Recently in Technology Category

Further proof that BBC Four is the best channel in the UK comes through a series of excellent programmes that have been on-air this week:

- Storyville had YouTube Hero: The Winnebego Man starting briefly with the stories on people who made it "big" on YouTube, but highlighting the story of Jack Rebney who shot to fame via an outtakes tape from an "industrial film" (i.e. corporate film) detailing the features of said range of camper vans. It's really worth watching.

- Upgrade Me with Simon Armitage is a timely repeat of a documentary from a year ago in which the poet and gadget fan examines why we feel the need to upgrade all the time. It's not a perfect film, but I found it worthwhile after my little piece the other day, and coming on the day that Apple releases its new range of music products (of which more anon).

- I'll happily watch just about anything on climbing or mountaineering. At the weekend we had the excellent Great Climb on BBC Two Scotland (watchable via Sky) and BBC HD. Watch the sequence about 23 minutes in. And then BBC Four tonight had The Eiger: Wall of Death.

- More or Less is back on Radio 4. If you're not already, you should be subscribing to their podcast.

- I enjoyed Legacy on Radio 7 but must admit that I've not played the accompanying game yet. It's getting a repeat on BBC Radio Scotland very shortly so hopefully episode 1 will be back online to listen to via iPlayer.

- It wasn't the greatest MacTaggart lecture ever, but I think Mark Thompson had some relevant points to make about Sky's investment in UK production.

- I was a little underwhelmed by Apple's announcement today. My favourite iPod is the Classic. It's the only one with enough capacity for my needs, yet Steve Jobs seemingly neglected to mention it despite saying the entire range was getting an overhaul. If it gets discontinued, then I'll have to look for a new portable music manufacturer. I'm not at all sure about the new look Nano which seems to be a step back to the horrible looking third generation device and not actually usable in the hand. The Touch is fine (although Apple still seems to limit FM radio to the Nano), and the Shuffle becomes usable again (if mostly pointless without a screen). But Apple has again concentrated only on the US with Apple TV. Not only does $99 = £99 in Apple world, but there's no TV programming available. Now if they'd got iPlayer, 4OD, ITVplayer, Sky Player and LoveFilm on the device, they'd have people falling over themselves to buy one. Internet on the TV is the future of TV - not 3D. But Apple has missed in a trick in beating Canvas to the punch. If I was Sony, Samsung, LG or Panasonic, I'd be rushing to get my £99 device into the marketplace which does all these things even if it's just these things. The jury's out on iTunes 10 because while it's a sophisticated piece of software, changing icons isn't the same as a ground up rewrite which I believe this software is in dire need of.

Remember when you were little, and there was always the annoying kid who had everything? He was the person who'd completed their Panini sticker collection before we'd even stuck in the free pack that came with the album. He had Bigtrak or a ZX81 even when he didn't really like computer programming? He got a shiny new Chopper while you had to make do with a no-brand? He had Adidas football boots while yours were made of Hi-Tec.

Maybe I'm letting a few too many of my own personal "issues" come into the open, but regardless of the generation you were brought up in, you recognise the type. When you complained to your parents that it was "so unfair..." they'd tell you were lucky to get what you had and the other child was spoilt.

Flash forward 30 or more years, and we live in basically the same world. Yesterday Samsung teased a 2 September announcement regarding their latest iPad-style tablet, while "everyone" is excited that Apple is going to announce some new iPods and possibly some other stuff.

And it is Apple and the video game manufacturers that have driven this growing need for rapid consumer satisfaction. They set very clear dates when their products are available to buy, and love the fact that people will queue outside stores to be sure of getting their device first. They worry about whether they'll get their product faster if they pre-order online or queue up.

Is this a healthy state of affairs?

I'd say, it's definitively not.

Perhaps it's my own fault. Should I step away from the tech blogs and news sites that breathlessly report this stuff? Do I eagerly read the review sites when new devices come out, keen to discover what new features this upgrade has?

I wonder if even the electronics industry really likes this state of affairs. While they're probably jealous of the coverage that companies like Apple, Nintendo, Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox achieve by releasing their products on a single day, encouraging pre-orders and queues for the devices, having a massive spike at the start of sales is not an easy way to manage inventory - particularly when consumers demand a worldwide simultaneous release. That means a lot of ramped up production to meet initial demands rather than a perhaps more measured production timetable.

It's the materialism and greed of it all that I'm finding more difficult. Should I feel guilty? We hear stories about suicides at Foxconn which manufacturers many of these devices as workers are put under intolerable pressure to meet production timetables.

Am I immune to it? No. I jumped on the phone to order my HTC Desire from Orange on the day it was made available, and I remember pre-ordering my PlayStation 2 for the day of release.

Sorry - this has all been a bit rambling, and I've certainly got no solutions. But this is something I find troubling.

[Note: The genesis of this blog entry is from something I've been thinking about anyway, but was catalised by what could be characterised as a Twitter "tiff" between myself and James Cridland last night - James was disappointed that he wasn't getting his new Amazon Kindle on its promised release date. In retrospect I was probably unfair to castigate him about Amazon's failure to manage their customers' expectations.]

Sorry. I'm going to return to an evil that I've talked about before.

What bedevilment do I mean?

Why - the standard "ear buds" that come with Apple's products.

Look - I know I can sometimes moan about Apple. They have their closed systems, their sometimes bloated software (iTunes - I'm looking at you), and their prices. But nobody can doubt their flair in the design and implementation stakes.

Like it or not, they've built the portable music business. They banged record company boss heads together until they could launch the iTunes store. And they employ Jonathan Ive, who makes just about everything they manufacture look and feel gorgeous.

But there's an Achilles Heel to many of their products. It's the standard headphones they ship iPods, iPhones and, I daresay, iPads with.

Those white ear buds are awful. Worthless. Terrible. They don't even sit in your ears nicely.

What's worse - they leak sound to the extent that I can often sing along to the song their wearers are listening to on a noisy tube train, while I have my own headphones on! The reason those people are listening at such high volumes is because so much sound is leaking out, that listeners have to compensate by turning up the volume.

Frankly, if you want to carefully rip your CD collection, or buy music mastered in state-of-the-art multi-million pound studios, and then listen to it on inadequate and acoustically awful headphones, then that's your choice. But if those phones are so awful, they cause me distress then it becomes a problem.

I genuinely believe that it'd be fair if I was allowed to carry a pair of scissors, or perhaps some secateurs. If I come across someone listening via those awful things, then a quick painless snip and I'd be improving both of our lives.

A general rule of thumb in the whole portable audio business, is that any bundled headphones from any device manufacturer are awful. The possible exception is Sony. They have a significant headphone business, and they know that if they sell terrible headphones bundled with their devices, then they're not exactly encouraging consumers to upgrade to other offerings in their range.

So why does Apple make a fantastic device like the iPod, and then lumber it with such an awful, yet important accessory? They don't do it with their other products. If you buy an Apple iMac, it'll come with a terrific monitor, their "Mighty Mouse" (which everyone says is great), and an excellent keyboard. Those are all areas, where many PC companies save a bob or two when putting together packages.

Yes, Apple sells a superior pair of headphones, in-ear ones, currently retailing at £61 in the UK. But I don't really think that's their business plan. You can also buy headphones from many other manufacturers at Apple Stores and online.

Apple obviously builds its products to a price (not necessarily a UK price, it should be said). Decisions are made about what components can be included - cameras on iPhones, aluminium, plastic or ceramic finishes, hard or solid state disk drives and so on. Headphones are obviously not an important part of this process. They price up a $199 iPod Touch, and perhaps allow $1 for the headphones. The biggest part of the decision surrounding the included headphones is ensuring that they're white and fit in with Apple's iconic advertising. Sound quality doesn't really figure.

Now there's always been a certain part of Apple which says that it's more about style than substance. And while its pro devices have always ensured that their evident style is also met with the requisite quality, I'm not always convinced that's the case in consumer products. I think the headphones issue supports that assertion.

What's more, Apple continued down this substandard headphone path with first their iPhone headphones with their built in microphone, and more depressingly with their most recent low-end iPod Shuffles. In the latter, they built the controls into the cable meaning consumers are basically forced to use the bundled headphones.

So what can you do if you're still listening to your iPod or iPhone via the bundled headphones?

Frankly you could do a lot worse than head over to Amazon and buy yourself a pair of Sennheiser CX 300-II currently retailing for just £16.09 (They come in white too).

(I was going to say that I don't have any monetary involvment in Sennheiser, but I will admit that I've put affiliate code in those links so that's not entirely true. Buy them somewhere else if you're not happy).

By the way, if you're listening at home, let me heartily recommend Grado 60i headphones which are stunning. They, however, leak an awful lot and definitely aren't for going out and about with. But if you're after a relatively inexpensive pair of headphones for home, go for these. They might look a bit odd, and the cool kids in their WESC or Skull Candy gear might not look up to them, but the sound they produce is amazing.

Whatever you do, if you're still listening with the default Apple ear buds, do yourself and your ears a favour, and buy something else.

I've got a new phone, and it runs Google's Android OS which is a first for me. It's an HTC Desire, and I've had it less than 24 hours. So these are just some intital thoughts.

I previously used the company's Nexus One phone, and essentially this is the same phone as Google's own phone. There are some subtle hardware differences in that the Desire has an FM Radio (no RDS), while the Nexus has a noise cancelling microphone. The Desire has improved camera software with face recognition. The Desire also has the HTC Sense UI sitting on top of it.

Synchronisation with my Gmail account is a breeze, and with links to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, most of my social media life quickly gets hooked up. Like INQ phones, the phone grabs Facebook imagery for my contacts.

One thing I do know about these phones is that my days of getting five days on a single charge are numbered for a bit. I've not tried a complete 24 hour period without any kind of charging, but the combination of WiFi (at home and at work), GPS and 3G obviously takes its toll on the battery.

The phone feels lovely, and the keyboard responded better to me once I'd been through the callibration tool as someone online suggested.

I've obviously gone mad downloading lots of recommended apps, but I'll thin what I use later. I still think Google Sky is the coolest app around, although Layar is also great.

Because the phone is linked to my Google account, that also means Google Checkout, which could be dangerous over the long run!

I'm on Orange and they're an operator who can never help fiddling with a phone before letting it go, and there lies my only gripe so far. Yes the phone has an Orange logo on the back of it - but I don't really care about that. And yes, they install some of their own applications on the phone including an alternative "App Shop" to the default Android Market (which is so rubbish that when I launched it in a WiFi zone, it gave an error message because it only works over 3G, and promptly crashed completely requiring the removal of the battery to fully kill the application). But you can quickly move these icons around and hide them from the main screen.

There are some game demos that seemingly can't be uninstalled which is a bit annoying. But the most annoying thing is that Orange has seemingly removed Google Talk.

A bit of Googling around Android and smartphone websites reveals the fact that Orange has done this before. I remember that previously when using an Orange Windows Mobile device, they removed the Messenger application.

More recently, Orange removed Gmail, YouTube and Google Talk from their version of the HTC Tattoo.

This time around, they've included the Gmail and YouTube applications, but Google Talk seems to be missing (I say "seems" because it could be there somewhere, but I'm not sure where). The thing is that Google Talk is there somewhere in the background. If I go to Settings > Applications > Running Services, the phone tells me that GTalkService is running in the background and starts up when the phone starts up.

Somewhere in the depths of the internet, I found the Google Talk apk for the Tattoo, but while that installs it fails to run. I guess I need to wait until I find a similar version extracted from a Desire ROM.

Is this all a deal-breaker? Not really. I know that in due course, should I want to, I'll be able to download a generic HTC Desire ROM from somewhere and fully expunge Orange's additions. But I'll leave that for now. Why Orange does this, I really don't know. They have their own IM application, but it doesn't work with Gmail, so I'm not interested.

It does annoy me, and if you happen to know how I can restore Google Talk please do let me know below.

But I won't let that small gripe detract from what seems to be a really nice device. The camera takes pretty decent quality pictures (see above for an example), and I was also pretty impressed with the video capabilities. The sound's poor on this sample movie, but I was impressed by the way it handled the changes in contrast.

Make sure that 480p is selected for best quality.

I'll write in more detail once I've used it more in the real world.

The big news eminating from the BBC today is that they're finally getting around to releasing some mobile applications.

That's not entirely true: the BBC has previously released other applications, such as the iPlayer for various Nokia mobile phones. But notably, it hasn't released any applications on the mobile daddy of them all - the iPhone.

As I understand it, this isn't a reluctance on their part - I'm sure they were sitting by watching other media organisations put together some excellent applications and "steal a march". I think this was more to do with the terms and conditions imposed by Apple and the BBC's status under the Charter.

And then there's the small matter of concern over users being landed with astronomical data bills because they watched last night's Eastenders via 3G, and don't have a good data package with their operator. I suspect that we'll see stern warnings on-screen before you can embark on streaming over 3G.

Obviously those little local difficulties have been overcome, because as the BBC News site, the press office, the BBC Internet blog and Erik Huggers himself all announce today - apps are coming.

With the BBC not having done anything up until now, others have filled the void. A number of applications use BBC RSS feeds to serve up news and sports stories. Other applications gather together links to radio and television services - including the BBC's - and are sold for profit.

So it certainly makes sense that the BBC does this itself.

And it's pleasing to see that unlike some media outlets, the BBC understands that it needs to develop for platforms beyond the iPhone, including Blackberry and Android. Notably, S60 isn't on that list. I don't suppose that means it's not being developed for, but it's clear that despite a massive user base, it's not a great development environment from what I can gather, and the variety of devices available for it can make coding for it problematic.

Anyway, having resolved that my next phone will be an Android device (HTC Desire - I have my eyes on you), I look forward to playing with these later in the year.

What are we to make over the weekend's bit of fun over at Amazon.com?

In brief, Amazon likes to charge a single price for its ebooks on the Kindle - $9.99. Macmillan, one of the biggest publishers in the US and the world, fundamentally disagrees with that philosophy.

While it's a clear and simple proposition for Amazon's customers, it's Amazon who is largely calling the shots. Yet the products they're selling belong to the publishers and authors.

A few things to note about this largely American scrap. US books are generally higher priced than they are in the UK. That said, if you've bought a Kindle in the UK, you're buying from the US Amazon store, so this does affect you.

For example, Stephen King's most recent novel, has a US list price of $35 and currently retails on Amazon for $20.47 (£12.82 at current conversion rates, compared with a current UK price of £11.99). But the Kindle price is $14.09.

King is published by Scribner in US, a Macmillan subsidiary. And Macmillan "won" this brief sortie.

There's a lot of discussion about what a fair price is to charge for an ebook. Many would point out that there are little to no distribution and transportation costs. Shops aren't required to keep stock, and inventory can be essentially infinite. In the above example, the saving is significant, but not massive. King's novel runs to nearly 900 pages, so surely the production costs must be immense.

But in reality, most physical media that we buy is actually pretty cheap to produce. Aside from sumptuously put together boxsets, the average CD, DVD or book costs mere pence to manufacture - assuming that you've got some kind of significant production run. That includes hardback books.

Whereas once albums were largely priced at a level that was largely kept the same year after year, we've been used for some time now, to buying catalogue material at generally knock down prices. Wander into your local HMV or scour the pages of Amazon, and any album more than a year or so old will be discounted from its original price quite heavily. Even the biggest selling artists' most recent works will eventually be just a few pounds in a sale.

The same is true of DVDs which might initially retail for around £14, before coming down in price a few months later, and then reaching a lower price again a few months after that. By the time the film has been screened on terrestrial TV it'll be under a fiver on DVD.

In the book world, variable pricing has been around since Penguin started printing paperbacks. Broadly, we've reached a stage where a hardback is published at a premium price, and roughly a year later, the paperback comes out. Mixed into this ecology are trade paperbacks sometimes sitting between the two, club editions, and the ending of the Net Book Agreement meaning that a popular hardback such as Dan Brown's recent novel, can be discounted massively depending on what retailers - especially online ones like Amazon and supermarkets - are prepared to do.

The belief is that this scrap has been prompted by Apple's ebook offering - last week's iPad launch. It's notable that Apple is letting publishers set their own prices as happens in the App store currently, with Apple taking 30% off the top.

The curious thing is that Amazon and Apple are currently in a reversal of their previous positions with music. In setting up the iTunes store, Apple managed to persuade all the record labels to charge a single price - 79c initially - for a single track.

Labels weren't happy with this but played along with it, and have reaped the rewards to an extent. Amazon, in launching its own mp3 store, allowed labels to adopt variable pricing - perhaps putting a premium on newer releases and discounting catalogue.

The record labels have managed to put pressure on Apple to change their postition and today, a single track can be charged at a range of different prices dictated by the record label.

It's almost as though it's in the best interests of whoever's first to market to have fixed pricing - presenting a strong proposition for consumers - only for second players to come in and demand alternatives.

But variable pricing has got to be the correct way? If Macmillan set their prices too high, then consumers will simply not purchase their offerings. And it's surely not in a publisher's interests to agree to a pricing route that undercuts their main source of income (sales of physical product vastly outweighs sales of ebooks and will do for quite some time).

Against the backdrop of all of this is the "Open" or "Closed" system debate. The iPad is a closed developmental environment - unless Apple approves your application, you can't run it on an iPad. More pertinent to ebooks is the fact that you'll only be able to buy iBooks through Apple's own iBookstore. The same is true for the Kindle which only lets you directly purchase from Amazon's own store.

Both the iPad and Kindle will accept ePub files, which can be bought from third parties, but it's clear that like the video games world, closed ecosystems are at the forefront. And that's probably not a good thing.

And having been mulling over this whole topic for the last few days, Bill Thompson neatly wraps it up over at the BBC.

This afternoon, I'll be watching Arsenal v Man Utd in 3D.

No - I'm not going to one of Sky's un-named pubs which will be showing the game in 3D - instead I'll be in the ground.

But with Avatar number one at the box office, and large numbers of exhibitors at the recent CES trade show showing off 3D TVs, the question must surely be when will 3D arrive and not if. Or is it?

When I was little, in my grandparents house I found and old box of photos from the turn of the last century. Obviously they were black and white, but they were stereoscopic images. Alongside the collection of photos was a viewer. You the photos in the viewer and one eye saw each photo - together giving the impression of 3D.

That's still how it works today. With polarised lenses and the like in cinemas, or even using different colour lenses to display or remove information as in the old red/blue cardboard glasses.

The first time I remember television trying to do 3D was sometime around 1982. ITV was showing a series of films on Sunday afternoons - if my memory serves me - which largely dated from the 50s when one of the earlier 3D crazes had begun. You got your glasses with the TV Times and could watch the films in glorious 3D.

Not in our house you couldn't. For starters, the edition of the TV Times that gave out the glasses was hard to get hold of, and then there was the small matter of our TV being black and white. I remember tuning in one afternoon to see what I was missing and realising that it was a dull western with a blurry image.

At the cinemas around the same time I could have watched Jaws 3-D or Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. I remember phoning up my local ABC (now a Tesco) to check that they gave out 3D glasses for the latter. But I didn't go. It's probably as well - the film's awful (that's why you've not heard of it) and the 3D was equally awful.

3D never died of course. It carried on improving, although seemingly largely limited to theme parks (e.g. Pirates 3D starring Leslie Nielsen) or IMAX films.

But now we're in a new 3D age, where the technology has matured so far, that any certainly just about any animated film - and quite a few horror films - simply have to be made in 3D.

Nope - I still haven't seen Avatar. Just that preview I described back in August. Indeed my 3D film going experience in its current incarnation is limited to that short, Coraline and Beowulf.

Those latter two films are set in slightly dark worlds which is just as well because the main issue I have with 3D is that it's actually too dark. At the Avatar preview I saw, the vivid colours of the world Cameron has built were a bit "muddy" for me. Taking my glasses off, revealed how much light was missing.

And I should point out that I've seen all these films in state of the art surroundings.

Have I got especially sensitive eyes? I don't know. I have 20:20 vision; not wearing contacts or glasses. But it's clear to me that the picture is inferior even if we do get an extra dimension.

I'm fussy about things like visuals and sounds. I was once the only person in a packed cinema who bothered to complain that the film was being screened in the wrong ratio. Yesterday, nobody apart from me seemed to mind that the film was being shown in mono when it had clearly been mastered in Dolby Digital (or other) and the cinema was equipped with as much.

So to me, 3D films are inferior because they're dark. And watching a film like that is a bit like watching a film on a sunny day in your living room with the light reflecting from your TV. You can watch a film like that, but don't expect me not to draw the curtains.

Sky and TV manufacturers are now all racing to build 3D sets. They think that we'll all want them in our homes. But I'm really not so sure.

Where do we stand in home entertainment? Well HD Ready TV sets are everywhere, although the technology moves apace and LED is to an extent replacing Plasma and LCD. And there'll no doubt be OLED at some point too. But most of what people are watching on these TVs is not HD.

Sky's current TV campaign is trying to drive that home. At best these TVs are being used to play PS3 or Xbox360 games in HD, and perhaps the odd Blu-Ray film. But only a relatively small number of people have HD either through Sky, Virgin Media or Freesat.

Freeview HD is due to launch any day now as the first Humax box becomes available, with the half the population being theoretically able to watch the World Cup in HD this summer. But there's still quite a job to get people to actually hook up an HD source to their HD sets (and speaking personally - I'm not prepared to pay a premium for it).

Sound is also vital. People are less willing to install full home cinema sound kit into their rooms, leaving the irony of them having some fantastic pictures on their new super-slim sets, but awful sound. Sets that slim simply can't put out good quality sound.

Buying a cheap receiver and plugging a few inexpensive speakers into it can make a colossal difference. But most consumers aren't aware of that.

So now it's onto 3D. I think the first question that needs to be asked is whether everyone is prepared to upgrade their sets again so soon? I'm not sure they are. HD Ready sets have only truly been mainstream for the last couple of years. And most have probably got another five or more years in them.

