Buying an LCD TV (Samsung vs. Sharp vs. Sony)

off the telecom topic for a while since I recently moved to a new house and started to buy the whole lot of furniture, appliances, silver wares...etc. for the new house.

 

Yesterday I went to a couple of the electronics shops looking for an LCD TV, among the big collection they have I shortlisted them to 3 Sharp, Sony and Samsung, those are being sold at almost the same price.

 

General consensus seems to be that Samsung has the best LCD on the market especially with the best contrast ratio among the three. Sharp has a great LCD too, that has incredible refresh rates. Sony has an overall good looking LCD that doesn't really excel at anything!

 

Surprisingly the LCD plant is a JV between Sony and Samsung (50:50 ratio) so Sony or Samsung LCD are the same (other than the software and the configuration). moreover Sony and Samsung are about to dissolve their JV with Samsung taking sole control of the factory. Sony has already indicated that the new plant will be a JV between Sharp and Sony.

 

Sony was the leader in most industries about since i was a kid but look where it is right now!! Hopefully it is the time for Sony to pick up the Sony brand, I think sony wants to partner with another Japanese manufacturer like Sharp, since although Samsung and Sony have a JV in LCDs they are still rivals.

VoIP on the Mobile

For those who doesn't know VoIP is totally blocked in Oman, while Skype is totally blocked (you can't get to Skype website!) MSN, Yahoo and other IMs cannot make voice chat!

 

Being an expat in this country I mainly use my  phone for international calls, after figuring out how much I pay for the international calls I managed to work around the VoIP blocking through using SSH tunneling and basically routing my traffic through some server out of the country to make PC to phone and PC to PC calls, but the inconvenience of using the PC and the lack of mobility while using the PC is  still major.

 

I am still thinking of a way of using the 3G mobile to actually make VoIP calls but apparently there isn't much providers for this, Call Back might be an option but again the rates are really high compared to the normal VoIP rates (especially for the terminating leg to Oman) any ideas of how to overcome this!?