Did our mascot give you a pleasant surprise? Welcome to our refreshed new HardwareZone!

HardwareZone.com has come a long way since it's inception in 1998, which means we've been around for more than 13 years. In this span of time, we grew from strength to strength, spawned the only local technology magazine, HWM, fanned out regionally, paved the way for various events that were the first of its kind in this entire region and cemented HardwareZone as the definitive tech portal of the Asia Pacific region.

While we've been busy empowering our readers all this while, admittedly, our site design didn't quite catch up. To tackle that, we embarked on a major overhaul and site revamp in 2009 that finally went live in early 2010. That edition of the site is perhaps the most familiar for most of our users.

Today, on 1st December 2011, we unveil a refresh to HardwareZone.com to rejuvenate the site and keep it fresh. These were some of the key goals of the refresh:-

• To give the site a cleaner feel and more focus to the important elements.
• Simplify content consumption for readers with a single stream of content updates on the home page - be it a review, feature, blog or news piece. The reader's focus should only be on what's new in tech or by product categories. Content type should not be a deciding factor.
• Make the site come alive with far more frequent tech updates.
• Integrating social sharing as part of the site functionality.
• Improved site navigation & content layout

What, no new features? We can almost hear your echo on that. To put things into perspective, HardwareZone has actually been enhancing the site constantly with new functions and features since the 2010 revamp. Today's site refresh was to give it an updated design to help users read and find what they want better.

Here's the summary of new features and functions implemented over the last year:-

• Tech Show Portal - The only link you'll ever need to plan what to get during a major tech show. Know what people are buying and recommending in the forums, a real-time reach out to us at HardwareZone via Twitter for assistance and other shopping resources like Buying Guides, Show Previews and Brochure downloads.
• Price Guides - The only place where you can actually compare product prices across various vendors and get the best deal with prices updated weekly.
• HardwareZone Site Search - more accurate and improved since revamp.
• New Product Categories implemented - Bluetooth headsets, PSUs, Tablets and more.
• RSS Feeds to follow our updates.
• Meebo Bar installed to support social sharing functions anywhere on the site and within easy reach.
• More forums to capture reader's needs like the Headphones and Tablet forums amongst many more.
• HardwareZone's very own forums iPhone App (and there's even a Windows Phone 7 app created by a member).
• Mobile edition for forums - vastly improved and platform agnostic.
• Automatically sharing editorial content within respective forums to give forum users a direct connection with the site's content and grow forum discussions.
• Regionalization of the HardwareZone platform with Malaysia and Philippines teams running their own site, providing more local content, services and updates.
• You Say I Give (uSiG) campaigns targeted to give users a chance to win important tech gifts through insightful discussions and fostering a closer relation with the community.

All of these features and highlights are brought over to the refreshed HardwareZone.com and it can only get better from here. We hope the entire refresh works to your advantage and you can be sure this isn't the end. Feel free to give us a thumbs up or discuss any concerns in our online feedback forum and we'll progressively do our best to address them.

At HardwareZone, you get the best of technology and entertainment from our various content and services. Expect more to come in 2012, but for now, enjoy the holiday season with a new experience of our site.

Oh and if you've haven't noticed, our Reader's Choice portion of the Tech Awards 2012 has been launched and you stand to win some cool holiday prizes just by having your say on which brands did the right thing and had the most positive impact on you.

So have fun, shop for your tech toys and stay healthy for this holiday season!

Vijay Anand / Editor-in-Chief of HardwareZone.com

A pioneering contributor of HardwareZone.com since its inception in 1998, his keen interest in DIY computing has helped establish content standards in testing and reporting online, while his drive to share knowledge has laid the foundation of Social Media 1.0 in Singapore (the HWZ Forums). As site editor since 2005, he oversees all content production with the local team, supervises the regional teams and provides forum management insights to the large pool of contributors.