Then the next question to ask is whether you're prepared to wear a special set of glasses at home to watch TV? I really doubt it.

3D has a wow-factor, but imagine the scene at home. You've found the remote, but not the glasses. Or you've got two pairs but not a third for the other family member. Sure they can go out and get more, but those ones your cinema sold you for 80p won't work on your TV set.

There's also the small matter that a single format hasn't yet been determined for the home market.

I think that like the "fads" for 3D in the fifties and eighties, we're going through another one now. With computer animation it's actually somewhat easier to make a film in 3D so there's a certain "why not" attached to doing so. You just have to render the "other eye". And of course, they earn you more in revenue. But it's a craze. And I think I'll take a pass. There will be some excellent photos of people in pubs watching the Arsenal game though!

Apple as a company is incredibly skillful in the way it essentially manipulates the media surrounding the launch of one of its new products. And the media justs lets itself be manipulated.

Apple certainly designs beautiful products that take design in consumer electronics to the next level. And their corporate muscle has managed to open doors, as we've seen with the iTunes store, in spite of the relatively poor user experience of some of their software (come on - you don't really like iTunes or Quicktime do you?).

So what do we have in the iPad? Is it a game changing device? Does this mean the end for all other netbooks or e-readers? Should Amazon, Asus and Samsung be running scared?

Not really.

Unless I've really missed something, they've built a more powerful than average netbook, but left off the keyboard (although you can get one as an optional extra!). I'm typing this on a rather gorgeous Asus UL30A. It's bigger than the iPad. In fact it's 13.3", but it's awfully slim. They key thing is that it has a lovely keyboard. Typing an email is a breeze. That's not really the case on touch screen devices is it? When was the last time someone sent you a long email via their iPhone? You can tell - because iPhone users, like Blackberry users before them, seem to love to brag about the device that they sent their message from. While this particular netbook is somewhat better powered than most with a CULV processor (and to be fair, more expensive than some iPads), it's also very easy for me to type on my Samsung N110. And the Asus gives me 12 hours on WiFi incidentally. What I'm really trying to say is that as a user interface, the traditional physical keyboard has yet to be beaten.

The iPad certainly cheaper than I was expecting with prices starting at $499, but with Apple being Apple, don't just run that through a currency converter to get the UK price. For starters, there's going to be VAT on top. And quite probably other import duties. To see what I mean check out the prices of the basic MacBook at the moment. In the US it's priced in the Apple Store at $999 which according to Google is £618. Yet Apple's UK Store charges £816 for the same computer. In the absence of any international pricing just yet, I'd suggest at least £399 if we're incredibly lucky, and up to £499 if we're not. For the base model without 3G.

What's really curious is the huge jump in prices between the ones with space for a SIM card and those that don't. While you can buy a USB stick for your laptop for around £15 on pay as you go, Apple seems to be charging $130 for adding that functionality. I wouldn't pretend that a stick out of the side or back of your netbook or laptop isn't a little unsightly, but that's a lot to pay to make it "sightly."

I'd suggest that it'd be more sensible to just go out and buy one of those aforementioned 3G sticks and pop it into your iPad. But unfortunately, rather than shipping with a traditional two or three USB ports, the iPad comes with none. You're going to have to buy an adaptor to get things into it.

That's certainly going to make transferring data onto it really easy from USB sticks and the like, just a little bit fiddly. You'd better hope you've got good online reception if you want to move your data around, because you're probably going to have to do it wirelessly.

Getting back to those price points for the 3G versions - the data packages will be extra. Do you really want to take out what's effectively a third internet subscription. You already have your home ISP and you mobile package (which, if you're interested in this product, will definitely include data). You might even already have a third subscription in the form of a Blackberry if you keep calls and email separate. Do you have a lot of cash burning a hole in your pocket right now? Well we have come out of the recession. But you might still have to cancel that gym membership.

At least that processor should let you do - you know - more than one thing at a time.

Nope. No multitasking. No leaving your Twitter application running while you do something else.

And it wouldn't have killed to put a little camera in the top would it? You know - for Skype and similar.

What about reading books on the device? Well I've not been happy with any of the products I've seen on the market to date, and I still have severe reservations about most people even wanting to read on an electronic device. I honestly don't see bookshops going out of business because of this (Bookshops may well go out of business, but that's because of the price cutting Amazon and the supermarkets are able to achieve - but that's another story entirely). I've been through the arguments before, but in essence books are more to me than bits in some memory somewhere. And I own rather than licencing them.

I've no doubt that some will want one for reading the paper, or books. But it's a damned expensive ebook reader. I've always been dubious of taking things like the Kindle or one of Sony's devices to places like the beach, or your bath. I certainly wouldn't go near one of those places with this. Indeed, I'm not sure I'd want to get it out on a London bus or tube. And those other e-readers use e-ink which means that you're power supply is going to last for ages. I'm not convinced that's the case with the iPad, with Jobs claiming a 10 hour life. There are going to be some dull journeys home when, because the device was on the work WiFi network all day, the battery flattened when you wanted to get back into your novel for the journey home.

Look - I've been especially negative about this. And that's probably been brought on by the sheer frenzy of everyone desperately wanting to be excited by whatever Apple bring out; the hostility is a little unfair. But the "Cult of Jobs" brings out the worst in me.

I've no doubt that they'll sell enough to make it worthwhile - it can't be less popular in the UK than Apple TV can it? But this is not going to be a massmarket device. Most people are going to be better off with a Dell Mini, or a Sony E-reader; a PSP or even an iPod Touch. Some will have great uses for it; I can already imagine that some professional photographers will immediately be buying one to display their wares in place of big albums of photos. The style conscious will want one to leave around on their Danish designed coffee table just next to the Bang and Olufsen remote.

If I get a chance to play with one, I'll jump at it. It's an unquestionably beautiful device. Yet for all that, I'm really not sure what it's offering me that I haven't already got.

In the end, I just don't see this as being a broad appeal device. If it was a little closer to Lenovo's IdeaPad U1 in functionality, then I can see it. Sadly that device has a predicted $999 cost, an awful lot for a netbook, however well designed, so it could be a while yet.

It does, as Steve Jobs pointed out, make a very lovely digital photo frame though*.

* If you buy the stand accessory.

Sometimes, a piece of information just doesn't smell right. On Boxing Day this year, Amazon announced a couple of pieces of information in a release that got lots of coverage, in large part - I'd suggest - because over the holiday period, and there's not a great deal of real news kicking around.

We were told that the Kindle is Amazon's most "gifted"* item ever on Amazon.com. It's worth noting that Amazon still doesn't properly sell this device in the UK - in that you have to buy it from the US store and pay the applicable import taxes and so on.

Nonetheless, I'm sure that it is a popular gift. But of course it's one device compared with literally millions of different book, CD or DVD titles that might otherwise be far more popular as gifts.

The release went on to say that: On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books.

So the dawn of the ebook age is finally here then?

Maybe. But I doubt it.

First of all, if somebody gave me a Kindle and I opened it on Christmas day, then there's a very high probablility that I buy at least one book. Otherwise, it's just a not-terribly-attractive paperweight.

On the other hand, most paper books exchanged need no activation or digital download. You can flick through them, or settle into them immediately. These will be many of the many 9.5m items that were shipped on just one day in December by Amazon.

It's certainly true that many people will have been given vouchers of gift certificates for Christmas. But on Amazon those vouchers can be used for anything - not just books. And I wonder - early sales aside - how many transactions are carried out on Christmas day compared with days either side of that date? That information might put into perspective what kind of achievement was really reached with the Kindle.

I'm not the only person a little sceptical about this. There was a fascinating piece on a blog by Mike Cane. He's more interested in finding out what the Kindle's sales figures are. More importantly, an anonymous commentor says that the company he or she works for has seen just 1000 sales of their biggest selling title to date. That person's information is corroborated by someone else also working for another US trade house.

There are also some interesting discussions about what a book "purchase" might mean for a Kindle. Many of the Amazon top 100 ebook titles are actually retailing for $0.00.

Now I don't want dismiss either the Kindle or any ebook readers. I think they'll be a relevant part of the book-reading world, and there's still plenty of room for growth. For some ebook readers will become utterly invaluable. But we've not reached that point yet. And I'm pretty certain that whatever exciting tablet Apple is about to release isn't going to make a great deal of difference either (for one thing, it'll cost the earth compared to the flawed, but cheap Elonex e-reader that Waterstone's has just started selling for £130). In that, I disagree to a small extent to John Naughton's thoughts in yesterday's otherwise very good Observer column.

So while Apple will come out with a much better thought out and designed device than anybody else, it won't change the game. At least not unless it retails for under 200 quid (Data problems aside, iPhones have been great for phone retailers because they achieve strong margins on sales and have normalised 18 and 24-month contracts. How many unlocked iPhones are being sold?). And of course retailers will have to work with Apple's iTunes store in terms of setting prices and agreeing terms.

Perhaps it's not surprising then, that publishers like Simon & Schuster can't even agree to releasing ebooks at the same time as hardbacks, instead settling on somewhere between the hardback and paperback release (odd - because they can set the price, and publicity tends to accompany paper releases).

So we're still a few iterations from a really well designed and affordable ebook reader. And even then, in the same way that radio wasn't killed off by television, and cinema was not put out to pasture by VHS, the printed book has plenty of positive attributes in its favour that will mean it remains an important part - indeed majority part - of the publishing ecology.

* How long has it been acceptable to use gift as a verb in this manner? While it can be a verb it's dreadful English and I'm not happy with it. I don't like "Gift Wrap" becoming the default for "Wrapping Paper" either. But that's another matter.

Yesterday's Observer had an interesting piece on Spotify that included a little more substance about whether or not Spotify is making money.

I tried to find out as much as I could about Spotify ahead of Radio at the Edge a few weeks ago, and put everything I determine into a short video.

As I said at the time, there are conflicting numbers published about Spotify which can muddy the waters a bit, but yesterday's Observer piece cuts through them as best as anybody can. The Swedish news that Lady Gaga's Poker Face only earned around £100 from Spotify in that country.

The most interesting information comes from Rob Wells at Universal who explains that although record companies have a stake in Spotify, it doesn't get better terms as a result. Moreover:

And the revenues are flowing, he stresses. In revenue terms, Spotify Sweden is now Universal Music Group International's eighth largest business partner, out of 1,400. "Watch this space. Those guys are absolutely on fire, you are going to see some amazing developments over the next three to six months."

For a good year or so I've been using Sky's mobile service on my phones - in particular their Remote Record function that allows me to browse the Sky EPG and set my Sky+ at home to record the programme I want. But it's not been the easiest thing to use. Not because the service doesn't work, but because Sky has seemed to make it as hard to use or find as possible. I'd end up in recurring loops chasing around the Sky website looking for a downloadable application, or a mobile web address I should go to.

On the first N82 I had (before it was damaged), I had to hunt high and low to find the Sky application, eventually getting it from a forum somewhere - certainly not a sky.com website. When I needed to reinstall the application, the same hunt across Sky's website revealed precisely nothing. I ended up with an inferior Java based application which still worked. It allowed me to log-in and set remote record reminders.

Sky seemed as keen as anything to get me to take out a mobile TV subscription, but I find Remote Record the most useful application.

Remote Record is also available via a texting mechanism which is fine, as long as you can remember the format that Sky wants date, channel and programme title:

Programme Title. Channel name. Two-digit day/Two-digit month. 24-hour time

Send this to 61759. Sky's example would be: 'Simpsons. Sky One. 22/03. 18:45'

That's fine, although I've struggled in the past with programmes like Match of the Day, which can be frustrating.

Their PC implementation is fine. But mobile is surely the most useful. Indeed Sky's recently launched an inevitable iPhone application to do this. The number of people who've got excited about something that other mobile users have had working for the last two years is extraordinary.

Which makes it all the more curious that yesterday Sky sent me a text to let me know that from November 29, their application would no longer work.

"We regret to say our Sky App will no longer work from 29 Nov. If you have Mob TV you can still watch via VF Live. For our latest Mob services visit sky.com."

To say this is disappointing is an understatement. Here's a service which works - and works well. What's more it's something that only Sky offers in the marketplace. So quite why non-iPhone users should have this functionality removed is bizarre. Does this cost Sky an awful lot to administer?

Someone I know who used to work at Sky once mentioned that hardly anyone used their mobile application service (this was pre-iPhone). I pointed out that this was probably because it was practically impossible to find on their website, and install. With the advent of the (flawed) Ovi store, Blackberry World, and Android store et al, people know about installing applications on phones more than ever.

A scan over at Digital Spy reveals similar consternation to my own, with the same confusion.

The text suggests that I visit sky.com to learn more about their mobile services. But I can't see anything on their main site or their mobile site to suggest a replacement service is coming. Indeed the Sky Mobile landing page currently pictures a Nokia N95 running the very app that is due to die next week.

In summary, I'm at a loss. Perhaps I've missed something obvious. But if I have, Sky has communicated this information very badly.

[Update] A further Google reveals this. There's a new Sky App for more Nokia phones! If that's the case, then why doesn't Sky say that we'll need to update our applications and not just say that they're all finishing?

In fact, having now installed and played with Sky's new Nokia application, it's actually pretty decent (although I'll wait to see if the programme I've just set to record did indeed record when I get home later).

Poor communication from Sky then?

How about this time, they make it a bit easier for people to find and install the application at sky.com? It's a shame to invest in developing a product and then not tell people about it properly.

[UPDATE 2] Sky responded to an email I sent them and are now directing customers to http://d2c.wecomm.com/sky to download the latest version of the application, which as I say above, is a welcome improvement.

It's Up For Grabs Now is a very good new podcast about Arsenal presented by Alan Davies and some of his mates. There are four episodes so far, and they're all excellent including yesterday's which deals with Thierry Henry and Ireland, the Sunderland game at the weekend, and even Spurs.

The podcast comes from a company called PlayBack Media who produce a variety of other podcasts, all with comedians or presenters. And the Arsenal one, at least, is very professionally recorded. It'll be interesting to see if they can earn some revenues and make the business pay.

They've effectively used Facebook Group pages as their home pages, which is fine, and efficiently ties in social media aspects. But when it comes to getting the podcasts I can't find a non-iTunes route. That's fine for me, but no good for my less-IT-literate friends.

[Quick Update] I note that these podcasts are being put together by Paul Myers, who I assume is the same man who was/is behind Wippit. Regular readers will know that he's had mixed fortunes in the past - notably over his dealings with Danny Baker.

Hopefully this won't end the same way as that did. Perhaps the market for paid-for podcasts like The All Day Breakfast Show was too nascent. I'll watch with interest...

--

I'm including this purely for Google purposes as it's something that really annoyed me for weeks and weeks.

Regular readers may know that I've struggled repeatedly with the Nokia Ovi store. Basically, since it launched, I'd been unable to log in.

On a PC it was fine. I've had a Nokia login for ages, and it still works. Ovi, in its previous guise as just a backup engine, had also worked. But try as I might, I couldn't log in on my phone. And downloading anything from the Ovi store involves logging in on your phone.

The solution came from here. I was trying to log in on my Nokia N82. I'm on Orange in the UK. But I repeatedly was given error messages.

It turns out that it was because I was using "Orange GPRS WAP" to connect to the internet (Why is a good question - but is based on an excellent price I get from Orange). If I change this to "Orange Internet" it works!

All that said, the Ovi store still leaves an awful lot to be desired. It's just not a friendly user experience finding anything interesting.

They say that if you don't experiment, you won't succeed. So let's call yesterday an experiment shall we?

About a year ago, Photojojo - a great photography website - sent out a link to a balloon photography experiment carried out by a guy named David Trawin.

He basically attached helium balloons to a cradle that contained a digital camera. He then floated the camera upwards, retaining it with a kite string, and took some fantastic aerial photos of New York.

Photojojo republished Trawin's instructions including a PDF of the cradle plans.

I'd been meaning to try this out for ages. And yesterday I did.

The first problem is finding a camera capable of taking lots of pictures remotely. Most cameras have some kind of timer feature, but it's usually a single shot with a 2 second, 10 second and perhaps 30 second timer delay. If you're lucky there might be a burst function that will take a couple of photos on the delay - useful for group shots. But taking more than a couple is difficult.

My recently purchased Canon G10 does do this (it was an insurance replacement for a stolen G7 - or otherwise I might well have waited for the G11), but it's a bit expensive for something as precarious as this, and in any case it weighs a lot.

Examining lots of camera manuals on manufacturers' websites revealed that pretty much none of the cheaper current cameras do this. Indeed only Ricoh seems to offer this functionality, but it's hardly a bargain basement brand.

So my other option was to use CHDK on a second-hand Canon camera. If you've never used it, CHDK is a wonderful thing. It allows you to do all sorts of things with your Canon camera that Canon never originally offered, not least of which is the ability to take RAW photos on devices originally only designed to take JPGs!

But crucially, CHDK lets you run scripts, and in particular this script - an intervalometer. Once installed and running, I was able to force my camera to take a new photo every five seconds - perfect for something like this.

I needed a camera, and a visit to my local Cex saw me pick up a Canon A470 for £38. Ebay would have probably been cheaper, but I needed something in a hurry. A couple of lithium AA batteries and a 2GB SD card and I was ready.

I built the cradle using foamboard, balloons, some rubber bands to keep it attached, got a couple of lengths of kite string (one for attaching balloons to the cradle, and one for to control the whole device) and some helium. If I learnt one thing from this whole experiment, you're much better off buying helium online than Clinton Cards.

Yesterday was Absolute Radio's first birthday, and I was hoping to use some leftover helium from a celebratory balloons. I was planning to get photos of everyone at work at our staff party - so this wasn't going to be out and out theft. But in the event, all the helium was used up for other balloons, and by yesterday morning, many of those balloons were a bit drab. By lunchtime, it was clear that I couldn't "repurpose" those balloons.

So yesterday lunchtime my friend Emily and I filled lots of balloons and attached them to the cradle. We weren't sure how many we'd need. I'd thought maybe a dozen, but in the end I used the entire cylinder which claimed to fill between 24 and 32 balloons depending on size. We'd got to about 28 balloons, and it still wasn't quite taking off. This was very annoying. So near and yet so far.

So out to a nearby card shop where I bought four red foil balloons. Walking through Soho it looked as though I was about to propose to a girlfrend or something. We attached these additional balloons and it still wasn't quite enough. Curses!

I thought we should probably go for it anyway, since a bit of wind would give them some lift. In retrospect, I think that fewer big balloons is better than lots of smaller ones. They all add weight and each additional balloon probably only added a cumulative bit of lift. Next time, I'll get a weather balloon or something similar. A large number of balloons is also somewhat unweildy. Getting into lifts with them was interesting.

We went out into Golden Square to give it a go, and you can see some of the results below. It didn't go all that high. The wind carried the balloon a little bit, but buildings and trees were getting in the way a bit. Emily took some photos of the attempts.

Never mind. Our staff party was to kick off in the roof bar of the Sanctum Hotel - perfect for a launch.

This is where things started to go wrong. It was certainly windy at the top which would help, but I was concerned that the hook that attached my control kite string to the cradle wouldn't be sufficient. So I tied the string to it. In retrospect I discover that I wouldn't get a badge from the Scouts with my knot tying ability.

Suddenly a gust of wind passed through and the balloons were off! Unfortuntely, my guide string wasn't. The balloons and my camera had floated over the side of the hotel and beyond.

It was probably as well that the balloons didn't quite give the camera enough lift. But they were still rising along the side of an adjacent building. After a little aimless floating, and much panic for me, the balloons got twisted around a fence on the rooftop of the building.

Great! Now all I had to was find the building (it can be very disorinetating on the roofs of strange buildings), get access to their roof and retrieve the camera.

Many of my colleagues from work were finding this all highly amusing and asking me if I wasn't mad sending my digital camera skywards. I pointed out that I'd always known that losing the camera was a possibility, and that I'd bought it cheaply for that express purpose. They were also a lot more worried than I was that the camera would slip out of the cradle. But I knew that the combination of rubber bands and cradle should stop the camera slipping to an ignominious death.

I quickly worked out which building it had got stuck on and hastened around to the front entrance of what turned out to be Sony Music (and Pictures). One of the more unusual conversations I've ever had at a reception desk then followed as I explained to the security guard on reception that I'd like to collect the camera and balloons that were currently entangled on Sony Records' roof. A 21st century "Can I have my ball back" conversation!

Unsurprisingly he found this amusing. But his colleague knew what I'd been up to and had seen me in Golden Square a little earlier - well it's hard to miss a man with about 30 balloons in his hand.

Heroically he left me in reception and went up to his roof. Minutes ticked by, and he returned with not only the camera, but the vast majority of the balloons!

One was burst, and I was told he'd released a couple more has he untangled them. I thanked him, and as I was passing back outside a couple of ladies who worked at Sony asked me about them and what I was going to do with them. I'd decided that I'd had enough balloon fun for one day, and ended up giving them the balloons as they said they were organising a party (I later spied the balloons in an office inside the Sony building).

And so here endeth the experiement. Not wholly successful, but not unsuccessful either. I didn't get the glorious London aerial photos I'd hoped for. But I'd got the camera back and it had floated - a bit.

There will be a next time, but it'll involve a larger balloon and more (hopefully cheaper) helium. And I'll do it somwhere in the wide open outdoors.

And beyond that, there's an even madder idea - but I won't get into that until plans develop...

There's much excitement today as Orange announces - two years after the phone's first launch - that it has secured the iPhone on its network. They've set up a pre-order system and everything.

As Rory-Cellan Jones says in his good piece over at the BBC: new phone launches on a network - so what?

