Here’s a reprint of my Manila Bulletin Technews Blog-O-Rama column for 26 November 2007:

The title of this article is inspired by a friend who commented that buying her son a Sony PSP Portable didn’t do them good after all.

This is brought by the fact that her son had become “anti-social” after being glued to his PSP for hours on end. My friend said the son was not his lively, prancing self because he was concentrating on his game-playing; he hardly talked and if he did, it was to mumble unsatisfactory one-liners.

This was not actually the first-time that I’ve heard such complaint from my lady buddies who are mothers, too. I certainly thought long and hard before I bought my son his early Christmas gift of Playstation 2 last week. I had to extract a promise from him that he would only play for a certain number of hours and his studies would still take priority. If you notice, PS2 is quite obsolete already but it is also intentional on my part not to spoil my city-bred kids with the latest gadgets, having grown-up in my time kicking ball in the open field and communing with nature in our house by the sea. If I have to choose between computers and sports, I’d go for the latter anytime.

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Having two or three phones is a phenomenon I am seeing among my friends. Plenty of reasons for this: they subscribe to different mobile service providers, they want to separate their personal phone from their work phone , or they have many girlfriends/boyfriends and carry a separate SIM card for each (ouch!) Whatever, I still think it’s cumbersome and the future trend leans towards multiple SIMs in a single mobile phone compartment.

The dual SIM mobile phone is a step in this direction. A bunch of bloggers and gadget reviewers were invited to have the first dibs at the Verzio dual SIM mobile at Fiamma Ristorante before it is fully launched to the public in December and I must say it’s impressive. The initial Verzio models are not only dual SIM, they’re also the first dual SIM phones to have 3G/EDGE-GPRS capability.

If you’re shopping for a gadget this Christmas, the Verzio phones could be an alternative. I am seriously thinking of getting one for myself. Dual SIM means you’re shooting two birds with one stone. Here goes:

verzio twinn.

Perky ETC Channel TV host Sam Oh shows off the Verzio Twinn, to retail at P12,000. This black slider has tri-band EDGE functionality, Bluetooth, USB connection, and weighs a light 110 grams (with battery).It’s equipped with handwriting recognition through a stylus, has an expandable memory (via T-Flash/MicroSD) and a 1.3 megapixel camera.

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