It rather went under my radar that Latitude has finally arrived on iPhone last week. However, it’s not quite what it is on Blackberry and Android.

I expected it would be rolled into an update to the superb Google Maps app but it seems not - it runs only as a web app apparently at the behest of Apple itself.

While on Blackberry and Android can run any application in the background - on the iPhone, Apple only lets a few, such as its own iPod and Mail apps, due to battery drain issues.

This means that to broadcast your location you have to have the web page open - do anything else, and move somewhere else, and it won’t track you.  Which makes it rather pointless in my book. And the app permanently things my office is in Paddington. Which it isn’t.

And the actual page doesn’t contain any useful contextual information about what the person is doing - it’s all rather bland.

I’m holding out hope, probably in vain, that this will be sorted in the next significant iPhone update. At the moment though, it’s a bit pants, basically.

It seems only a few years ago that Sky TV introduced High Definition into the UK, but today’s it’s announced that it’s going to be launching 3DTV next year.

Interestingly, it won’t require a new set-top box and the current Sky HD box will carry the service. But what it will require is 3D TV - so just as an HD TV is required for HD - a 3D TV is required for 3D TV, which makes sense. These will become available on our shores around the same time, most likely initially from Panasonic.

From what I can gather, you’ll need to pop on a pair of glasses to watch the content in 3D though, but that didn’t bother me too much when I saw Monsters and  Aliens in 3D at Dreamworks.

Now while I’m normally, a huge fan of any new technology that comes along,especially 3D, which I’ve been impressed with both in the cinema and on the PC gaming side of things.

However, I’m actually slightly peeved that it will be arriving on our shores so soon. I’ve so far not made the jump to HD but was planning on getting something large and high-endish very soon.

But if I do, I might be plunging into into expensive obsolescence, which considering my current TV is about to reach its 10 anniversary, would disappoint me somewhat.

It’s a classic tale I guess - when should you jump onto that technology bus. There’s always something better around the corner.

It’s been less than a month since Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 and now it’s been and gone and done released some screenshots of what it thinks Firefox 4.0 might look like.

Just so we’re clear - it has the caveat in large letters at the top of the page that they are “NOT FINAL! THEY ARE ONLY FOR BRAINSTORMING/EXPLORATION!”

With Aero enabled, its has to be said that the design looks quite a bit like Google Chrome, which as we all know, in Chrome OS form, will shortly be taking over the world near you.

The raised buttons on the left are pure Chrome, as it the tool options to the right of the search bar. The tabs are separated out a little and without tool bars, it does look cleaner and more modern.

Is that a  tab on the left for showing a thumbnails of favourite sites - a la, Chrome and Safari?

So far Mozilla hasn’t gone the whole hog and combined the address bar and the search bar, a la Chrome, and the tabs are still below rather than above the address bar.

Regardless of design, I feel the most important thing Mozilla can do it to ensure that like Chrome, it puts each tab into a separate process, so when one crashes, it doesn’t take the whole browser with it.

Generally though, I like what I see.

Any other thoughts on the look of Firefox 4 so far?

Despite the fact that the moon has been in the sky for a while and it’s hopefully not going anywhere too soon, it’s been in the news a lot lately for some reason. Therefore I’ve put together my favourite top-ten moon ‘fun’ facts that I’ve gleaned in the last few days.

1.  Yes, we know who the first man to step on the surface of the moon was, but Buzz Aldrin was the first to pee on it.

2. Despite the peeing, Buzz Aldrin was, and still is, a religious man and performed Holy Communion in the lunar lander. NASA would not broadcast it though for fears of backlashes from atheists. They probably should have left them on Earth.

3.  The lunar lander has several nicknames, but my favourite was the ‘chocolate box’ because of its gold coverings.

4.  Again with the Buzz Aldrin - most of the pictures of the moon landing are of him, not of ‘er, the other one.

5.  The lunar lander had less than a minute left of fuel left in it, by the time Armstrong set it down as he’d had to adjust course to find a better landing spot as the guidance computer kept crashing.

6.  This was probably because the processing power on the Apollo lunar lander was the same as a child’s toy would have today and it only had 64Kb of memory. (This is a shorter version of my Moon feature).

7.  Buzz Aldrin had to be careful not to lock the door of the lunar lander as he left it could only be unlocked from the inside. Luckily he got that right as otherwise he and Neil Armstrong would still be there. Only thinner.

8.  Google Maps now extends to the moon and you can view it in 3D as part of Google Earth! The landing locations of each of the six Apollo missions are marked on Google Maps. But there doesn’t appear to be any way of getting directions to my house.

9.  A Nevada entrepreneur says he owns the moon and that he’s interim president of the first known galactic government. I am also Britney Spears.

10.  All of the Apollo missions were faked by NASA. True story.

Bonus.

11. Nobody ever mentions Michael Collins.

If you’ve got your hopes set on a Palm Pre this Chrimbo then you might want to hold off on updating iTunes.

