HWM Singapore April 2022

TELLING A STORY WITH TECH Every month as I assemble the top-notch, crack team of articles that make up HWM Singapore, I normally try to make sure that there is some kind of overarching theme that goes into the issue. Sometimes this theme can be very overtly planned, such as during major events such as the Consumer Electronics Show or Mobile World Congress; even the many pandemic related issues stories we’ve run. Sometimes it’s hard, but this month was a bit of a surprise, even to me, and I didn’t really realise it till I was looking at the finished product. Many of our articles can be linked back to how technology is used to tell a story, and when I say this, I don’t just mean sensory-wise. We’ve got a chat…

We’ve all wished at some point that we could divorce our personal lives from the gruelling responsibilities of our jobs. A healthy work-life balance is often held up as some vaunted ideal – the dream is to check out from work entirely when 6PM rolls around and not receive a single message on Slack until the next morning. Severance, a new sci-fi series from Apple TV+, takes that to its logical extreme. Workers divide their minds into two halves, and neither half retains any memories from the other. Their personal selves take the elevator up to the office every morning, and their work selves take over when they step out. From the perspective of your personal self, this means driving to work each morning at 9AM, and then leaving immediately at 5PM.…

Grammy Award-winning producer, songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Giles Martin (you might also know him as the son of Sir George Martin) joined Apple Music’s Zane Lowe for an in-depth conversation about the arrival of The Beatles’ iconic “1” album in Spatial Audio for the first time, in addition to “Strawberry Fields Forever” in celebration of the song’s 55th anniversary. During this discussion, Martin discussed the responsibility of tackling a project like this as well as unique insights and stories about the process of bringing immersive audio to a legendary body of work, how the new technology is transforming how music is created and enjoyed, honoring the legacy of his father and The Beatles, the implications for a new generation of artists, and more. Here are some key highlights from this conversation,…

The journey of bringing new technology to the beatles’ catalog… I think Sgt. Pepper’s the first Dolby Atmos record. We went back and redid it because technology changed, like it does. Paul and Ringo are always going, “How can we push technology? How can we change the way?” So it made sense to me to do Sgt. Pepper’s, one of most famous albums of all time in new technology, because that’s what The Beatles want. Paul says, “I don’t want to be stuck in a museum. I don’t want to be under a glass case. I want people to discover things. I want people to listen to stuff, to explore. People have an opinion about things”. The Beatles don’t want to be the sort of on some mount going, “don’t…

Dreamcore got my attention with their impressive productivity-focused Dreambook Touch 15 and now they are going after gamers and content creators. The new Dreambook Fusion 15 is also based on the Intel NUC X15 reference design, so it isn’t particularly unique or exclusive to Dreamcore. But since all NUC products go through Intel’s strict certifications, there’s a level of reliability that one can expect from these products. The Dreamcore Fusion 15 is at its heart a 15.6-inch performance notebook, powered by Intel’s 11th Gen Core i7-11800H in two versions differentiated by their graphics processors and displays. The RTX 3060 Laptop GPU forms the base-level graphics option, but if you prefer more power, there’s also the RTX 3070 Laptop GPU option. For displays, you get to pick a FHD (1080p) with a fast…

Apple hasn’t done much to change the way its newest iPad Air looks and feels. That’s no bad thing because there’s little to fault its design. The 100% recycled aluminium body has flat sides that many love and it feels solid and every bit like a premium device should. It’s also thin, compact, and light. The only change in terms of design is colours. There are still five colours to choose from – Space Grey, Starlight, Purple, Pink, Blue – but the hues have been updated. The 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display is unchanged. So we have a resolution of 2360 x 1640 pixels, P3 wide colour support, and True Tone technology. I know many were hoping for a ProMotion display but Apple is reserving that for its “Pro” iPads. And as for…