We've been promised video calls for years, but they've never really taken off - but thanks to last night's Apple announcements, we might need to smarten ourselves up whenever the phone rings.

Apple changed music with the iPod - and it looks like it's going to use the same bit of kit to change the way we talk, too.

Adding the FaceTime video calling system to the iPod touch means that FaceTime may be heading for prime time.

Until yesterday FaceTime was brilliant and largely pointless: it was only available for the iPhone 4, so if all your friends weren't early-adopting free-spending latte-sipping hipsters who hold their phones really, really carefully then FaceTime suffered from the Only Fax Machine In The World problem: who do you call when no-one has the kit?

FaceTime on the iPod touch changes that. Steve Jobs reckons Apple is activating 230,000 iOS devices a day, and a good proportion of those devices are iPod touches - which means that over the Christmas period hundreds of thousands of people will end up with FaceTime-enabled iPods in their stockings.

The odds are that while you might not know many iPhone 4 owners, you'll know plenty of iPod touch owners - and increasingly, you'll be able to talk to them via FaceTime.

FaceTime everywhere

The next step for Apple is obvious: FaceTime in everything else.

There's no technical reason it can't be in OS X - FaceTime's really just iChat AV in different trousers - and the widely expected cameras in next year's second generation iPad mean it should come to Apple's tablet, too, ushering in a whole new world of chinny videos shot from unflattering angles.

While Apple is at it it could easily add it to the Apple TV: an add-on camera wouldn't be that expensive, even with Apple's massive profit margins, and FaceTime on your HDTV would deliver some of the wow factor Apple's telly box desperately needs.

Don't forget that FaceTime is supposed to be an open standard, too. In the long term, that means it should appear on all kinds of devices, not just ones with the Apple logo.

The big question is whether people want to see one another on the phone. I think the older generation hate the idea. I certainly do, but that's because I have what's best described as a face for radio and some really ugly friends.

Phone networks won't like it, either, because if it takes off it'll mean massive data demands over networks that often struggle to cope with Twitter.

But I reckon The Kids - that is, the constantly videoing, texting, chatting, oversharing Kids who can't take a breath without videoing it and uploading it to YouTube - will love it.

Apple isn't the first firm to try to take video calling into the mainstream - but it wasn't the first firm to make an MP3 player, either. That worked out OK, didn't it?

Badly dubbed adverts really annoy me. Faintly sinister firms make an advert for shoes or yoghurts or incomprehensible children's toys in Germany, and instead of filming a new version for the UK they just do a half-arsed bit of dubbing that doesn't even attempt to match the mouths to the sounds they're supposed to be making. "Oh, who cares," the advertisers think. "It's only the UK."

The Apple TV is a bit like that.

I like the idea of the Apple TV, but like those European adverts something goes horribly wrong when it has to cross the sea to get to Britain.

The price goes up for starters - $99 becomes £99, which either means VAT went up to 50% last night when nobody was looking or Apple's taking the mickey - but more importantly, many of the good bits disappear.

If you look at the US page for the Apple TV, there's a whole section dedicated to HD TV Shows: "Instant TV rentals. Just 99c." On the UK page, there isn't anything. That's because Apple doesn't have the UK deals in place to deliver TV rentals, so there's a big hole in the Apple TV's feature list.

Film rentals aren't much better. Fancy renting Chris Morris's Four Lions? You can't: it's buy-only. Hot Tub Time Machine? Buy only. Zombieland? Buy only. Anchorman? Buy only.

Paying more for less

Apple isn't the only firm who doesn't have the right deals in place for the UK - while things are improving, Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace, now Zune Video, spent a long time with a selection of films that would look rubbish on petrol station shelves, never mind a flagship video service - but it does mean that Apple is charging UK customers considerably more than US customers for a device and associated service that does considerably less.

Video on the Xbox 360 is a handy optional extra on a games console, but the whole point of the Apple TV is to be a home entertainment hub.

I know it's not really Apple's fault - the deals or lack of deals is down to negotiations between Apple and the various film studios and TV companies - but I don't really care: no matter who's to blame, the result is the same. It doesn't even have iPlayer, which rather bizarrely means that for me, my iPhone is a better TV device than an Apple TV is.

What's really frustrating about this for me is that I really want a home entertainment hub: the day I can throw my Sky box in a skip and enjoy high definition television at a reasonable price with an interface that doesn't suck giant monkey balls will be one of the happiest days in home entertainment history.

I really want an Apple TV: it's just that I don't want the one Apple is currently making. In the UK at least it's a Windows Media Center rival, a channel changer instead of a game changer.

Venture capitalists provide cash, guidance and resources to help new businesses thrive - businesses like Google, which might still be stuck in a garage if it weren't for VCs' early investments.

Now the search giant wants to return the favour, and its Google Ventures arm aims to find the most exciting new businesses and help them to thrive - not just by throwing money at them, but by sharing resources too. Here are ten firms that Google's backing to make them bigger.

1. Adimab

"The first fully integrated, yeast-based antibody discovery platform" might not sound too exciting, but Adimab is doing something extraordinary: it's built a kind of synthetic immune system that can help pharmaceutical companies develop the antibody drugs of the future.

2. Corduro

Don't bother checking out the Corduro website: it's essentially a placeholder, with precious little information. You might be better off checking out the iPhone/iPad payment application Square, because we suspect Google's investment in Corduro is for something similar: the firm offers a mobile payment platform for small businesses, and of course Google has a mobile platform in Android.

3. English Central

Bringing English Central into the YouTube family makes a lot of sense. The site offers an unusual take on language learning, enabling students to choose popular English language video clips rather than traditional, deathly dull educational footage. English Central then uses speech recognition to analyse the students' speech and provide feedback.

4. iPierian

Another medical investment, iPierian focuses on fighting diseases for which there are poor medical models and limited available treatments such as Parkinson's disease, spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Its technology effectively reprogrammes human adult cells to behave like stem cells, deftly side-stepping the controversy over the use of human embryos' cells in medical research.

5. Miso

The Miso service is a kind of Foursquare for TV, enabling you to share what you're watching with others, discover new things to watch and earn points to unlock "fun, virtual badges like Princess, Food Mobster and Moustache Patrol." Miso was already available in Web-based, iPhone and iPad flavours, an Android version has just launched and we'd expect to see it on Google TV when that ships.

6. Pixazza

Pixazza turns pictures into sales opportunities and has been dubbed "AdSense for images", so it's not surprising that Google's taken an interest. Celeb snaps become "get the look!" sales opportunities; photos of beautiful beaches sprout adverts for boat trips; and time-lapse photos become equipment lists with shopping links.

PIXAZZA: If you've ever wished web pages had more things popping up in front of them, has Pixazza got the product for you!

7. Recorded Future

Remember the pre-cogs in Minority Report? Recorded Future is a bit like that, but without floating any bald people in tanks. The world's first "temporal analytics engine" analyses the past to predict the future, and immediate applications include financial trading, competitor analysis and national security. When Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal that "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next" we suspect that Recorded Future was part of what he had in mind.

