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Gemalto is hosting their famous Mobile World Congress (MWC) Q&A session on their blog. A few weeks I inquired about the future of NFC, mobile payments and banking, and wondered if these technologies would be better targeted at emerging markets where smartphone penetration is higher than PC. The reason I asked is because I spent half my life in Malaysia and have families there, so I am aware on how high smartphone penetration is there when compared to traditional computers. Even then, mobile banking has yet to take off. Heck, they have yet to embrace chip & pin solutions as we have here (my dad still insists on using signatures!). In a country that has yet to have a single payment technology establishing itself on the market like chip & pin has done here, I figured it would more sense to target them. After all, it appears that people in emerging developing countries are addicted to smartphones, and with NFC becoming more prevalent, it seems ripe for the technology to take of

Windows Phone 8 has a strange storage 'bug' that keeps eating away at your storage space if you are not too careful. Now this happens all the time (it happens on my Android and iPhone as well), but on my HTC Windows Phone 8X , with its limited 16 GB of storage (12 GB after formatting and system allocations) and no ability to expand storage via microSD slot, this can lead to tons of frustration. A Windows Phone developer once told me that all Windows Phone apps are run sandboxed, meaning if you delete them, everything associated with the app goes. This also means there is no reason for a file explorer or registry so you can go an manually delete any orphan and temporary files. Unfortunately this isn't always exactly true. It appears that Windows Phone 8 uses a susbtantial amount of storage space which is labelled as 'Other'. And like the misunderstood villains of the first few series of Lost (before the series turned into an orgy for writers to make stuff up as they

Tate Modern is hosting an exhibition based on the great American artist, Roy Lichtenstein. Alongside Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein was an influential part of the Pop Art visual movement. The exhibition at the former Bankside power station will bring together and celebrate 125 of his best paintings and sculptures for the first time in twenty years. These includes such classics as  Whaam! , Drowning Girl and Oh, Jeff... I Love You, Too... But... Lichtenstein: A Retrospective opens this week and will go on until 27 May 2013. Tickets are available for £14. So, fans of Pop Art, go get your comic art fix. An app accompanying the exhibition is also available for iOS devices  (only - boo!). Incidentally, BrewDog, everyone's favourite rebel brewer, has crafted a special edition Lichtenstein beer called the Torpedo beer, featuring the artist's Torpedo... Los! artwork. Awesomeness.

London baby! (taken from Sushisamba  @ Heron Tower) Yo Londoners. CBS Outdoor, the media agency behind the popular Look for Longer competition that is holding another competition. This is a photo competition aimed at promoting your love to London (yeah, I know, we were kinda hoping for Look for Longerer, but this will do, for now...). A Samsung Galaxy Camera  (its basically a funny looking camera'ised version of the Galaxy S III ) is up for grabs. Winning pictures will also be exhibited to London Underground commuters on their advertising tellies. Up for the creative challenge? Well, if you think you are, grab a camera (any camera!), explore and shoot this great city. After all, we love London don't we? Source:  I ♥ London

I have been using Windows Phone 8 for a solid two months now, first with the Nokia Lumia 920 and then the HTC Windows Phone 8X . And just like it was a year ago with Windows Phone 7.5 , and the year before that with the original Windows Phone 7 , I am in love with this OS. The beautiful Swiss-style Metro UI is just perfect for my mobile needs. It's so intuitive even a bloody cat can operate it. I can't go back to using an Android or iOS device without muttering, bloody Xerox grids. Go back to the 1980s where you belong. But as before, Windows Phone's great UI and UX aren't enough. There is so much to Windows Phone 8 that doesn't deserve Microsoft's inaction. I understand they had to get Windows 8 launch out of the way, but their strategy with Windows Phone is now making less sense than ever. They stumbled upon such a beautiful UI that they even made their core OS and Office products out of it, so the first product line to ever use it (Zune doesn't count)

The Xperia Z is one of the most awaited smartphone coming out this year. Sony's flagship ticks most of the boxes when it comes to what people want from a 2013 phone - a full HD 1080p 5" display, quad core Snapdragon S4 SoC, 2GB RAM, decent camera and expansion slot. In case you miss that, yes, this is the first smartphone with a 1080p (that's a resolution larger than my laptop!) display to be marketed here. The pixel density of this 5" display is at a ridiculous Retina-destroying 441 pixels per inch, or 1323 sub pixels per inch! Truth be told, I am already spoiled by the 4.3" 720p display on the HTC 8X, but this is on a whole new level - and if I am being honest, I can't really tell the difference when it comes to sharpness. But higher is better, right? The Xperia Z is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 Pro SoC, with quad core 1.7 GHz Krait processors and the latest in GPU technology, the Adreno 320; 2GB RAM, 16GB of NAND storage, NFC, 13 MP camera with

London-based Design Museum has announced the nominations for this year's The Designs of the Year awards. The award will showcase innovative designs spanning across seven categories: graphics, transport, product, fashion, digital, furniture and architecture. Among those nominated., these includes the A Room for London, a pop up hotel currently sitting on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall building at the Southbank Centre; The Shard, Europe's newest tallest building build in the London Bridge district and Kapow!, the book set about in the Arab Spring. From a digital/mobile technology perspective (only because I blog a lot about phones), Windows Phone 8, the Swiss style inspired mobile OS reboot by Microsoft - which I recently reviewed with the HTC Windows Phone 8X and Nokia Lumia 920 , was also nominated. According to Pete Collard , the exhibition's curator, “the language that Windows Phone 8 presents is a very digital language, it says ‘this is digital information presented on

