You will hear a slew of new product announcements from Nokia, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Intel, Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and new partnerships. Some of the biggest news like Nokia Maemo and Intel Moblin to merge to a new product called MeeGo, HTC Desire – the Nexus one with Sense UI,  Mobile Windows Phone 7′s impressive new concept and other product announcement that Sherwin will share with us.

Related to the mobile world, Adobe Air announced that they will develop Air for mobile devices. I think this gave us the biggest “Sigh” in the podcast.

We dissected Google Buzz and what is really mean to us after 2 weeks of usage. Is this going to be a useful tool for gmail users or a lead in to something bigger from Google?

Somehow with all the Mobile World Congress and Google Buzz hype, the Google Speech-To-Speech translator slipped in unnoticed by most of us. So hear what we thing about another game changer that Google is developing.

We then diverted to talk about translation as a whole while expanding on the google’s speech-to-speech translator and ended up having lots of time wasting fun with Translation Party (http://translationparty.com). So if you want to know what the title of the podcast means go here – http://www.translationparty.com/#6616031 and find out what we were laughing about.

We ended with the most crucial technology contribution that Mimos (Malaysia) will bring to the community. The Aunty PC (Jen-ii, formerly known as the Mak-cik PC) A hilarious tickling of the funny bone ensues…

Enjoy!

This Week’s theITChannel Podcast is brought to you by:

Michael Foong
Court Jester and Host of theITChannel
http://twitter.com/mikefoong

Sheldon Goh
Techie Cartoonist Telco Specialist Extraordinaire Masked Super Hero
http://twitter.com/sheldongoh

Andrew Kok
Super Gamer Geek God Techmeister
http://twitter.com/andrewkjs

Sherwin Loh
Correspondent for the Digital Life, Straits Times, Singapore Rabbit Eater
http://twitter.com/angelsherwin

Listen to us on streaming audio here: http://media.libsyn.com/media/theitchannel/theITChannel_Podcast_Episode_33.mp3

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Show Links after the jump

Here are the topics we rambled about this week:
1. Google Wave Revisit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ&feature=autoshare
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/09/google-wave-is-easier-to-understand-than/

2. Windows Launch Party
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/10/09/unboxing-the-windows-7-launch-party-kit/
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/09/28/2136255/Mainstream-Press-Cringes-At-Win7-Launch-Parties?from=rs
http://lifehacker.com/5077690/get-windows-7s-best-features-right-now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ&feature=player_embedded#t=148

3. Kindle to go worldwide
http://www.pcworld.com/article/173392/amazon_already_taking_international_kindle_orders.html
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/09/amazon-confirms-international-kindle-dx-is-on-the-way-too/

4. HTC Touch 2 and HTC Leo
http://mytechnews.info/b/2009/10/and-the-htc-leo-is-official.html
http://mytechnews.info/b/2009/10/some-pictures-from-the-htc-touch2-offer.html

Listen to us on streaming audio here: Download audio file (theITChannel_Podcast_Episode_22_1.mp3)

Subscribe to theITChannel podcast

RSS: http://theitchannel.libsyn.com/rss

iTunes: http://bit.ly/2LUG19

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.