I was in Singapore last week for some business appointments and had to stay at Hotel 81 (Bugis) because most hotels were fully sold out - no thanks to CommunicAsia. I also caught the GSS virus from my wife and ended up with a new HTC Touch PDA Phone.

It was my first time staying at the Hotel 81 chain and I loathed paying S$140/night (all Singapore hotels jacked up their room rates because of CommunicAsia), especially one notorious for quickies, one-night-stands and what not. It wasn’t that difficult to figure that out once you saw “Transit - S$20 for 2 hours” in the list of room types/rates at the reception.

For travellers to Singapore, I would strongly suggest staying around this area because of the convenient location. It’s within short walking distance to places like Parco Bugis Junction (Bugis MRT), Bugis Village, Suntec City, Raffles City Shopping Center (City Hall MRT), Marina Square, Funan Center and Sim Lim Square.

Throughout my stay, I also saw quite a number of couples that looked like students and employees after work that came for the Transit plan. The men would pay upfront at the reception (IC or passport required) while the girls either waited near the lift or went up seperately. There is a carpark and a back entrance to help you avoid the unnecessary attention if you prefer. And for the record, you WILL almost always attract stares when walking out the front door. :)

The room itself was very small and very basic, i.e. no cupboard, fridge, safe, writing table - you get the picture. They did provide a bottle of 500ml mineral water, a cup of instant noodle and a packet of Milo though. Room service was almost round-the-clock because of Transit customers, and there were CCTV cameras in every corner of the hotel.

Would I stay there again? Preferably not unless my first choice, Park View Hotel, is full.

While I was out and about meeting clients, my wife was gleefully celebrating this year’s Great Singapore Sale, raiding the shopping malls along Orchard Road. She reasoned that it was extra important to buy something this time because of the impending GST increase to 7% on 1st July - women!

That was how I ended up upgrading my trusty SonyEricsson P900 to the new HTC Touch PDA phone. For those unfamiliar, HTC is the new brand replacing Dopod and they are/were the contract manufacturers of HP iPaQ and O2 Atom PDA phones.

The HTC Touch (Windows Mobile 6) is a PDA phone that’s the size of a regular mobile phone - infact smaller than most. The things I liked about it is definitely the affordable price, svelte form factor, “wow” effect, custom HTC interface and bundled 3rd party applications. HTC has also made sure that you won’t need to buy much more extras by thoughtfully including a screen protector, 1GB micro-SD card, spare stylus, padded case and stereo headset.

The things that I wished had been included was 3G (HSDPA) support, more internal memory, built-in GPS and a standard audio jack. Another thing to note is that first-time PDA phone users will need to get used to the differences with a regular mobile phone, e.g. making a call involves more steps and likely with both hands. If you’re interested in the HTC Touch, do check out these review and forum discussion.

And since you’ve made it to the end of my blog post, here’s a tip for you - there’s a shop called PC Connect #3-38 in Funan Center on the 3rd level that’s retailing the HTC Touch for S$729 with GST, i.e. a S$119 discount over the RRP of S$848.

Update: my most used application right now is InfoFeed - an RSS reader. I connect via wifi every morning to download the latest RSS feeds, ping.sg included. There are other nice mobile applications available like Google Earth (requires wifi) and you can even download wikipedia to the HTC Touch for reference on the go.

Update: the TI OMAP 201 MHz processor may be a tad slow but there’s a free overclocking software called BatteryStatus available. Many HTC Touch owners have reportedly overclocked up to 260 MHz without problems - this is roughly equivalent to the speed of an Intel XScale 400+ MHz CPU. Mine’s overclocked to 240 MHz.

Update: there seems to be a “memory leak” problem whereby after opening and closing applications, the memory used is not completely returned. This results in the HTC Touch becoming sluggish overtime and you need to soft-reset the device to clear the memory.

Update: if you SMS alot and find jabbing on the onscreen keyboard a chore, there’s an intuitive software called TENGO that’s available for free and created by a Singapore company called Xrgomics.