8. SCVNGR

Life, the saying goes, is a game. SCVNGR took that literally and created a gaming platform where the real world is the game world. More than 550 organisations in 20 different countries have built applications using SCVNGR, encouraging users to carry out specific tasks - strike a pose, scan a code or just check in, Foursquare style - in order to earn points. Think of it as a high-tech treasure hunt and you've got the basic idea, but this is a system that scales: games can be as small as you like or encompass entire cities with thousands of simultaneous players.

SCVNGR: This app turns the real world into a gaming platform, with locations setting challenges that you can take to earn points

9. Silver Spring Networks

Silver Spring creates hardware, software and services for Smart Grid systems, a more efficient way to deliver electricity. As the US department of energy notes, "if the grid were just 5 per cent more efficient, the energy savings would equate to permanently eliminating the fuel and greenhouse gas emissions from 53 million cars". Smart Grid technology also encompasses home automation, with appliances monitoring energy use and adjusting their behaviour to keep your utility bills low.

10. V-Vehicle

This is perhaps the most intriguing investment of all: V-Vehicle is a new car company that promises to "make green affordable for the masses". What kind of cars will it make? Nobody knows for sure, although reports suggest they'll have plastic, customisable bodies rather than traditional steel skins. What technologies will its vehicles adopt? Nobody's saying. The presence of former Mazda designer Tom Motano - the man behind the RX-7 and the MX-5 - bodes well, as does the presence of other heavyweight investors including famous VC firm Kleiner Perkins and former Texas oil boss T. Boone Pickens.

V-VEHICLE: So far the only pictures of the V-Vehicle car are teaser shots in video clips. The firm promises affordable green motoring for the masses

If you're anything like me, you saw Google's new Gmail voice calling service and thought this: voice calls? How quaint!

The Gmail users who use the new service will be making voice calls, but they won't really be voice calls: like Skype, Google Voice uses Voice over IP to send voice data in much the same way servers send Web pages, MP3s or emails.

It's not a voice service; it's a data service whose data just happens to be voice. And that means Google's service is yet another nail in the coffin of the humble telephone call, something that's not so much dying as building up a mountain of milk bottles at its front door.

Phones have never been so numerous, and yet we're barely using them as phones. They're iPods, or video players, or Twitter clients, or games consoles. According to the New York Times, people are using phones for pretty much anything except making calls. While 90% of households have mobile phones, the number of minutes being used isn't increasing accordingly.

More data on phones

What is increasing, though, is data use. Text messaging increased by 50 per cent last year, and in 2009 the amount of data used by mobile phones surpassed the amount of data used for voice calls.

I'm surprised it took so long. I barely use my phone for voice at all - although that's partly because it's an iPhone, so making calls isn't exactly its strong point - and when I look at my remaining voice minutes the number has more digits than a lottery winner's cheque.

I'd much rather have a data-only tariff, with voice calls transmitted via Voice over IP, treated like any other data use and deducted from my monthly bandwidth limit.

That's where it's going, but I doubt it'll be cheap. The phone companies agree that data is the future, but they're not too happy about it - which is why in recent months they've all started to remove the word "unlimited" from their data plans.

It's also why they're all rather unhappy with the idea of Net Neutrality - which, interestingly, is something Google doesn't think should apply to wireless networks either. With voice revenues in free-fall and data use exploding, don't be too surprised if the networks launch an all-out assault on net neutraility. Talk is cheap, but the cheaper it gets the more likely we'll pay for it in other ways.

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Windows 95 is fifteen today. It's hard to imagine it now, but the launch was greeted with the sort of hype that only Apple generates today: the Empire State Building lit in Windows colours, midnight queues outside PC shops, wall-to-wall news coverage and that Rolling Stones riff.

To some, the arrival of Windows 95 heralded a brave new world of personal computing; to others, it was the beginning of a long period of stagnation for the PC platform.

There's no doubt that if you were running Windows 3.1 or 3.11, Windows 95 was like a visitor from the planet Groovy. No, really. It looked great, and provided you treated the system requirements - a 386 with 4MB of RAM and 120MB of disk space - with the contempt they deserved then it ran great too.

• Windows retrospective: boot screens through the ages

Heavily targeted towards home users as well as the more traditional corporate users, it was the first stand-alone Windows (MS-DOS was part of it rather than a separate OS). It had an exciting new interface that's still visible in Windows 7, and it even had Microsoft's first go at a Web browser - albeit one that was initially tucked away on the optional-extra Plus pack.

The beginning of the big boots

Critics, however, would argue that Windows 95 was when Microsoft started throwing its weight around.

They argue that by bundling MS-DOS inside Windows, Microsoft killed the market for MS-DOS rivals; the arrival of Internet Explorer would become the Netscape-crushing browser war; and the US Department of Justice found that it used the "Windows Tax" - that is, offering manufacturers discounted prices if they promised to limit the number of non-Windows PCs they sold - to stifle competition.

In 1998 consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote a devastating critique that accused Microsoft of "suffocating" the PC industry and argued that "the victims of Microsoft's monopolistic activities aren't just the companies that go belly-up; they are the consumers who pay high prices to use mediocre and unreliable products."

It's bleakly amusing to note that when the (then) Microsoft-owned Slate magazine responded to Nader, it argued that "in the browser wars, Microsoft faces a formidable array of opponents--Sun and Oracle, to name just two--and, after two years, it still lags behind Netscape even though IE generally gets better reviews than Navigator."

A force for good

Let's concentrate on the product itself, though, because when you do that Windows 95 was clearly a force for good too. It was a vast improvement over its predecessors. It revolutionised PC gaming. It made using computers - computers that we could actually afford to build or buy - much easier than before.

You may mock its primitive graphics, its press-Start-to-stop interface, its increasingly demented product names - Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2, anyone? - and its postie-crippling pile of installation floppies, but fifteen years ago Windows 95 was as cool as computing got.

With the imminent release of the Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet computing is about to get a whole lot more interesting: the Android-powered device is a real rival to Apple's iPad, promising multi-touch goodies without the expense of Apple kit.

At least, that's what we hope is happening, because the Samsung Galaxy Tab price is still secret.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab Android tablet isn't the only Google-powered device heading our way: in addition to the iPod-rivalling Samsung Galaxy Player Toshiba's working on an Android tablet, too, and the same reports suggest HP is doing the same.

HTC's forthcoming tablet drinks Google juice, too - although confusingly it appears to be running Chrome OS rather than Android.

It looks like the Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet will be the first Android tablet to actually ship, so the stakes are high: if it's a dog it could seriously damage Android tablets' reputation - and if it's great, it could tempt prospective iPad purchasers away from the Apple Store.

Here's what we know.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab looks awfully like an iPad

As with mobile phones, there's not much you can do to differentiate your tablet from Apple's one: the screen has to dominate, which leaves precious little room for design flourishes.

It looks like it'll be a little bit smaller than the current iPad, with a 7-inch screen although the rumour mill says Apple's about to show off a cheaper 7-inch iPad itself.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab specs have probably been leaked

Samsung Firmware has got its hands on what appears to be genuine firmware for the Galaxy Tab, and it seems that the Samsung Galaxy Tab specs are as follows: a 3.1 megapixel camera, a QVGA forward-facing camera for video calling, am ARM11 1GHz processor and the usual Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth.