I find the whole idea of networks exlusively carrying specific models of phones thoroughly bizarre. Realistically, Apple has deprived itself of customers over the last two years by cutting off potential customers of the UK's other four major networks. Of course, O2 paid some kind of premium for the right to have that exclusivity and the sums may well have added up for Apple.

Apple is believed to charge O2 significant amounts for the iPhone, and the cheapest contract for a consumer is about £30 for a paltry 75 minutes of talktime a month (a similarly priced plan for another phone might get you more like 400 minutes a month).

Contract lengths have slowly been creeping up from first 12, then 18, and now often 24 months.

Orange will clearly sell a lot of iPhones. They'll also retain customers who might have otherwise jumped ship. They'll also please some customers who - like me - refuse to change operators for a particular model of mobile phone. (Not that I'm saying I'll get an iPhone. There are some very interesting forthcoming Nokia and Android phones that will vie for my attention).

But the real fanboys have all got an iPhone having jumped networks if need be months or years ago.

Which makes it all the more surprising that Palm has done an exclusive deal with O2 for the forthcoming Pre. I questioned this before, when it was announced, and now I question it even more.

The iPhone has surely mopped up all the interest from the gadget obsessed and "cool kids". Are there really that many people with O2 who've been after a state of the art smartphone, and decided against the iPhone, instead waiting for something else to come along? Nor, surely, are there loads of people on other networks who've been waiting for this opportunity to jump over to O2.

Having a hot exclusive phone on your network seems to be a better deal for O2 who obviously knew they were losing iPhone exclusivity, than for Palm, who surely want to sell lots of phones.

In light of today's developments, surely Palm would have been better off doing a deal with Vodafone? A big network with lots of marketing weight that they could put behind it.

Anyway, let's see how Orange's tariffs compare with O2's. And will they do a similar deal to Apple with regards to WiFi networks?

It's finally here - The Digital Britain report. It's Lord Stephen Carter's magnum opus, before he ups and offs.

The headlines are sure to be the levy charged on fixed lines to fund broadband, encouraging and enabling the wider take-up of broadband, and even the piracy issue. What happens to BBC licence fee money is certainly a big part of the story.

But for some of us, the key issue here is radio. Digital radio.

Digital radio gets its own chapter.

The chapter opens with a quote from the early nineteenth century Scottish writer, Thomas Carlyle: "One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or No."

This seems to be addressing the need for radio, as an industry, to stop dithering and jump into the digital soup. Or am I mixing my metaphors?

What is clear, that radio, as a relatively small industry worth £1.1bn per year (including BBC spend), needs to do something to remain essential to the vast majority of the population who continue to listen.

At the heart of our vision is the delivery of a Digital Radio Upgrade programme by the end of 2015.

So there's the date: 2015. It's not actually that far off. The plan is that the "Digital Radio Upgrade" as it's to be known (to differentiate from TV's "Digital Switchover" one supposes), will take place on a single date in that year, with at least two years' advance notice.

To enable this to take place, two key crieria need to be met by the end of 2013.

1. 50% of listening is to digital
2. national DAB coverage is comparable to FM coverage, and local DAB reaches 90% of the population and all major roads

(Note that digital obviously doesn't solely include DAB).

The Digital Britain report says that it's "our intention that the criteria should be met by the end of 2013."

An accompanying (and in the first release at least, wrongly labelled) chart shows that left to itself, we should reach 43% digital by 2013 rather than 50%. The difference will be delivered by the "Drive to Digital" effort. By switchover in 2015, the reports' authors predict that 68% of listening will be to a digital platform. Obviously at that point, we will need to get it to 100%.

Ofcom has been asked to produce a report, at least once a year, on the progress towards these criteria. I'd suggest that it might be more appropriate to report quarterly as it has done for digital television.

The Consumer Expert Group, which has helped oversee digital TV switchover, is being brought in to help facilitate all this. They'll also determine whether or not a Digital Radio Help Scheme will need to be put in place. This is akin to the scheme set up for TV to ensure that nobody is disenfranchised by the move to digital.

Within radio circles there has been an endless series of discussions about whether DAB is the right format and whether we should instead be adopting DAB+, DRM, IP or some other format. The Digital Britain report largely dismisses these discussions. It makes clear the importance of a broadcast medium over internet delivery because it offers advantages such as portability, the most financially viable, and free at the point of access amongst others.

However, the report does seek to ensure that all digital radio sets sold in the UK conform to the WorldDMB profile 1. This will mean that going forward, we'd be able to move across to other formats like DAB+ and DMB-A without requiring a new radio. Adopting a single standard like this is also easier for manufacturers meaning a single set will work across Europe - something that's not the case currently.

One pair of lines which might concern commercial radio operators is the following one:

Achieving the Digital Radio Upgrade timetable will require building a DAB infrastructure which meets the needs of broadcasters, multiplex operators and listeners. This will require a significant contribution from the commercial operators and the Government welcomes the early commitments that they have given.

The report doesn't suggest much in the way of spare cash being brought to bear to improve digital radio coverage.

However, the BBC will also be expected to contribute in line with its Charter Public Purpose.

Although most radio stations have benefited from the lower transmission charges that followed on from the untakings made by Arqiva to the Competition Commission, that didn't necessarily follow through to everyone. In particular, multiplex owners tended to be beneficiaries rather than stations broadcast on their muxes.

The BBC will be required to roll-out DAB coverage nationally to the same level as its current FM network. This needs to be achieved by the end of 2014. The national commercial multiplex, run by Digital One (D1), and shortly to fall under Arqiva's control, already matches Classic FM's coverage in overall coverage (Classic FM being the only commercial FM broadcaster), although currently the FM and DAB coverage areas don't actually match. So it's actually likely that D1's coverage area will need increasing.

The report's authors also believe that signal strength needs increasing to improve indoor coverage. This is certainly true - as many listeners will tell you. Hopefully a lot of this can be achieved "simply" by turning up the power on current transmitters (I speak as a non-engineer).

I think stations on the national commercial multiplex (my employer included) will be pleased that Digital Britain proposes that the BBC and D1 should work closely together to ensure that new transmitters put up by the BBC should benefit both puiblic and commercial multiplexes. This should result in lower costs for the commercial operator as the network is extended.

Local and regional multiplexes need work which everyone seems to understand.

Local multiplex operators will probably be pleased to learn that the BBC is likely to be required to fund significant proportions of some of their build out costs. These multiplexes will need expanding if the BBC local services (which all sit on commercial multiplexes) are to reach the current FM penetrations.

Meanwhile regional multiplexes will be replanned entirely to produce a second national multiplex. In essence, many quasi-national services are available on many different regional (and local) multiplexes. This replanning should allow regional advertising - something that the current national multiplex is unable to offer.

To encourage operators to find solutions, multiplex licences could be extended to 2030; the D1 licence currently expires at the end of 2011. Administered Incentive Pricing (AIP) would also be delayed - the dreaded spectrum pricing. We'll know for certain what's being offered in a year's time.

What's clear is that the report's authors understand that what's really needed is encouragement for less die-hard listeners to adopt digital radio.

The report suggests that we need niche services like "a dedicated jazz station" (Jazz FM is back on air), getting better value from existing content like "live coverage of Premiership football or uninterrupted coverage from music festivals" is important.

I'm not sure that any broadcaster with Premiership football is not making full use of its rights. They're not cheap after all. And I suspect that the BBC will argue that the live festival coverage is exactly what 6Music is doing at Glastonbury in a couple of weeks (My employer, of course, has just spent the weekend at the Isle of Wight Festival, including live broadcasts of Simple Minds and Stereophonics). In my experience, this is more a question of securing rights from promoters, bands and record labels. That said, you'll be hard pushed to find much live music coverage across the commercial radio dial. Aside from Absolute Radio, Classic FM is probably the other main exception.

The report suggests that it's not just new services that are required to get more listeners adopting digital, but also more services. The report suggests that these might be EPGs, slideshows, downloading music, and so on. Pause and rewind is useful, and can already be found on high-end DAB sets. And the ability to save to memory card is also built in to some sets.

But cheap sets are also needed. The report talks about sub-£20 sets within the next two years. Seemingly set manufacturers have promised this. That said, some supermarkets have already reached this pricepoint now (Although my recent Sainsburys "Red" radio has dreadful sound and I wouldn't recommend it at all. The quality of the speaker is awful).

The idea of having DAB to "FM-rebroadcasters" is an interesting one. Effectively the equivalent of Pure's Highway for the home. I guess that one device in the house could serve multiple old FM receivers. I can see a problem in family homes where people change channels...

Getting digital radio into cars and other vehicles is obviously a key issue. The Digital Britain report highlights a five point programme that involves working with manufacturers to ensure that all vehicles are sold with a "digitally enabled" radio by 2013. Unlike France, there's no suggestion that this would be legislated, although with a definitive switchover date, manufacturers would need to go digital anyway.

Other points include adopting a common logo for digital radios and the encouragement of converters like the Pure Highway in devices like Sat-Navs.

For local radio services, there are some key issues that the industry has been trying to achieve. John Myers produced a well-received report earlier this year for Digital Britain, and his recommendations are reprinted in the Digital Britain report.

Ofcom, however, didn't fully support some of the details. In particular how a local impact test might be defined. The report ploughs through some of these objections and says that Ofcom will need to agree a two-year pilot based on an output focused regulatory regime. In other words, it'll be how a radio service sounds to the listener, rather than where it's based, that will be important. The pilot will only include a limited number of stations, but should it prove satisfactory, it'll be rolled out "more widely."

The report does go on to say that it wants to produce a new tier of what it describes as "ultra-local" services which will remain on FM. In effect, the idea is to bundle smaller ILR services and community stations together, leaving the bigger players, with networked programming, on DAB. I suspect some smaller players in local radio might not be happy with some of the proposed relaxations on community services, who'll now be competitors not just for listeners but also for money. At a time when the smaller services are hurting the most - and closing down - I'm not sure that this is the news they want to hear.

Ofcom will extend licence periods for all national and local services that broadcast on DAB for up to seven more years. But if, by 2013, the Digital Upgrade timetable isn't on track, then licences will be terminated in 2015, meaning rebidding would apply.

This is obviously important news for any ILR that's close to licence expiry. And it's especially important for the national commercial radio services all of whose licences expire between 2011 and 2012. In particular Classic FM and Talksport will appreciate the additional time this gives them to migrate their audience over to digital. That national FM licence in particular would have been hard fought over, however few years the licence might have been for.

Finally, the report will allow two or more smaller stations to be put together to form a single DAB service. With the prospective replanning of local and regional multiplexes, this neatly sidesteps some of the issues of geography that are simply unworkable currently.

Overall, then, I think that this is massively encouraging for radio. There are certainly going to be issues along the way, and obviously key to all of this is getting DAB coverage improved to meet current FM coverage. In particular, that means ensuring that DAB sets work satisfactorily indoors. Anyone who has tried using a DAB set in a modern office, often acting as a massive Faraday cage, will know what I mean.

As ever, these are my own views, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

Update: I have amended or clarified a couple of small errors since first publishing this piece.

This is easily a topic for a book, but I shall limit this to a short rant about Epson.

In early January this year I bought a new printer - an Epson. It was nice printer, not massively overpriced, but a good quality photo printer with the widely priased Claria ink system.

During installation and set-up, I filled out my details with Epson, to register my ownership. I thought that this might help with guarantees and also mean that Epson could drop me a note if new drivers became available. Of course I knew that Epson would market me with direct email. That's fine. I don't mind too much. Well targeted advertising emails work well.

Since registering with Epson, I've received 18 separate emails. While one or two advertise ink/paper deals or offers on projectors, just about every single one is advertising... another printer.

Despite having bought a new printer less than six months ago, Epson seems hellbent on getting me to buy another new printer!

Do they have so little belief in their products that they think the printer I bought all the way back at the start of 2009 might have already broken? It just doesn't make sense.

Try to sell me a scanner, ink, paper, photo frames, whatever... Honestly - I don't really mind. But don't try to sell another printer!.

I'm not quite sure I understand all the annoyance at the moment over the new iPhone.

As I see it, things go like this:

* November 2007 - Apple and O2 release the iPhone in the UK and sell 18 month contracts.

* July 2008 - Apple and O2 release the 3G version of the iPhone in the UK and sell more 18 month contracts. People on the original contracts are allowed to upgrade but they must take out new contracts, and I believe extend them by the original "missing" bit. That means 2 years plus for some people if they upgraded in July that year.

* June 2009 - Apple and O2 release the 3G S version of the iPhone in the UK. There's no early upgrade procedure, so short of buying yourself out of the contract, a current 3G customer is going to have to wait at least seven months, and quite possibly longer if they want the new version without incurring a significant upgrade cost.

This seems to have caused quite a bit of fuss.

I'm really not sure why. Of course, we all want the latest phone. But we have to pay for it.

Nokia releases a new phone every five minutes. My current phone is on an eighteen month contract. I knew what I was doing when I signed up. I'll just have to wait that contract out before I upgrade.

I'm well aware that this time next year Apple will have another new phone out. And the same each year thereafter - possibly more frequently. Pay through the nose, or realise that you can't always have the latest phones all the time.

There's a wider question about our consumer society and the difference between "want" and "need" anyway. Unless the phone's broken, do we really have to upgrade every five minutes?

But back to phones. I suppose I'm more disappointed that Apple and O2 have seen fit to remain exclusive. That means that O2 can charge what it likes since there's no competition - and it's a lot. And it also means that a large proportion of the population can't upgrade to the iPhone without changing networks.

I've said before, and I'll say again, I'm not changing networks for a phone. An inexact analogy would be only able to use Esso fuel with a Mercedes.

And with the Palm Pre also going to O2 exclusively, it really does mean a topsy-turvy situation in the UK smartphone market. As I said previously, if I was an O2 customer and wanted a smartphone would I really not have already bought an iPhone? Because it's the remainder that O2 are chasing now. And the Palm Pre is just as much a premium smartphone as the iPhone.

That should leave the way open for others to try to take advantage. Nokia would be the obvious candidate - although it's having its own issues with networks getting upset when it installs things like Skype on some of its new phones.

But the real advantage must flow to Google's Android OS. With four networks, as well as O2 able to sell Android devices, that means that it could (and should) quickly overtake Apple's market share.

As yet, devices in the UK have been thin on the ground with just a single T-Mobile handset and the recent Vodafone HTC Magic launch. There's always the promise of lots more phones coming soon, but I must admit that I'm surprised that more aren't here yet.

Perhaps, like Apple, it's taking Google a little longer than they thought to build a truly robust phone.

Competition can only be good, and with some top quality alternative phones emerging, we can only hope for the best.

The other day I talked about the frustration I suffered when I tried to listen to BBC Radio Five Live on my mobile streaming via 3G.

I thought that it might be worth exploring that a little more.

Most of the news about listening to the radio via your phone is about the iPhone. Of course unlike many phones with lesser specifications, the iPhone doesn't have an FM receiver built into it, so if you want to listen to the radio with it, you're probably looking at getting an app to do the job.

Many radio broadcasters are busily bringing out feature packed applications that do more than just play the radio. Absolute Radio, my own employer, has recently released its very well received application, and the team at Global have just received a Sony Radio Academy Award nomination for the work on their Capital FM app (which is being rapidly rolled out to other stations in their portfolio).

That's all well and good, but what about the other smartphone platforms?

Getting accurate market share data for this is not easy. Some of the data is jealously guarded by various manufacturers and operators, and other data is available at a nice premium.

For the purposes of this analysis I'm using data from AdMob. They release regular reports based on the traffic they see for the mobile sites that they serve advertising for.

Their February 2009 report suggests that globally, the Symbian operating system (as used by Nokia) remains the most popular amongst smartphone users. This is followed by the iPhone OS, although traffic from the iPod Touch is excluded since, well, it's not a phone (although obviously it can be used for online apps with a WiFi network).

In the UK the two are reversed and it seems that the iPhone is the smartphone platform of choice for developers to first concentrate on. However, it should be remembered that the data is not based on device ownership however - it's based on traffic. And because Apple's devices have a usefully large screen and excellent data packages, they are likely to be used significantly more than smaller "phone-sized" devices.

To return to my original question. How could I listen to the radio, via 3G or GPRS, on my N-Series Nokia phone? I have listened to Five Live in the past and it was a hit-or-miss affair. But websites have changed since I last tried it in 2008, and I was unsuccessful this week.

A little bit of Googling revealed that Nokia does indeed have an internet radio application. But there was a problem (although I didn't discover it at first).

The first search result takes you to a Nokia site that insists that the first thing you have to do is download PC Suite. This is a bit of problem for two reasons. First, because Nokia, in its infinite wisdom, keeps releasing different "suites". And secondly, because it turns out that Internet Radio is included with more recent phones (with superior "Feature Packs" in Nokia's terminology). Unfortunately, if like me, your phone is locked to your network, and your network provider insists on tweaking the firmware (take a bow Orange), then you'll never have updated firmware made available for your phone.

When I got my N82 it came with a CD from Nokia with N Series Suite which is fine - but is different to the regular PC Suite and from the newish Ovi Suite. Ovi is the brand that Nokia will be launching for its forthcoming app store.

Unhelpfully, Nokia keeps links to all three of these alive making it hard to know which version I should be using. I'm pretty sure that it's Ovi, but Nokia does a dreadful job explaining that to the consumer. For all my moaning about new versions of iTunes everytime Apple adds a new property to some other device in its portfolio, at least it's easy to track down the correct piece of software.

But back to my radio issue. The only obvious way of installing the Internet Radio application was to install PC Suite which I didn't want to do as I'm now using Ovi. Surely the application existed on its own? It did. The problem was that searching initially led me to this old open source version that involves using Shoutcast. Adding stations is a complicated affair involving using something like Winamp to create a playlist and then export that list to your phone. Not exactly friendly. I installed it and played with it for a while, getting very frustrated.

In the end, I found the version I wanted at S60.com. This works pretty well and is a standalone app with no messing around using Shoutcast or PC applications. It lets you bookmark your favourite stations, allows you to choose quality depending on your connection (3G, GRPS or WiFi), and does a very neat fade in and fade out when changing stations. And of course, unlike a certain market leading smartphone I could mention, you can listen to the radio and do other things at the same time like sending text messages or reading email.

If the station includes the data correctly, as Absolute Radio does, you get details of the current song playing too.

So no problem then?

Well not quite. You see, while Nokia's directory includes many of the main UK commercial stations - I've mentioned Absolute, but Global's main brands like Classic FM, Capital 95.8FM, and a couple of Heart FMs are in there - there's a notable absentee. The only BBC service available is the BBC World Service (I should also mention that Bauer services aren't included, and neither is Talksport).

Now I rather suspect that unless these services aren't that bothered, the reason they're missing is to do with geo-IP blocking. Does Nokia have the functionality to allow this? The BBC wouldn't be allowed to serve much football on Five Live to Nokia phones outside the UK, and for all I know, all these radio services are streaming through a big server in Finland.

The Internet Radio application does allow you to plug in streams directly, but that rather supposes you can find the streams' details. Have a good look around the BBC website and see if you can find them. I suspect that if I had a working internet radio I might be able to find the stream details that way, but rooting around the website turns nothing up.

So if I can't get an application to play BBC radio, can I just visit their website and listen there?

Um. No.

Visiting bbc.co.uk on the Nokia cleverly sends me to their mobile website (or a version of it), and that doesn't include any listening links. I believe that the BBC is concerned that people will run up huge data bills on their mobiles listening to the radio without realising it. So to avoid all complications, I just don't see the links.

That's the reason that my N82 isn't up to date enough to (officially) run the Nokia iPlayer application. In my firmware, Realplayer, which plays the files back, doesn't refer to your application's choice of data connectivity and so even if you think you've connected on WiFi, without changing a fiddly Realplayer setting, you might end up listening via 3G - and get a big data bill to boot. Once we're all on all-you-can-eat data plans this will go away, but in the meantime, it's a bit like stepping back into 56k modem days.

Anyway, I couldn't find a listen live button on the mobile radio site. Visiting the iPlayer site presents a non-mobile friendly site, but it also doesn't think that I have Real installed despite the fact that I do, and implores me to load it before I can listen to the live stream.

So there's no way I can see of using the BBC website, on my mobile at least, to listen to a live radio stream.

I'm obviously not the only person with this problem, because someone has set up this page which works. It's just a mobile friendly page of links to RAM streams and they play fine. The only downside is that you can't use another application while listening - unlike most Nokia applications. But that's a Realplayer shortcoming.

It'd be really good if there was a nice 32k AAC+ stream publicly available to listen to via the Nokia Internet Radio application (128k AAC+ streams are being used for iPlayer, but that data rate's a little high for mobile). But in the meantime, this non-authorised workaround is the only way I can find.

In summary - radio on the Nokia really should be better, and much easier for the consumer. At the moment with the iPhone we're seeing nearly every station produce their own application which feels a little silly, albeit providing good additional functionality. Nokia's Internet Radio application is a nice start, but it really needs the support of the nation's biggest and most popular radio broadcaster. Listening to the BBC on the iPhone or Windows Media devices, is also difficult, and sites like bbcstreams.com are filling the hole currently.

15-24 listening is declining across the board, and if your station is not on the one device that you know that this age group carry and use, then it's harder to make sure the next generation keeps the radio habit.

As ever, these are my thoughts and don't represent those of my employer. And I'm not really trying to bash the BBC who are doing an excellent job in so many ways with radio. I'm just frustrated with the difficulties I had over this earlier in the week, and my attempts to work around them.

In a lot of ways iTunes is really very good.

Obviously it's a painless way to purchase music, or convert your CDs to audiofiles for uploading to your iPod. It allows you to sync your library to your portable device relatively painlessly. And I must admit that the new Genius feature isn't too bad (if sometimes a little obvious).

