set up doesn’t work for most people. What I did was to take a photo with the camera and pretended to send the photo by email.

Since I don’t have a mailbox in the phone as I have deleted the Gmail that didn’t work, I was asked if I wanted to set up one. I selected Yes. I was then given an option to create a new email box. I selected “Other” (email provider) to trick the phone so that it will ask me to input all the values manually.

Once I entered a phony Gmail account, I was taken to the next page where I would have to select my account type, POP/IMAP. I selected IMAP. Following that, I would have to enter a “fake” password. Once these are given, I was required to key in other advanced settings, as follows, taken from Gmail Support page and voila, it works well now!

Incoming Mail (IMAP) Server – requires SSL: imap.gmail.com
Use SSL: Yes
Port: 993

Outgoing Mail (SMTP) Server – requires TLS: smtp.gmail.com (use authentication)
Use Authentication: Yes
Use STARTTLS: Yes (some clients call this SSL)
Port: 465 or 587

Account Name: your full email address (including @gmail.com)
Email Address: your full Gmail email address
Password: your Gmail password

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