This may seem a bit off topic, but advertising is the spice of life at the moment for me.  I find myself keeping track of lot’s of clever video that advertise everything from blenders to mobile phone plans, and they are getting better and better.

Luckily enough I’ve not been burdened with the legacy of children, but I know that if I had, I’d be as protective as all get out, to the point of psycho as the dad in this T – Mobile ad!

An old concept but still funny, and I’m sure a lot of Dads out there will relate!

If you’ve been following me on twitter lately (not many of you do) you may have noticed I’ve been losing some proverbial sleep lately over something I never thought I’d lose sleep over and that’s reading. I’m not a writer (I hack it here) but I’m not a writer, and for years I haven’t really been a reader either. I almost had to laugh when I saw Doug and all our other web friends were tripping all over themselves to get to their wallets to order the Kindle 2. However, when I started deciding it was time to look into developing for the iPhone as a side project, I soon realized I was going to be doing a lot of reading. I’ve since ordered maybe 8-10 different books and half of them have been in digital format. I stuck with some in paper form because it was all that was available, and some others I bought in e-book format because it was much cheaper.

However as time has gone on, one thing I’ve come to find is that while paper is great to read its tough to carry and can get pretty destroyed after shoving into and out of a bag a few times a day. The other thing I’ve come to find is that reading a 500+ page book on my laptop can be tough. Granted the screen on my MacBook is excellent, but still its not meant for reading books. One other minor problem has crept in and that’s during my ‘free’ time at work I tend to be away from a computer so e-books don’t work out to well. I’ve tried them on my iPhone, but I just can’t do the 3″ screen reading and again the lighting of the screen tends to wear out my eyes.

So anyway, I was at Target (of all places) the other day and ran across the Sony prs-505 personal reading system. Since that time I’ve been in a constant cycle of debate with myself over if I should follow the herd and pick up a Kindle or go with a slightly lesser known but still very capable Sony reader. Through all of this, I’ve come to some very difficult conclusions and made a few decisions along the way, including the fact that e-books NEED Apple and they need Apple bad.

Read More …

Here in the States, we’ve had the Android platform available via T-Mobile’s G1 for quite a while now, and it looks like come May 5th the HTC Magic will be arriving in the UK through Vodafone.

It will be touchscreen only, no keyboard like the G1 currently has and will apparently be offered for free on tariffs over £30. You can read more about it over at Boygeniusreport.

You know, I’m over Windows Mobile updates, it seems like I’m going to have to get married, create progeny, and wait for  the grand kids to start appearing, before I get to have a look at  WinMo 7. Has anyone else noticed that there is a windows update link in WinMo 6.1 that does nothing? All of the hubbub about  Windows mobile today, is focusing on the fact that there is an actual release date for Windows Mobile 6.5, May Eleventh!

Woo Hoo, you gotta be kidding right, a release of the actual OS, does not really mean your gonna be loving it any time soon. It has to be something device manufacturers are kosher with, and the flow on to you the consumer, may take a little time!

The fact is that top line developers are creating applications for a  sluggish, underdeveloped OS that is crawling along at a snails pace [note: a sloth may be slower] and making them work. The Question is: When will Microsoft see the value of the Mobile OS, and invest in it appropriately?

Streamlining is probably the key for most of us, the reliance of the NetCF programming base for WinMo does actually bloat a lot of programs for the format, and let’s face it, a lot of major developers are stuck in 2003.

Most of us should realise that we aren’t going to see major changes in the near future with WinMo, but we still stay loyal, Go Figure?

Microsoft set to release Windows Mobile 6.5 next month – SlashGear

So we got a message in our inbox today about Nokia losing 90% in in earnings over the last year. The doomsday headline “Could this be the end of Nokia”?

I’m not so sure. Nokia isn’t huge here in the US cellphone market, but I do know they’re one of the biggest smartphone (and regular cellphone) providers in the United Kingdom and Europe.

According to the latest Bloomberg report, it’s not that bleak.
This is just my personal opinion, and I will welcome any comments good or bad. The entire economy is down, tech stocks are down but they’re coming back (I have a vested interest and have seen what’s been happening the last few weeks). After what happened in the last 8 months on the stock market, all companies are in the same boat – now it’s just a matter of faith in investments.