But it's still a ridiculously large download that only seems to get ever bigger with every new device that Apple puts into the marketplace. It seems that this one piece of software should serve everything that portable devices might ever need to do. So frequently is it updated, that you don't even get a CD of the application in the box when you buy an iPod - you're expected to be online and download the latest version.

I'd like to see programmers at Apple have a bottom up rethink of the software and rewrite it. I'm sure that it's just poor code built on poor code.

But that's not really what this piece is about. It's about the poor way that Apple handles audiobooks - especially ones not bought from either them or Audible.

If you do buy either an Audible book or an audiobook from the iTunes store, then it's pretty decent. The book downloads and drops into the appropriate Audiobook section of iTunes (you'll have to turn the View Audiobooks feature on incidentally as by default it's off, and that can lead to confusion about where your purchase has actually gone). The default settings mean that the audiobook won't be included in Shuffle - so you won't segue gently from Bruce Springsteen to a chapter from Moby Dick which might kill the mood a little - and both iTunes and your iPod will remember your position. So no jumping back to the start of a chapter or even the start of a whole play. And on the device itself, you can speed up or slow down playback.

That's fine, as I say, if you buy online from an approved reseller. Indeed Audible books even have chaptering built in that's largely unavailable to other formats of audio. But I don't always want to buy from Audible. Indeed, their sound quality, even at the highest setting, is too close to AM radio for my liking (and I speak as a subcriber).

You might want to rip a CD of a radio series like the recent complete On The Hour series that were released, or you might simply record an mp3 of a radio programme or otherwise.

Of course iTunes is wonderful at handling podcasts, but they're slightly more transient - disposable even - in the way they're handled. iTunes marks "new" episodes of programmes, and allows you to sync just them. The majority, seeking mass usage of their podcasts, use the more common mp3 format, but iTunes happily remembers your position should you need to stop and come back to a podcast.

But let's get back to the non-iTunes store and non-podcast spoken word audio.

It's a complete pain to get into the Audiobooks section of iTunes. First you need to rip in an AAC format. That's fine, but even if you tell iTunes that the genre is Audiobook or similar, that won't be enough. The next step is to manually go to the folder where you're ripped files reside and rename all the files from m4a files to m4b (Incidentally, the tutorials that exist on the web all suggest that you drop AAC encoding to quite a low level like 128 or even 64 kbps. That's fine unless you don't like to hear incidental music in a decent fashion or appreciate the stereo sound effects that might have been employed. Even if you do only have an 8GB iPhone and very limited memory, go for the higher quality).

Once you've manually edited all the file names, you have to reimport them back into iTunes. And then you have to delete the original versions from the library - you'll see small exclamation marks next to the files iTunes can no longer find. Then go into the properties of each of the files and check the boxes to remove them shuffle and to ensure that playback position is recalled.

Why on earth doens't iTunes either handle this automatically when you change to an appropriate genre, or just allow you to do this from a window?

Incidentally, depending on how the CD you're ripping is chaptered, you might want to merge tracks in iTunes before the initial rip.

If you want to make an audiobook from an mp3 that you have, then it's basically the same again. First of all you have to convert your mp3 to AAC because an mp3 just cannot sit in the Audiobooks section for some reason. While this might be economic with space on your device (AAC files commonly being smaller than their equivalent mp3 files), it's another needless conversion.

This ridiculous farrago has been true for at least the last three major versions of iTunes and probably more.

Note to Apple: the audiobook business is growing and not everybody gets their audiobooks from Audible or the iTunes store. Lots of third party suppliers and publishers are offering CDs, MP3-CDs and downloads (again usually in mp3 format), so I know that I'm not the only person jumping through these hoops.

As I say, I like iTunes to an extent and the functionality is excellent, but there's more to audio than music, and Apple needs to remember that as I think it's TV and Apps that it now concentrates on.

Everything happens at once. Yesterday, saw the publication of Q4 2008's RAJAR results, and the eagerly awaited Digital Britain report.

They're not really related, but I should probably say something about both. From close to home, my employer, Absolute Radio, published its first results, and they clearly don't make for comfortable reading. The numbers show significant falls in most measures, but it's to be expected. As James Cridland notes, RAJAR diaries require recall of station brands, and that's not something that's easy to do when a service has been on air for such a short period of time. In spite of marketing, it takes time for a new brand to seep into public consciousness.

There's a lot of rebranding happening out there at the moment. Global has rebranded most of its FM services in the East of England from the start of this year. Broadland, Chiltern, SGR et al are now called Heart. And at the end of March, the next tranch of services will get the rebranding treatment - this time in the West of England, from 2-Ten and Fox FM to GWR and Plymouth Sound. Again they'll form part of the Heart network. It'll be worth watching RAJAR results for these services too in coming quarters to see how figures change. I know what I think will happen.

But there were some very positive signs to be found in RAJAR. Despite continued negative press surrounding DAB, the news is encouraging. Ownership of DAB digital radios has increased to 29.7%. So getting on for one in three homes has at least one DAB radio in it. That's a great start, but I don't think anyone believes that it's anything more than a start. That's in line with the 32.2% of the population who've listened to at least some radio via a digital platform (DAB/DTV/Internet), accounting for 18.3% of all radio listening.

The disparity between those figures is explained by the vast number of radios that still need replacing.

I should at this point also point out that Absolute Radio is doing enormously well in the digital sphere, which explains why my employer remains a very keen supporter of digital, and DAB in particular. Let's face it - you don't want to listen to a music radio service on AM do you? Our national service now has 45% of its listening via a digital platform compared with that All Radio average of 18.3%.

And that digital listening is predominantly DAB. Of that 18.3%, 11.4% is DAB, with 3.2% DTV, and 2.0% via the internet (the other 1.7% of hours aren't stated). In other words, roughly two thirds of all digital radio listening is via DAB.

The same is true for Absolute Radio. For our national service, that 45.0% is made up of 32.0% DAB (71% of all digital listening), 6.8% via DTV and 5.8% via the internet. Even if you look at our overall service which includes London and so has lower overall figures since the service is also available via FM, digital listening overall still accounts for a very impressive 28.8% of all listening. That's made up of 20.6% DAB (72% of digital listening), 4.4% via DTV and 3.8% over the the internet.

If that jumble of numbers has left you a little confused, it just shows that DAB is by far the most popular digital format to listen to the radio. And for Absolute Radio in particular, it's a vital service accounting for a very significant proportion of all listening to the service.

And the DRDB has just released data indicating that by the end of 2008, the total number of DAB sets sold had reached 8.53m.

I've highlighted DAB to this extent because yesterday saw the launch of the draft Digital Britain report. I somehow expect that you know this already, because there's been lots of coverage of it all over the place. Stephen Carter used to head up Ofcom, but he was enobled and now he's been tasked with the job of building a blueprint for ensuring that we have a fully digital economy. With our manufacturing industry growing more defunct by the day, digital is an opportunity too good to miss. Indeed the report makes clear that if we don't do something, countries like the US and France will overtake us.

Obviously the major story is about the provision of broadband internet access to "every home by 2012" with a speed of at least 2 Mbps. Seemingly, this will be paid for by the £130m a year "digital switchover surplus."

Anyway, more of this anon, but let's get back to radio, and see what the Digital Britain report has to say about a medium very close to home for me at least.

Last year's DRWG report was fed directly into Digital Britain, so unsurprisingly this new report speaks of DAB as having become "the platform of choice for digital radio listening."

In truth, I'm not sure that the Digital Britain report really goes a great deal beyond what the DRWG report before it suggested. But those plans are now to be implemented.

Specifically, the actions the report outlines for radio are as follows:

We will take action to support DAB digital radio in seven areas:
a. We are making a clear statement of Government and policy commitment to enabling DAB to be a primary distribution network for radio;
b. We will create a plan for digital migration of radio, which the Government intends to put in place once the following criteria have been met:
- When 50% of radio listening is digital;
- When national DAB coverage is comparable to FM coverage, and local DAB reaches 90% of population and all major roads.
c. We will create a Digital Radio Delivery Group which includes the retailers, the Transmission Networks, the BBC, the Commercial Radio Companies, the Car Manufacturers, consumer representatives and the device manufacturers whose role would be to increase the attractiveness, availability and affordability of DAB and to advise on the Digital Migration Plan.
d. We will work with the BBC to explore how they could extend their digital radio coverage to replicate at least current FM analogue coverage.
e. As recommended by the Digital Radio Working Group, we will conduct a cost-benefit analysis of digital migration.
f. We will consult on new legislation to allow a one-off five-year extension of existing community radio licences, to bring them in line with other radio licences and recognise the important role they have in delivering social gain. We also intend to re-consider the rationale for the current restriction of 50% of funding from any one source.
g. We will commission an independent expert examination of the economic viability, continuing social contribution of, and most effective delivery methods for, local radio services and existing localness legislation.

a and b above are directly from the DRWG report. The creation of a Digital Radio Delivery Group is to be welcomed, although we've had a number of groups over the last few years. We do need the will of all concerned to drive this forward.

Extending DAB coverage to meet current FM coverage is essential - especially for BBC licence payers. But as the population gets more spread out, the harder and more expensive this becomes. Nick Piggott has a great explanation of how DAB was launched in the UK and why this has been made harder, and therefore more expensive than was perhaps necessary.

One key area that still needs addressing is how some of this will be achieved. As mentioned before, the only cash "swilling" around is the BBC's switchover surplus, but broadband is getting this.

The report rejects a proposal to allow an automatic further extension of analogue and multiplex licences, but will keep this under review if the industry is able to come up with a compelling and agreed "drive to digital" plan. In other words: it's up to the radio industry to show Ofcom what it can offer for this incentive.

But Ofcom is carrying out a cost-benefit analysis of digital migration, and it's some of those costs that still need addressing.

The full Digital Britain report is now in due in May, and there are likely to be changes before then: not just in radio, but in some of the other industries it covers. I'll try to put together a wider summary of my thoughts coming out from this report later.

One of the most interesting documents likely to be published in the UK in the next few months is Lord Stephen Carter's Digital Britain report. The draft report is due to be published by the end of this month, and it's likely to cover things like public service, broadband and digital radio. The recent DRWG report has been passed to Lord Carter's team.

But the leaks are starting now. Today's FT has a report that details what is likely to be the highest profile element of his report: universal broadband access.

Currently 40% of households don't have broadband access, and after years of growth, the increase has slowed.

The Digital Britain report proposes that every household in the UK should have access to at least 2 megabits per second download speed. This would be either via fixed wires, or via wireless 3G technology in rural areas.

What isn't clear from the FT's reports is how this would be funded, and how much it would cost householders. If 40% of homes have yet to subscribe to broadband, many are obviously in areas that can receive broadband currently. So are they not subscribing because it's too expensive? Or do they not have PCs? There's not really a "pay as you go" broadband offering - you're generally tied into 12 month contracts which some find either unaffordable or otherwise unviable. And of course, not everyone owns a PC or other device that would make use of the internet.

Without universal access to the internet, we are already becoming a two-tiered society. So giving access to all is important.

More on Digital Britain once the draft report is published, including much about radio...

A story in Marketing magazine leads me to the Asda site where it has launched a series of own brand electrical items.

These include an Asda DAB digital radio that sells, online at least, for the princely sum of £24.47.

A DAB radio for under twenty-five quid is fine by me, and thankfully, the set comes without any obvious signs of "Asda" branding.

But what I really love in the description. This radio comes with a "Gyro signal DAB module". Ooh. Impressive. I was looking for a radio with one of those!

Even more amusing is the fact that the tuner runs to "2 decimal places." So no longer do I need to listen to Absolute Radio on 105.8 FM when I can listen to it on 105.80 FM!

(NB. Yes, I know having this level of accuracy is useful on things like multi-band shortwave sets, but I don't see it as a feature to be promoted on a bog-standard radio).

It might have cost attendees (or their companies) cold hard cash to attend, but the audio from this year's Radio at the Edge is now available as a series of downloads as well as a summary podcast.

Entertainingly, the one session that isn't available is the Collings and Herrin podcast which they've deemed "uncompliant"!

Happily, this is available via their own podcast - it's number 37a.

I got invited along to the launch of a mobile phone the other day - the INQ1 (pronounced "Ink"). But just calling it a mobile phone is a bit harsh - it's more of a communications device than anything.

It comes from a new company who are looking to target people for who iPhones, Blackberrys, and Nseries Nokias are out of their price range (or desire). These are great, but expensive devices, and that means that the bulk of the market aren't interested in them. (I, of course, am interested in them, and currently quite like my Nokia N82).

What INQ has done is produce a device that serves a purpose and does it well. This, if you like, is the Facebook phone. Indeed we got a pre-recorded message from Mark Zuckerberg (a bit wooden, but then he's not an actor), telling us how much he loved it. Facebook is essentially built into the phone, along with Skype, eBay, MS Live Messenger et al. What is very clever, and has been done nowhere else, is the way it imports your contacts from these social networks into the phone.

So your Facebook contacts are now your phone contacts, along with photo profiles, and other data. The phone grabs similar data from your other networks and then lets you merge the various people together. You have to do this because in one system I might be "Adam Bowie", in another "A Bowie" and in another... well something very different.

The always on nature of the phone along with the built-in all-you-can-eat data seems good value, and it means that your Facebook updates ping the phone as they come through.

This is a basic phone, but at a reasonable PAYG price point or free on contract, it's going to appeal to a lot of people who don't need all the bells and whistles but just want internet connectivity wherever they go.

What is clear is that INQ and Three do seem to understand the market, and where there's a gap in it. I think that this could be pretty popular.

Disclaimer: I was invited to this launch presentation, and was given a memory stick, a poster and a t-shirt. So I think I'm being impartial!

A couple of weeks ago, I started playing with Geode - a Firefox plugin that allows your browser to use geolocation technology to determine whereabouts you are.

When you reach a Geode compatable site, a bar at the top of the browser asks you how much information you want to pass to the requesting site - Exact, Neighbourhood, City, Nothing.

When I tested it, I decided it could have my exact location. Now I was trying this using a WiFi laptop sitting at home. A Google map appeared and I was shocked to discover that it had my location within perhaps 10 metres.

My laptop has no GPS to position me, and it isn't connected to a cell-network for triangulation via cell towers. So how did it locate me?

Geode currently uses Skyhook who essentially maintain a database using GPS, cell tower locations and, importantly, a reference list of WiFi websites that are geocoded.

Mine is not the only wireless network in the flats where I live. I can see eight or ten other networks to one extent or another. And my neighbours are technical enough to have security enabled their networks (I discovered this when I was between routers and tried to find someone to leach from before my replacement router arrived). It's entirely possible that someone else's router is registered to Skyhook.

I assume that this is how my location was determined. I have a fixed IP Address and my ISP does know where I live, but it doesn't know whether or not I have WiFi, so I don't think that there's any data it could be selling on about me. In any case, if I beef up my WiFi security to the maximum, there's no way to discover my IP Address simply by sniffing my router.

But I would like to know for certain that one of my neighbours has registered their router, and my location is not somehow coming from my own router. While I'm sure that Skyhook's privacy is strict, I like to be in charge of my own data.

I was thinking about that when I was looking into another technology - satnavs. At the weekend, Something For The Weekend, the Tim Lovejoy vehicle, had their regular gadget review. A lady came on to demonstrate a couple of new pieces of technology. One was a TomTom satnav that included the usual mapping and traffic information, as well as things like local petrol prices.

Lovejoy asked a very fair question: how did the satnav know the prices? "From the satellites" came the answer. He tried again: he understood how the device knew where it was, but where was the petrol price information coming from. Satellites was again the answer. Eventually he gave up and moved on.

It was a fair question, because of couse, the only information coming from GPS satellites is location information - or more to the point, information about the satellites' positions to allow the device to triangulate its position on Earth. GPS satellites do not transmit UK petrol prices.

So how was it getting its info? Many devices have traffic information - usually provided by Trafficmaster. This is broadcast in the UK using RDS TMC technology on the FM network. Classic FM, the only national commercial FM operator carries the data and so as long as your satnav can receive Classic FM, it can pull that data down and use it to plot alternative routes etc. A separate system

But that's not how TomTom is getting either its traffic info, or its petrol price info. The petrol price info actually has to be downloaded via your home PC. I guess you just plug your device in regularly to keep it up to date. You're not storing your satnav in your glove compartment are you? TomTom buys the data from a third-party company.

But it's their HD Traffic I'm more interested in. Devices with this technology have SIM cards fitted, and we're told that the system uses 16.7m anonymous mobile phones. By capturing location detail from these phones, the system is able to monitor traffic flow - and you can be sure that these devices also contribute to that information. TomTom is, of course, keen to point out that this is an anonymous service, and you can't be tracked with it (there are mobile phone tracking services out there elsewhere mind you).

But given that the technology is fairly new, whose 16.7m phones is it using, and do the owners of those phones know?

The initial Dutch data utilised the Vodafone network, and it's that network that's also being used in the UK.

So if you're a Vodafone subscriber, did you know that Vodafone is monetising the data they collect about your location? To be clear, that's essentially data about which mast or masts your phone can see when it pings them. I'm sure that buried away in the terms and conditions you signed when you took our your contract, you agreed to let them use said data. But I feel uncomfortable about this.

It's come to my attention that over the last couple of years, although I still buy and listen to a lot of music, too much of it is through my iPod. Although I've got some half-decent Sennheiser earphones (i.e. not the ones that came with the device which are embarrassingly bad), that's not really the best way to listen.

On top of that, I actually have a quite decent stereo system at home, and when I do listen to CDs via that, the quality is astonishing.

So yesterday I went out and bought an Airport Express. OK - my interest had been piqued by a conversation with Geoff a couple of weeks ago. But I now realised that this relatively inexpensive device is exactly what I needed.

Setting it up was OK, although installation on Windows wasn't quite as simple and painless as Apple tried to claim it was. Indeed, on my Vista setup, I'd have been completely lost were it not for the fact that I've used WiFi for a few years now. Connecting to the Airport Express also meant losing my wireless router connection for a while until I could tie the two together into a single WiFi network.

Even that was a problem because the password I was using for my WEP-protected router wasn't 13 characters precisely. I took the opportunity to upgrade from WEP in the protection stakes, and this also meant some fiddling on XP machines with a patch that mysteriously hadn't been included on either of my machines (including my very recently flashed Asus Eee that now runs XP booting in under 30 seconds).

I got everything back on network with the exception of my PSP which refuses to work. No great loss as I rarely use it online these days.

As for the Airport Express? Well it works very well indeed. I think that Apple might include at least a cable in the box, but I'd bought one knowing that they hadn't.

And once installed, all the computers with iTunes on my network saw it, and gave me the option of streaming music to it rather than the tinny computer speakers.

Now I need to properly work out a single place for my iTunes library - preferably on a NAS drive. And finally I can start to comprehensively rip all my CDs in the same format. I have some as mp3s (and with an ongoing eMusic subscription, I'm likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future). Others are in Windows Media format, while anything ripped more recently is in AAC - at 256k. That's a particularly important detail, as I don't want my stereo finding the encoding quality wanting.

Any recommendations of NAS devices or enclosures with good power management (I don't want the drives continually spinning), would be more than welcome.

UBC today announced that it was closing down the phone service Cliq while it continues to look towards "connected" radios which will become available later in the year for its future business model.

Cliq worked by installing a JAVA app on your mobile that used the data network. The service monitored the output of 28 partner stations (including Heart and Galaxy networks), and allowed you to buy and download the music you heard for a price of £1.25.

Allowing your listeners to buy the songs that they've just heard is a perfectly sensible thing to be doing. So why has the service failed?

Well the takeup was low, and they had technical difficulties that they found hard to overcome. I know one person who simply couldn't get the service to work. I did have it running on my previous Windows Mobile device, but never actually used the service.

The fact that the music was encrypted with DRM, meaning that I had a limited number of devices to playback the music was the main reason, but the £1.25 price point is unattractive when iTunes is selling the same songs for 79p. That's a 58% premium! I believe that un-encrypted downloads are the only longterm solution that's going to be accepted by the public. We're already seeing that with iTunes beginning to unlock some of its inventory. Play.com is already up and running selling mp3s in the UK, with EMI the first of the big four record companies working with them. Amazon has announced it'll be selling downloads later this year, and it'll undoubtedly have done deals with all the majors, and Napster in the US has gone down the mp3 route for its sold tracks (subscriptions obviously work differently).

As a consumer I want to be able to listen to my music on my iPod, my mobile, my PSP, my Xbox, my PC and even my SatNav if I want!

But price is important as well. The music industry has undoubtedly taken a hit in recent years with albums seemingly as cheap now as they were when I was growing up. I read reports that Coldplay's new album, supposedly the saviour of EMI this year, is going to be sold for just £7 in Asda (and no doubt other supermarkets) tomorrow when it's released. But record companies lost control of the market when they left it to Apple to launch the iTunes store and didn't offer the service their consumers were crying out for themselves.

Linking your music sales offering with a radio station still makes sense. I'm concerned about developing hardware around a specific sales offering though. Requiring me to buy a new device in order that I can purchase your product is a brave move to make.

That said, wi-fi radios have yet to reach a significant level in the UK, and if they have DAB chips in them too, and are offered at a reasonable price point, then there's certainly a possibility. I believe that wi-fi is still a bit of a black art for many people. How many subscribers who have a BT Home Hub realise that they also have a wi-fi base station I wonder?

Anyway, I'll look forward to seeing the devices when they're released later in the year. But your product has to be priced in line with the rest of the industry, and when Amazon opens its mp3 store, we're all going to hear about it.

If you were a UK resident and rushed out and bought an Apple TV device after they were announced in autumn 2006, you'd have been sorely disappointed when you got home and plugged it in. Certainly you could listen to you iTunes library through your TV, as well as any video podcasts you subscribed to. But actual films or TV programmes were in short supply.

