MONEY SPECIALIST

31st August is a special day not only because it’s a National Day for Malaysia. More importantly, it’s the second month in a row after 31st July that you get to enjoy Baskin Robbins ice cream at promotion value of 31% discount. Being a public holiday, it’s definitely a wonderful day for ice cream lovers to enjoy Baskin Robbins, especially on a hot day!

As for myself, I’m contemplating whether to enjoy a tub of Baskin Robbins today. For the past two months, I had overload of ABC ice-cream, with flavours ranging from almond to butter to chocolate. Don’t believe me? Just look at the picture!

Imaging how much I have put on weight since then! That’s the price to pay for indulging too much of ice cream. Maybe I should heed the hint of the car plate below: WORK OUT. Hmm… maybe not. Anyway, Happy Merdeka Day!

Ever since tablet was made popular again by Apple iPad, other companies are trying their best to capture a slice of the market by introducing their own range of tablets. One tablet that came to my attention is an Andriod based tablet by StreamTV named Elocity A7.

Elocity A7 is a 7-inch tablet will be packing a powerful Tegra 2 1GHz CPU. With Android 2.2 as the OS, the possibility is endless from productivity to multimedia to gaming.

What caught my eye about the tablet is the glossy deep red build, and the touch sensitive buttons along the right side of the bezel. They are the same buttons you will find on Android smartphones, such as the Droid and Nexus One.

On the top left corner of the bezel, you will find a front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera for video conferencing. You can actually use Fring app to make video call over Wi-Fi or 3G network. How cool is that!

Now, let us move back to the main screen, which is capacitive touchscreen with the resolution of 800 x 480. I’m happy to report that the screen is extremely responsive and mutitouch works well in the browser and photo gallery. With screen size of 7 inch, the tablet is good enough as ebook reader. There’s accelerometer built-in, so you can take advantage of it with racing game like Asphalt for some steering action.

Surrounding the tablet is an SD card slot along with USB and HDMI ports, the latter of which did come very handy for hooking up the tablet to a HDTV and watching a 1080p clip is pretty smooth. Although the entire tablet experience was pretty great, now comes the bad part. Elocity A7 won’t be preloaded with Google’s Marketplace because of restriction. As a replacement, it will come with GetJar app store instead. What a bummer…

By now you must be wondering how much will this tablet cost? For $399, not only you will get the cool gadget itself, but also coming with the box is an HDMI cable and wireless keyboard. Are you excited yet? Head over to Amazon to place your order in September!