Exclusive: Amazon: why we won't make a touchscreen Kindle
TechRadar spoke to Amazon today about its new Kindle device which is set to hit the UK this August.
The refreshed Kindle range has been made 20 per cent smaller than previous devices and utilises new more readable e-ink, but features like colour and touchscreen technology are nowhere to be seen on the device.
There is a very good reason to this according to Amazon.
Speaking to Steve Kessel, senior vice president for Kindle at Amazon, he told TechRadar that there won't be a touchscreen version of the Kindle as this will impede on the user experience.
We won't compromise
"I don't think there will be a touchscreen version [of the Kindle] and let me tell you why: touch for an LCD display makes a ton of sense. Because touch is a layer which goes over the top. But an LCD is backlit so it doesn't matter," Kessel notes.
"But if you put touch on an e-ink display – a reflective display – then anything you put on the top ruins readability. You can already see this with some devices which are out on the market at the moment that have integrated touch into the displays.
"It increases glare and makes it more fuzzy. We won't do that; we won't compromise the reading experience because of the technology.
"Colour is the same, there isn't a great colour reflective display yet."
When we asked about the simple functionality of the Kindle and its general lack of features and gimmicks, Kessel explained: "We didn't want to design a gadget, we wanted to design a functional dedicated reading device."
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Hands on: new Amazon Kindle review
There's no denying that the ebook market is one of the most burgeoning out there at the moment, with sales of ebooks overtaking sales of hardbacks and myriad devices arriving, which can take advantage of the thousands of digital books available online.The question remains though: do you need a dedicated device for ebooks, or will phones and tablet devices suffice?
Amazon is doing its best to convince the world that dedicated devices are the way forward for ebooks and its new and improved Kindle shows this. Couple this with news that the e-tailer has finally launched a UK version of ebook store and it does seem that things are falling into place.
The new Kindle comes in two flavours: 3G and Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi only. There's a £40 difference in the two Kindles, but the choice really comes down to how you want to consume your ebook content. If you are going to be buying books on the go, then the 3D version is for you.
If you are going to restrict your book buying to your Wi-Fi enabled home, or whenever you hit a hotspot, then this is the one you want.
The size of the device itself has been significantly reduced, but without any reduction to the reading area. This stays at a decent six inches.
The new slim look definitely suits the Kindle. It now feels like the paperback version, rather than a bulky hardback.
Weight-wise, it is a full 15 per cent lighter, making this one of the most comfortable ebook readers we have held. At 247g, there is absolutely no strain on the arm – it's even lighter than most paperbacks.
And it you choose Wi-Fi only, then the weight is snipped to a stupidly lean 241g.
Once we did take our eyes off of the look of the device – and the new granite chassis is very desirable – the thing that grabs your attention most is the screen. Yes, it's the same size as prior Kindles but the e-ink is clearer, with Amazon bringing an all-new ink solution to the device.
It's of a higher contrast and even under the brightest sunlight, it looks brilliantly clear. The fonts have also been tweaked to be easier on the eye and pages turn that little bit faster.
There is still that jarring 'bleed' you get with page turns, but it is definitely speedier.
Memory size has also increased. You can now store 3,500 books on the Kindle. Which is an impressive feat, considering that's almost the whole of Barbara Cartland collection. Almost.
The battery life has also been extended so that you can now go a month without charging the thing. If you are heavy on the Wi-Fi use, though, this is restricted to just 10 days.
When it comes to the 3G, Amazon isn't messing around with micorSIMs, but is giving its 3G away for free, so you don't have to worry about the cash you are spending on data transfers. Given the rather small files ebooks come in, we doubt you would be worried about this but it is a decent gesture anyway.
Something has clicked with the new Kindle. If there are those that are unsure about a dedicated ebook device, then this is something which will definitely change your mind.
In relation to other devices on the market it is cheap. When it comes to font clarity, nothing else competes and direct access to the Kindle store from the device means you aren't tied to a computer when you use the thing.
We never thought we'd say it but maybe time is ticking away for the humble paperback.
The new Amazon Kindle has a UK release date of 27 August. It will cost £149 with the free 3G (supplied by Vodafone) or £109 for a Wi-Fi only version.
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Gary Marshall: Facebook wants you to work for it - for free
Facebook has a new service, Facebook Questions. As the firms' Blake Ross explains, "Millions of people ask their friends questions on Facebook every day. What new music should I listen to? Where's the best sushi place in town? How do I learn to play the piano? How can I give my valuable time and knowledge to help an enormous, vaguely creepy corporation make money that it won't share with me?"
I made that last question up. Maybe I should post it on Facebook.
One question I don't need to ask is: what on Earth is Facebook up to now? It's obvious: it's another Facebook land grab, another attempt by everyone's favourite sinister social network to take something that exists on the open internet and bring it inside Facebook's reinforced walls.
There are already stacks of Q&A sites online - Ask Metafilter, Yahoo Answers, Quora, Ask.com and many, many more - but none of those sites are Facebook. Time spent on those sites is time you're not spending on Facebook, and when that happens Facebook makes a sad face.
By "sad face", of course, I mean "attempts to clone those sites in the hope it can do to their business what a Terminator would like to do to Sarah Connor". Like Google and Microsoft before it, Facebook's sheer scale means that when it decides to compete in a new sector, the resulting competition is a bit like a fist-fight between Soviet Russia and an eight-year-old girl.
Content for nothing
Facebook has half a billion users, and even if only the tiniest percentage of users contribute answers, and even if only the tiniest percentage of those users aren't complete and utter imbeciles - which, to be fair, is a pretty big if - then Facebook will end up with an enormous amount of Q&A content.
Unlike the "demonic" content farms who are often pilloried for paying a pittance and stuffing the web with search engine bait, Facebook seems to think a pittance is far too generous.
The answers won't cost Facebook a penny, but collectively they could bring in enormous amounts of traffic that Facebook can throw targeted ads at.
It's a simple enough plan: make every single link on Google point to a Facebook page. Where's the best place to buy a T-31 Modulator? Ask Facebook. What's the best time of year to go turtle punching? Ask Facebook. How can I tell if I have a horrible bum disease? Ask Facebook. Have we always been at war with Eurasia? Ask Facebook.
Matt Haughey created MetaFilter, one of the smartest websites on the entire internet. In a recent interview, he put it like this: "Facebook's coming at it from a corporate position. It's basically like AOL in 1997 - everything is there and there's no need to go anywhere else. I don't know if they're even considering what users want anymore. It's all about how to maximize revenue and all that crap."
Still, it's not all bad. Dumbasses only have so much free time, so let's make sure we encourage them to spend all their time posting and answering on Facebook. By making Facebook into an idiot magnet, magically drawing all the droolers to its warm embrace, that'll keep the other Q&A sites idiot-free. Hurrah for Facebook!
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Magic Trackpad given teardown treatment
Apple's Magic TrackPad has been given iFixit's customary teardown - and they can confirm that magical unicorns are not part of the components list. The teardown specialists discovered that Broadcom's chips are the key components, running both the touch surface and the Bluetooth connectivity.
It is Broadcom chips that can be found performing similar roles in the Magic Mouse and iPad/iPhone from Apple.
No unicorns
"We didn't find any magical unicorns inside, but we did uncover a plethora of components inside the Trackpad's *very* thin profile," said iFixit.