Over the past few months, that situation has improved, and you can buy episodes of Ashes to Ashes or Gavin and Stacey (ahead of a DVD release) availble to buy, but films have been in short supply, with some Pixar shorts being the main offerings.

ITV has been less forthcoming with its iTunes offering, with the feeling that they're holding back programming until after the launch of Kangaroo or SeeSaw or whatever the joint BBC Worldwide/ITV/Channel 4 venture ends up being called.

But back to films. Today, Apple's finally gotten around to making films available, and entertainingly, for the UK market, they're promoted on the iTunes store front page as being "films" even if they end up appearing in your iTunes library as "movies".

I'm not sure that I'm going to bother though. OK - so I don't have an Apple TV, iPhone, iPod Touch or even an iPod Classic, so aside from watching on my laptop screen, there's not a great deal of value me buying. Yet even if I did have one of the devices, the prices don't really do it for me.

First off there are rentals priced at £2.49 or £3.49 for catalogue and new releases respectively. So The Matrix will cost be £2.49 to rent. Yet the price of the DVD at Amazon to buy is only £2.98. Certainly there's a postage charge to come, but I've got Amazon Prime so it'd be here tomorrow for no extra cost!

Let's choose another film at random (Honestly - I am looking at random. I'm not just looking for examples to prove my point): School of Rock. Well, for some reason, that's not available to rent. But I can buy it for £6.99 as it's a catalogue title. At Amazon it's £4.97. Team America: World Police? Well it's on C4 this Saturday but again only available to buy at £6.99. £4.98 at Amazon.

A Mighty Heart? Well that doesn't count as a catalogue title because it's priced at £10.99. It's £6.98 on Amazon for the DVD.

I drew all these titles at random from the carousel on iTunes films homepage. I'm sure that there are films I can rent cheaper than I can buy them at Amazon, but then I could probably rent those at Blockbuster or Love Film or whatever too.

Maybe the situation's better for newer titles, since £10.99 compares well with new DVD's typically priced around fifteen quid on the high street in their week of release. National Treasure 2, brand new on DVD, is priced at £10.99 on iTunes. What about Amazon? 99p more expensive at £11.98. iTunes wins!

Of course you don't get the extras with iTunes, and the 1.4GB download might into your bandwidth capacity if you've got a cap. It's also more than likely to take you a while download. The size isn't suprising since the resolution is 640 by 480. Mind you PAL DVDs are 720 by 576, so iTune's resolution is inferior.

Then there's the sound - iTunes offers Dolby surround. Most DVDs offer Dolby Digital 5.1 sound - again vastly superior, especially if you have a home cinema set-up.

If buying movie downloads is to become as "successful" as it has been with music, then the price has to be more attractive. DVD prices are undoubtedly on a downward spiral (I use quotes because the growth in download revenues does not make up for the loss of CD revenues), with new released reaching the 3 for £20 price point ever faster, and even the movie companies realise that sales may well have peaked overall. But if they want to pick up some of the slack, then the pricing needs to be competitive. I don't think that it currently is. I could also go into a great rant about DRM, but I'll leave that for others. Needless to say, that alone is reason enough for me not to buy.

So in summary, iTunes movies are more restrictive than DVDs (you can't lend them to friends or sell them on eBay), are worse quality than DVDs, have fewer features than DVDs (no extras or commentaries), and as often than not more expensive than their DVD equivalents.

This won't matter to some people who'll be glad to find something that they can easily and legally put on their brand new 3G iPhones (coming soon we're promised), but overall I'm not convinced. Buy the DVD - you can use it in lots of hardware, and grab a copy of Handbrake. Drop the file onto your iPod Touch, PSP, Asus EEE, Xbox 360 or whatever, and watch it how you like.

There's been an awful lot of fuss in the last few weeks about "net neutrality" in the UK.

The supposed reason for this is the immediate success of the BBC iPlayer which is eating up bandwidth like it's going out of fashion. As the iPlayer arrives on the Nintendo Wii, the BBC announces that 42 million programmes have been downloaded in the iPlayer's first three months. And given that the top programme to make it into the top twenty fell right at the end of the period measured, it's fair to say that iPlayer is very much still in the ascendant.

The net result of this is that ISPs are beginning to call on the BBC to give them cash to offset the additional costs that the ISPs are facing. In particular, Tiscali and Virgin Media have been particularly outspoken.

Do they have a point? I don't think they have actually.

The problem is that many ISPs' business models are just completely broken. Tiscali's broadband offering, for example, starts at just £6.49. This includes "unlimited downloads" (although their fair usage policy explains that they traffic shape the bandwidth of P2P users during peak times).

The problem is that ISPs such as Tiscali generally rely on BT Wholesale for their ADSL connections. So, unless they actually fit kit in BT exchanges, they have to pay a metered rate to BT Wholesale for the bandwidth their customers use.

Yet Tiscali's agreesive pricing means that they feel they have to market their product on an unlimited basis.

It doesn't take a genius to realise that as people begin to want to download more data, the ISPs' profit margins are going to get squeezed. And it doesn't help that they're all in an ultra competitive marketplace where additional services including phone and television services are bundled together at a single price.

Here's a simple analogy. I decide to open an "eat as much as you like" buffet for which I'm going to charge diners £10 a plate. Overheads aside, some diners will eat less than a tenner's worth of food and I make money, while some greedy bastards will eat more and I'll lose money. I have to pitch the price right so that I get many more of the former than the latter.

But if everyone become's very greedy - we do live in an obese society - and I begin to see diminishing profits what do I do?

I can either up the cost of my buffet, or I can move to a more usual business plan and charge on a per meal basis. I particularly need to take into account how much my supplier charges me for food - and they almost certainly don't do that on an "unlimited" basis.

ISPs need to bite the bullet if they're not making enough cash. They need to either charge consumers more for unlimited data, or move to a per GB charge. They could, of course, drop access to high bandwidth sites like YouTube or the BBC. But I'm guessing that few consumers would take up such cheap internet (in)access.

I suspect that if my ISP moved to a per GB charge, that would lead to increased costs for me, although I should say that I've used the same ISP for coming on for 15 years now, and although I pay over the odds, I generally believe you get the service you pay for.

If a business plan is unsustainable, then change the business plan.

Otherwise you begin to sound like ITV moaning about how it can't afford its public service broadcasting obligations yet remaining quite happy to receive its spectrum free of charge (there was a very funny letter in The Guardian on Saturday from Five pointing out all its PSB efforts, and how it was quite happy to continue doing them: "don't charge us for our spectrum" was what I took from it).

So today, Ofcom has announced that it's planning a reorganisation of Freeview to allow one of the current six multiplexes to be made available for high definition services. New Freeview boxes will come onstream, and improved compression rates will to allow these new services to squeeze into the space. At the same time services currently sitting on the multiplex ear-marked for HD will move across to other multiplexes.

Ofcom's put together this lovely chart to explain the changes:

The space will become available by the BBC and NGW upgrading their multiplexes to use 64QAM instead of the current 16QAM. 64QAM allows for higher compression rates, although there have been questions asked (and these are mentioned in the Ofcom document) about the relative robustness of 64QAM compared to 16QAM. Ofcom believes that these issues have been resolved in later generations of Freeview devices.

Although overall, it's probably in the interests of consumers that some HD channels are available via Freeview (and thus don't require subscriptions to either Sky or Virgin cable), we must be concerned about any degradation in picture quality of the current channels.

A case in point was Tuesday night when ITV1 was showing Roma v Manchester United in the Champions' League. The picture quality was absolutely fine. But then switch over to Schalke v Barcelona on ITV4 and it's immediately clear that the picture is more "blocky." That's simply because ITV4 has greater compression than ITV1 (and as such, isn't directly related to whether the multiplex uses 16QAM or 64QAM - more how much bandwidth is given over to the channel). Both channels are on the same multiplex (Mux 2), which already uses 64QAM.

It's also worth noting that the HD services will be using the progressive rather than interlaced format ("p" rather than "i"). Sky HD, largely uses 1080i. There is ongoing debate into what's better, although Blu-Ray discs, I understand, tend to use 1080p.

I'm sure that we'll hear plenty more about all of this. Separately, it's going to be interesting to hear what Ofcom's verdict is on Sky's proposals to use the capacity is currently has on Mux C for Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three, and move to a subscription model using new compression techniques (as are being proposed for HD - they'll use DVB-T2 MPEG-4) to get more than three channels in.

On a broader scale, Ofcom hasn't explicitly talked about moving Freeview over to the MPEG-4 standard, although I can easily forsee this in the future, and the HD "back-door" route to get kit into homes is a good one.

Dennis Publishing has just started "the WORLD'S FIRST fully interactive digital magazine dedicated to bringing you the very latest and best in consumer technology." The second issue is out this week.

It's called iGIZMO, and it's dreadful.

Dennis has previously had success with a magazine called Monkey which is a similarly interactive title aimed at people who "read" Nuts and Zoo magazines. I'm not in their target market, but I can understand how that title might have succeeded - these magazines are things that you look at rather than read. As long as it has the right number of half-naked women, it's doing its "job."

As I say, I'm not a fan. But iGizmo has really failed because it has tried to mimic too closely the values of its predecessor. But this time, it's not just beautiful product shots that the reader wants (although they certainly do want those). The reader also needs to be informed about the products. And that means some kind of accompanying writing or perhaps video. Not only that, but the writing needs to be of a good standard, with an editorial voice that I can trust. If I'm expected to be spending four digits on some new high-end laptop or portable device, I really need to be sure that I'm spending it wisely. That's why I want a trusted voice. I'm not saying that it has to be a po-faced and dry voice, but I really do need to believe that I'm going to get valuable background information to make a decision.

You only have to look at the paper magazines that are in this marketplace already to realise this: Stuff and T3. They both have great photography, but they also have reviews that at least satisfy your needs. I wouldn't pretend that either magazine are the last word in flat screen TVs or digital radios, just as Five's The Gadget Show necessarily covers things relatively lightly to reach a larger audience. But in each of their cases, they do it well, and I'd be fairly happy making a buying decision on the back of one of their reviews.

Of course not everyone reads pages and pages of reviews and background information before deciding what new mp3 player they're going to buy. They might pick their device on the basis of a one-page summary in a non-tech magazine like FHM or Esquire. But then these aren't the people who are going to read something like iGizmo either. If I'm going to read a gadget magazine, then I'm going to want it to know about said gadgets in quite some detail.

Otherwise, I'm not really a fan of the page-turning mechanism iGizmo employs, and the double page ads are full of "content" that does nothing of interest. The computer games reviews are again better handled on specialist sites or magazines. Overall, it's just obvious that more time has spent considering the style and the look and feel of the "magazine" than has been spent commissioning pieces to actually read or videos to view. Very poor.

I'm much better off reading Wired and Engadget.

In the past I've had a bit of a go at websites rushing to produce iPhone friendly versions of themselves. This might be in some part because I'm not an Apple evangelist like so many tech people (I have an iPod, but that's it, and I think iTunes is a truly awful piece of bloatware). But I think it's mostly because producing websites for single platforms is surely a bad idea in the long term: if you produce an iPhone version of your site, then do you also produce a Windows Media, PSP or S60 version?

We're likely to get many more hardware devices of various sizes and shapes over the coming years. That's why we have standards, and browsers that can correctly render websites.

There is an argument for producing "lite" or mobile versions of websites. If you're unfortunate enough to be browsing via mobile on less than 3G (I am), then you need these versions, and frankly you need them with 3G too. And I see that the BBC has just launched a new version of its mobile site, although I'll stick to the PDA version since it's more useful for my handset.

But it's interesting to see what's happened following the creation of an iPhone friendly version of the iPlayer. Since Apple is for reasons currently unknown, refusing to implement Flash on its platform, the regular streaming version of the iPlayer won't work - and can't be tweaked to work.

That meant using a streaming H.264 format. But within hours of this new service launching, it quickly became apparent that you can pull down this stream relatively easily (well, OK - a bit of technical knowledge is required) thus ending up with highish quality un-DRMd mpeg-4 files of programmes. Why is it without DRM? Well that's pretty much the only way you can get your programmes onto an iPhone without selling it through the Apple Store, and that's a totally different proposition.

It's certainly true that there aren't "Download" here buttons, and you need some tools largely used by developers to pull the streams down. But it can be done, and it can be automated.

In reality, I wouldn't expect too many users to misuse the streams like this, although it does set a precedent. If you really want a dodgy download of Torchwood, you can already get it in a multiplicity of places. Divx/Xvid remains far more popular, with many DVD players now playing back this format natively.

But the questions regarding the choice of the iPhone as a platform remain. Many of the comments in the Beeb's internet blog on the subject are worth reading and valid.

Finally, it's worth noting that the BBC has explicitly explained that these services are for WiFi connections only, since a half hour programme results in a file well over 100MB in size - not something easily downloadable via EDGE (should you actually get that). GCap, who have started streaming a number of their radio services via the iPhone, similarly tells listeners that their service is for WiFi connections only. This isn't because you couldn't stream radio online via the iPhone - you could - but because O2, the UK's only iPhone service provider, actually disallows streaming. Lovely.

In some respects, this is a continuation of my last entry about Qtrax. While the final position of Qtrax has yet to be established, it's interesting to look at another high profile example that got plenty of coverage last year - Nokia's Comes With Music package.

As you may or may not recall, Nokia announced that a new range of Nokia phones would come with the ability to listen to free music from the Universal catalogue. Well, according to a piece from Bloomberg reported by Engadget, all is not quite what it might have first seemed.

Telecoms operators have something called ARPU which they're continually driving to maximise. It stands for Average Revenue Per User, and it refers to all those bolt-on services that you buy aside from airtime and texts. These days there's obviously data, any number of subscription text and video "content" and so on. Music downloads have been a recent addition, although issues based around getting your music from one device to another begin to rear their head and have probably stymied sales somewhat. But music remains popular, and advance access to concert tickets is another key area with all the major operators doing things in the area.

But when manufacturers like Nokia (or Apple) introduce their own services, they can sometimes undercut the telecoms operators, and an impasse can be reached.

So this report is interesting for two reasons. First, it explains that the "free" music is not really free, and that Universal is getting a cut of the handset cost and potentially part of the monthly contract in a similar way to Apple taking a proportion of its users' contracts. That cost might have to be built into the "music contract" that a user will have to sign. Secondly, they realise that without the assistance of the operators like Orange and Vodafone, they can't really get the scheme off the ground.

It still seems to me that it's unnecessarily confusing for an Orange subscriber with a Nokia "Comes With Music" phone has two different mechanisms for getting music - almost certainly incompatible with one another. But then PC users have a multiplicity of mechanisms for buying digital music from heavily DRMd iTunes music to mp3s from Emusic.

The market will have its say in the long term, but I would be very wary of anybody claiming that they're offering free music. We're at an experimental stage where new payment mechanisms need to be tried on for size. Jumping straight to free probably isn't sustainable in the long term.

Rory Cellan-Jones has a pretty spot-on analysis of a certain company's new product announcement yesterday. The argument put to him is that a new model of Ford Focus probably affects more people. I'm not sure that in hard numbers it does, but the point is well made.

Now if Bic launched a new version of the Biro...

(Via John Naughton)

This is pretty important. Back in 2006, Andrew Gowers published his review of intellectual property in the UK. It was a pretty intelligent look at the state of play in this country, although not everyone was happy with what he was recommending.

Anyway, a year has passed and now intellectual property minister Lord Triesman has published a public consultation on proposed changes to law.

The key change that's highlighted is making ripping a CD to your computer legal - as things stand, it's currently illegal in the UK.

Over a range of areas, the consultation is proposing a range of options and seeking views on which it should follow. This is actually a crucial chance to affect UK copyright law. So if like me, you care about this area of law, you need to carefully read through the consultation, and respond by 8 April 2008.

I'll return to this in more detail soon, but I expect that there'll be some significant internet debate in the meantime.

A recent entry on Boing Boing pointed to an article in Rolling Stone magazine which highlighted the fact that producers mix tracks so that they sound good when they're ripped to an mp3 player, at the same time, removing the subtleties that a wider dynamic range allows.

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow comments "...it seems to me that as a society, we're happy to sacrifice fidelity for ease of use, flexibility and low-cost (see, for example, the trend from landlines to cordless phones to mobile phones to Skype). Designing for that, as opposed to lamenting it -- is a damned good and realistic thing to do."

But has he read the full article? If he has, then he'll see that engineers and producers aren't happy with this trend. What we're getting are tracks with dynamic range compression to make them sound loud, thus removing some of the subtleties of the original sounds.

When you rip a CD to mp3 or similar lossy compression format, you're losing some of that range. We're often told that this compression simply loses audio beyond our hearing range, but it's really not as simple as that - an mp3 does not sound as good as a CD track when you play it through some decent speakers.

If all you're going to do is listen to your track through your iPod listening via the terrible ear buds that came with it, then you probably don't care. But give the crappy compressed version of the track to people who buy it from iTunes if they're happy with that. I still buy the majority of my music on CD because I want to hear the full range. I've got a rather nice stereo system with big floor standing speakers, and I can very much hear the difference.

Most FM radio stations also use lots of compression to make them sound "louder" and clearer than other stations on the dial. The music suffers.

You really can't just design for the lowest common denominator, otherwise we might as well design music to be optimised for those kids who listen to it from the speakers of their Nokia mobile phones at the back of the bus.

It really is strange that at a time when in the A/V world, we're all being persuaded to upgrade to HD TVs and high end 7.1 surround speaker systems to watch our Blu-Ray movies on, the CD world is going the other way.

But it's not just CDs - there are plenty of other areas where quality is losing out.

In the digital broadcast arena, poor quality seems to be accepted. Look at TV channels on Freeview and compare, say, BBC1 with ITV4. The latter, even with recently made programming looks terrible in comparison because it has a much lower bit-rate. ITV4 is on a multiplex that uses a more efficient compression technology, but it's still significantly worse. What that means is that channels look more "blocky" - something that's especially apparent as we all get larger and larger TVs (you can see a range of bitrates here).

A recent Deloitte & Touche report into the efficient use of spectrum by the BBC even recommended that the BBC should reduce its bitrate to squeeze more channels on. Viewers don't care they claimed. The BBC has promised to look into it.

In the run up to a full digital TV switchover in 2012, we're now looking at the resulting over-the-air pictures being worse than the previous analogue pictures. Yes, plenty of households had ghosting on their sets due to misaligned aerials, or coat-hangers stuffed into the back of their portable units, but that's not a reason to accept lower standards.

Satellite and digital cable are better but have their own issues. There's not a bandwidth shortage (at least for satellite), and those channels that are obviously lower in quality are so because they output in that format, or they're not prepared to spend enough on decent bandwidth on those platforms.

I am surprised that so few channels are broadcasting in widescreen - yes I'm looking at you UKTV and Virgin Media. Just about every TV sold these days is widescreen, yet even when a good proportion of their programming is now originated in 16:9, they persist in cropping it. There really is no excuse in 2008.

I'd love to say that my industry, radio, is better. But it's not is it? DAB can sound fine, but unless you invest in up to date codecs (ahem, Digital One), or don't overcompress, then it really doesn't beat a good analogue signal. Ask a Radio 3 listener or a DAB listener to the mono Radio 7.

The industry would argue that listeners don't care. They'll point to the fact that most DAB sets sold are "kitchen radios" which natively come with a single speaker. So there's no problem if they broadcast in 128k stereo (nearly every station), or even mono. Last Christmas, GCap launched theJazz and it's been pretty successful, in audience terms at least. Yet it's broadcast in mono. Now I'm no jazz aficionado, but surely this was a mistake. Jazz fans that I've met tend to be very particular about their listening environments, and high end kit is part of that. And maybe theJazz isn't really aimed at those hardcore fans (in the same way that Classic FM isn't really aimed at the die hards who prefer Radio 3), but it's telling that they even answer the mono question in their FAQs (and there is some space on Digital One these days...). Stereo was first broadcast in the UK in 1925 yet over 80 years later, we're not seeing greater dynamic range and more channels (5 or 7), but fewer.

If you look at the newspaper industry, they're continuing to upgrade presses to allow full colour on all their pages, and trying to ensure that ink doesn't rub off on your fingers. The technical quality is improving. Your local cinema probably sounds better than ever, and many screens are slowly becoming digital, meaning that we're seeing fewer scratchy old prints, instead getting pristine copies as we tend to see on recent well-mastered DVD releases.

But in so much of the broadcast arena, we're seeing declining quality. I'd argue that it was only recently that TV technology has improved to match a decent tube from ten or fifteen years ago, not displaying motion blur when showing sport, and handling dark pictures with lots of greys and blacks without "jaggies" appearing everywhere.

Quality really does matter. There are still many more stereo CD players in the world than mp3 players. At a time when record companies are facing a bleaker future than ever before, they might want to consider maintaining a quality product.

[UPDATE] Well what do you know? theJazz has just become stereo! Only 128kbps stereo - but that's still a vast improvement! Well done GCap/Digital One for finally getting that sorted.

And while we're talking about DAB - it's a shame today to hear that Oneword is effectively being closed down as Channel 4 pulls out of it. Oneword has always been a troubled station since there was never any real investment. Ironically they did have some decent programming, but it was just packaged badly. There'd be an unabridged adaptation of, say, Oliver Twist, that would run to forty episodes. Nobody is going to follow a series that long apart from one or two very real die-hards. Radio 4 rarely run a daily serial over more than a couple of weeks, and their hour long Classic Dramas tend to be between 1 and 4 weeks with very occasional "epics" that might run 13 weeks. But getting a producer to edit down the readings to more manageable lumps from the original unabridged audiobook versions was obviously expensive. And in any case, they filled time, and filling 24 hours a day with non-music programming is not a cheap thing to do.