Vietnamese tech site Tinh Te reports a 4000mAh battery, 16GB of internal memory upgradeable to 48GB, and a MicroSD slot with support for cards up to 32GB.

The firmware suggests that the Samsung Galaxy Tab will be running Android 2.2, aka Froyo, and the excellent Swype gesture recognition software will be in there too. Samsung's own TouchWiz interface takes care of the touchy-feely stuff.

There's a bit of debate over the screen resolution, because everyone expected a high resolution Super AMOLED screen; early analysis of the firmware suggested a frankly crappy 800 x 480 resolution, but Gizmodo reports that it may be a more pleasant 1024 x 600.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab will run Flash

Is there an app for that, Apple? Eh? Eh? EH?

The Samsung Galaxy Tab release date looks like September

It looks like the Samsung Galaxy Tab release date is imminent: the official announcement is due in September, and we'd expect sales to start pretty much immediately so Samsung doesn't miss the crucial Christmas sales period.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab pricing is still secret

While Vodafone has leaked the news that it'll be flogging Samsung's tablet in the UK, the Samsung Galaxy Tab price remains a secret - although if it isn't significantly cheaper than the iPad we'll eat something Android-powered.

We've all done it: the angry email to an ex after one shandy too many; the character assassination sent by accident to the person you're talking about rather than the person you were talking about them to; the offensive image sent to your mum instead of your mates; the message to a potential employer saying "see attached" that doesn't have anything attached to it.

It's the twenty-first century - shouldn't technology be able to stop such shenanigans and stop us from looking stupid? The good news is that it can. Here's how technology can make your messages seem less silly.

Mail Goggles

Drinking and typing don't really mix, and writing emails when you're half cut can often have catastrophic consequences. If you tell Mail Goggles when you're likely to be plastered, Gmail will check its watch and if it's Danger O'Clock it'll ask you to do some sums before it'll send your message. Get the answers wrong or run out of time and your message remains unsent.

ToneCheck

Is the email you're about to send the most offensive thing ever written? Are you prone to typing things like "HOPE YOU DIE IN A FIRE, BUMFACE!" in messages to the MD? ToneCheck is shorter than a course of anger management therapy, faster than a P45 and plugs into Outlook 2003-2010, looking for and flagging "emotionally charged" phrases in your message when you press Send.

It looks and works like a spell checker, so while it shows you what you're doing wrong you can override it if you're sure you want your message to stay as it is. If you're like us, you'll set the Tone Tolerance settings to their most liberal and then go out of your way to try and hit the triggers.

Forgotten Attachment Detector

Microsoft and Google both offer Forgotten Attachment Detectors, which scan your messages to make sure you've included any files you meant to include. Google's version is built into Gmail while Microsoft's one is an add-on for Outlook.

Got The Wrong Bob?

We're beginning to wonder whether Google's engineers are the world's worst emailers, because Gmail's Labs are positively packed with embarrassment preventers. Got The Wrong Bob aims to prevent mixups such as mailing something to Bob The Boss when you meant to send it to Bob The Builder. The add-on kicks in if you're sending something to multiple recipients and asks "Did you mean….?" as you enter recipients' names.

Undo Send

This Gmail feature isn't as clever as it might seem, because once a normal internet email lands in someone's inbox you can't magically get it back again (you can undo emails in closed environments, so for example Outlook-based email systems in companies support undo, and you used to be able to undo AOL-to-AOL emails). What happens when you enable this feature is that Gmail hangs on to your message for 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds when you hit Send, giving you enough time to go "aaaaagh! Noooooo!" and cancel it.

It's a great time to be a gadget geek. From wireless routers to Windows PCs, smartphones to sat navs, our technology has never been smarter - or cheaper.

The internet is a hardware heaven where you can pick up enormously powerful bits of kit for tiny amounts of money. It's just a shame about the whole economic damage, worker exploitation, environmental catastrophe side of things.

Cheap technology isn't as cheap as you might think. When something's designed to a particular price, compromises have to be made. Those compromises aren't just in the design, although of course you can't expect Porsche quality at Primark prices; they're in every part of the technology company's business from the factories it uses to the way it provides technical support. Typically, cheap technology means cutting every possible corner to make the price as low as possible.

What happens when you cut one corner too many? Let's ask Dell, the pioneer of ultra-cheap PCs, who managed to ship 11.8 million faulty - and potentially explosive - PCs between 2003 and 2005

The problem was with dodgy capacitors, manufactured from a stolen - and, it turned out, incorrect - formula. Writing in The Independent in 2003, Charles Arthur noted that Dell was aware of the compromised capacitors, and interviewed Dennis Zogbi of Paumanok Publications, who said: "People want Western quality and Chinese prices. Well, you can't have both."

Dell thought you could.

Dell's business was - and is - based on what the New York Times describes as "limiting its inventory and squeezing suppliers", but it's possible to squeeze too hard. Cheap technology is a balancing act between price and quality control, and it seems that Dell lost its balance: the NYT reports that Dell suffered far more from bad capacitors than its rivals.

Despite internal tests finding that Optiplex desktops might have a failure rate as high as 97%, Dell didn't want an enormous and enormously expensive product recall, so it had a brilliant idea: it would blame its customers for the faulty computers.

According to the NYT Dell told the University of Texas its computers were failing because staff were "making them perform difficult math calculations."

BAD CAPACITORS: This Dell customer's capacitors don't look too clever. In total, Dell shipped 11.8 million machines with capacitors likely to fail

Still, at least if your Optiplex exploded you'd be able to speak to somebody knowledgeable about it. Wouldn't you? Nope. Dell was one of the first tech firms to outsource its customer service and technical support to Bangalore, and while the results were so bad and unpopular that Dell very quickly reinstated US-based support for its lucrative corporate customers, the idea stuck. These days, cheap kit means outsourced or online-only, irritating and inadequate technical support. You get what you pay for.

Unemployment and unhappy workers

Decent wages, employee healthcare, pensions and other benefits aren't compatible with cheap kit.

Because of those costs, Western technology firms have been outsourcing assembly work since the 1980s. Incredibly, there are fewer people making computers in the US now than there were in the 1970s: writing in BusinessWeek, former Intel boss Andy Grove says: "manufacturing employment in the US computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975."

OUTSOURCED: There are fewer people employed making computers in the US today than there were when this was cutting-edge tech

People still make our gadgets, of course. They just don't do it in the West. From Xbox 360s to iPhone 4s, many of our devices are put together in China. China's biggest electronics subcontractor, Foxconn, has around 800,000 employees and adds 100,000 more every year; Grove says that Foxconn employs "more than the combined worldwide headcount of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, HP, Intel and Sony."

In total, an estimated 1.5 million people work in Asian assembly plants. For every Western employee a technology firm has, there are ten Asian assembly workers putting its products together - often on very low wages and in poor working conditions.

