Two weeks ago while Carly and I were in Macau, I somehow managed to get my wallet ripped off, along with our digital camera. Then at the end of last week (Friday, I think it was), I lost my cell/hand/mobile/whateveryoucallit phone.

All in all, none of this has proven to be a good experience, in the slightest, and I’m sure I’ve taken a few years off my life in trying to deal with insurance companies, and the general frustration that goes along with getting stuff stolen / lost.

Today though, I managed to head down to Sim Lim Square (huge IT type mall here in Singapore) and picked up a new handphone and camera.

The last camera we had was nice and small, a Canon Digital ELPH (SD110), but we were starting to really crave something with a much better optical zoom. After doing a boatload of research, it seemed that the best options were the Canon S3 IS, Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7, and Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1 (5 Megapixel and 10x Optical Zoom in a Compact format thanks to folded optics). We settled on the latter of the three as it is a bit more of a point and shoot, and we’re not really photography ninjas. Kodak released that crazy V610 a few weeks back, but it always makes me nervous buying electronic gadgets that I can’t read any reviews for.

On the phone side of things, as much as I really would have liked to pick up a Motorola PEBL, I can’t really justify dropping S$500 on a phone that I only talk on for 22 minutes a month, so I settled on a Nokia 6021, which was a great find. Nice little phone that has bluetooth, without all the camera/mp3/magicpixiedust/othercrap.