There were some good shows like "Between The Lines," which felt almost unique in that it was book programme not presented by Mariella (Open Book on Radio 4, The Book Show on Sky Arts) Frostrop. But sadly it was lost amid the miasma of long form serials.

Of course this is also the problem that Channel 4 Radio is going to have. Widely touted as an alternative to Radio 4, it seems to me that it's bound to be closer to the non sports parts of Five Live. Not for nothing have they hired Five Live's Bob Shannon. They're unlikely to have more than a few serial book readings if they're sensible. Instead, the current affairs phone in is likely to prevail - less adversarial than Talksport perhaps.

With the recent launch of the iPhone in the UK, suddenly we're getting a spate of "we've optimised what we do for the iPhone" announcements.

For example, Sky News has an iPhone friendly home page, while the BBC has streamlined its podcasts page for iPhones.

A couple of things to say about this:

1) Isn't the point of the Safari browser on the iPhone that it can handle ordinary webpages without them having to be specially formated?

2) Why does the iPhone get special attention? Surely these sort of optimisations should be happening for all mobile clients?

OK. So both the BBC and Sky already have excellent mobile versions of their websites, and I know that producing these pages is probably just a little tinkering with some previously created templates via their content management systems.

But we're entering dangerous territory if we're expecting website creators to launch new versions of websites for every new devices that hits the market. I quite fancy one of those Asus Eee PCs which have very small screens. They're selling bucketloads, so can everyone please make their websites look nice for that device - making full use of the screen's fairly limited real estate? The BBC blog notes that other devices are coming soon. So which device has more in the market in the UK currently? The iPhone or the PSP? And which one has gets the new podcast page. Hmm. It's not like anyone's going to be downloading podcasts on the iPhone via EDGE anyway...

And no, this website is not optimised for the iPhone or any mobile device. There's a very slow redesign happening, and a mobile version may or may not be part of it depending on how hard it is to read. Let's face it, you're reading this text via your favourite RSS reader anyway!

It's great to hear that the team over at Bletchley Park has finished its rebuild of Colossus. This was one of the first programmable computers ever built, and it was used for code breaking towards the end of WWII.

The photo above was taken a couple of years ago now when I visited Bletchley Park. The whole project has actually taken 14 years to complete!

I note that Virgin Media customers will be able to get "dynamic interactive content" from BBC Radio services later this month. Basically this gives you lots of "now playing" type information when you're watching a BBC Radio channel.

As the press release explains, this has been available on Freeview for sometime. And the release also coyly mentions that "BBCi now visualises radio listening on most major digital TV platforms."

In other words: you can get it on Freeview, and you can get it on cable. But you can't get it on Sky.

If there's one glaring in hole in Sky's otherwise very good system, it's the lack of flexibility in their radio section, without even basic Now & Next functionality. You can't see anything beyond a description of the current programme on the EPG - certainly not a list of programmes over the coming days. And you can't set your Sky+ to record a radio programme without prior knowledge of programme times, and an understanding of how to manually record things.

Let's hope that releases like this get Sky to pull their finger out and do something. It really can't be that hard!

I'm torn. I admit it.

On the one hand, it annoys the hell out of me that one company's product launches gets so much coverage. But on the other hand, at 6pm last night I was sitting at my desk hitting refresh on Engadget's excellent live blogging of Apple's latest launch event.

So much was hoped for. Not quite as much was delivered.

There's a new Nano which, while smaller and with video, I'm not convinced is actually in a good form factor being just about square. Perhaps if I play with one in an Apple store I'll think differently, but given that you can watch video on it, how are you supposed to comfortably hold it? It's also disappointing that the memory size hasn't increased, with just 4GB and 8GB models available. My current Nano is 8GB already (yes these new ones are cheaper).

I'll leave Americans to stew about the price cut in the iPhone just a couple of months after launch. I think that's an implicit acknowledgment that the product's been overpriced to date. When we hear about European, and particularly British carriers, the pricing will be really interesting. Whoever gets it, will surely give it away pretty cheaply or even free for new customers who switch. Charging upwards of £300 is not something the mass market is prepared to do here.

But I am a bit disappointed in what we must now call the iPod Touch. Certainly it looks cool, and having WiFi and a big screen is great. But it only comes in 8GB or 16GB sizes because the memory's flash. In the UK I can pay £269 for a 16GB cool looking video player? Or I can pay slightly less for a 160GB iPod Classic. It's simply not value for money. You're surely better off getting one of the new slim PSPs and a decent sized memory card. Given that video is a large part of it's raison d'etre, you're not going to get many episodes of TV shows or films on it before you run out of memory. My Nano just has music and podcasts and is regularly jam-packed at 8GB.

The 160GB iPod Classic does look interesting since it has a hard disk that might actually take my entire CD collection.

Oh, and there's no sign of the suggested digital radio (not even an included FM radio which is pathetic really) which doesn't surprise me, with no formal standard adopted.

Nor is there any sign of any BBC programming on iTunes. I think that was a wild rumour based around the fact that in the UK, Apple used BBC Television Centre to beam back Steve Jobs' presentation.

And I don't understand why WiFi isn't built into all the new iPods. The Zune managed it.

Apple did announce some kind of buy it now service in Starbucks using the iPod Touch, but I'd have thought they'd have the ability to do much more.

How about this? Your WiFi iPod lets you stream radio via Apple's iTunes service. Apples uses a music matching service much like how Shazam works with mobile phones, that compares the audio you're hearing with all the tracks they have in their iTunes database. They can then easily identify the track you're hearing from your favourite radio station, and you can buy it there and then.

I mentioned the NBC/Apple spat about video pricing the other day, and I still stand by the idea that pricing should be variable as it is in nearly every other product or service that you can buy. But I'm not too impressed with NBC's solution which is to go with Amazon's (US only) Unbox service, since that just serves DRM'd Windows Media files. No use for an iPod or PSP - surely the two most popular digital video playback devices. I know NBC seems perversely scared about DRM-free content, but they do need to remember that they're broadcasting this stuff free-to-air in HD. Just make it easy for consumers to buy, and buy it they surely will. Oh, and price it cheaper than DVDs - just like downloads tend to (but not always) cost less than CDs.

Anyway, the device I'm most interested that was announced yesterday is the Sony Alpha 700. Quite pricey though...

I can't believe the number of times that Dixons Stores Group can put out effectively the same press release, and still get the media lapping it up.

Today, it's the shock-horror news that they're no longer going to sell blank cassettes. Are we going to get this same story every time DSG makes a decision about what products they're going to stock?

We've already had VCRs, Analogue Radios (not remotely true as they still sell worldband radios as well as AM/FM radios built into mini-systems), CRT televisions (even though in many cases, they're still better than their flatscreen equivalents), 35mm film cameras (nobody's making them much, so it's moot) and even incandescent bulbs (seriously - who goes to Currys to buy bulbs?). I expect I missed the LaserDisc, Disc Camera and Eight-track Cartridge announcements.

Isn't reporting these releases the equivalent to building a feature from a press-released "poll?" Mabe Argos is missing a trick by not listing junked items between its catalogues.

It's just lazy journalism.

This week's Independent on Sunday had a massive banner headline - "Wi-Fi: Children at risk from 'electronic smog' "

A further story was entitled "Danger on the airwaves: Is the Wi-Fi revolution a health time bomb?"

The reports go on to report that WiFi is everywhere these days including many homes, towns and schools. So is it dangerous? What's the basis of these reports?

"Virtually no studies have been carried out into Wi-Fi's effects on pupils," says the Independent on Sunday's report. So what's the basis of a front page scaremongering story then?

WiFi broadcasts around 2.4 GHz (UHF - Ultra High Frequency) which is somewhere around where microwave ovens work as well as TV is broadcast, along with mobile phones, bluetooth, GPS, some two-way radios and many other things. WiFi is limited to around 100m maximum, whereas mobile phones broadcast for upwards of 2km. I trust that no parent is ever again let their child use a mobile phone, and nor are they going to have any switched on themselves in the home (or any other time they're with their children).

So, as Rob Beschizza writes over at Wired, either all of these things are dangerous, or none of them.

Undoubtedly, examining whether there are health risks based around all these technologies is a worthwhile venture, but I'd really hope that The Independent on Sunday is above these feeble sensationalist headlines.

There's an excellent piece penned by Bill Thompson over at the BBC dismantling this kind of scaremongering.

Google recently introduced an application for Windows Mobile phones that lets you view Google Maps neatly and quickly on your mobile phone. This is a great little app which is wonderfully useful. No longer will I have to remember to printout a paper map before I set off somewhere new.

On GPRS, the maps load quickly, and they're a lot better than the feeble ones I can get via Orange. I once tried relying on them in the depths of Suffolk and walked a good half an hour out of my way as a result. Then I lost reception... but that's going to be a factor here too!

Visit google.com/gmm on your mobile device to download the 600k application.

Just as well that I'm on an eat-as-much-as-you-want data plan! With the Gmail application, I'm getting few quite a few MB a month on my mobile these days.

A short aside from the previous piece on Apple. In the presentation, Jobs pointed out that Apple had got more than 200 patents on various parts of the iPhone. And a recent Audi A6 TV ad talks about how it has taken out more patents than NASA has ever taken out for its new car (9,621 filed).

Am I the only person who thinks that extreme numbers of patents are actually a really bad thing? I mean are there 10,000 different components actually in a new car that can be patented?

OK. I know every website, newspaper and blog in the world has already commented on Apple's announcements yesterday, but I just had to get a few things off my chest.

First of all, I want to know why everyone practically has orgasms about new Apple launches. I mean CES has been taking place in Las Vegas this week, and everyone and their mum has been launching some new hardware device. But this gets the cover of The Times, a full page in The Guardian and countless TV and web reports.

It seems that in an increasingly secular world, the new Messiah for some is Steve Jobs (when really they should be worshipping Jonathan Ive CBE). Maybe he should trade his black T-shirt for long flowing white robes.

From a rational point of view, it seems that a hi-tech company has announced two new products: a mobile phone, and a television set-top box. But the phone looks really cool and comes from the people who brought you the iPod. And the set-top box links up with your home network.

Lets look at the phone first, since that's what everyone else is doing. It's cool. It's desirable. It's got some very neat features. It won't be out in Europe until at least October. And then it may not be on your network. Cue fights between UK networks to get dibs on it, since not inconsiderable numbers of Apple devotees would undoubtedly switch networks to get one.

So what's wrong with that? Well, a few things. I've got a Windows Smartphone. It's one with a stylus, but without a keyboard, and it's, well, OK...ish. It does some stuff brilliantly, and that's why I have it. It syncs perfectly with both my work and home computers which means when I recently lost my phone, I could get up and running with all my contacts and calendar information restored immediately. It too has a big screen, and a largish surface area.

Whilst my phone is undoubtedly thicker that the iPhone, it does share one characteristic, and that's that most of the top surface area is a screen. And screens need protecting and get dirty.

If you buy an iPod - particuarly something like a Nano - you almost certainly need to protect it with some type of case or "skin". This is all the more so with a device that is effectively glass on one side. You're not going to be able to put it with your keys in your pocket or wherever. Suddenly not so slim.

If I hold my screen up to the light, it's covered in fingerprints and marks. I'm always polishing the screen with my shirt tail. This is a phone that I'm supposed to use a stylus with rather than my fingers don't forget. The iPhone is going to get mucky.

I suppose that I'm disappointed that for a phone that's the size of a regular iPod, the disk size is only the same spec as a larger capacity Nano. Regular iPod users aren't going to be able to fully replace their devices with this phone. And while a widescreen is lovely (and something iPod should already have had), that memory's sure going to get eaten up if you download many films. Speaking of which, has anyone yet seen any of these on the UK iTunes store? More of this is a minute.

Nokia and Sony Ericsson's Walkman latest music phones already come with 4GB. They're bound to be 8GB too by the end of the year.

Finally, the iPhone is big. Really big. But it'll sell plenty.

Onto Apple TV. From a broader point of view, this is a device that I want to buy. It could be the link between my PC and my TV that I've been looking for. I'm still hoping to find a way to get TV back to my, that doesn't involve unscrewing my PVR's front cover and removing the hard drive, but at the moment, I'm making full use of a Divx/Xvid enabled DVD player to watch downloaded television.

Apple TV links iTunes on my home network with my TV to let me see video, as well as music and photos played back on the set. Sadly, it's next to useless for me for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it's broadly HD-only. In fact the PAL version only really requires a widescreen set, but with only HDMI and component outs, it's not enough for those of us clinging onto perfectly good TVs that don't have better connectivity; a scart socket for example. HDTV doesn't have the penetration here that it does in the States. I'd have specced the device differently for the UK, but that's not something Apple gets into as far as I can tell.

Worse than that is the media you play through it. Looking at the specs, it's clearly aimed at either video content you've authored yourself - perhaps in Final Cut Pro or Premiere - or more likely, downloaded via iTunes. For us in the UK, that's not really enough. iTunes has minimal video content available, with either a selection of music videos or a handful of Pixar shorts to watch. I'm not sure how video that was encoded to be played back on an iPod is going to look on a 40" HD plasma anyway.

So I'm still looking for some kind of device to play back my music, movies and photos on my TV via my network. Actually, I suspect that it already exists, and that I should have picked up one of those Xboxes that were on sale for £49 at Argos the other week.

[UPDATE]

A fascinating piece on the Communities Dominate Brands blog, explaining the real complications Apple face in becoming a major player in mobile phones. In particular, the diverse European market where there are upwards of 100 different operators that need to be dealt with, each of whom has their own requirements. The Orange logo and Vodafone Live buttons are both mentioned. Well worth a read, and be sure to read the comments and the author's responses to those comments. Yes, I know it runs to something like 12,000 words as it stands - perhaps a fifth of a 240 page novel. But it's worth it!

Please do let me know if I'm doing some obviously wrong, but I've got a bit of an issue with iTunes that I can't solve without using a workaround.

I have iTunes on a work computer (ahem - don't tell our IT department) and also on a home PC. I like to listen to podcasts. I understand that iTunes will only sync to podcasts on one PC, so I've chosen my home machine. But sometimes I like to download an up to date podcast to listen to on the way home.

I can't sync to my work machine, but I can drag and drop individual podcasts from iTunes to my iPod. Except that the tracks then don't show up under the iPod's Music or Podcasts (or Audiobooks) menus in iTunes. They've vanished - even though I saw some transfer activity as I drag and dropped.

Not only that, but you can only find these orphaned "songs" under the Songs menu on the iPod itself. In other words - they're there on the device, but you can't see them via iTunes.

That's a bit of a problem, because in Apple's infinite wisdom, it seems to have neglected to include a "Delete" function for songs. I quite like to delete podcasts after I've heard them to keep things nice and tidy, and I'm not always near a PC to do this.

But now I have audio on my iPod that I can't see through iTunes and can't delete on the iPod. My Nano could quickly fill up this way.

My workaround is a little program called Yamipod which seems to let me explore my iPod directly, find these orphaned podcasts, and delete them.

I guess it's a bug, and searching Apple's forums suggests that I'm not the first to have this issue. Suggestions included starting afresh by restoring my iPod to factory settings! Except that some of my "music" (in particular Audiobooks), I've archived off to hard drives to keep my PC clean. Plus, that's not a very neat solution is it?

And while I'm at it, why is it so hard to rip spoken words CDs and have them displayed as Audiobooks? If you buy an audiobook on iTunes or through Audible things are fine, but I tend to either have mp3s to transfer or CDs to rip. The only route seems to be renaming files as *.m4b rather than *.m4a files and "deleting" the music files while re-importing the folder with the *.m4b files. The reason that I want to have Audiobooks separately managed is that it keeps the menus clean for when I'm looking to listen to either spoken word or music, and it ensures that I don't have chapters of books turning up mid-shuffle. Audiobooks also automatically bookmark where you've got to. Actually, Audiobooks is a bit of a mess with all the chapters placed into a single folder rather than being able to choose "Titles" and then "Chapters". And yes, I do "Join Tracks" when I rip a CD to minimise chapter points.

I've only recently started to use iTunes fully by linking it to an actual iPod, so I'm a bit surprised that some relatively basic things are so complicated to achieve considering Apple seems to release new versions of iTunes on a very regular basis. This isn't all just because I'm using Windows is it? Is all sweetness and light in OS X?

Well - PVRs or DVRs - whatever the correct phrase is.

"Sky+ has changed my life!"

This is a phrase you hear all too frequently. This must be a truly wonderous invention then?

Well, having now experienced it first hand, I must admit that it is really pretty good. But you know what? Some things are done better by my £94.99 PVR (Now £79.99) - a Digifusion FVRT95.

What I'm not going to compare are channel options. Obviously this is pretty important, but I'm examining the technology here.

Why Sky+ is better:

• Well it's got a dual tuner. So you can watch one thing and record another. Indeed, you can record two programmes and either watch one of them or playback a recording simultaneously.
  
• Sky support. Aside from a dodgy box initially, I've not suffered any technical difficulties with my Sky+, but at least I know that the Sky R&D department is busily working on bug fixes and improvements all the while. Access Devices who worked on the excellent software on my Digifusion have gone bust which may mean seeing no more upgrades for my device in the future.
  
• Series link. I think that this might be coming with Freeview Playback, but I've yet to see the definitive list of specifications.
  
• Programme reminders that pop up during trailers to let you either remind you of a programme or set a recording for it.
  
• Texting Sky+. Or setting your PVR via the web. Pretty useful; very cool.
  

Why the Digifusion is better:

• The programme guide is neater. A minimised screen of what you're watching remains on the screen when you're browsing either your recordings or the programme guide. Sky+ stops your viewing altogether if you want to do this. You also have to go into a setup option to turn off the muzak that accompanies the guide by default.
  
• Skipping. Advertisers and commercial broadcasters hate this. Indeed I note that in the Freeview Playback marketing logo guidelines (p17 of the PDF), companies are specifically from promoting "functionality that enable viewers to skip or fast forward through advertisements." Wow. You certainly wouldn't want anyone to know that you can fast forward the ads would you? (Don't forget that ITV actually wanted speeds limited as part of the Freeview Playback spec.) Well Sky+ lets you go up to 30x when fast-forwarding. My Digifusion lets you go 48x, or even better, skip a preset number of minutes altogether. I have it set at 3 mins which means I can avoid seeing the ads completely.
  
• Easier access to pre-recorded programmes. I'm really not sure why Sky+ doesn't have a button to take me directly to the "Planner". Instead I have to go to TV Guide and then press Green. On my Digifusion, I can get straight to this list in one button press.
  
• Radio is on the programme guide. I'm really not sure why Sky+ doesn't offer this. They're given the programme details and they charge stations to be on the system. So why you can't see anything apart from the current programme is beyond me. This also makes it harder to record radio programmes as it's back to the old-style VCR manual timer-recording process.
  
• Programme info for other channels without switching over. Sky+ insists that you either go to the programme guide or switch to the channel to see the info. My freeview box may only have Now & Next without opening the guide (although I can still watch TV doing this) but I can read a description of other shows without leaving my current one.
  
• Displaying programmes set to be recorded in the programme guide. Very simply, shows are highlighted in red if I hit "R" and similarly un-highlighted if I press the button again. For some reason Sky+ doesn't offer this.
  

To be honest, aside from missing a second tuner and obviously the channel choice, my Freeview box offers some serious improvements over Sky+. The graphics aren't quite as neat, but they're not bad. And I can think of a few extra changes I'd add - a series link facility, and the ability to specify how many minutes early to start a recording eg. 1 minute before the scheduled start.

But it's really pretty damned good.

Happy New Year by the way. I spent it watching Charlie Brooker's excellent Screenwipe which included the best wrap up of UK TV I've seen or read this year (OTT's isn't bad, but I don't agree with everything they say. Maybe I'll write more on this another time).

I thought I'd write a brief review of the recently released Bush Wi-Fi radio. With the growing number of home networks being set up, this has to be a growth area for radio, and I've only really been waiting for prices to fall far enough to buy one.

This particular model can be purchased at Argos for £119.99 currently, although I also hear that it's available for £80 + VAT at Makro if you've got one of their trade cards.

Anyway, back to the product in hand. Setting it up was really very simple with a quick scan for local networks and then a prompt to enter any appropriate passwords. There's also a process for networks with hidden SSIDs so everyone should be catered for.

A couple of quick station listing updates (via Reciva), and I was away.

The three main options at the start are Stations, Media Player and Configure. I jumped to Stations, then selecting first Location, then Europe and then the UK which has 484 stations listed. First up had to be Virgin Radio. The sounds was good with nice bass considering that there's only a single speaker on the unit.

The buffering was very quick, and under the station name, a second line told me that it's Real Enabled. But another piece of text told me that it was actually using the 128k MP3 stream that Virgin offers. That made it sound awfully good. Plugging headphones in, just showed the quality of the audio - it was much better than our usual DAB signal, but I'll leave that argument to others.

128k MP3 streams were also used for Virgin Radio Xtreme, Virgin Radio Classic Rock and Virgin Radio Groove, or "Virgin Radio G" as it comes up on the somewhat limited display.

Flicking over to Talksport, a station I'd never ordinarily listen to, revealed what happens when you use too little bandwidth for streaming. Their 20k WMA stream was worse than a decent AM signal. I found it pretty unlistenable. The buffering took longer as well.

Over on Capital Radio, the 32k WMA was only marginally better, but disappointing for a music station. The buffering wasn't as bad as it was for Talksport, but really this isn't up to DAB or FM in quality.

Similarly, Classic FM was also only on a 32k WMA stream, but the piece of music I listened to wasn't as bad sounding as Shakira had been on Capital.