By outsourcing the assembly work, we're missing out on money that would otherwise be spent locally. With no factories here, there are no machines for local firms to service, no subcontractors providing key components, no armies of hungry workers for the local shops and take-aways to feed, no pay packets injecting cash into local businesses from cake shops to car dealers.

For now it's Foxconn's turn in the sun, but that won't last forever. The same things that eventually made the US too expensive for tech firms - rising wages, good working conditions and organised labour - are starting to happen in China, too.

After a wave of suicides led to unwelcome foreign attention, Foxconn massively increased employee wages; meanwhile, a wave of strikes in China is forcing other firms to pay more, too.

That's good and bad. It's good if you're getting a pay rise, but it's not so good if your employer decides to up sticks to somewhere cheaper. And there is always somewhere cheaper. Right now that's inland China, where living costs and therefore wage expectations are lower than in coastal regions, so firms are moving there.

In the longer term firms may leave China altogether and go where labour costs are lower: South America, perhaps, or Vietnam. They're already thinking about it.

Carcinogens, conflict and child labour

Tim Hunt is with Ethical Consumer magazine, which hopes to make us think again about cheap, disposable technology. As EC reports, the gadgets we dump often end up in places like Indonesia, where "those processing the waste are often overworked (up to 18 hours per day) and underpaid, and the use of child labour is common… often unprotected, workers use fire and mercuric acid baths to extract the precious metals. Burning releases dioxins - some of the most toxic compounds on Earth - while the acid residue contaminates drinking water."

"There are also problems around the mining of natural resources, from the Congo for instance," Hunt told TechRadar. "Here the trade in metals has been blamed for fuelling the conflict that has raged there for several years."

WASTED: Disposable technology doesn't always end up in recycling plants. E-Waste has become a global problem [image credit: CP on Flickr]

As technology becomes increasingly fashion-driven, this year's must-have gadget quickly becomes unwanted - and the move to mobile-based computing means things are speeding up. Where a PC has a useful lifespan of three to five years, we replace our mobiles every 18 months.

"It is clearly worse than it was 20 years ago because there is just more technology around and things are progressing so quickly," Hunt says. "If there is a closed loop where all products and materials are recycled then it shouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, even with the new EU regulations, much of the waste finds its way into the landfills of poorer countries."

Greenpeace wants to see tech firms eradicate toxic chemicals altogether. "The issue of toxicity is overarching," it says. "Until the use of toxic substances is eliminated, it is impossible to secure 'safe' recycling."

Perhaps the Electronics Industry Code of Conduct will save the world. The work of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, the EICC is a code of practice for electronics companies that prohibits the use of child labour, illegal working practices, dumping poison into duck ponds and so on.

It's been around since 2004 and signatories include Dell, who Greenpeace is currently attacking for its use of toxic chemicals and Microsoft, whose KYE subcontractor has been accused of child labour. So that's working well.

"Images of electronic waste in the form of discarded computers and other 'electro-scrap' dumped in Asia, other social and labour issues as well as pressure from civil society, prompted the electronics sector to develop an Electronics Industry Code of Conduct," Greenpeace says.

"However, despite this Code, the hi-tech sector continues to produce ever shorter-life, often superfluous products with inherently hazardous materials. Why are hi-tech corporations, which profess to be responsible corporate citizens, allowing this to happen?"

It's a rhetorical question. "One answer is that CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] initiatives, whether they involve Codes of Conduct or reporting guidelines, are voluntary," Greenpeace adds. "At best, CSR can be a way for the best companies to lead the way. At worst, CSR initiatives can even be a diversionary tactic, used by industry to pretend that they are taking action and to avoid regulation."

BAD GRADES: Ethical Consumer grades firms on their Corporate Social Responsibility pronouncements. It's not a great result for HTC

Economic realities

Those iPhones you see being assembled in Foxconn factories have an estimated profit margin of 60 per cent. Could Apple still make money without using Foxconn? Absolutely. Could it still make money if its kit was assembled in the US? Probably. Will it try? No chance.

Apple, like every other corporation, must give its shareholders the best return on their investment - and the best way to do that isn't to get your products made in your own country, or to work only with firms whose assembly plants are filled with joy and laughter.

"Most companies are taking some steps," Tim Hunt says, "but as they all strive to generate more profit by producing more and more goods at the lowest possible price, they are clearly going to come into conflict with labour and the environment."

Perhaps the answer is to embarrass them. When Greenpeace wanted to draw public attention to the tech industry's environmental record in 2006 it picked on Apple, which was actually one of the more environmentally friendly firms; nevertheless, the Green My Apple campaign used Apple's high profile to great effect and Apple made more improvements. Apple now mentions its products' green credentials in its marketing.

POOR FORM: It's no coincidence that the firms low on Greenpeace's green electronics meter tend to be makers of low-cost kit

Could the same trick work with corporate citizenship? Probably not, because the way our economy works - essentially, shares are owned by large pension funds whose managers are paid by performance and therefore don't really care about the longer term or the bigger picture - means firms' number one priority is short-term profit.

Then again, perhaps the problem isn't the companies. Maybe it's us. Those pension funds are our pension funds, and we're the people who choose to buy cheap kit. Apple is atypical: the profit margin on a laptop is around 2%, while the margin on a netbook is less than one per cent. The aggressive pricing that makes netbooks so attractive also means manufacturers can be left with a margin of just twenty cents.

That means our buying choices matter: if we buy entirely on price, choosing our kit on the basis of who offers the most bang for the least amount of bucks, then we're helping to perpetuate the system.

If we want companies to care about the bigger picture, we need to show them that we care about it, too.

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!

Apple's Magic Trackpad confirms what many of us already suspected: iOS, or something very like it, is coming to the Mac.

It's not just the Mac, either. I'm willing to bet that it's coming to the Apple TV, too.

Apps would make Steve Jobs' hobby much more appealing, and it would mean that all of Apple's consumer products - iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad and Apple TV - would share the same interface, the same apps and the same data.

That data will be stored centrally, either via the cloud or on a shared network storage device such as a Time Capsule. Remember Apple's enormous, billion-dollar data centre? That's for the cloud bit.

Don't believe me? Ask the developers. When Ars Technica put together a panel of Apple devs, they were unanimous: Mac OS X will eventually be subsumed by iOS. "Developers are seeing iOS influencing Mac OS X instead of the other way around", Chris Foresman reports.

Cabel Sasser from Panic's prediction rings true: "I could see a gradual, slow merger between iOS and Mac OS X styles and approaches," he says. "It doesn't make sense for them to be developing two of everything, one good, one not as good - two calendars, two address books. It's got to merge somehow."

This isn't going to happen overnight, but it's going to happen. The reason it's going to happen is that for very many things, iOS is better than OS X, let alone Windows or desktop Linux.

Unlike traditional operating systems, iOS is immediate. Every iPhone or iPad owner with young children has watched their kids pick up the device, launch a few apps, delete all of Daddy's data and run up enormous credit card bills: there's no learning curve whatsoever, no time spent learning the operating system before you can actually do something. It's an operating system that gets out of the way.

