TECH AWARDS 2020 READERS' CHOICE
This year marks the 11th edition of the annual HWM+HardwareZone.com Tech Awards, Singapore tech industry’s premier event where we recognize the best brands, products and services. While the event was scheduled to be held on February 21st 2020, due to the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, we’ve chosen not to host a physical event to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all our working partners and staff.
Voting for the 40 Readers’ Choice categories was opened to all readers of HWM, HardwareZone.com, and GameAxis. com. With a total of 245 brand nominations, it remains one of the most comprehensive brand recognition surveys in the industry.
BEST ULTRAPORTABLE NOTEBOOK BRAND
APPLE
With 28% of the votes, Apple is the brand that comes to most of our readers’ mind when asked about ultraportable notebooks. To refresh your memory, towards the end of 2018, Apple finally introduced an all-new MacBook Air portable. Sporting the original MacBook Air’s signature wedge-shape design, the new Air measures 15.6mm at its thickest point and weighs just 1.25kg. It also has Touch ID, two USB-C ports (support Thunderbolt 3) and, yes, a Retina display. Another Mac portable that’s released in 2019 is the new 16-inch MacBook Pro. Other than its larger screen size, the most obvious difference between it and the 15-inch MacBook Pro is the inclusion of a Magic Keyboard that uses a more traditional scissor-switch mechanism. Other notable features include a 3-mic array for better audio recordings and four USB-C Thunderbolt ports.
BEST PC COMPONENTS RETAILER BRAND
FUWELL
Sim Lim Square has always been the go-to place for DIY enthusiasts building their own systems, as this is the mall that gathers numerous PC components retailers under the same roof. For the 11th straight year, our readers have voted Fuwell (14%) their favorite local PC components retailer. Once again, Fuwell has to fight off strong challenges from many other crowd favourites such as Bizgram (10%), Allstars (9%), PC Themes (9%) and Best Bargain (9%).
BEST EXTERNAL STORAGE BRAND
SEAGATE
With 22% of the votes, the winner of this year’s Readers’ Choice award for Best External Storage Brand goes to Seagate, which also won the award last year. If you need a portable SSD that’s fast, fits in your palm and supports USB-C, the Seagate Fast SSD (really, that’s the name) is worth checking out. Of course, if tons of storage is your priority, external drives using traditional HDDs like Seagate’s Backup Plus products still offer the best bang for the buck. In second and third place this year is WD (20%) and SanDisk (19%), which are hot on the heels of Seagate’s pole position.
BEST GRAPHICS CARD BRAND
ASUS
With 43% of the votes, do you know that this is the 11th year ASUS is walking home with our Readers’ Choice award for Best Graphics Card Brand? Like its motherboards, we think ASUS’ popularity boils down to its longstanding ability to churn out a wide range of graphics cards for both NVIDIA and AMD users. And mind you, these aren’t just duplicates of reference cards, but cards with exclusive ASUS technologies, such as
