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It’s the season to buy your favorite toys and
gadgets. The choices are bewildering and the options are limited
only by your budget, how deep your pocket is, and what your
priorities in life are.
Flat screen plasma or LCD
television sets are the rage. Their prices are about 30 percent off
from last year’s already reduced prices.
The rule of thumb, it seems, is
to multiply P1,000 for every inch (diagonally) of the display. Thus,
a 32-inch LCD TV should be priced P32,000. If it is a Sony Bravia,
you add 20 percent. If it is a Panasonic, you deduct 12 percent to
15 percent. So P32,000 becomes P28,000. Please note though that big
appliance retailers typically add a margin of 20 percent to 30
percent to the price. So haggle. Sometimes, the retailer will
package the TV with a 5.1 home theater, a P10,000 unit for just
P5,000.
With a so-called economic
slowdown or recession, consumers will probably try buying a large
screen TV rather than splurge on eating out, seeing a movie, or
watching a play or a musical. Buffet meals in hotels cost at least
P1,000 and popular restaurants have a waiting queue worse than an
budget airline’s check-in counter.
TV buyers are going upmarket and
gobbling up sets from 40 to 52 inches. To arrive at their pricing,
you multiply each inch by P2,700 because the screens are much larger
and they are in high definition. So a 52-inch Samsung High
Definition TV will cost upwards of P138,000. Sony Bravia is even
more expensive. Its 46-inch XBR5 full HD will cost you P140,000.
You should not buy a TV set whose
price will get you downpayment for a brand-new Toyota. Spending a
small fortune for a big screen TV makes no sense since the
technology is evolving and prices are crashing every six months.
What used to cost P500,000 three years ago can now be had for
P150,000 to P180,000 with a higher resolution.
At best, opt for the 42-inch full
HD Panasonic. The price is P56,000, if not less. Without full HD,
the price is P3,500 to P5,000 less. To an untrained eye, a full HD
(1080) and an upscaled HD TV (720) are almost the same in quality.
Besides, TV signals, at 500 lines resolution, are not yet high
definition.
Meanwhile, the iPhone 3G has
become the second best selling cellular phone, after Nokia,
worldwide. In the Philippines, buyers are still turned off by
iPhone’s stiff price, pre-paid at P37,600 for the 8 gig to P43,800
for the 16 gig. With that money, you can buy ten decent, late-model
Nokias.
Manny Aligada, Globe head for
customer engagement says “the iPhone has become the season’s
must-have gadget. It’s very popular. Sales are above
expectations.” Globe offers the 8-gig iPhone free at Plan P4,999
and the 16 gig for just P2,999.
The iPhone, says Aligada, “is
the only cellular phone that offers music, Internet, telephone and
apps store. No other phone offers the four in one package.”
One thing great about the Ipods
and the iPhone, you can download thousands of songs, from classical
to rock or simply inane sounds, on the iTune or Limewire for free
and build a huge music library on the go.
Digital cameras have improved in
megapixels at a lower price and smaller size. Please note though
that a six-megapixel camera will do well at most shooting
situations. So a 12-meg seems like a luxury.
Panasonic has come out with what
to me is the best consumer digital camera. The LX3 has wide angle
lens—24 (rare for a compact camera) to 60 mm., is ultra bright
with lens opening of F2, 10.1 megapixels from a newly developed
1/1.63-inch RGB CCD image sensor which is said to offer 40 percent
higher sensitivity, and a three-inch LCD display.
At less than P25,000, the LX3 is
very affordable and at just 9.1 oz, makes mincemeat of the Nikon
P6000 (P22,000) and the Canon G10 (P25,500). You cannot find a
better amateur camera than the LX3.The
As for computers, there are, of
course, the new Netbook class of lightweight computers with 7 to
10-inch displays. The Lenovo has the IdeaPad S10, for instance, as
well as the groundbreaking Asus EEE PC 701, the HP Mini-Note (2.8
lbs), and the Acer Aspire One (2.1 lbs).
Take a look at the MacBook Air.
It’s thin (.76-inch thick at its thickest), lightweight (3 lbs),
it has good screen size (13 inches, LED backlit display), trackpad
controls, iSight camera and mic. It has a 1.6GHz Intel Core Duo
processor and has aluminum chassis.
The Macbook Air has very limited
connectivity. It has no hard drive (you can use remote optical
drives), no FireWire, no Ethernet, no mobile broadband. It has only
one USB port, and its battery is not user replaceable. And it costs
a fortune, at more than P93,000 to P150,000.
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