You might call it "computing for the rest of us".

The vision is this: iPods, iPhones, iPads and Apple TV for everyday stuff; iMacs for editing and other tasks that need proper horsepower; Mac Pros for content creation.

Steve Jobs recently spoke about cars and trucks. In the near future, i-devices and Apple TV are the cars, and Mac Pros are the trucks.

By bringing out the Magic Trackpad, Apple has given the mouse its marching orders: don't be entirely surprised if there's a Magic Trackpad Pro to offer pen-based input for artists and anyone else who'll miss the precision of mouse input.

But for the rest of us, Apple clearly thinks fat-fingered fun is the future. I think it's right.

Flying in the face of everything that's good and lovely about the world, Facebook has hit the 500 million user mark - and it's so popular Hollywood is making a movie, The Social Network, about it.

You may have heard about it, partly because there's a trailer for it before showings of Inception and partly because every time you mention social networking online right now someone from a street team pops up and says "OMG THE SOCIAL NETWORK TRAILER IS AWESOME".

Unless reviews talk about The Social Network's Seven-style horrors it's safe to say we probably won't be going to see it, but it's got us wondering: what would the film versions of other sites and services be like?

Twitter

With a cast of 140 characters including Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry and Stephen Fry, the Twitter movie is bound to be a success - but will the projectors be able to stay working for an entire showing? No!

Google

Two and a half hours of adverts and pictures of kittens punctuated at random intervals by a man screaming "WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE! WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE!"

Wikipedia

Written, directed and acted entirely by volunteers, the Wikipedia movie is an incomprehensible pile of old tosh featuring bearded men arguing.

Written, directed and acted entirely by volunteers, the Wikipedia movie is the best film ever made [edited by WikiMan 10:47 22 July 2010].

MySpace

Filmed in Super Squinty Vision, The MySpace Movie follows a bunch of emo kids, the odd high school bomber and a few registered sex offenders as they discover that life, like, is soooooo unfair. The plot? There's no plot. MySpace lost that years ago.

Shit my dad says

Fictionalised biography of a man whose dad doesn't care what anyone thinks. Starring Prince Harry.

Perez Hilton

Filmed on a single camera in a grubby basement, a chubby man with stupid hair shouts "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!" in increasingly silly voices for eight hours before Will.I.Am gives him a good slapping.

YouTube

It's a cat, on a skateboard, and the skateboard is on fire, and the cat is on fire, and like how did they do that? That's totally awesome! Running time: three seconds.

Gizmodo

Someone makes a blogger an offer he can't refuse: Steve Jobs' lunchtime sandwich, so fresh that the edges haven't started to curl yet. Can he post pics of it online before SWAT teams, the Marines and the Girl Guides kick down his door and kick him in the face?

Yahoo! Answers

Who is Babby, and how is he formed? Also, how girl get pragnent? You've seen Inception. Now, discover the secrets of conception!

eBay

Nail-biting thriller directed by Michael eBay and featuring a mobile phone, a mysterious bidder and the entire population of Nigeria. Can our hero sell his smartphone to a reputable seller? Features gratuitous slow-mo and unnecessary explosions.

Stuff White People Like

Starring Mel Gibson.

The most recent cringe-worthy Facebook movie trailer is below.

Apple's iOS 4 looks great, has loads of new features, works just fine on a 3GS. But it's turned our iPhone 3Gs into expensive ornaments: it made them - and the 3Gs of everyone we know - so slow they were barely useable.

The good news is that you can fix it; the bad news is that you need to dump iOS 4 and it takes ages. Here's how to roll back iPhone OS to 3.13.

Disclaimer: Future Publishing Limited provides the information for this project in good faith and makes no representations as to its completeness or accuracy. Individuals carrying out the instructions in this project do so at their own risk.

Step 1

Before you do anything, sync your iPhone with iTunes and ensure anything you want to keep - including contacts and photos - is on your computer. If you've disabled syncing of contacts, photos and so on it might be an idea to enable them again and do another sync.

We can't stress this enough: the downgrade will wipe your iPhone, and once you're back on OS 3.1.3 you can't restore data from backups made in iOS 4.0 or 4.0.1. That means if something hasn't been copied from your iPhone to your computer and you've added it since upgrading to 4.0 or 4.0.1, you'll lose it permanently.

Step 2

Now, we need to find iPhone OS 3.1.3. This should be on your computer: on a Mac, go to your hard disk and open up Macintosh HD > Users > Yourname > Library > iTunes > iPhone Software Updates; on a PC, head for C:\Documents and Setting\Yourname\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Software Updates. The one we're looking for is iPhone1,2_3.1.3_7E18_Restore.ipsw. If it isn't there, download it.

Please note this file is for a 3G, not a 3GS: if you're downgrading one of them for whatever reason, the .ipsw file you need starts iPhone2,1.

Step 3

Time for another download: RecBoot. On Windows, you'll also need to make sure you've got .NET 4.0 installed, and if you're running Vista or Windows 7 you'll need to run it in Compatibility Mode. Full instructions are here.

Now, put your iPhone into recovery mode. To do that, connect your iPhone to your computer and switch it off. When it's completely off, press and hold the power button and the Home button for ten seconds and then let go of the power button. Keep pressing Home until iTunes says that it "has detected an iPhone in recovery mode".

Step 4

If iTunes hasn't done it already, select your iPhone in the left hand iTunes panel so the Restore button is visible. Don't just click it, though: Alt/Option-Click it if you're on a Mac and Shift-Click it if you're on a PC. This enables you to select the file to restore from, which is the .ipsw one we looked for earlier, so locate that, select it and click on Choose.

Step 5

iTunes will now give you a factory-fresh iPhone 3G running OS 3.1.3. The process takes ten minutes or so, and when it's finished iTunes will probably tell you that the iPhone couldn't be restored because of an unknown error. Don't worry about this: that's why we downloaded RecBoot. On a Mac, run the RecBoot Exit Only application; on PC, launch RecBoot. Now, select Exit Recovery Mode.

Step 6

Your iPhone should now restart, and after a moment iTunes will ask whether you want to set it up as a new iPhone or restore from a backup. Now that you've downgraded you can't restore from iOS 4.0 or 4.0.1 backups, so you'll have to choose a pre-iOS 4 backup (if you have one). The restore process takes about ten minutes.

Step 7

Your iPhone should restart again, but it's not ready to use yet: now, you need to sync it. That means copying across all your music, all your movies, all your apps… this would be a good time to make dinner, start a family, make a volcano from mashed potato or write the Great American Novel. Depending on how much stuff there is to sync, syncing your newly restored 3G can take hours. Trust us. It's worth it.

After months of anticipation, something amazing happens. There's a pause and then a cry, and then you're holding your pride and joy, tightly wrapped.

You gently unwrap your precious parcel so you can see it for the very first time. And that's when you discover that the midwife has drawn a comedy 'tache and specs in thick black marker pen.

Mobile phones are a bit like that.