Moving over to the BBC, I tuned to BBC Radio 3. Choosing a BBC station gives you a choice of Live or On Demand. I chose live, and after a pre-roll informing me that I was listening to the streaming version of the station, it was onto the service which was encoded in a 44k Real format. I suspect that Real is the default option when there are choices, but that tends to be the BBC default anyway since it's available on more platforms. Listening via headphones, the unit had good sound to the live concert that was being broadcast when I was testing it. You could hear a little "noise" in some quieter moments though. Reasonably acceptable, although not as good as a strong FM or DAB signal.

What's really powerful about the BBC's offering, is of course, the On Demand listening. Choosing On Demand from Radio 4, I was presented with an up to date list of current programmes. If there are multiple editions, then I get a day by day breakdown to choose the one I want to hear.

Some stations, like Virgin Radio, have a variety of streams available to listen, and the radio doesn't really give you the option to choose. That's down to Reciva picking the appropriate one.

It's worth noting that I didn't do anything too bandwidth heavy whilst listening. So no torrents or anything, but I did download a couple of sizeable files whilst listening to Virgin and BBC stations, without any interruptions or buffering.

Listening to the odd on demand programmes, I did notice the occasional break-up, and the BBC has that slightly annoying habit of changing bit-rates mid-stream. But it's all very good.

There's one more part of this radio that really needs addressing. As I've mentioned, Reciva are responsible for the station list. They supply the list to pretty much all the available wi-fi radios currently on the market. If you go to the Reciva website you can register your set online which creates a "My Stuff" section which lets you add your own streams and station favourites. So, although there are ten presets built in for favourites, you can have more by going to the My Stuff menu option.

Adding streams is especially useful if you want to use a higher quality version of a stream than the one offered by default. Unfortunately, none of the three I've tried so far has worked. I listen to Paul Harris on KMOX a bit, and CBS has an annoying new system of making you register before you get a player launched. Discovering the exact stream took a bit of detective work. But although it works in Windows Media Player, the radio fails to play the stream.

What's really curious is that there is precisely no mention of Reciva or its website and the functionality it offers, anywhere in the Bush manual. You just have to "know" to get there.

I do think that some radio stations need to ask some serious questions about the quality that they're currently using to encode their streams. As more people start to get these radios (and I've heard that one manufacturer is planning on building wi-fi into most of their digital radios in the future), sub-standard streaming is going to become as issue. And only offering streams locked into players is not going to be enormously helpful, unless the stations at least let Reciva know what the real addresses of their streams are.

The only two things I can say at this early stage that could do with improving are the size of the display, which is a little small, and the shame that there's no way of getting some of the scrolling text that various players can offer. Obviously with no single standard for players, this latter is going to be a problem.

Still, all said and done, the ease with which you can just listen on demand to programming when you feel like it without booting up a computer, makes this a killer device. Roll on the advent of listening on demand in commercial radio in the UK.

By the way, it's probably a bit misleading of Argos to print details on DAB Digital Radio in their catalogue in the entry for this unit. There's no DAB or AM/FM on this product. They even print the DAB logo. Mind you, the photo shows the radio as having an antenna when it doesn't.

If you're familiar with the alphabet, you'll appreciate that any list of names sorted in alphabetical order that includes mine, will place me somewhere near the top. Indeed, unless you have friends named Aaron, Abraham, Abel or Abi, I'm quite possibly heading your list. Now think about your mobile phone contact list, and you'll appreciate that when you want to, say, send me a text, it's not hard to find my name. It's right there at the top!

On the other hand, if you don't want to send me a text message, it's also quite easy to inadvertantly send it to me anyway since a slip of the finger means that you've selected me.

Now consider a couple of possibilities. Your phone's unlocked, and one of its softbuttons says the following in sequence if you keep pressing it: "New Message" "Add Recipient" "Select Contact" "Send Message" [Return to start].

You might begin to appreciate that a phone in your pocket alongside, perhaps, a particularly angled key or coin, and you could be repeatedly pressing that softbutton a lot of times.

Guess what? That means that the person at the top of the list can get multiple blanks texts. And let me tell you, it happens more often than you think.

Other things that can happen to those lucky enough to appear at the top of phone lists include misdirected texts when the sender's inebriated. Certainly I've had very curious texts arrive on my phone in the early hours of the morning which are occassionally followed by "Please ignore my last text" messages.

Then there's straightforward calls from your pocket. One colleague repeatedly phoned me from a trip to Russia, running up an expensive bill. Even turning my phone off just meant that my voicemail got filled with rubbish. I've heard plenty of ambient train and car travel noises, as well as the background sounds from pubs and bars.

My top tip to you, if you're phone is inclined to make calls or texts without your assistance, is to enter a dummy "AAA" name at the top with a number that can't be dialled like "1". Think of all the money you'll save?

Technology Guardian has a front page piece on proposals to extend the lifespan of copyright on music, from 50 years to 95 years. Why 95 years? Well because that's what it is in America.

Actually, the real rush is because music recorded in the 1950s is now coming out of copyright and in 2012, in time for the Olympics, the first Beatles tracks will be out of copyright. As the article points out, that doesn't mean that you don't have to pay anything since publishing royalties are payable to the artist for 70 years beyond the artist's death. But it does mean that I'd be free to repackage those early Beatles songs and as long as I paid the royalties holder (in this instance Sony after Michael Jackson sold them on - I believe he may have been short of a bob or two), I can release my collections.

I've been through this before, and regular readers will know that I'm fundamentally opposed to an extension.

The tenet of the Guardian piece was actually more to do with the various British libraries being unable to legally make copies of pieces of music that are falling to bits before their eyes. While legislation to allow them to make copies as they need to is welcome, extension to 95 years seems to just be for the benefits of record companies who somehow haven't been able to fully monetise their opportunity over a period of FIFTY YEARS.

There's also the small matter of all the non famous material that's locked up in those archives. Whilst anything of any significant commercial interest will either be released by the company itself, or licenced to another label, there is more locked in there. And releasing DRM-locked electronic versions is not a long-term viable answer.

In the meantime, I still don't own a Beatles album, since they're possibly the most over-priced classic albums on sale in the UK today and I refuse to be gouged.

The BBC has released some news "vodcasts" of things like Newsnight and the News at Ten. Except that these are weekly highlights packages rather than full nightly editions. Still better than nothing.

But I wish I could get them to work on my PSP. I don't have a video iPod (or a normal one for that matter), and I'd like to be able to copy them across onto the portable digital media player that I do have.

But it seems that simply renaming them MAQ*****.MP4 files as usual doesn't work. I know I could probably transcode the file with something or other, but it seems stupid to have to do that with an MP4 file as it stands. And it'd be hoped that, like Google Video, the Beeb would offer a choice of formats for major video playing devices (and the PSP is a major platform).

A good piece on Mediaguardian about HD, with Sky's service launching today, and material already being available to some Telewest customers.

I tend to think that it won't take off quite as quickly as some would hope, since we've alredy got more definition with PAL, compared to the US NTSC format. We've also had widescreen for quite a while now. We're certainly all buying HD ready TVs, but that's really a by product of the cheaper and more readily available flat screen LCD and plasma TVs that are now on the market. They're HD ready by default.

Undoubtedly, some will be jumping to upgrade their Sky or Telewest systems, but for most it'll be a natural progression rather than a quick jump. Allied to the fact that we still don't know which format will win out in the Hi Def DVD market, complications over various DRM systems, and suddenly it's only the early adopters who'll be jumping in - at least until Sky end up giving away the boxes to all their customers.

HD won't move as fast in Britain as some expect. Certainly not as fast as it has in the States.

Orange just sent me an email promoting their usual stuff - films, music, downloads etc. I was curious about what they were doing with V for Vendetta, so I followed the link. There I learnt I could download various media... except that I can't.

Each time the 247 code that I should text to receive my downloads appears, alongside it is an asterisk that explains that "this service is unavailable on all Orange SPV phone, the PalmOne Treo and the LG U8150."

So let's be clear. The service will not work on any of Orange's own-brand phones - that is to say, their SPV range.

Brilliant.

Of course, why precisely I'd want to spend £2 on a wallpaper that I could make myself in about 30 seconds using the PC wallpapers available free from the official site, is not something to worry about here.

Similarly, I can't download ringtones or "voicetones" at the princely sum of £3.00-£3.50 each. Shame.

On a different matter, when is Orange going to release a Windows Smartphone with WiFi built in? Sadly the SPV 600, which would otherwise be my next phone, doesn't have it. Is there something around the corner? I know they don't want me making calls via Skype with it, hence cutting them out of the revenue stream. The M600 could be the answer, but it seems more of a PDA than a phone.

For the last twelve weeks, the Ricky Gervais podcast has been at the top of the iTunes chart in both Britain and the US. Indeed it even got awarded a Guinees Book of Records award as the most listened to podcast (albeit that there are other podcasts out there, distriubtedly significantly beyond iTunes, that may also be potential bestsellers).

Given that Ricky Gervais has a commercially strong product, the question was bound to be asked: "Why don't we charge for each episode?"

Well now, it seems, they are.

Now I've listened for the last 12 weeks and enjoyed the programme, going back each week, but I won't be forking out, even 95p, for further editions. Advertising support I can appreciate, but it's not so good that I'd actually pay for what effectively are just ramblings. While they may do some preperation for the show, I don't feel I'd be paying for skilled performers giving us material that I'd otherwise not get. It's good radio - and all the radio I listen to is free (or paid for via advertising or my value-for-money licence fee).

It's a shame that the BBC has yet to offer any of its comedy programming as podcasts - I suppose there's too much value in selling CDs later. To that end, I must recommend Virgin Radio's very own Al Murray as one of the best free comedy shows that you can now download, for free, in a non-proprietry format. And while you're at it, get The Geoff Show too.

There's another reason why I won't be buying it. The deal has been done with Audible. Now Audible programming is available via iTunes, but without first burning the show onto CD and then re-ripping, that's no use for my Creative Zen Touch or Sony PSP. And in any case, even at its highest quality, I'm not especially happy with the sound quality of Audible's codecs. I have bought a couple of books and plays via iTunes, and been through the 'burning a CD and then ripping it back' process and it doesn't do the sound any favours.

Virgin Mobile has announced the launch of their mobile with TV service.

Conspicuously absent from the press release are:
the cost of the service to consumers
what the TV channel package actually consists of
and when it'll be available from.

So, just the salient points then.

Nokia are making phones with wi-fi that'll enable them to make VoIP calls. (They're not the first, incidentally).

I'm guessing that Orange, and some of the other networks, won't be offering these phones in a hurry to their customers. The networks are desperate enough for revenues as it stands. They certainly don't want us making free calls when they could be earning revenue.

As things stand, the phones that get market share are the phones that are adopted by one or more of the networks. If your phone's not adopted by a network to offer to new customers or upgraders with a subsidy, then you're just left with the unlocked phone market where phones sell at significantly higher prices.

At the moment, this unlocked market is pretty small, but a move like this from Nokia could increase things. The only problem is that large numbers of outlets on the high street are now aligned with one or other network. So where do you buy these unlocked phones?

Emily Bell in today's Mediaguardian:

Watching television on your mobile is a stupid idea. Nobody will do it for any length of time at any sustained cost. But obviously the expansion of what is considered to be a mobile - size of a matchbox or size of a front door - will expand and so will the rationale for paying.

Meanwhile Endermol is reported (free reg. reqd.) to be producing "high-quality programming and compelling interactive content" for BT's forthcoming broadband TV service.

Let's leap ahead and consider Big Brother on a mobile phone for a subscription. That might work. Ot#s sto;; a waste of spectrum.

I noticed the handsets for Tesco's VOIP service at the weekend. They come in at a very reasonable £19.97 (whats with the .97 price point?). But I don't want to use Tesco's service particularly. So can I use the handsets with Skype?

Sadly, plenty of Googling reveals nothing obvious.

If you want to see film trailers, the best place to visit is, of course, Apple's Quicktime Trailer site. Indeed the main reason to continually upgrade your version of Quicktime is so that you can see things like the latest V for Vendetta trailer in all their glory. Unsurprisingly video iPod downloads are available for many of the films too.

So this begs the question, why doesn't Sony have a PSP trailer site of a similar style? Yes, if I visit the site of the big 2006 Sony Pictures films, such as The Da Vinci Code's website, I can download the trailer for PSP. But that's in the minority.

I don't know how many video iPods have been sold compared with PSPs, but if I were Sony, I would put together a big site with trailers from other film companies as well as my own. It's really not counter-intuitive for Sony to be effectively promoting their competitor's films since most consumers choose to see films based on their content, not their distributing company. And you can can buy UMDs of films from most major studios.

Sony Connect is supposedly being relaunched soon with the PSP to be an intergral part of the landscape. To get people using the site, allowing you download free movie trailers would be a smart move - the same way Apple gets you using iTunes to get free podcasts. Once you're there and registered, actually buying something is a hop and a step away.

Today's Letter's and blogs section of Technology Guardian's worth reading!

This last week or so has seen the results of two separate trials of consumer reaction to getting mobile television services to watch on their phone.

Arqiva (formerly NTL Broadcast) has just released the findings of its experiment in Oxford with Nokia which saw 375 O2 users receiving 16 digital television channels. This trial used the DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld) standard for broadcasting. Key findings were that 83% of users were satisifed with the service and 76% of triallists "indicate that they would take up the service within 12 months."

Meanwhile back in London BT Movio (previously BT Livetime) has released some findings of its trial among 1000 Virgin Mobile users using customised Windows Mobile phones, this time based around DAB. Depending on which report you read, customers are happy to pay either £5 or £8 a month for the service - only three channels at a time in this instance. 59% of respondents rated the service as "appealing" or "very appealing", while 65% said the same about digital radio.

There are some interesting findings in the usage patterns with the Arqiva trial finding an additional lunchtime peak, while the BT Movio trial indicated an overall 6pm peak.

So all is well in the world of mobile television then? Strong consumer uptake looks likely and mobile phone operators, still desperate to increase per user revenues, if only to make all their 3G licences pay for themselves, have another revenue stream to tap.

Well hold on there one minute.

Let's examine some of those numbers a little bit more shall we?

The question that supplied the Nokia/Oxford result: "76% of triallists indicate that they would take up the service within 12 months" was probably a multiple choice question with the options "definitely would" and "might" take up the service. These will have been added together (Disclaimer: of course I don't know this, without seeing the questionnaire). The triallists were also all under the age of 45, so perhaps the results aren't as strong as they at first appear.

Meanwhile in the BT Movio trial, users watched 66 minutes of television but listened to 95 minutes of radio a week. This isn't surprising since radio is far more easily consumed on the move than television is. Indeed, we should be suspicious about the 50% of BT Movio triallists who watched TV services at home. Why would you watch on a tiddly little mobile phone screen rather than your somewhat larger ordinary television. Surely it couldn't be the addition of a late night "adult" service during the trial could it? [UPDATE: The 50% figure refers to EVER watching a TV service at home. Somewhat fewer watched mobile TV the most at home]

And then there's simply the question of where precisely this extra revenue is really going to come from. The majority of the channels trialled on both services were channels that you can get free to air with a Freeview box or the Sky FreeSat system. So if they're free anyway, are consumers going to want to pay for them for the privilige of watching TV on the go. There may be some benefit to those of us who use rail or bus services to commute or travel regularly, there isn't any obvious need for television on the go. There are certainly times when it might be nice to watch TV on a mobile, but they're few and far between.

I don't know about the Nokia/Oxford trial, but for the BT Movio one, the phones were supplied free of charge, and there weren't any bills to be met (they even included some free calls). I know, because I had some limited use of one of the devices. I can tell you that they eat battery power like it's going out of fashion, and the pre-release phone I was using was brick-sized.

Incidentally, Engadget has just published a very good three part article explaining the different digital television systems currently in use and coming soon around the world.

In summary, I believe that there is a place for television on the go. Seeing the goals go in with your friends with the pub on Sky Sports News might be reasonable. And Casio have made a decent going concern manufacturing portable analogue televisions for years, but it's never been more than a niche market, and I can't see that changing. Not in a world where we can also watch videos that we've chosen on our iPods or PSPs, and portable DVD players are reaching the fifty pound mark.

What's certain is that there aren't that many people who're going to be willing to spend even £5 a month on a limited selection of TV services. So the mobile companies need to think again.

[UPDATE: It's also worth mentioning that Channel 4 is said to be very interested in getting into DAB, and bidding for the new DAB national multiplex. The theory is that since you're allowed to use 25% of the multiplex for data - i.e. mobile television - their services could be made more available. The thing I find surprising about this newly found love of digital radio is that it's now practically a year since C4 took a significant stake in the national speech station Oneword, and the only involvement they seem to have made so far was to broadcast a Jon Snow presented programme on the dangers of cannabis usage last week, also available as a podcast. So unless they just want to be gatekeepers of the spectrum, why haven't they done more with Oneword? To my mind, Oneword could be quite a valuable property if it were given a bit of a shake up, with minimal additional investment. In its current guise, it's simply too onerous on the listener to completely follow their unabridged readings, even with repeats throughout the day. For example, today they were broadcasting 30 minutes of Oliver Twist - episode 33 of 44 - and later on it was episode 38 of 41 for Jude the Obscure. Can a listener really be dedicated enough to follow so many episodes? I grant you that the 15 minute daily serial broadcast daily at the end of Woman's Hour, and repeted after The Archers sometimes runs to 15 episodes, but you don't often get any more than that. There are occassional major classic serials on Sunday afternoons that run to 9 or 12 episodes, but they're the exception rather than the rule. If I was C4, I'd play around with Oneword a little more before I got heavily into more radio services. Perhaps, broadcast audio versions of programming that doesn't rely on pictures significantly - the Channel 4 News at 8pm or 9pm could be repurposed, as could the soundtrack to the nightly More 4 discussion programme The Last Word. Be creative. Rather than stick simply to occassional webchats, why don't they have phone-ins for some of their popular upmarket programmes - say Time Team; or a spin-off radio advice show on buying property abroad (I couldn't bear such a show, but there are many who could - witness the fact that this week's seen the announcement of a spin-off magazine). I suppose, given the current Oneword ratings, such programming might run the danger of no/few callers, but with plugs on TV which are now allowable, sufficient calls should be generated.]

Sky has busily been announcing new services over the past couple of days. But there are a couple of issues with some of their new services.

The big new service today is the availability of some of their films to be downloaded to PCs owned by subscribers. The only problem there is that it's seemingly limited to subscribers who have Windows Media Centre PCs which is still quite a small subset of the overall population. Still, an interesting service, even if it's not clear whether or not the video can be transferred to other devices aside from the PC itself.

The other announcement was the launch of a Sky News video podcasting
service. The press release notes that this service is available for iPods and other "multimedia players". But the reality is that this is correctly formatted for the video iPod only and no other device. It wouldn't take much to make it work on a PSP too would it?

OK, so the Google presentation didn't exactly live up to all the expectations (or hopes) about $200 thin clients or whatever.

But I've just been reading about the Sony Reader, their new ebook machine, and there are couple of interesting aspects that are worth commenting on. The first is that the memory is pretty tiny. They're talking about the machine being capable of holding 80 ebooks at an average 800k. That makes the flash memory on this device something like 64MB - pretty puny really, albeit that you're unlikely to ever need 80 (unillustrated) books in one go. In Tesco the other week they had 256MB MP3 players for under a tenner (not in my one sadly), so flash memory has really come down.

The second curious thing is that it's expandable via Memory stick or SD card. The inclusion of the latter is really unusual. There may be the odd Vaio with an SD card slot, but Sony conceding ground to SD cards is a little like the time they finally got around to launching a VHS VCR after firmly sticking by Betamax for all that time.

Overall, I really don't see this being that big. The screen's probably great, but it's mono (less important for books admitedly). All the various file formats it plays need conversion and the price is high at $349. Indeed, wouldn't it be easier to run the software on the much cheaper (and smaller) PSP?

Speaking of which, Sony are going to be making 4GB and 8GB Memory Sticks this year. They'll cost a small mortgage I've no doubt, but that's great news for carrying content around on your PSP.

This article leads you to at first think that content producers are failing to actually copyright their product - perhaps allowing it to slip into public domain or something.

Actually, it seems to be Macrovision touting for business. They obviously don't think that they're getting their wretched technology onto enough CDs and DVDs.

If a CD has the copyright protection that Macrovision has on it, then it's no longer actually a "CD" according to the white book standards. It's a disc that may play on your CD player, but that's not the same thing - it can't actually have the CD logo on it. Their technology is the kind of rubbish that frustrates consumers who want to legally place their purchased music onto their mp3 players.

I guess that with DRM being sown up by the major players - Apple and Microsoft - the long term future of CD copy protection is bleak. Oh, and their DVD protection can easily be sidestepped. The technically savvy who are able to rip a DVD and put it onto a torrenting site are not the sort of people who're going to be too worried by "CP" appearing on the back of the DVD they're ripping.

Yes - everyone who cares knows by now that Apple's launched the new iPod Nano. Looks lovely and everything, although I'm not sure about value for money since at £139 for the 2GB model, it's half the size of the equivalent iPod Mini it's replacing.

But what I do appreciate about Apple is that Steve Jobs announces something on Wednesday night, and by Thursday morning I can actually buy it. I walked past the Apple store on Regents Street last night, and although there was quite a queue at the cash desk, they seemed to have fairly plentiful stock of the Nano. If I'd wanted to, I could have bought one.

Mind you, the front window still had a massive iPod Mini in it...

I spent a bit of time deciding whether or not I'd install the new PSP update that takes the firmware to 2.0. It adds a proper browser, but takes away all the homebrew stuff that's possible at the moment.

In the end I had to bite the bullet and download it - every game from here on in will force the update anyway.

It's just a shame that I don't have wi-fi (and none of my neighbours with strong enough signal strength have left theirs turned on and open) to make full use. At work, I managed to get the T-Mobile default site from the Starbucks next door. But you need to pay to use it.