"Even though repairing the components might be infeasible, we're still impressed by everything Apple's engineers managed to stuff into the Trackpad."
One point of note is the clever way that the button is pressed by users.

"The Magic Trackpad has a unique way of triggering the mouse button," adds iFixit's report.
" As you press down on the top surface of the pad, the two rubber feet near its front edge push on a plate attached to the chassis.
"The plate squeezes the electronic mouse button switch, producing the characteristic 'click'."
More pictures and details are at the iFixit website.
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Internet gets massive security upgrade
DNSSEC, the new web security system which hopes to make the internet harder for hackers to attack, has been officially given the go ahead in the US – ushering in a new era of the internet.Just two years ago the safety of the internet came under question when security consultant Dan Kaminsky found a fatal flaw in the internet's Domain Name System (DNS).
Although this was hastily patched up it got web honchos ICANN thinking fast on how to make the internet safer from attacks and DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security) was born.
At Black Hat USA 2010, this new system was shown, which adds root signatures to all things on the web.
This extra cushion of verification is something which should deter hackers from trying to spoof users into thinking that they are looking at a real website, when it is actually fake.
Root verification
Speaking at the Black Hat conference, Kaminsky said to V3 that: "What DNSSEC allows is that each party online can say not only am I sending you a mail but I can put a stamp on it so you can see it's real.
"This isn't something we're had the ability to do on a wide scale."
DNSSEC has already been rolled out to .org and .uk domains and the makers of the system are hoping that it will be adopted by all major domains, given the low cost of the system.
Just this week it was announced that the British CEO of CommunityDNS is one of only seven people in the world who holds a key to reboot the internet in the case of a terrorist attack.
This all came about because of the new security features found in DNSSEC.
Although DNSSEC is deemed to be a much safer alternative to DNS, Kaminsky admits the system isn't perfect.
Something we are betting the likes of 4Chan will be working on to prove right now.
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In Depth: iOS vs Android vs WebOS vs Maemo
There's no doubt that Apple has done a fantastic job with the iPhone, both in the hardware and in the software. It has single-handedly transformed the once-turgid smartphone market into a total money spinner. Every manufacturer has had to rethink its strategy to compete, giving Linux the perfect opportunity to test its mettle.
The striking thing is how comprehensively Linux has succeeded on mobile phones. Linux has become the OS equivalent of the ARM processor, sneaking to market dominance through its fantastic versatility, performance and cost.
This success is a significant vindication of what Linux stands for and how its works. It shows that in the ultracompetitive world of the mobile phone, at a hardware level, marketing, branding and style don't matter.
What manufacturers want is an operating system that delivers, and that's why they're choosing Linux. We've looked at three Linux-based phones that give the iPhone ecosystem a run for its money. There's the Palm Pre, running WebOS; Nokia's Maemo 5-based N900, and the HTC Legend, running Android. Each gives Apple's device a run for its money, and they beat it today in significant areas. So which is best for you?
So let's look at hardware first:
Palm Pre: hardware
After building a business on niche 'Personal Digital Assistants', Palm tried for years to re-align itself with smartphone-wielding business executives by embedding its old feature set within a Blackberry-like mobile phone.
With the Palm Pre, the company has finally hit its target. The smooth contours and gloss black design of the device made a considerable impact on the market, and it's a decent size and design.
The addition of a vertically scrolling keyboard, which appears from the lower side of the unit with a soft click, is a step up from the embedded versions of older Palm devices. But it's still too small if you have large hands and fingers, especially as it's designed primarily for two-thumb use. Getting your right thumb to hit the H key after your left thumb has just hit T can be problematic, but as with all such devices, you do get used to it.
The lower section of the display is used to hold commonly used icons, as well as the all-important Call button. Just click on this to either dial someone from your address book or enter the number manually, and the entire package feels more portable and manageable than older HTC devices, as well as the Nokia N900.
The original Palm Pre also features a single button beneath its capacitive multitouch 3.1 inch 320x480 display. Pressing this will minimise any running application and enable you to run another at the same time, a feature no doubt designed for maximum impact in a world dominated by the currently mono-process iPhone.
But the button has been dropped in the new Palm Pre Plus, which also doubles the internal memory to 512MB, and doubles storage space to 16GB of Flash memory.
More importantly, it also increases the space slightly between the keys, potentially aiding fat finger input, but we weren't able to get our hands on a device to be able to say whether it worked or not.
Inside the case, there's an Omap 3430 ARM CPU and enough battery life to last you around five hours of talking and a reported thirteen days if you're waiting for a call. You can also change the battery if you need to, in contrast to the sealed, locked-down iPhone.
The silicon also includes the C64x co-processor, which should be able to boost playback of Ogg Theora files, as well as Google's new VP8 video format.
The graphics themselves are driven by an integrated PowerVR SGX 530 core, which is slightly less powerful than the PowerVR chip reported to be in the iPhone 3GS (it's impossible to make authoritative comparisons, as Apple doesn't publish exactly what its devices use).
Finally, a modern phone wouldn't be complete without all kinds of sensors. The Palm Pre features an accelerometer, a proximity sensor to help when making calls, and a GPS for navigation. There's also a pretty good camera, featuring 3.2MP capture along with an LED flash and geotagging, but there's no autofocus. Version 1.4 of the OS, released in February, added the ability to capture and edit video.
Nokia N900: hardware
The most impressive thing about the N900 is its screen. It easily trumps the Palm Pre for resolution, and in our opinion, clarity. 800x480 is a big step up in size. iPhone 4 has a 960-by-640 resolution.
But there's one big drawback: the touchscreen is resistive, and that means no multitouch. Nokia puts a brave face on it, but there's no doubt this feels like a serious drawback. As if to make the point more clearly, the N900 even comes with an embedded stylus, just like the bad old days of Windows Mobile, but you could argue that the ability to use a fingernail is an advantage.
Its CPU is the same as that found in the Palm, an Omap 3430 with C64x coprocessor. But this one is running at its full clock speed – 600MHz rather than the 500MHz used in the Palm.
Memory capacity is a little mix-and-match. There's 256MB of physical memory on board, but up to 768MB can be used from flash memory as a kind of swap file for processes running in the background.
In a more useful step back to Windows mobile devices, flash memory is installable using a Micro SDHC card slot, and the device can access up to 32GB of extra storage.
The N900's battery is of a slightly higher capacity than the Palm, pulling in 1320mAh as opposed to 1150mAh on the Palm, but the higher clock speed takes its toll. We were only able to get around eight hours of normal use with the N900, compared with at least double on the Palm.
Under the surface, there are the obligatory axis sensors that can switch the screen between landscape and portrait mode, as well as a GPS and proximity monitor, just like the Palm Pre and most Android devices.
Another worthwhile feature is the ability to connect your N900 to a TV, using the audio and video cables provided. But the most important physical characteristic of the N900 is the slide-out Qwerty keyboard. It's backlit and provides more space than the equivalent keyboard on the Palm Pre.
But it's still cramped, and even worse, each key is arranged in a strict matrix. The letter Q is directly above A, for example, while P is in a column on its own on the far-right. The Palm Pre keyboard has a slight offset, and as a result is much easier to use.
The added camera bevel on the back of the device also means that you can't rest the N900 flat on a surface, which makes typing even harder, although the bevel does hide an angled stand for watching media on your phone.