Ramen is making a come back splash in London. After Tonkotsu, we sample out the latest in Soho ramen scene, Bone Daddies. Opened last year, each of our visit to Ross Shonhan's newest noodle bar continues to stun our palette. Alongside Tonkotsu  at nearby Dean Street and Shoryu on lower Regent Street, Bone Daddies is the ramen joint to visit in London. With all the rage of tonkotsu-style ramen, perhaps the biggest surprise with Bone Daddies is the T22 chicken ramen. The soy-based ramen, which is made up of a bowl of delicious chicken bone broth, slices of chicken and out of this world cock scratchings. Now, there is something about these cock scratchings that get to me each time I visit. It destroys everything else on their menu. Utterly delicious and brilliant. And the soft boiled Clarence Court eggs? Mind blowing. This deadly combination? A snip at £9. Chicken ramen for the enlightened soul Still, if you are here for some tonkotsu ramen, then you won't find yourself disappoint

The HTC Windows Phone 8X and Nokia Lumia 920 are two of the best Windows Phone 8 smartphones currently on the market, so it makes sense to put these two head to head. Consider this a rematch of my HTC Radar vs Nokia Lumia 710  post. Both the 8X and Lumia 920 are first generation Windows Phone 8 smartphones and comes powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 SoC with a pair of Krait CPU and Adreno 225 GPU. Both these devices are clocked at a modest 1.5GHz speed and are augmented by 1GB RAM. While the SoC here is regarded as mid-range, the processor is more than capable of everything thrown at it. Windows Phone 8 appears to be efficient. The Lumia 920's 4.5" display is a tinge larger than the one on the HTC Windows Phone 8X. With a smaller display, the HTC 8X's 4.3" screen features a slightly higher pixel density and hence sharper, on paper. In real life, there is little to distinguish between the two when it comes to sharpness, though the Lumia 920's has an advanta

Ahoy Londoners, the Lunar/Chinese New Year festival is once again upon us. On Sunday, 10 February, Trafalgar Square will once again be transformed for this year's Chinese New year festival in London. A parade of floats and traditional drum music will begin at 10am from Trafalgar Square and ending in Rupert Street in Chinatown, ending at 11am, presumably when everyone would rush to their favourite Dim Sum restaurant. A host of live performance will greet party goers in Trafalgar Square from noon. This includes one of my favourite London-based indie folk musician, the lovely  Emmy the Great  (see the videos below of her and Tim Wheeler rocking our Christmas of 2011). Other performances include the Chen Brothers Flying Lion Dance (I've got to see this!) and other performers from China. The celebration will be followed by a display of fireworks at 5.55pm, ushering the year of the snake.

Windows Phone platform has a surprising number of working emulators. The first released was vNES, an emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System also known as the Famicom in Japan, a relatively old console and hence easy to emulate. There are also emulators for the Sega MasterSystem, Sega GameGear and Nintendo Game Boy Color. For a walled garden platform, Microsoft has been surprisingly lenient when it comes to allowing such apps on their Marketplace. Perhaps this is Microsoft's way of compensating and apologising for the severe lack of Windows Phone Xbox Live games... Chrono Trigger , still one of the best Japanese RPGs One of the newer and perhaps more impressive emulator on the platform is Snes8x, an emulator for old time gamers who wishes to relive their favourite childhood SNES games, many of which rivals even modern gaming. What is a SNES? Well any self respecting gamer will know about the SNES, Nintendo's second home console. The Super Nintendo is known to have create

Sony's newest flagship the Xperia Z has just gone on pre-order with Three UK . This is the first smartphone with a 1080p (that's a resolution larger than my laptop!) display to be marketed here. Read that again, that's 1080p - full HD resolution - that's more than double the pixels my sorry of an excuse television has (yeah, I am due for an upgrade)! In fact, the pixel density of this 5" display is at a ridiculous Retina-murdering 441 pixels per inch, or 1323 sub pixels per inch! If that doesn't get your geek heart fluttering, nothing will. Not only that, the Xperia Z is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 Pro SoC, with quad core 1.7 GHz Krait processors and the latest in GPU technology, the Adreno 320. Coupled with 2GB RAM, 16GB of NAND storage and expandable storage, this will surely impress your other phone geek mates. So if you are the sort of person who wants the top dog in Android smartphones, then be sure to get this. According to Three, the Xperia Z

G-Drive mini is a high performance stylish  portable drive by G-Technology. Available in variants up to 1TB in storage size and equipped with a 7200rpm harddrive, the G-Drive mini is a fast portable drive for those requiring that extra bit of space. Formatted originally for Mac OS X's HFS+, a small instruction is printed inside the packaging instructing users of other operating systems to visit their website for solutions to how to format the drive for their respective systems. Fortunately formatting it for Windows NTFS is simple enough, for me, but I can't see how average computer users like my dad would know. It would be helpful if a more helpful step by step instruction is included in the packaging, or better yet, just format it for Windows. After all, Windows still run on the majority of PCs. If you are a Windows user and have issues mounting the drive, right click on 'Computer' and click on 'Manage', then head to 'Disk Management', where you can for