Annoying apps are spoiling smartphones, and they're often harder to get rid of than a marker pen moustache. We thought Apple's iPhone would kill them off, but even Apple's at it: good luck getting shot of Stocks or wiping the Weather app. And now, other smartphone users are finding their phones infected with apps they don't want, and can't delete.

The apps depend on where you are, what you've got and who you're with. US Droid X users get Blockbuster Video apps and Need for Speed demos; Samsung Vibrant users get an app for Smurf movie Avatar.

Over here Androids ship with the Stocks and Facebook, plus whatever delights the operator decides to add. It's no wonder that as boxes are opened and the latest, shiniest smartphones are powered up, a cry goes out across the planet: "what the hell is this crap?"

I think I can speak on behalf of every irritated smartphone user when I say: get your crap off my smartphone!

"T-Mobile put each of these partnerships into place to deliver a great mobile entertainment experience on the device," T-Mobile spokesman David Henderson told the LA times. I don't know about you, but when I want a premium entertainment experience pretty much the last people I'll turn to are the hepcats at my friendly neighbourhood mobile phone carrier.

Here's how to deliver a great mobile entertainment experience on a device: get your crap off my smartphone!

Money maker

The apps are there for one reason and one reason only: to generate cash. That's not good enough.

We're not talking about pay as you go phones that you can buy with the change from your weekly shop; we're talking smartphones, premium products that tend to have premium prices - or at the very least, premium price plans - attached.

Are the phones and the talk plans free? No? Then - and I think you know where I'm going here - get your crap off my smartphone!

We've been here before. PCs came with so much crap preinstalled that people wrote applications to get rid of the applications. PC makers' plans to squeeze every last penny from low margin kit backfired spectacularly, creating out-of-the-box experiences so horrid that people started to say nice things about Linux.

At least you could delete the PC stuff. That's not always the case on phones. Installing crapware is bad enough on hardware with severely limited storage space and fairly limited horsepower. Making it impossible to remove is unforgivable.

What's mildly annoying on a PC is an enormous pain in the arse on a mobile phone, and anything that's responsible for "how do I remove…?" post after post after post in mobile phone forums is a sign that the "experience" you're delivering isn't welcome. Get your crap off my smartphone!

22 days. That's how long Apple took to stop Antennagate. Steve Jobs clearly thinks that's fast. He's wrong.

Apple didn't need 22 days to make videos showing rival phones losing signal, it didn't need 22 days to tell its customers that it cares about them, and it definitely didn't need 22 days of increasingly bad publicity.

The problem, I suspect, is that Apple doesn't really do social media. The odd open letter or terse email from Steve Jobs aside, Apple doesn't blog, doesn't tweet, and doesn't hang around on Facebook telling you what its favourite kind of cheese is.

Its media strategy is distinctly old-school, with Apple bestowing favours only on a chosen few and responding to most things with a swift "no comment". And more often than not, it works.

Until it doesn't.

Jobs says Apple needed 22 days to investigate, and that "if we'd have done this [press conference] a week and a half ago, we wouldn't have had half the data that we shared with you today." I don't think that's the whole story.

It looks rather like Apple wasn't too bothered about the antenna story until it exploded across the mainstream media. Jobs was hurt when Consumer Reports slammed the iPhone? What about when Apple fans slammed it weeks before?

Not fast enough

Apple has arguably the most loyal fans of any firm, and if it had addressed their concerns earlier and got them on its side, this supposed scandal would have remained a minor kerfuffle. Look how quickly and how widely fake Jobs emails - "it's just a phone" - spread. A real one sent to every Apple ID could have stopped the whole thing before it started.

I'm not sure Apple really understands how the rise of social media has changed the media landscape. Never mind 22 days; a Twitterstorm can happen in 22 minutes. Bad news has never spread more quickly, more widely or with so little regard for the truth - and firms who don't realise that or deal with that can easily see a non-story snowball.

I think that's what happened here. It's not that Apple dropped the ball; it's that Apple didn't even know the ball was missing until Consumer Reports, the newspapers and the TV networks turned up at Infinite Loop asking, "hey, is this your ball? Is it true that it's crap?"

I don't see Steve Jobs blogging any time soon, but perhaps there are PR lessons to be learnt from Antennagate. I don't doubt for a moment that Jobs means it when he says Apple loves its customers and wants to surprise and delight them. But maybe it's time to start talking to them, too.

I think the iPhone 4 signal issues have been blown out of all proportion - but I also reckon Apple PR has gone completely crazy.

Instead of putting their hands up and saying "hey, it's possible to bridge the antennas at one particular point and that can make the signal drop, but that's the price you pay for the BEST RECEPTION ON AN IPHONE EVER!" they've said that the reason for disappearing bars is "both simple and surprising".

Presumably it's simple as in "let's make something up! Simple!" and surprising as in "we'll be surprised if anyone believes this". In Apple PR land an issue that can be fixed with nail polish, a rubber band or a different grip can also be fixed with… software!

I slept or daydreamed through science classes at school, but even I know that you can't fix software with a hammer and you can't fix hardware with software.

Sure, you can change how the hardware behaves with software - you can change its settings, turn features on and off and so on - but if your PC is on fire you can't put out the flames by typing WATER WATER WATER or recalibrating your How Flamey Is My PC readout.

And yet Apple is expecting us to believe that the iPhone signal problem, a problem that despite Apple's claims doesn't really occur on other people's phones or even other iPhones, a problem that only happens when you change how you physically hold the phone, is fixable with a formula.

Never mind the Reality Distortion Field. That's a Very Fabric Of The Universe Distortion Field.

Incorrect formula

As one bemused iPhone owner wrote to Apple (TechRadar was sent a copy too): "According to your findings the formula for the iPhone is incorrect, and displays too many signal bars. If this were correct then I must live in an area where there is no O2 reception at all, as my iPhone 4 loses all signal if held long enough (if not held I get full reception)."

I'm in the same boat: if Apple's formula shows two more bars than it should, my iPhone hasn't had a signal in two years and I've been imagining every phone call or email I've received since I unwrapped my 3G. Maybe the formula is wrong, but it's not what's making iPhone 4 signal bars drop.

What's particularly crazy about all of this is that it clearly can't be that big a problem or Apple Stores, O2 Shops and Carphone Warehouses would be packed with people returning their iPhones. They aren't.

But by dismissing the concerns of people who do have the problem - and worse, telling them to shell out an extra twenty-odd quid for an Apple-made case that fixes the problem - they're fanning the flames and ruining the iPhone's image.

Apple needs to 'fess up and offer a fix - if Apple hasn't got an alternative way to solve the problem, free bumpers wouldn't cost that much - and move on, because the reception issues are damaging the reputation of an incredibly clever bit of kit.

Even worse, if the public perception of the iPhone 4 is that it doesn't work properly, then it takes some of the cool factor away from being an iPhone owner - and the cool factor is one of the things that makes people buy iPhones over HTC Desires.

The original iPhone was dubbed the Jesus Phone. Apple can't afford version 4 to be seen as the Jesus, What A Crappy Phone.

Cloud computing doesn't really mean storing your data in a cloud: it means your stuff's been stuck on a server in an enormous temperature-controlled room somewhere.