Add this to the lack of input correction, and you're left wondering about whether the added weight, size and complexity of a real physical keyboard is the best possible solution for the N900.
HTC Legend: hardware
There are dozens of different Android devices, all with different specifications, from the size of their memory to the resolution of the screens. Which one you choose generally comes down to price and performance, but the dominant manufacturer is currently HTC.
It builds Google's Nexus One, currently the flag bearer of the enterprise, as well as its own Android devices, the two most recent of which are the HTC Desire and Legend.
The HTC Legend shows how far HTC has come with its designs since the release of the iPhone. It's smaller, thinner, lighter and has a better, brighter, capacitive OLED screen, even if it is at the same resolution.
The most striking part of the design seems to have taken a leaf out of Apple's book, as the entire case is made out of a single piece of aluminium.
The front of the device has five keys: one for accessing the home screen, another for opening the menu, one for Back and another for Search. Just below these is an optical track button, which seems to operate a little like the underside of an optical mouse. It depresses, as you'd expect, but you can also move your finger across its surface to move a hidden cursor around the screen.
You'll also find a 5MP camera, complete with autofocus and flash, a micro-USB slot for connection to your computer, and on the inside, the standard array of GPS, proximity, G-force and ambient light sensors.
A hidden MicroSD card slot is present for storage, and you'll need to add this to the price as you'll need storage to hold apps, photographs and data.
Unlike earlier HTC models, there's no slide-out keyboard. Android's on-screen replacement is just as viable as the iPhone's virtual keyboard, although the smaller screen forces the keys to be a little closer together.
The haptic feedback, an effect that quickly vibrates the device when you press a virtual key, is a useful addition that can help when you type quickly.
Maemo
The N900 runs Maemo 5. This is the operating system that's going to be replaced with MeeGo, the Nokia/Intel joint effort to pool their resources and take on the might of Apple and Google.
Only MeeGo isn't officially going to be available for the N900, and this leaves us with Maemo indefinitely. And when MeeGo does arrive, early impressions are that it's going to look and behave a lot more like Moblin than Maemo. This may mean that the N900 is the last in a long line of Nokia tablets to use the GTK-based Linux system.
The basic concept behind Maemo 5 is borrowed from virtual desktops. Only, instead of being called desktops, they're called 'views'. Swiping your finger to the left or right across the screen will take you to a different view, complete with a parallax effect that scrolls the icons and the background image at a different rate.
Each desktop can be populated with your choice of widgets, online links and applications. By default there are only a few, including links to the integrated navigation tool, Ovi maps, various Nokia-centric online links along with several social networking sites and services.
Besides this, there's a windows button, a clock and a battery/connectivity meter in the top-left of the display.
Hold your finger down on a blank space on one of these desktops and a small configuration gear appears in the top right. You can use this to either enter a further configuration menu, or remove links on the current screen.
The menu will let you change the theme, the background, add a bookmark, and get access to the view widgets.
With a default installation, these include email access, a media player, a current location map view and the Twitter and Facebook links preconfigured to the first screen. To get at everything else, you need to hit the windows button on the top-left.
On the first touch, this will show a minimised view of every application you have running, enabling you to switch between them with another touch. On the second touch, you'll see the applications view. This is a scrollable list of icons for everything currently installed on the device.
You'll find a file manager, for instance, a PDF reader, calendar, sketch tool, a few games and an instant messaging tool that talks to Skype, Google Talk, Facebook, Jabber and SIP contacts.
Most impressively, there's even an X terminal. Confusingly, the Ovi Maps Navigator icon looks almost identical to the icon used to launch the Safari web browser, and the operating system's user experience can be a little inconsistent.
Earlier versions of Maemo used a More button to page through to another screen of applications, while other screens, such as the settings panel, used vertical scrolling.
It's also sometimes impossible to work out how to get back to a previous screen. But this is improving, with the 'More' button removed by the latest update and the UI getting faster to operate with each new release.
Maemo's web browser is called MicroB, and it's based on Firefox. It works well enough and you get maximum website compatibility, but it's not as fast as a WebKit-based browser and you have to suffer several Firefox annoyances, including its tedious 'Ignore Certificate' routine.
But our biggest quibble was fixed with the 1.2 firmware update release late May. You can now view web pages in portrait mode, a crazy omission from the previous releases.
But the best thing about the N900 is the App Manager, the portal into a world of third-party applications. The N900 has a very enthusiastic following, and there are some reasonable applications to download. There's the fantastic Angry Birds game, for example, and even Brain Party.
You can also find both an SSH client and server, along with dozens of other tools, utilities and emulators. There's even a version of PyQt, along with an editor, which makes building your own applications a breeze now that Qt is part of Maemo.
It's the polar opposite of what you can install with the iPhone, and is the best reason for using an N900.
Android 2.1
Despite early scepticism, Google's Android is doing very well. A recent report by the NPD Group suggests that it may even be out-selling the iPhone in the US.
This isn't so much of a surprise when you realise that there are so many different phones running the operating system, rather than Apple's handful.
But Android has the potential to be more than a mobile phone. It's now making a break for a variety of mobile devices, including iPad competitors recently announced by Dell and HP as well as more media-centric devices like the two new 'Home' tablets from Arkos. It's also an operating system that has seen many changes over its relatively short history.
It's an easy OS to use, borrowing ideas from the iPhone and Maemo, as well as a few from older versions of Windows Mobile. Our Legend device uses Android 2.1.
As with many other HTC phones, including those designed for Windows Mobile, there's a custom graphical shell that sits over the vanilla OS that HTC has dubbed, 'HTC Sense', and the Legend and the HTC Desire are the first phones to get a new version.
The first thing you notice when you unlock the device by pressing the power button and sliding your finger down the screen is that the display is very bright and colourful. This is HTC Sense, a flip-card time display above a weather applet and several shortcuts to the most common features of the device.
As with the N900, you can now slide to the left and right to access seven virtual desktops, each of which have been configured to include another weather applet, SMS, email, quick access to your favourite contacts and a list of bookmarks.
It's easy to add your own widgets to this display, and there's a huge selection to choose from, including those who access your social networks, music, YouTube and photos. While these applets only offer immediate visual functionality, there are plenty of more comprehensive applications too, and these are accessed by touching the arrow in the bottom-left corner.
This takes you to the raw Android operating system, and by default, there's the same standard selection of tools installed that you find on the Maemo setups on both the Palm Pre and the N900. The exceptions are mainly thanks to your Android device being tied to your Google account. Click on 'Talk', for example, and you'll see a Google Talk messenger client. Click on 'Mail', and you can instantly access your Gmail inbox.
This Google-centricity doesn't stretch to pre-configuring the email applet though, which requires a more standard POP3/IMAP or Exchange server, but it does mean that you'll get instant access to Gmail messages as they arrive, as well as your contacts and calendar populated for free without any further configuration from Google's servers.
One nice feature of the calender is that as you view your agenda for the days ahead, you'll also see a guess to what the weather is likely to be.
The search is also very powerful, as you might expect, spanning both local and remote data. Hit the magnifying glass button and type a search term, and you'll see its entry from Google online, as well as within any calendars, emails, notes or applications you've stored on your phone.
In general functionality, there isn't that much within Android to distinguish it from other mobile operating systems. On our Legend it was stable and fast. Although not quite as smooth in transitions as our iPhone 3GS, it was much quicker than the N900.
