Update: theITChannel Vidcast – Host Christel Quek takes you on a quick tour  of the event, V.Clone and Drop Guard after the jump

EMC now has an end-to-end storage market from the low cost consumer portable storage to high end enterprise grade SAN storages. The good thing is, we would see some of the higher grade storage software from the enterprise flowing down to the consumer products. We can only hope that one day enterprise class storage systems and software becomes widely available to use data consuming folks at home.

The event was held at the loft at duxton hill, they simulated a home environment where iomega products plays a part in managing the home’s data storage. The showcase includes Network Attached Storage (NAS) to prosumer 4 disk high available storage. Where the storage had some form of data management and data protection system called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disk) and it allows you to combine multiple disk into one large volume called striping. To media centers and practical storage usage like CCTV (close circuit television) surveillance footage.

With RSA ( a large data security company and a pioneer in the data security encryption algorithms) under EMC’s group of companies, they also provide secure storage solution for those of us who has valuable data stored on portable media. These drives comes with high end enterprise grade security encryption on their disk. So you won’t even need to worry about encrypting your data when you store them on a portable device. This helps when you lose your portable hard disk or if your portable hard disk is stolen.

Two things that attracted me to the whole development of the consumer level storage is that iomega is really leveraging on the current trends of portable data storage and ability to merge with it’s own software or 3rd party partners. They are making it easy for consumers to expand their data storage requirements while providing easy to use software to manage their data needs.

With partnerships with VMware, they are able to preinstall V.Clone, a software that enables you to clone your working environment and bring your current working environment anywhere you go on a portable hard disk. In fact you can bring different working environments for different type of work or play as long as your portable can hold the space for your working environments. The beauty of this software is that you are able to keep your environments in sync. Meaning even if you are working overseas with a clone of your environment and when you come back to home base, you are able to sync not on the files that you are working on, it also syncs the updates you have made to the software you’ve installed and the operating system.

This is probably an extension or a lighter version of the popular VMware V.Motion software where you can clone a live system and migrate it to a virtual environment while it is still running. If you remember the Norton Ghost, this is like Norton Ghost with VMware Virtualisation all rolled into one.

We will update with videos soon. Updated: Video of the Event

Producer: Michael Foong
Camera/Photographer: Wilfred Phua and Christel Quek
Host: Christel Quek

What’s in this video is I will show you the stuff I bought for the iPad and the iPad shipment itself from USUnlocked. As a first part of the whole iPad Experience Series, you will see how I unboxed the package, skinning the iPad with a screen protector, the iPad Cases and Sleeves.

The highlight of this episode is that on video I will show you how I cut and shaved down a standard sim into a MicroSim format and made the iPad 3G work on Singtel 3G, my current iPhone Data provider.  Enjoy the video and don’t forget to leave your comments.

theITChannel Vidcast: the iPad 3G Experience from Michael Foong on Vimeo.

The HTC Hero Demo:

1. The Hardware and the Design of the HTC Hero. The HERO white has a teflon coating to give it a smooth glossy feel but maintain a non-slippery feel.

The HERO also has a fingerprint resistant glass screen that can withstand some degree of scratching. He demoed the scratching part with his car key.

The tailing is designed to have a better grip on the palm and for easy access to the buttons. What I really didn’t think it was a feature of the infamous “Chin” was that it was used as an easy to to tilt to prevent glaring.

The HERO also comes with a  G-Sensor which is similar to the accelerometer and it can detect the phones orientation to suit.

2. Sense UI

The Sense UI is pretty impressive. In fact its one of the things I envy over the iPhone. It’s pretty snappy on the HERO hardware. It is highly customizable with 7 screens to play around with.

The scenes feature allows you to personalize your mood/space on the HERO where you can define a screen that reflects your needs, mood or your current task. For example Work scenes, Holiday scene, and etc.

3. People (aka Contacts)

The Contacts feature on the Sense UI called People (They really need to have better naming conventions) is very innovative. It is making the contacts closer to today’s Social Media/Network context where it integrates with your social network status profiles and other social components like photo albums. When you pick a contact, it shows not only your standard contacts but it updates your current status on twitter and facebook. It also shows the photo albums that is tied to the profile/contact you just selected. Imagine having the Facebook App and your Contacts integrated into one.

4. Pinch

This I find is pretty similar to the iPhone with 1 difference the pinch works a little differently on the browser. The HTC Hero/Android browser is able to resize the text based on the screen size or viewing size to a more readable format. It nice for reading lots of text. It however reformats the webpages and we know that how it really mess up the layout on the mobile platform when we do that. Nevertheless it does help with enlarging the smaller text for better viewing.

Although I must say that the iPhone does have this nailed down pretty well. With the double tap to refocus the text. When you pinch to enlarge it moves off the screen. HTC however just enlarge to fit the screen and it does not go off screen. I see the advantages of both in different situations.

The HTC Hero retails for RM 2399.00

HTC Hero Fact Sheet:

Check out the video below: (Note: If you use a Netbook or a lower powered computer that does not support HD, you will experience video jerk, try turning off HD

HTC Hero Demo from theITChannel on Vimeo.