That doesn't mean it has to be in a boring building, though: it could be down a mine, in something that looks like Dr Evil's control centre or even off the coast of Suffolk.

Here are 10 weird places that data can be, will be or has been stored in.

1. In a former nuclear fuel facility

1&1 Internet's data centre in Hanau, Germany - currently under construction - is in a facility called New MOX. The facility was originally built in the 1980s to produce mixed oxide rods from enriched uranium and plutonium, but it never became operational.

Image credit: 1&1 Internet

2. Underneath a cathedral

Never mind backups: wouldn't it be great if your data was protected not just by reinforced concrete, but by God too? That may have been the thinking behind Academica's data centre in Finland, which is located in a former World War II bomb shelter underneath the Uspenski Cathedral. Its waste heat will be pumped into the city's heating grid, which heats water in pipes to warm local homes.

Image credit: InvictaHOG on Wikimedia

3. In a car park

In a trend magnificently dubbed White Trash Data Centers by The Register, firms such as Sun Microsystems, HP and Microsoft have stuffed entire data centres into shipping containers that can be dropped off in a company's car park, hooked up and switched on.

4. In a nuclear bunker

Never mind mere bomb shelters: if you want to turn other ISPs green with envy, you need to follow Swedish ISP Bahnhof's lead and stick your data centre in a nuclear bunker. Not only that but you also need to add waterfalls, greenery and lighting that makes it look like something from a video game.

Image credit: Bahnhof

5. Six miles off the coast of Suffolk

Sealand - or the Principality of Sealand, to give it its full name - was built to defend British shores from the Nazis. Its owners, the Bates family, believe that it's a fully independent nation, although the British government would disagree. In 2000 it became a data haven for firms and individuals who wanted to keep their data away from the mainland's authorities. The Pirate Bay nearly bought it in 2007 but the deal fell through, and hosting firm HavenCo went offline in 2008.

Image credit: Octal on Flickr

6. In a shopping mall

Remember the shopping mall zombie game Dead Rising? Replace zombies with servers… that doesn't really work, does it? Never mind. Lifeline Data Centers turned the Eastgate Mall in Indianapolis into a data centre. It's no ordinary mall, though: thanks to tax credits for fallout shelters, the mall's designers made liberal use of reinforced concrete and dug hardened shelters underneath the shops.

Image credit: Lifeline Data Centers

7. In a chapel

Chapels appear to be great for data centres: the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre stuck its MareNostrum supercomputer in the 19th century Chapel Torre Girona, while Boston College stuck its own data centre in the empty St Clement's Chapel.

Image credit: Boston College

8. In an air base

Data centre provider Advanced Data Centers took on part of the McClellan Air Base in Sacramento, California, building an enormous and relatively environmentally friendly data centre that uses 38% less energy than traditional data centres.

Image credit: ADC

9. At the bottom of a coal mine

In 2007, Sun Microsystems announced plans to chuck 30 Blackbox self-contained computing facilities down a Japanese coal mine to create an underground data centre. Mines are cold, and that means no need for air-conditioning - so a 30,000 server core data centre would save $9 million a year on its electricity bills.

Image credit: Sun

10. In a Van De Graaf silo

Remember the Van De Graaf generators that made your hair stand on end in school? Imagine a truly enormous one, decommissioned and filled with servers. Compute Canada's CLUMEQ project has three floors of concentric rings, which hold server racks boasting some 12,000 processors.

Image credit: Compute Canada

Good news! Microsoft is "hardcore" about Windows 7 slates.

More good news! Microsoft already has an awesome Windows slate with an eye-popping interface and the all-important wow factor! Bad news! It was called Courier, and Microsoft cancelled it ages ago!

Oops!

The Courier won't happen, but Windows slates definitely will. Just days after Microsoft canned its half-cocked Kin mobile phone, does its slate plans mean it's heading for another expensive and embarrassing disaster? The pro-Microsoft angel on our left shoulder hopes not, but the realistic angel on our right fears the worst.

The danger here is that Microsoft approaches Windows slate devices from the wrong direction. If Microsoft asks "how can we stuff Windows into an iPad-style device?" rather than "how can we make the most awesome tablet computer ever made, a machine so mind-meltingly incredible that Steve Jobs fills his pants when he sees it?" then all we'll end up with is a bunch of slightly smaller tablet PCs.

Don't get me wrong. I like Windows 7, and I quite like tablet PCs. But I like the iPad much, much more. It's an amazing device, and that's largely because Apple hasn't just sawed the keyboard off a MacBook Pro and jumped around the place shouting "and that's magic!" like a demented Paul Daniels.

It's been designed from the get-go as a mobile, finger friendly device, not a Mac with touchy-feely bits glued on as an afterthought.

The Windows approach

Have you tried HP's touch-enabled Windows 7 PCs? They look great but they don't quite work, and that's mainly because Windows 7 isn't a finger-based system and HP's touch goodies have been stuck on top of it.

Sure, you can flip your photos and spin things around in the obligatory eye-catching manner, but doing something as simple as picking a track in Windows Media Player has you reaching for the keyboard and the mouse. It isn't a true touch system any more than a teenage boy's facial fluff is a proper beard.

Microsoft could easily do this right. With Windows Phone it's recognised that to compete in an iPhone and Android world it needs to start from scratch - something the failure of the Kin only underlines - and it needs to do the same with tablets.

By all means use Windows to provide the horsepower, but create the front end from scratch, creating something so simple a two-year-old can use it. We mean it: two-year-olds can easily use iPads and run up insane bills from in-app purchases. Microsoft needs to emulate that, although perhaps not with the bankrupting-parents bit.

Most importantly of all, Microsoft needs to make sure its OS works with fingers and thumbs. Not fingers and thumbs for most things, but fingers and thumbs for everything – and if anyone says "hey, this would be awesome if it used a stylus" then take them out the back and shoot them.

When it comes to the tablet form factor, Steve Jobs is right and Steve Ballmer is wrong. If your tablet needs more than fingers, you've failed.

Are you thinking of buying a 3D TV? "For God's sake, don't," says virtual reality expert Mark Pesce – and while TV manufacturers don't agree with his comments, they do warn buyers of potential problems.

Samsung's Australian website warns of numerous side effects including disorientation, headaches and motion sickness, and recommends you don't watch 3D TV if "you are in bad physical condition, need sleep or have been drinking alcohol".

In its manual for its Series 7 3D TV it also urges you not to let under-sixes watch any 3D whatsoever. It's not the TVs; it's the 3D.

Screenings of Avatar gave many cinemagoers headaches, with reports saying that up to 15 per cent of 3D moviegoers get sore heads. That's largely because 3D tells your eyes that they can look anywhere, but much of what's on-screen is blurred – so while the characters may be pinsharp, other foreground elements may be out of focus.

So is 3D actually bad for you? Do Samsung's warnings rule out watching 3D World Cup footage down the pub? According to Mark Pesce, the answer is yes.

Pesce helped invent the virtual reality language VRML and worked with Sega to develop a VR headset in the 1980s. The project was canned when it emerged that 3D messed with many people's heads.