But the heart of the OS is the Market application. This is the portal to the world of third-party applications. Android's Market is the closest competitor to Apple's App Store, and includes tens of thousands of games, utilities and applications to download.
The interface is also very slick, downloading and installing applications in the background, rather than by switching back to the launcher view, as on the iPhone.
But its best feature is that you don't have to just install applications that are officially supported by Google – you can grab third-party applications as APK files, stick them on your memory stick, and use Market to install them manually.
But you might not need to. At the end of April 2010, Android's Market was reported to contain over 50,000 applications, the Apple App Store had over 200,000. While this might seem like a large gap, Android's Market is at the same point the App Store was in June 2009.
Palm has a long and well earned tradition for designing operating systems that are both resource-and user-efficient, making the best use of your hardware's capabilities and your intuition. As a result, the best thing about the Palm Pre's WebOS is its speed.
It's a quick, responsive and intuitive system that feels slightly slicker than both Android and Maemo. It's also going to be the operating system most likely to win-over non-technical users, as it doesn't drown basic functionality in a sea of potential applications and other options.
It also makes great use of the multi-touch display, letting users pinch, zoom and rotate the interface in similar ways to Apple's iPhone. The main view looks like a slightly squished iPhone GUI, with five quick-launch buttons on the bottom border of the screen and a main view that lets you scroll left and right through whatever applications and tools you happen to have installed.
Press the single button on the front of the screen, and the full-screen display of your applications scrolls into the background slightly, showing your background as well as any other applications to the left and right of your current application.
On the Palm Pre Plus, now that this button has been removed, you just need to swipe your finger up the screen. You can then switch between applications with a left or right swipe of your finger, or get back to the launch menu to start something else. Quitting an application is as simple as swiping upwards.
On a default device, you get a version of Google Maps, a YouTube app that feels very similar to its iPhone equivalent and a media player and photo browser. There's also a general document and PDF viewer.
As with Nokia's N900, there's no requirement to sync data with your desktop, and no way of doing so. Fortunately, most things can be stored and grabbed from the cloud or accessed through the browser.
The web browser is excellent. Based on WebKit, it loads pages quickly and the multi-touch interface lets you navigate between pages with ease. The browser doesn't have the ability to create new tabs, but the multi-tasking nature of WebOS means you can launch another browser just as quickly, and run this alongside the current session. There's no prospect of Flash, but this is a larger general issue.
Possibly the weakest part of WebOS is that there is a serious lack of third-party applications. There is an app store, just as with the Nokia and Android offerings, but the platform has failed to inspire developers to port their projects and make them available. It comes in third place in comparison.
This is the biggest drawback to the device, because it means that you can't augment your installation with the applications and utilities you might be expecting.
The rapid growth of mobile applications is the most important difference between the current generation of smartphones and what came before, which is why the Palm Pre currently fails. Hopefully, with renewed investment from Palm's new owner, HP, new portable devices using WebOS and the new version of the phone, development could pick up.
If not, this might be the final nail in Palm's coffin. Under the hood How to experiment with or develop apps for your chosen platform Each of these three platforms is built on Linux, and unlike some of their competitors, you can use Linux to experiment with each device, as well as build and deploy your own applications.
Each competes favourably with Apple's development environment, and in many ways the phones we're looking at here are better. You're not forced to use Objective C, or pay for a developer's licence, for example. And nor are you forced to stick to the official API or vague application guidelines.
Developing for Android is straightforward, especially when you compare it with Apple's closed and insular development environment: anyone can download and install the SDK.
You start with a small helper package, and when this is run, everything else you need, including the main body of the development environment, is downloaded and installed into your home directory. Even without messing around with any source code, you can run a virtual Android phone using the SDK.
Just launch the Android SDK and AVD Manager, click on New and run. You'll be able to play around with a complete virtual Android. The only thing missing is the Market application.
If you run the development environment, you can send your applications directly to the running Android and debug their execution in exactly the same way you would on a real device. You can create a virtual device, and send your applications to this device through plugins installed for your IDE.
As with Palm devices, most developers seem to prefer the Eclipse environment, and you'll find plugins designed to make things easier as part of the download package. If Android development interests you, you should take a look at our development tutorials from a few months ago.
If you want to get stuck into an Android phone in the same way you might with a Linux desktop, then you're going to run into problems. Like each one of these devices, the core components are locked behind an encrypted ROM so that users can't make fundamental changes to the configuration and hardware.
As with all such protection schemes, there are ways around it, and many people use rooted Android systems to give themselves full access to the hardware.
WebOS
Like Android, Palm provides a virtual version of its phone's operating system with which to experiment, develop and play with. But this version really is virtual, as the install procedure requires you to grab the latest version of VirtualBox along with the various elements of the SDK.
Getting the whole thing to work is slightly trickier than with Android's single master application, but it isn't too difficult, and once it's up and running, you can play with WebOS on your desktop without having to find a real phone.
The only difference in the operating system is that, as with Android, there's no application store running within the virtualised environment. Also like Android, you can find plugins for the Eclipse development environment that will handle communication to your device and to its virtualised version.
Despite selling on millions of devices, WebOS is in desperate need of new software, which may give developers an advantage over the Android market, as your application is more likely to be noticed. Also, an update to both the OS and the SDK at the beginning of the year is likely to make development much easier.
This is the inclusion of SDL, the groups of open source libraries often used for games development and emulators. This means that other SDL tools, such as the thousands you find within a typical Linux package manager, could be ported to WebOS with relative ease, especially compared with starting from scratch or learning Objective C.
But at a lower level, the Palm Pre shares another similarity to Android, and that's that it is locked down at the kernel level. As a result, you can't get complete control of the device without going through a rather arcane and unofficial procedure.
Maemo & MeeGo
Both Maemo and MeeGo are in a big state of transition. What's worse is that the N900 is not going to be updated to run MeeGo, which means that you could argue developing applications for the current model's Maemo 5 is a waste of time. But if you want to plan for the future, Linux is a great platform for MeeGo development.
This is because the official development environment for MeeGo is Qt Creator, which is a lot easier to use for beginners than Eclipse.
And because Nokia owns and develops Qt Creator, you will find there are plenty of examples, good documentation and a platform that's fully supported by the company that makes the hardware.
This makes MeeGo development for future Nokia and Intel devices much more like the Apple experience, especially when done in combination with Nokia's Qt SDK. This is a separate package from Qt that bundles Qt Creator alongside all the development libraries you'll need and a highperformance simulator which can emulate the look and feel of your phone.
Linux vs iPhone: the winner
Mobile Linux is an unprecedented success. It amazing that our open source operating system is rivalling Apple without the massive research and development budgets, without the singular vision and without curtailing users' freedom, albeit with help from the likes of Google.
What's most impressive is that Linux-based mobile phones can beat the iPhone without resorting to free software idealism. In many cases, they're just better. Simple functions like modifying your home screen, or replacing your music and photo browsers, are almost impossible on the iPhone, and ridiculously easy on all three of the platforms we've looked at.
Their APIs aren't controlled by a single developer, they don't force draconian limitations on their use, and you're free to create and install any kind of application you choose, regardless of the moral judgements of the developers behind the platform.