I guess a wireless router is on my wants list now...

I was pretty rubbish on Saturday, and only made this event by the skin of my teeth - not an easy achievement given the state of London transport in the aftermath of recent events.

Anyway, it was well worth going to, and there was the usual problem of deciding which events to see - the main lecture stream or the seminar stream.

My biggest technical accomplishment of the day was surely to work out how to operate the taps in the bathroom though. I felt completely stupid when having spent a couple of minutes waving my hand under unseen (and un-present) sensors, to get the water working, before finally realising there were foot pedals.

Biggest joke of the day was when a session on device hacking began with audience members being invited to bring their Ipod Shuffles to the front. They were immediately put in a cardboard box, "shuffled" and redistributed. Later on, they had to be "un-shuffled" when it became clear that valuable files might also be saved on the drives.

Anyway, lots of stuff to see and learn. Many more people I should have said hello to, but didn't. But that's my shy/nervous demeanour.

And I'd happily be building a Myth TV box right now, were it not for the fact that when our IT department rolled out new PCs to our department over the weekend, they insisted on taking away the old ones and not selling them off cheap. I'd have paid £100 for my old machine!

"Moblogging" - another horrible word. But I do love the underlying technology. So now, using my new Flickr account which gives me an email address that I can email photos from my phone to.

Of course, I also spent an age getting my moderately new Orange SPV to email via Gmail. I'm still a little disappointed that the phone insists on downloading everything in my Inbox irrespective of whether or not I've read them or have labelled them. But time will tell.

The other day I was in Borders in Oxford Street having a bit of a wander after work looking at books and so on, when I had a look at my mobile phone and realised that I'd been sent a midi file of Krafty by New Order. I'm on a few junk text message lists, and it's possible that I once gave my phone number to a record company that are now pushing ringtones and the like to get me to buy New Order's new album. I just hoped that I hadn't been charged three quid for a ringtone (Incidentally, why do people pay so much for ringtones when the actual tracks only cost 79p each at Itunes?).

I was back in Oxford Street today and I realised what had happened. I didn't get sent the ringtone by the record company - I got it from a window display in HMV. There's a big ad for the New Order album in the HMV's window and I'd noticed it a couple of times over the last week or so. What I hadn't noticed was that in the middle of poster there's a "hole" where you point your mobile phone to receive an audio demo by infra-red. How did I receive the ringtone via infra-red without knowing? I didn't. It's also being pushed via Bluetooth. Before I visited Borders, I stopped by in HMV, and must have spent enough time browsing near the front of the store for the data to reach my phone. I still had to choose "Accept" but I did so the previous week out of curiosity, and in any case, if you've got it on your phone, you've been charged at that point anyway.

All in all, it adds up to a very clever marketing idea. Possibly not new, but something that'll be used more and more I've no doubt.

I've only recently got a phone with Bluetooth and I'm still a little new to it, but a brief "look" around in a pub the other week brought at least ten other phones in close enough proximity. I still haven't tried bluejacking though.

All the phone companies are pushing this at the moment, and Orange is among them. Somehow, I haven't yet felt compelled to upgrade, or be lured by the prospect of perhaps seeing who I'm calling (but probably not, since they won't have a phone. And in any case, isn't one of the best things about phones the fact that you don't have to see the other person, or more to the point, worry about them seeing you?), or watch goals or movie trailers on a screen the size of a largish stamp.

So it was worth "experiencing 3G" on the Orange website. Go here (Flash required), click on "Experience 3G", then choose "Video Calling" and watch the worst acting you've seen since you last watched a schools' language programme. The guy hasn't even learnt his lines and keeps looking up to see the idiot boards.

I can't claim ownership of this but it makes me chuckle.

Next time a friend or colleague is wowing you with their new state of the art mobile phone fresh from the box, pick it up, weigh it in your hand and comment on how light it is. But then add sagely, that of course it'll be heavier once it's been fully charged...

The news was abuzz was the story that Dixons is no longer going to be selling VCRs once its current stock has run out. This strikes me as a very suspicious move on their part, and I'm not sure what to make of it.

A couple of things spring to mind.

1) The margin on VCRs has come down enormously, with them going for as little as thirty quid if you shop around. They therefore probably don't make as much money given the space they take up as other products.

2) Dixons themselves have refocused and are now seemingly focusing on selling smaller products like digital cameras, mp3 players and the like. They do sell televisions, but I'm guessing that these make up a smallish proportion of sales since Dixons tend to be town centre stores, whilst larger purchases are more likely to made from out of town stores with car parks.

The reality is that the video is not yet dead, because we don't have a medium to replace it. Sky+ is doing well, but it and other hard disk recorders are their infancy at the moment. And if you do have a Sky+ and want to keep something, what do you record it onto?

Recordable DVD is seemingly the recordable medium of the future for keeping programmes. But at the moment it too is at an early stage, with competing technologies, and hit or miss products. The "ultimate" combo of hard disk combined with DVD recorder is still a pricey premium option. Cheap and cheerful they are not, even if £150 is now the lowest point of entry for these products.

But of course with millions upon millions of legacy tapes still out there, people are going to need VCRs for some time to come. Similarly, it doesn't take much hunting to find cassette players and recorders - in Dixons for example.

The real reason for the Dixons announcement is likely to be a marketing reason trying to show, in the run up to Christmas, that Dixons is at the forefront of all things technological.

Two things worrying about this story.

1) That DRM could be stymied before it's got off the ground (and with the Chinese government backing it, cheap radios are going to be much more plentfiul far quicker than DAB radios have been)

2) That it could stop Shortwave radio transmissions completely. That would be terribly sad. I want to see a full working digital alternative to analogue before it gets switched off. A colleague borrowed some experimental DRM gear recently and it seems to suffer the manifest problem with digital broadcasting - if you're on the cusp of clear reception, then you get horrible quite literally "bitty" reception.

Woo. With the advent of an OS X version of Skype I was finally able to communicate with my brother using this VOIP application. I've got to say that it worked pretty well. It probably helps that we both have broadband, but the quality is massively better than that offered by the regular telephone. Just sub-ISDN I'd say, although it is prone to breakup and strange drop outs. Perfectly usable though. Now I wonder if it works through the firewall at work?

I love DAB. In many respects it's great. But there are things wrong with it...

Their time has yet to come. There's Sky+, but it's quite expensive and tied to a Sky subscription. Freeview does now have a 7 day EPG which is an essential part of the mix, but the boxes are unsubsided so still pricey.

So they need to come down in price (you can buy a VCR at Richer Sounds for less than £30 just now). But what I hadn't realised until today was that one of Sky's reasons for increasing the capacity of their next genereation Sky+ boxes was to allow the box to record Sky Box Office movies whether you want them or not, and then charge you when you unlock them and watch them video on demand style.

But lets take this one step further. The price of hard disks keeps falling, and instead of 80MB or 160MB disks we end up with terrabytes of data. And multiple tuners (to handle the different multiplexes). Why not have a box that's recording just about everything all the time, on either a 24 hour or 7 day rolling bassis? Then, when you're in work the next day, and someone asks if you saw Trouble At The Top last night, and you realise that there isn't an imminent repeat, you can just turn on your box when you get in and watch the programme.

This is probably a little way off but not far. And it removes the need for bandwidth hungry streaming.

A more immediate question is why Sky doesn't yet let you control your Sky+ box remotely. Surely it'd be simple for users who are out and realise they're not going to back for tonight's Eastenders, to log into a secure area of Sky's website. There they'd be able to send a signal over the Sky satellite system that let their box know that it should record BBC1 between 7.30 and 8.00 this evening. You could text your request in too if you've pre-registered. Premium texts would earn Sky some cash (I hate premium texts in principle, but it's a possiblity nonetheless). All completely doable I'd have thought.

In the meantime, I read this article in Salon yesterday, but have so far been unable to get Buttress (at time of writing, it's not working) to work at home. The idea is that you marry together RSS feeds from your favourite TV torrent websites with an intelligent search filter that looks for your favourite shows. That way, they get downloaded without you doing anything. Great idea, but as I say, so far I haven't got it working.

Finally we're beginning to see cheaper generic music players coming through. I got an email from Novatech today advertising their 20GB music player for 149.95 - the NPOD if you will! I'd been wondering how long it was going to take for some Chinese factory to start knocking out generics.

The specs don't look too bad, and it claims reasonable playback. I'd say that there was a pretty good chance that the price will have come down by a few quid by Christmas. And this is only days after the 24 July launch in Europe of the 5GB mini iPod was announced by Apple. That'll set you back 180 quid. So take your pick.

On a related note, there was a letter in today's Guardian Online section berating the fact that Sony very cleverly failed to allow the transfer of music from their NetMD devices back to a computer. Indeed the same is generally true of iPods I'm lead to believe. Of course there are ways and means around the iPod issue - but I've yet to come across a Sony solution that didn't involve using analogue sound card ports.

(And now to go off on a complete tangent, can I just recommend that everyone read the Online section of The Guardian in general. Today's articles were an excellent representation of what to expect on a weekly basis: Ben Hammersley on software patents - a bad thing; a piece on Phil Gyford; and the usual round-up of new technology announced this week. All this and a fabulous science section up front.)

So the iPod is, what, over two and a half years old now? My big question is why no-one has quite launched the iPod killer. Yes I know that the iRiver is pretty damn good and about a hundred quid cheaper than the equivalent iPod, but why aren't there cheap Taiwanese or Chinese versions around - I mean really cheap? I'm amazed that there aren't. Today's Guardian Online lists a couple of other entrants in the market, but we're not talking mega-cheap. I know there are loads of Apple evangelists out there who can't understand why I wouldn't want the overpriced, yet beautiful simplicity of an iPod, but I want something with a big hard drive that plays mp3s and is relatively cheap. If I want a personal CD player - there's the full range to go for, but essentially from 19.99 to 199.99 they all play CDs. That's what I'm talking about.

I'm also slightly disturbed about the quasi-religious fervour with which some people talk about their iPods. I was reading the new issue of the excellent Word magazine, but as a magazine with several pages regularly devoted to all things iPod, someone really ought to tell them that "other music players are available".

Aaargh.... Nooooo..... My primary hard drive's failed at home couldn't get it to boot for love nor money. Obviously I haven't been backing up assiduously either. At least the email is likely to be OK minus about a week's worth - it backs up onto another drive on a weekly basis.

Add to that the fact that I forgot my wallet and Travelcard today (the nice man at Oxford Circus let me through without paying - well I had no cash - and gave me form to fill out once I'd borrowed some cash at work and bought a return ticket to let me have my money for that fare back! Left my Palm at home too.

And no wallet means that I can't go out and buy a new hard drive at lunchtime to begin the reinstallation process tonight. And what a daunting prospect that is. At least this time I'll be able to properly use Norton Ghost to make a backup.

Well not content with finally twiddling with MTAmazon enough to get it working, I've now been playing with the top 10 thing on the right hand side of the page.

Basically you can play around with Amazon.com's scratchpad in an attempt to build an RSS XML feed, but the scratchpad doesn't fully work. For one thing, the locale setting makes no difference, and for another, it doesn't mention RSS feeds.

It's easy enought to discover that these need to be of the form:

http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?t=webservices-20&dev-t=amznRss&BrowseNodeSearch=130&mode=dvd&bcm=DVD
&type=lite&page=1&ct=text/xml&sort=+salesrank
&f=http://xml.amazon.com/xsl/xml-rss091.xsl

But that's only good for the US. First I inserted &locale=uk into the string, and then I replaced the initial URL with xml-eu.amazon.com which started serving me with the correct information. The resultant URLs were completely wrong since Amazon doesn't have a UK version of xml-rss091.xsl. So I took a copy of that file, and just replaced all the amazon.com's with amazon.co.uk and saved it locally.

Et voila, after replacing developer tokens and associate ID, you get what I have on the right.

Here's the sample code:

http://xml-eu.amazon.com/onca/xml3?t=webservices-20
&dev-t=amzn-Rss&BrowseNodeSearch=62&mode=books&bcm=
&type=lite&page=1&ct=text/xml&sort=+salesrank
&locale=uk&f=http://www.adambowie.com/weblog/xml-rss091.xsl

UPDATE: One thing to note is that I have bastardised that xml-rss091.xsl file a bit so that the description no longer exists. I've replaced this with Amazon's asin code since I wanted to use that in conjunction with MTAmazon to pull in pictures of the books. Now I probably should have rewritten the file entirely into an RSS 2.0 compliant version, thus letting me have both pieces of information. But that seemed just too much like hard work. I'm sure someone else will fully script that version.

Well I'll be buggered if I can get MTAmazon working at the moment. It returns precisely nothing. I'm fed up with it now!

UPDATE: Obviously I've got it working again.

Today see's the launch of the Nokia N-Gage, its phone and pocket games console combo. I've got to say that I'm not sure about the whole thing. I had a bit of a play with one in the Nokia shop on Regent Street yesterday, and the first thing that strikes you is its size. It's a bulk of a thing compared to the dinky new Gameboy Advance SP, and doesn't look like too well designed to use as a phone.

As usual with these combinations, they're neither one thing nor the other - be they phone organisers or phone gaming systems. I'm sure that playing bluetooth games together is great fun, but the system's far more expensive than the Gameboy.

Time will tell, but I think portable gaming is one area that Nintendo still rules.

The government last week published a report into digital television, Digital Television For All: A report on usability and accessible design. The DTI published it in association with a research outfit called The Generics Group.

In particular the report examines current motivations for going digital, and the usability of the systems currently available.

It still seems strange to me that the government believes that it�ll be able to turn off analogue broadcasts by 2010 (never mind 2006). We�re getting towards the end of 2003 just now, and we don�t have anyway near the coverage that�s acceptable.

The report highlights the fact that Dixons are currently seeing one in four set-top boxes being returned, with at least half of them showing no discernable fault.

The report�s main focus is on the fact that set-top boxes are hard to use, with a lot of the population being actively disadvantaged by their design. While this is worthy and useful stuff, we�re still overlooking the sheer improbability of conversion happening to the government�s timescale.

That wasn�t the remit of this report, but it�s the main issue still. The average home in the UK has more than one television, and each of these, plus each video recorder needs a separate box. Even allowing for the continued fall in cost of these devices, is the government really going to render so many pieces of technology useless overnight?

Scary - I finally got around to fitting a new fan to my main PC. The problem was that every time I came to rebooting it, the motherboard made beeping noises at me, and I had to wait a few minutes for it to cool down. This is surely not a good thing!

So now I've replaced it with a Coolermaster thing that I got at PC World (well I wanted something in a hurry. Relatively easy to fit, although the old fan was a bugger to get out without damaging nearby RAM chips and the like.

I wasn't impressed by the instructions which came with the fan which were minimal in the extreme. And an instruction to add some special gel, but to apply neither too much nor too little, without any measurements given, wasn't exactly easy to follow.

I suppose the next thing would be to see if I can upgrade this PC's processor much on my current motherboard. Every time I look, I get seriously conflicting results. One step at a time I guess.

A story on Mediaguardian reports another little area in which mobile operators are stinging their customers - international texts. Of course Orange already double charge you with the cost at the far end as well as the cost at your end.

Charging 24p for such a tiny piece of data when email is free is daylight robbery however.

With Orange busily cancelling useful stuff like Everyphone, there must be room for a customer focused telecoms operator to come into the fray. Maybe 3?

Slightly annoying - my PC crashed, and as a consequence, it seems to have lost all my cookies.

Now do I try to get into this Fightbox thing?

Slightly annoying - my PC crashed, and as a consequence, it seems to have lost all my cookies.

Now do I try to get into this Fightbox thing?

I see that Tessa Jowell is claiming that the digital switchover is likely to be in 2010. I just can't see that.

While many homes are now "digital", they only have one receiver which means additional TVs and videos are not. There are also vast tracts of the country that are simply not covered by anything bar Sky. All those little transmitters serving tiny communities in rural parts of Britain - particularly in Scotland and Wales. And the technology is still unproven.

It's taken a while, but finally Dell has released their $199 and $299 Pocket PCs to the market. Just a couple of minor riders - the prices require you to mail in for a $50 rebate (they bank on you not mailing in), and secondly they won't reach Europe until February/March next year. And can I see a $1=�1 price comparison coming?

At least they're not �500 toys for the rich anymore. But I still think it'll be a while before my trusty old Psion 5 is updated.

I'm still suffering from unresolved firewire "issues". I can capture happily from my camera but can't record back to it. I don't know if there's a problem with the camera, my computer or just the cable. Some experimenting at work tomorrow (or later today) is in order.

Today's Guardian handed over it's second section totally to the phenomomenom that is the mobile phone. Full of fascinating facts about the number of mobile phones overtaking landlines internationally, that one person in six on the planet has one and that the British do a lot of texting (oh - you knew that).

But can anyone explain to me why when I went to the urinal after the film this evening, the guy next to me steps up to the urinal and before doing anything else, switches his phone on. Some things take precident to my mind! And don't people panic that they may have missed a call. The credits had barely started rolling, when the tell-tale green and blue luminence began to appear throughout the auditorium.

This article on The Register is suggesting that both BMG and EMI (Germany, at least) plan on copy protecting all their music CDs from now on.

I'm furious at this news for three key reasons:

1) I can't play the CDs back on my PC. Some copy protection systems ship with below par windows encoded sound files, but I didn't purchase a CD for this. I want to be able to listen to music without the hassle.

2) I bought a NET MD a few months ago, made by Sony. The idea is that software that ships with the product allows me to copy my CDs onto MiniDisc, compressing the files down into varying levels of compression to get more music onto one disc. Sony, is of course at the forefront of the copy protection business, busily protecting many of its key releases. So I can't listen to them on my Sony MD!

3) The way that most of these copy protection systems work is by using the built-in CD error correction system to their own ends. The CD standard has error correction which allows the seamless playing of CDs with small scratches and imperfections, without the listener hearing them. Copy protection systems mean that this error correction is reduced, and therefore the CDs are more susceptible to scratches than before.

I heartily support the Campaign for Digital Rights stance on this matter. The bottom line is that I refuse to buy CDs like this that I can't listen to as I choose. And if I come across one, I'll just have to return it to the retailer I bought it from. These CDs do not conform to the CD "red-book" standard, and therefore shouldnot have a "CD" logo on the case.

Piracy is certainly a concern for music publishers, but maybe they should look at some the sky-high prices they charge, which "disincentivise" purchase. I don't begrudge artists and performers their royalties, but the prices they charge for a product that costs just a few pence to manufacture cannot be helping sales. And as for the massive increase in blank CD sales - well some are undoubtedly used for piracy, but there are a multitude of legitimate applications in these days of bloated file sizes and broadband.

It's been a while since RAM was so cheap, and at �25 for 256MB PC133 (what my PC takes) with one spare slot in my computer, I decided to wait until it was even lower. Well of course it went back into the �50 range, so I waited. And waited. And finally bought the extra RAM this week for about �19 plus postage, which leaves my PC maxed out at 768MB.

I just had to let out some steam! I've just spent about two hours trying to install, remove, reinstall, remove, install once more, then think I have working a TV card, until finally I nearly had the computer not boot up at all. It all drives me totally mad.

Just to explain that my computer has been away having a totally shot motherboard replaced, and for whatever reason, it looked like it was happening again.

Now, of course, I have a (seemingly) working system with no TV capture card. Better the devil you know.

I'm trying to work teach myself Freehand 10 so I can put together the company's weekend away magazine. Why is it always print settings that bugger me up? If I create a 300dpi image in Photoshop and then import it into a 300dpi Freehand document, shouldn't it look good? It doesn't.

Interesting article in yesterday's Guardian Online section about 3G's slow eventual rollout now beginning.

I have some serious doubts about the whole thing, and the amount of money everyone spent. On the one hand I certainly don't want the Treasury paying any of that money back - if I go mad at a Bargain Hunt antiques auction, I won't get much sympathy for getting carried away in the heat of the moment. On the other hand, someone's going to have to foot the bill for all this, and that must surely mean the consumer.

Now I'd love to be proven wrong, but I just can't see consumers really going for it that much. The phone companies are all desperately trying to increase their revenues, but I firmly believe that there's a maximum amount of cash consumers are prepared to spend on all their communication/entertainment needs. And in that I include, ISP subscriptions, Satellite/Cable costs, video/dvd spending, mobile phone bills, and video games. The only way one can increase their spend is for another to get less. So 3 who have Premiership football rights, have to really get us to spend less on our Sky Sports subs if we're to pay for video downloads. I admit that I want to see Arsenal's goals on a Saturday/Sunday/whenever, but with ITV's The Premiership, Sky Sports News, BBC News footage and the like, I can easily get to see the goals. I'm not going to pay extra to see jerky video on a 2"x3" screen.

I'll leave aside all the technical issues of whether the system actually works, but there's the cost of the phones, the poor battery life at the moment, the lack of 3G coverage and so on.

Mobiles are a fashion accessory now, but the real function is to carry speech, and they do this now, very successfully. I'd hate to be seen as a doomsayer who couldn't see why television and the railways would take off, when there was no "demand" for them before. But I genuinely don't think that beyond a few alert services etc. and some fun in sending photos (both currently doable with 2/2.5G phones), there's not a whole lot more to needed. Video phones? Limited. Now prove me wrong!

I didn't realise how quickly I'd miss my computer when it broke down. Actually, let me put that another way. I didn't realise how much I'd miss my computer. I know that I'm fortunate to have an old computer (and I do mean old) which lets me get on the net and get my email.

But what about video editing, cd-burning, audio editing, and the like? Aaargh. Just phoned up Mesh who collected the PC last Monday to find out how long it'd take. They said that it's normally 12 working days. That takes me to next Wednesday (and of course I'm travelling to Sheringham on Thursday...).

I'll just have to find other ways to entertain myself.