With 3D films, he says, "You'll leave the theatre and your perception – your depth perception – will be screwed up. It'll snap back to normal [but] it'll take different times… some people will snap back immediately, some will snap back in an hour and so on."

It's all an illusion

Steven Nusinowitz, Professor of Ophthalmology at the Jules Stein Eye Institute, has echoed Pesce's comments. He explained to CNN: "The movie is telling you 'Hey, I'm moving around in this scene' but your vestibular system is telling you, 'I'm not moving anywhere'. That disconnect will make some people feel sick."

The problem, Pesce says, is that no matter how good a 3D system is, it's still an illusion. Your eyes are fooled into seeing a 3D scene on a 2D screen, and when it's over it takes a while for your eyes and your brain to return to normal.

"None of this has been thought through by any of the consumer electronics companies," he says. "If you're going to be using it night after night in your living room, it's probably quite unhealthy."

Despite its warnings, Samsung says there's nothing to worry about. "Samsung 3D TVs are safe," a spokesman told us flatly. "When used properly and advisories are followed, 3D functions should not pose adverse health or safety risks."

Samsung R&D chief Simon Lee is more forthcoming. "Each person's ability to recognise the 3D effect is slightly different," he says: around two per cent of us can't view 3D correctly, and small children are more likely to be in that group.

3D TV won't be much fun for them; unfortunately, the technology's too new for anyone to know what, if anything, it will do to the rest of us.

This weekend Apple's App Store will reach its second birthday. Like many good Apple things - iPods with video, electronic books, tablet computers - Steve Jobs originally pooh-poohed the idea of iPhone apps.

Who needs applications when developers can build web-based applications instead? Some 225,000 apps, 5 billion downloads and tens of millions of iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad sales later, the answer appears to be: everyone.

The numbers are truly extraordinary. The App Store launched with just 500 apps, but that number went up quickly: 10,000 by December 2008, 100,000 the following November and 200,000 this April.

The number of downloads went through the roof, too. The Store hit 10 million downloads within four days, reached its first billion in nine months and cracked the five billion mark before two years were up. Not bad for something nobody wanted or needed.

It hasn't been perfect - Apple has been accused of overzealous censorship, of having an inconsistent approvals process and of letting all kinds of crap into the App Store - but the App Store deserves birthday congratulations for two very good reasons. It's been great for independent developers, and it's been great for ordinary users.

Developers first. While App Store millionaires are the minority, Apple reckons that between them, its developers have still trousered more than a billion dollars in App Store revenues. Does anyone really think web-based iPhone apps would have generated even a fraction of that? It's hard to stand out from the crowd, we know, but the App Store does enable even the smallest development team - or individual - to compete with the big boys, and word of mouth can still generate significant sales.

The knock-on effect of that is a whole wide world of applications covering every conceivable niche, usually at a knock-down price. Even Apple's apps are cheap: six quid for an iPad word processor? It wasn't so long ago that considerably less powerful programs cost hundreds.

Being able to pick up apps for a few quid here, a few pence there encourages us to experiment, to forget our favourites when something brighter and better comes along - and that in turn means developers are constantly under pressure to raise their game, to create even better applications. Software hasn't been this exciting since the online shareware explosion of the nineties.

We're in the middle of an extraordinary period of innovation, a time when anything seems possible and when even fairly modest hardware is an all-singing, all-dancing do-anything machine. That may have happened without the App Store, but we very much doubt it. App-y birthday, App Store.

There are two things everybody knows about Twitter: lots of famous people use it, and Twitter is down a lot.

The Fail Whale, Twitter's cute "oops! We're over capacity!" page, was a regular sight in Twitter's early days, but the service has made lots of improvements to cope with demand. Or at least, that's what we've been told.

So why has the Fail Whale been as much a part of this year's World Cup as the dreaded vuvuzela?

The short answer is demand. Twitter's extraordinary growth has seen it go from 2.5 million tweets per day in January 2009 to 50 million in January 2010, and the numbers just keep on growing: it averaged 55 million tweets per day in April 2010 and is currently sitting at an enormous 65 million tweets per day.

On a typical day Twitter deals with an average of 750 tweets per second, but during popular events those numbers go through the roof. Writing on the official Twitter blog, Sean Garrett notes that June's game between the LA Lakers and the Boston Celtics generated a record 3,085 tweets per second. That record didn't last long: Japan's World Cup game against Denmark saw Twitter hit a new peak of 3,283 tweets per second.

Those peaks in demand can overwhelm websites, as Mike Bromilow, country manager for UK, Middle East and Africa at website performance experts Keynote Systems, explains. "This year's World Cup has really tested online resources such as sporting sites and social networks as when goals are scored during big matches, there has been a huge reaction online," he says.

World Cup fail

"A good example of this was during England's World Cup match against Slovenia. According to our statistics, Twitter's availability dropped to just over 30 percent in the UK during the match."

Hence the Fail Whale. But why does Twitter fall down when other high profile sites don't? "Our statistics show that other free social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook consistently outperform Twitter in terms of availability and download speeds," Bromilow says.

To be fair, LinkedIn is a business-focused network so you wouldn't expect it to have much traffic during a World Cup match, and while Facebook's status updates are as prone to peaks as Twitter tweets are, Facebook has been dealing with hundreds of millions of visitors for considerably longer. Twitter has been beefing up its infrastructure, but it hasn't always done it right.

Sean Garrett admits that June has been "Twitter's worst month since last October." As he explains, the site has been trying to tweak its systems while dealing with record traffic levels.

"We have long-term solutions that we are working towards, but in the meantime we are making real-time adjustments so that we can grow our capacity and avoid outages during the World Cup," he says. "We have uncovered unexpected deeper issues and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of our attempts to make changes."

Complications

As Bromilow points out, "A site falling over is very rarely bad luck. With all sites, problems of this nature are typically due to a lack of planning, load testing and site performance monitoring which can leave sites unprepared for an influx of site visitors at one particular time."

In Twitter's case it says it did plan, it did test and it did monitor performance - but just as traffic levels started to soar, it discovered that things were more complicated than expected. As Sean Garrett explains, "we were well aware of the likely impact of the World Cup. What we didn't anticipate was some of the complexities that have been inherent in fixing and optimizing our systems before and during the event."

So does any of this matter? Twitter is keen to point out that, according to Pingdom, it's still achieving over 98% uptime - but the same reports show that Twitter is getting slower, and of course 98% uptime is only impressive if that 98% includes the times when you actually want to use the service.

As Mark Bromilow points out, the danger for a real-time communications site such as Twitter is obvious. "If a particular social networking site isn't performing as it should and people are unable to voice their opinion in this way, they will soon lose patience and may look to using another site in the first instance in future."

So far, it seems that the outages aren't doing Twitter any serious damage: if you check out the traffic graphs on Alexa, Twitter just gets more and more popular.

But social network users are a fickle bunch, and fortunes can change overnight: one day you're surfing an ever-increasing wave of traffic, and the next you're watching all your users flee. Just ask MySpace.