But the best reason is that they all run Linux, and while you might not be able to get into the operating system as much as you can on your desktop, you can't completely escape from it either. Many Linux tools and applications have been ported to these devices, and much of the third-party software you find in their app stores has been derived from open source projects.
This means you're probably already familiar with them, and it also means that there's a great sense of longevity in these phones. The hardware may change, and so too may the operating system and APIs, but the free software bedrock upon which they're built won't change, and can only go from strength to strength.
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Review: Compro VideoMate S800F
It may look like the graphics card from your first PC in 1997, but the VideoMate S800F from Compro is a handy bit of PCB that allows you to watch and record live television on your PC. Along with the S800F card itself, Compro has included a software suite, a remote control, and a vast multi-coloured spaghetti of cables.
Thankfully you won't need to use all the leads provided, they're included because the S800F is extremely versatile in terms of the aerial connections it supports. DVB-S (Freesat to its mates), DVB-T (Freeview) and the all-but-defunct Analog connections are all fully supported.
Compro's bundled software suite also lets you record live TV straight onto hard disk and take screenshots.
The S800F is intended to allow users access to TV with the ease they're used to from their actual idiot box, but with much more tweakery and functionality.
Installation is simple as.
Bung the card in a free PCI-E slot (the S800F will fit in just about any PC including home entertainment systems due to its low profile), connect it up to your signal method of choice, install the software and endure the tedious auto scan process that we've all learned to dread since the first digibox was conceived.
Easy.
Just as well it's simple though, because Compro's setup guide for the S800F is so badly translated it becomes enigmatic and rather poetic at times.
The same can be said of the included software; at once point while I was updating the driver for the card I was informed that simply 'an event' had prevented successful installation.
Compro's DTV 4 software suite is a simple, but immensely effective bit of kit, but if you're getting your TV signal through anything but DVB-S, you can just as easily use the S800F with Windows Media Center.
Compro's software allows quicker access to all features, such as the time-shift and multi-screening, but Media Centre sure is easier on the eye if you're just using it as a straight TV.
The single biggest advantage Compro's S800F has over simply watching TV on a, you know, television, is the ability it gives the user to record live broadcasting and save it directly to hard disk.
It's as easy as pressing the big red button either on your remote or on screen, and setting the file path you want to save to. Other features, such as choosing your reception from amongst a myriad of unavailable satellite networks, are less useful...
We liked:
It's hard to lay into the Compro S800F for its functionality, ease of use or reliability. Short of some quite endearing mistranslations in the manual and software, it's a very user-friendly package.We disliked:
The problem is, however easy you make it, using your PC to watch TV will never be as simple as using a TV and a digibox. You don't want wires snaking across your room connecting your PC to an aerial any more than you want to shift the thing next to the TV.That would be beyond futile.
With the rise of on-demand services like iPlayer and 4OD available on your PC, do you need a tuner card all that much?
Final word:
A versatile and user-friendly card, rendered partially redundant by online and on-demand TV.Specifications:
Input support: DVB-T, DVB-S, Analogue, FM RadioForm factor: Low profile PCI-E
Remote control: Yes
Software support: Windows Media Centre
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Report: AMD overtakes Nvidia in chip shipments
The latest figures from Mercury Research have suggested that AMD has overtaken former market leader Nvidia in graphics chips shipped in the second quarter of 2010. The figures suggest that AMD captured 51 per cent of discrete graphics chip shipments compared to Nvidia's 49 per cent, representing a huge turnaround from a year ago.
Indeed, 2009's second quarter saw AMD with just 41 per cent of the market - making it a 10 per cent year-on-year swing.
Short of predictions
Nvidia has already told the market that its revenues will fall short of predictions, but the company will be keen to stop the rot.
AMD revealed last month that it had shipped 16 million DX11 cards in the past 9 months.
The company's successful 5800 series tapped into the latest DirectX11 technology offered by Microsoft Windows 7 and has reaped the benefits of getting to market first.
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Facebook Questions beta is announced
Facebook has unveiled Facebook Questions, with the beta functionality offering its users the opportunity to poll the wisdom of the Facebook community. Facebook's mighty reach means that Facebook Questions could well prove to be a major hit, despite rivalry from internet sites like Yahoo Answers or the search engine Ask.
"Millions of people ask their friends questions on Facebook every day. What new music should I listen to? Where's the best sushi place in town? How do I learn to play the piano?" explains Facebook's release.
Beta arrival
"Today we're introducing Facebook Questions, a beta product that lets you pose questions like these to the Facebook community," it continues.
"With this new application, you can get a broader set of answers and learn valuable information from people knowledgeable on a range of topics.
"Since we like to develop products carefully over time with your help, Facebook Questions is available to a limited number of people right now, and we'll be developing it rapidly based on their feedback.
"We're aiming to bring this product to all of you as quickly as we can."
'Ask question'
If you happen to be one of those granted access to Facebook Questions you can participate simply by hitting the 'Ask question' button at the top of the screen - you can add a poll or photo.
"To help us show your question to the most relevant people and ensure the best answers, you can tag it with a specific topic," adds Facebook.
"For instance, if you have a question about what type of camera you should buy, you could tag it with "Photography." If you want to find the best bike routes in the area, you might tag it with "Cycling."
"The questions you ask will be shown to people who have expressed interest in the particular topics you tag, as well as to your friends and friends of friends."
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Nintendo 3DS price unveiled on 29 Sep
Nintendo will release the price and the release date of the eagerly awaited 3DS handheld console on 29 September. A spokesman for Nintendo Yasushi Hiroshi Minagawa told the Japanese branch of news service Bloomberg that more details on the Nintendo 3DS would arrive in two months' time.
The Nintendo 3DS has already caused a huge stir with its glassless stereoscopic 3D, and TechRadar's early impressions of the handheld have been favourable.
UK market
The UK has always been a consistent market for Nintendo's portable consoles and the 3DS is likely to sell well.
Although there was no confirmation if the 29 September date would also bring news of the UK release date and price, it is likely to be the first quarter of 2011.
The news came as Nintendo reported a 25.2 billion yen (£184.3m) loss for its first financial quarter, down from a profit of 42.3 billion yen a year ago.
Sales declined 25.6 per cent during the three month period to 188.6 billion yen (£1.4b), and operating income fell 42.2 per cent to 23.3 billion yen (£171m).
"Appreciation of the yen and the lowering of the price of Nintendo DS hardware in Japan and Europe adversely impacted net sales and operating income," said Nintendo.
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Nintendo 3DS price unveiled on 29 Sep
Nintendo will release the price and the release date of the eagerly awaited 3DS handheld console on 29 September. A spokesman for Nintendo Yasushi Hiroshi Minagawa told the Japanese branch of news service Bloomberg that more details on the Nintendo 3DS would arrive in two months' time.
The Nintendo 3DS has already caused a huge stir with its glassless stereoscopic 3D, and TechRadar's early impressions of the handheld have been favourable.
UK market
The UK has always been a consistent market for Nintendo's portable consoles and the 3DS is likely to sell well.
Although there was no confirmation if the 29 September date would also bring news of the UK release date and price, it is likely to be the first quarter of 2011.
The news came as Nintendo reported a 25.2 billion yen (£184.3m) loss for its first financial quarter, down from a profit of 42.3 billion yen a year ago.
Sales declined 25.6 per cent during the three month period to 188.6 billion yen (£1.4b), and operating income fell 42.2 per cent to 23.3 billion yen (£171m).
"Appreciation of the yen and the lowering of the price of Nintendo DS hardware in Japan and Europe adversely impacted net sales and operating income," said Nintendo.
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Review: Toshiba Portege R700
The Portege R600 has long been one of our favourite ultraportables and it has now been upgraded with the Portégé R700 – the lightest Intel Core-powered laptop we've seen at 1.1kg. Toshiba claims up to nine hours of battery power will be on offer, but since our review sample was a pre-production unit, we were unable to confirm this.
Despite its tiny form factor, the review sample we saw featured a high-powered Intel Core i7 620M processor and 4096MB of DDR3 memory. Core i3 and i5 models are also planned for release and even at this pre-production stage this is one of the most powerful ultraportables we've seen.
During preliminary testing, we found the laptop extremely fast to use, running standard office applications and more demanding programs with ease.
The use of an integrated Intel GMA HD graphics card means even basic multimedia tasks such as photo or video editing are also possible.
Toshiba and Intel have developed what they call Airflow Cooling Technology. This places the core components near the chassis' edge so that a fan can continually draw cool air into the chassis to be blown over the components to keep them cool.
The system works well in allowing such powerful components to be used inside such a small laptop, but we did notice the left side of the chassis gets quite hot during intensive use.
Resilient design
As well as being thin and light, the chassis is incredibly tough. Only the lid feels flimsy, but is in fact designed to flex under pressure, reducing the risk of cracking.
The 13.3-inch screen uses transflective LED screen technology for optimum visibility indoors and out, and the panel provides great colour and contrast.
Usability is less impressive, although this could be a result of our pre-production test machine, with the isolated-style keyboard proving one of the spongiest we've used.
To keep the chassis as light as possible, a 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD) has been used rather than a standard 2.5-inch hard drive. While SSDs are less prone to data loss caused by knocks and bumps and also provide very fast access to your data, the limited storage space is an unfortunate trade-off.
More pleasing is the fact that Toshiba has managed to squeeze a DVD rewriter into such a small laptop, for read/write access to CDs and DVDs.
Connectivity is also top-notch, courtesy of 802.11n Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet. There's also a 3G module for wireless broadband access.
Even at this pre-production stage, we're very impressed by the Portege R700. While there are a few minor niggles, we're confident they will all be resolved for mass-production and this is sure to be a big winner for Toshiba.
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In Depth: 20 brilliant web apps you've never heard of
Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr - a few giants so dominate the web app world that it's hard for anyone else to make an impression.We've spent some time looking beyond the leading sites, though, and discovered a host of interesting tech startups.
Some take existing web app ideas and add a new spin of their own. Others are more innovative, using fresh concepts to deliver powerful new ways of using the web. But they're all worthy of your attention - and here are 20 of the best.
1. TeamLab
Big business has long understood the value of powerful and efficient collaboration tools - and now TeamLab is making them available to everyone. Project management with tasks and milestones; instant messaging via a built-in web client; blogs, forums, news, polls, photo albums, a wiki and more, are all yours for free.
The service is perfect for small businesses, clubs, or any group of people who need to work together online. And the platform is open source, too, so you can alternatively host TeamLab yourself or extend it in any way that suits your needs.
2. Roc
Roc is a free online music creator that's entirely browser-based, point and click - no musical ability required. It looks like most other loop creators, in that you choose from a decent selection of instruments (there are 10 drum types alone), assign them to tracks and then click to create notes.
Editing options are unsurprisingly on the basic side, but Roc is a lot of fun to use, offers plenty of scope for creativity and lets you save the results as an MP3 file when you're done. (The instruments are all Creative Commons-licenced, too, so whatever you create can be used in any way you like, no royalty restrictions to worry about.)
3. BuzzVoice
Time. There's really never quite enough, is there? But maybe BuzzVoice can help. This clever app grabs news from your choice of more than 1,600 top blogs and news sources, and converts them into audio files in real time. You can then stream the audio directly to your PC, listen to it on the go via the BuzzVoice iPhone or iPod touch app, or save it to your MP3 player for playback any time.
The free version of buzzVoice has ads and some limitations - you're allowed a maximum of 10 web sources in your personal playlist, for instance - but it worked for us. And if you need more, then the commercial BuzzVoice Pro can be yours for $3.99 monthly.
4. HomePipe
Music, videos, pictures, work documents - your PC is packed with important files. And now, with HomePipe, you can access them from anywhere. Securely share the folders you need, then access your content via an iPhone or iPod Touch, Android mobiles or other PCs. The system is currently a little basic, but it's easy to set up, and allows you to, say, stream all the music on your PC to your phone.
5. Resnooze
Resnooze is a well-designed reminder application that makes it easy to be prompted for recurring tasks (daily, weekly, monthly and so on). Just enter a line of text about whatever it is you need to do, choose the task frequency, optionally share the alert on Facebook, and that's it: you'll now be sent regular reminders by email, so you'll be able to access them from anywhere.
6. Scrumy
Organising a group of people to work on a project can be complex, difficult, time-consuming - or you can just use Scrumy. There's no registration involved, just enter a project name and you're off.
Next, enter some "stories", high-level goals that you'd like to achieve. Then create a few to-do lists that will help you get there, and assign individual tasks to your friends and colleagues. They can then log on to see what's required, change the status of various tasks - set the first to "In Progress", say - and keep an eye on what's going on.
Scrumy is basic, but also simple to use and very effective. You have to be careful about what you put on your page, though - it's public and can be viewed by anyone who enters your URL. If that's a problem, check out Scrumy Pro, which adds password protection and a number of other useful extras for $7 a month.
7. Good Noows
Good Noows is a stylish feed reader that collects the news from your choice of topics and sources, then assembles it into an eye-catching newspaper-type layout. The app is particularly strong on visual styles - every topic can have its own look, if you like. And if you spot a story of particular interest then you can share it on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more in a couple of clicks.
8. Touration
If your website is complex, then it's important to give your visitors the guidance they'll need - and Touration makes this very simple. The site allows you to build guided tours for your site, with multiple callouts explaining everything the viewer needs to know. This is all done within a simple WYSIWYG editor, so no need to write code or worry about scripting issues.
You will have to embed a simple script into your web page to make this work, but the Touration site has plenty of guidance on how to do this so it shouldn't get in your way.
9. iSendr
When you need to send a huge file to a friend then there are plenty of services that will host it for you. But what if it's something confidential, private, a file that you'd really rather not leave on some distant server? Then iSendr could be a better choice.
Point the program at the file on your PC, give your friend the private link, and they'll be able to download it - but directly from your system. The connection is encrypted and the link can even be password-protected for additional security.
10. Online Converter
There are plenty of sites around that perform some useful file conversion, such as transforming HTML code into a PDF document. Online Converter goes a little further, though, by providing tools to transform audio, video and image files, documents and eBooks from one format into another.
There's excellent format support, so for instance the site can handle 11 image file types, and 9 eBook variants. And the Video module is able to output movies targeted at particular devices, including the iPhone, iPod, Nintendo DS, PS3, PSP, Wii, and XBOX360.
11. Wozaik
Regular text-based bookmarks are compact, but don't tell you very much. Which is why, if you scroll through your collection, there are probably many bookmarks where you've absolutely no idea what they represent.
Wozaik takes a different approach, allowing you to crop content from your favourite websites, and save them on the same page. Your grabs then become dynamic bookmarks, and work just as they did on the original site: links are clickable, video and audio can be played, and when the site is updated then your view of the content will change accordingly.
12. 101in365
More than just another to-do app, 101in365 aims to inspire and get your life moving by persuading you to list 101 things that you plan to do in the next 365 days. Your first challenge comes in thinking of 101 goals, but as the site points out, these don't have to be huge: "learn how to boil an egg" is just fine, as is anything else that will personally make a difference to you.
Once you've created the list, lock it, and go to work, marking items as in progress or completed as the year goes by. You can optionally make your list public, too, so friends and family can check on your progress and make sure you're on schedule.
13. MugTug
MugTug offers an attractive suite of tools to help you work with graphics online.
Darkroom is an easy-to-use image processor for tweaking an image's brightness, contrast, exposure, contrast and saturation, as well as applying a few special effects.
Sketchpad is an interesting paint and drawing tool, with all the usual options, and some surprising extras: a spirograph drawing tool, customisable gradient and pattern options, a range of swatches, and more.
And once you join the site's online community then you're able to share your creations (and any of your other favourite photos) and view those of other members, add a comment to anything that catches your attention, and share ideas on how to improve your work.
14. Tweetaboogle
Tweetaboogle is an interesting mashup of Google and Twitter in a Facebook-like interface. Just carry out a regular web, news, video or image search, and the Google results are given context by any related tweets that the site has uncovered.
You could then click your preferred Google link; maybe you'll be inspired by the tweets to carry out another search; or you might even add a tweet of your own (anonymously, if you like) - it's your call.
15. ZOCIAL.tv
You don't have to go trawling multiple websites to discover which videos are grabbing the world's attention right now - ZOCIAL.tv displays the top trending videos on Twitter and Facebook on one, simple page. Just choose your preferred category, hover your mouse cursor over a thumbnail to see the video title, and click to view it: easy.
16. DearMap
If the main online mapping apps don't deliver the results you need, then DearMap may be able to help. This handy web service takes a base Google Maps view of your location, then allows you to customise it with lines, shapes, captions, icons and descriptions.
A URL allows you to share the results directly with anyone who might be interested, or you can use an embed code to add the map to your website or blog. Either way, any visitors can then post comments, and if you've produced something really special then they're even able to share the map on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social media sites.
17. Historious
You bookmarked a great article a couple of months ago, and now you need to find it again - but which one was it? If you're not the type who bothers with tags or descriptions then it may take some time to find out. But that's where Historio.us comes in.
This lightweight and simple tool bookmarks a page using its bookmarklet (no bulky extensions here), and then allows full text searching of your bookmark collection, any time you like.
18. Envolve
Envolve provides a very simple way to add Facebook-style chat to your website or blog. Just copy and paste a couple of lines of code and your site will gain a chat room at the bottom of the screen (collapsible, so it'll take the minimum amount of space). And not just any chat room, either. You're able to have multiple tabs for separate conversations; chats that stay with you as you move from page to page; even real-time translation for chats with visitors from around the world. And each chat gets its own short URL, so memorable conversations can easily be reviewed or shared with others.
19. Publisha
Calling Publisha a blogging service really doesn't do it justice. Sure, there's a simple WYSIWYG editor that you can use to create articles, but the idea is that you'll these to create "issues", custom digital magazines.
You can publish these at publisha.com, on your own domain, via iPhone and iPad apps, or view them on the Kindle and other e-readers; a Facebook app adds a searchable archive of articles to your Facebook page; and if your content is really good then you can even make money from your work with the built-in ad platform.
20. ShortForm.tv
While there's plenty of great videos on YouTube, separating them from the dross can take a little work, so if you prefer an easy life then ShortForm.tv may appeal. This new site scans an array of online video sources, identifying the latest viral hits on your behalf. And all you have to do is visit ShortForm.tv, choose a channel - "Facebook Hits", "HaHa Funny", "Animated Shorts" and so on - then sit back and watch a continuous stream of video content - no more manual searching required.
If that sounds a little too passive then there are ways to get more involved, though. You can skip a clip you don't link, or give it a thumbs down if it doesn't appeal; share clips via Facebook or Twitter; even create your own custom channel with all your favourite clips.
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Review: Toshiba Satellite P500-1DZ
Toshiba's Satellite P500-1DZ is a big screen media centre, built for multimedia use. With its huge 18.4-inch screen, capacious storage and powerful graphics, it is ideal for work and play and a great choice for university studies. The thick chassis weighs a back-breaking 4.5kg, so this is not a laptop you'll want to carry outside very often. The 210-minute battery life is surprisingly capable, however, and allows basic mobility.
The entire chassis is finished in glossy black plastic. While this creates an eye-catching style, it won't suit all tastes. The plastics are also particularly susceptible to scratches and smudges, and will require regular care and cleaning, which may not suit less careful students.
Glossy plastics are also used across the keyboard, although fingerprints are thankfully barely noticeable. The board is frustratingly spongy to type on, however, requiring a firm strike to register. All the keys move quietly and accurately, but usability cannot match its rivals.
The large 18.4-inch screen features the same hit-and-miss approach. While its size and sharp contrast make it ideal for watching movies and doing university course work, it is not as bright as we would like, failing to match the Apple MacBook Pro and Sony VAIO VPC-F12M0E/B.
Sub-par power
While on paper the quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU should prove more powerful than all but the Sony VAIO VPC-F12M0E/B, supplementary testing revealed it to provide quite a low performance in comparison to its main rivals. That's not to say it is remotely underpowered, however, as it dispatches most tasks with ease.
Graphics are far more pleasing and bettered only by the Sony VAIO VPC-F12M0E/B. The dedicated Nvidia GPU smoothly runs the latest games and allows high-definition (HD) video to run with ease. Frequent photo and video editing is also easily possible.
Multimedia use is enhanced by the inclusion of stereo speakers from audio specialist Harman Kardon. Audio quality is among the best in the group and music and movies sound great.
A touch-sensitive control pad on the chassis's left-hand side allows easy control of multimedia files.
The 640GB of hard drive storage space is generous and will provide more than enough storage for years to come.
Microsoft Works software is also included, providing basic office tools to get you started during your studies.
While there is plenty to like about the Satellite P500-1DZ, when you compare it to the Sony VAIO VPC-F12M0E/B, by spending an extra £100 you can get significantly more for your money, making the Toshiba difficult to recommend highly against its rivals.
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Review: Motorola Milestone XT720
We've been waiting for the Motorola Milestone XT720 for absolutely ages. When we looked at the Motoroi back in February, we said it was launching in Korea and destined to come to Europe. Well, with a change of name, the loss of its digital video tuner and a few other tweaks to make it UK-friendly, the Motoroi has made it to the UK as the Motorola Milestone XT720.
If your favourite Android handset so far has been the HTC Desire, with its top of the range specs, we really can't blame you. But the Motorola Milestone XT720 could be the handset to give the Desire a run for its money.
We say that because of things like its 8-megapixel camera with xenon flash, 720p video recording, HDMI-out – with cable provided – and vast high-resolution screen.
Of course there's no Sense UI as you'll find on the Desire, but you might be able to live with that, and the rest of the expected goodies are here too, such as Wi-Fi, GPS and 3G.
The Milestone isn't cheap, though. SIM free it'll set you back around £350 (The Desire is currently going for around £390).
The Motorola Milestone XT720 is a chunky beast of a phone. It has to be to contain its 3.7-inch screen, but there's quite a lot of framing around the screen so that overall it measures 115.95 x 60.9 x 10.9mm and it isn't light, either at 160g.
It feels a bit brickish in the hands, partly because it lacks the rounded edges of the Desire, or indeed the iPhone. And then there's the odd 'hump' on the right hand edge which makes the Motorola Milestone XT720 even wider at the bottom than it is at the top.
The upshot is that anyone with smaller hands might struggle to hold the Motorola Milestone XT720 and will almost certainly find it a challenge to reach right across the screen one-handed.
This is a handset that is peppered with buttons and connectors. There's nothing on the bottom edge, but on the top you'll find a 3.5mm headset slot and the main on/off/hold button. Oh, and under a hinged cover, that mini-HDMI port for getting video onto your TV.
On the left there's a micro-USB port protected by a hinged cover. The right edge houses the volume rocker, camera key and a toggle button which moves you between stills camera, video camera and gallery.
With Android 2.1 at its heart the Motorola Milestone XT720 is well equipped with modern smartphone goodness. Motorola adds its own touch user interface elements on top to give you some nice tweaks, such as a scrolling menu for viewing pictures which is accessible direct from the camera.
Motorola has also done its own thing with the main screens selection. The Home screen has room for nine application shortcuts and, along the bottom of the screen there are shortcuts to the dialler, messaging and, in between these two, an icon you sweep upwards to get to the main apps menu.
There are five Home screens in all, and, as usual, you get to these with horizontal finger sweeps and can fill them with widgets.
The front chassis is not without its buttons, too. There are four, beneath the display. They offer the usual Home, Menu, Back and Search functions.
On that little hump on the right of the chassis there are three tiny teeny icons that look as though they might be touch buttons too. In fact they just light up to remind you what camera mode you're in – video, camera or gallery. Yeah, thanks Moto.
The screen is an absolute wonder. We've already said that it measures 3.7 inches, which puts it on a par with the HTC Desire, and makes it .2 inches larger than that of the iPhone.
But there's more to it than size alone. The screen delivers 480 x 854 pixels. Now, the HTC Desire manages 480 x 800 and the iPhone 4 has its well-documented 960 x 640.
The screen is a standard TFT and it isn't as bright or resoundingly clear as super AMOLED screens such as that on the Samsung Wave. In fact, we had trouble viewing it in bright outdoor sunshine.
The screen is capacitive, which means it responds to pinch to zoom requests, though we found this a little hit and miss at times. And, in general, we found the screen less responsive to taps than we'd like.
Mostly it wasn't a problem, but it's not up there with the best. Another negative on the screen is that it is a real fingerprint magnet.
Motorola has implemented a clever little feature called My Sign. You can use this to get quickly to an app or service by designating an on-screen gesture as a link to it. You need to actually run the My Sign app for gestures to be recognised, though, so this is best put on the main screen if you want to use it.
In general we like the UI tweaks that Motorola has thought of, but it has to be said that things aren't as slick as they are on HTC's Sense user interface.
There's nothing very special about the dialler in the Motorola Milestone XT720. You've got the usual on-screen dial pad and access to contacts, a call log and favourite contacts. There's a nice handy shortcut to call voicemail beneath the dialler.
The Motorola Milestone XT720 will import contacts but it isn't as clever as many at this task. You can import your corporate contacts through Exchange and your Google contacts, and that's it.
There's no option to bring in Facebook or Twitter friends. If you've got contacts on your main computer you can sync them across to the Motorola Milestone XT720 too, but that's a far less desirable option than getting your data from the cloud for many people these days.
When it comes to typing out messages, the accelerometer turns the screen between wide and tall formats for access to smaller or larger qwerty keyboards onto which you can tap. Despite the large screen size, we found the smaller tall format screen a bit on the cramped side.
The predictive text system works well and helped us get our messages and emails written faster.
There's a little smiley icon on the main keyboard which we found quite handy, and there's a microphone icon which you can tap to use Google speech recognition.
When we tried this we found it remarkably accurate – and fast. In fact, in many cases it was actually quicker than typing out a message by hand.
Social networking fans may be dismayed to find there are neither Facebook nor Twitter apps on board. You can download third-party tools easily enough, but Motorola really ought to have provided something out of the box, we reckon.
With a large screen, you'd expect the Motorola Milestone XT720 to be good at the web, and indeed it is – in parts.
The WebKit browser can have up to eight windows open at once. To bring up a new one, you just choose to do so from an option that appears when you hit the menu key. Then, when you've got several open, you can hit the window key to move between them. It's fast and slick.
The high resolution screen really comes into its own with web browsing. Though it's unlikely you'll be able to read much on many home pages, when they load you can see an awful lot of info.
The browser is fast and it's easy to flick around within pages, but there's no text reflowing, so you can find yourself panning around a bit to read pages. We found flipping into widescreen mode was the best option.
Pinch to zoom is quite responsive and there's also a double-tap zoom option, though this only gives you one level of zoom in, with the second double-tap zooming you back out again.
You can copy and paste text from web pages, and the process is not too convoluted. Tap the menu, choose More, then choose Select Text and you can highlight what you want. When you lift your finger from the screen your selection is automatically copied to the clipboard for pasting into a new app, so the trick is to make sure you actually pan over the text you want in one move.
Flash support seems to be a bit iffy. We couldn't watch video from the BBC website. However, YouTube video streamed fantastically over Wi-Fi.
Rendering was smooth and the quality was certainly good enough to provide a generous dollop of entertainment. What you'll get over the network in terms of quality will depend on your connection, of course.
Well, this might be the bit you've been waiting for. The Motorola Milestone XT720 sports an 8-megapixel camera with xenon flash and 720p video recording.
These are just the headline features, and actually the camera has a good number of tweaks up its sleeve that put it on a par with some of the top notch camera phones.
There are several capture modes, for example, including self portrait and six-shot burst shooting. You can use face detection, a camera shake prevention mode and there's touch focus, so you can get the camera to focus on what you want rather than whatever's in the middle of the shot.
We didn't notice any shutter lag, and if we have a usability complaint, it's that the shooting button on the right edge of the chassis doesn't actually give a lot of tactile feedback when you're shooting a photo.
(Click here for full-res version)DETAIL: This outdoor shot shows how well the camera grasps details. The conditions were quite dark and it managed to let quite a lot of light in to make this shot work
(Click here for full-res version)WIDE ANGLE: The wide angle of the lens really comes into its own when there's a lot you want to capture. Here, at the full 8MP, we wanted to get a lot of the playground paraphernalia in shot, for example
(Click here for full-res version)GOOD ZOOM: There's plenty of detail on this image of a bike, and you can zoom in quite a long way before the photo degrades beyond all usability. You won't get that with many camera phones
(Click here for full-res version)CLOSE-UP: The macro mode is particularly impressive. Colour reproduction of this orchid is spot on, and the detail is magnificent
(Click here for full-res version)INDOORS: Shooting indoors with the Xenon flash produced mixed results. Even Xenon isn't going to get you great photos when the subject is a little way away, but when fairly close in you can get pretty good shots. For once, the cat is reproduced in his true colour, and there's plenty of detail in this close-in shot too
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