When the  Pre first launch in the US, Palm reasonably made a bit of a fuss that its shiny new phone could sync music with iTunes - making it a real pull to those considering switching to Palm but who had already invested in iTunes music. (The Pre didn’t work with copy protected music but was less of an issue seeing as iTunes has ditched DRM).

This pallying up with iTunes unsurprisingly didn’t go unnoticed by Apple, and so, even less surprisingly, the latest iTunes update breaks it. Ostensibly, it’s about bug fixes, but really it’s all about Palm. To Apple’s it’s the biggest bug of all.

The message? Apple are meanies.

The fact is though that Apple was never going to sit back and let its potentially most serious competitor  muscle in on its iTunes monopoly.

There are ways round it though - through third-party programs that sit between the device and iTunes, such as Salling Media Sync and The Missing Sync for Palm Pre, which has been doing the Mac, Palm Sync thing for years. The former has a free version available and apparantely the paid for version enables ‘faster sync’. The latter costs $40.

To be honest if your set on using iTunes and your non-Apple device you might as well pay-up and let some other company worry about having to deal with Apple’s ploys - it’s cash yes, but life’s too short.

And as others have also commented, this sort of shenanigans might focus some attention on Apple’s iPod/iTunes hegemony.

They don’t stop those Google people do they. If you’ve used Google Maps on an iPhone or Android phone you’ll probably be familiar with the ‘My Location’ feature – which can pinpoint your location within a radius of a few hundred yards, even without GPS. And jolly useful it is too.

Now Google has brought it to your browser too – with some caveats. First you need to be using a browser that supports the Geo-location feature. Firefox 3.5 is the only one that has it built-in, but you can also use any browser that supports Google Gears as a plug-in– this includes Google Chrome 2 or dare I say it, Internet Explorer 8.

To get it to work go to Google Maps and click on the circle that appear at the top left, between the navigation pad and the Street View man icon. The first time you click on it your browser will ask you if you want to share location – obviously you’ll say yes - and then it will go and find data using a location API, which pulls in data from the best possible source. Your desktop PC or laptop is unlikely to have GPS built-in so instead it will look to the Wi-Fi or your IP address to determine your location.

However, the implementation in Firefox, and naturally Google Gear browsers (Chrome, IE) uses Google Location Services API rather than the alternative, ‘Skyhook’, and the problem is that Google’s isn’t that accurate - and some have reported themselves being located miles from where they actually are.

So not much use for finding local pizza restaurants, which is naturally the very first use I found for it.

Interestingly, Opera has plumped for Skyhook, but Google Maps doesn’t work with that so there’s no easy way to compare.

So far, in our testing, we’ve been quite underwhelmed by the feature. Testing in Firefox 3.5, the closest I could get was for Google Maps to show me the whole of Greater London – which I didn’t really need Google Maps to tell me.

A work in progress we think.

I don’t mean to keep bashing Microsoft. I really don’t. I like Windows 7, Office 2007, Windows Live Messenger and Media Centre. I like Windows Mesh too.

But I have to. Last week I had occasion to have a pop at what I thought was a tasteless add campaign for IE8, and now I find it’s got a campaign for Office 2010 - and it’s kind of lame.

They’ve put together a trailer to promote the new Office in a sort of The Matrix meets 24 sort of style. Production values and the editing are slick – it’s done very well – in fact too well. The problem is that it’s not that funny – it’s not silly enough.
And the ‘Death of Clippy’ stick - didn’t they do this last time round?

Perhaps if there was a Simon Pegg or a Ben Stiller in there, they might be able to carry it off – but why on earth would they want to be in a Microsoft ad?

Apple’s ‘Mac vs PC ads may have been a bit smug, but they got the tone right, and they were amusing on the whole. At least I thought so.

All of these Microsoft’s adds still have the feel of trying to watch your Dad get down with the kids.

And in other news, RIM and U2 have cosied up to make some ads – which is sort of odd considering that Bono’  Elevation Partners put up the $100 million or so that went into propping up Palm. Bono is clearly smartphone platform agnostic – as long as it pays.

I’ve just discovered a Windows 7 shortcut today and I like it so much I feel the need to share.

Windows 7 has a cool new feature where if you drag a Windows over to the left of the right of the screen it will automatically snap to fit half the monitor, making it very easy to place two documents next to each other. Also if you drag it to the top it will maximise the document to fill the screen.

The only issue is that if you’re running two monitors you can’t snap to the edges in the middle, as Windows sees both as once big screen - therefore you can only snap to the far left and far right. This means that you still have to do the side by side thing manually, which isn’t so great.

However, if you press the Windows key and then the arrows on your keyboard it will snap left, right, and up, while down with reduce the window size. The cool bit though is that it snaps to the edges of your physical monitors, solving my little problem.

This is a rather long-winded way of describing something that if you’re running Windows 7 and have two or more monitors you can try out in seconds. It’s neat - so go do that now.

Thank you.

It is really an iPhone killer out there? After three years or so trying, it’s probably fair to say that there won’t be a single iPhone killer – the Apple wonder just has too much momentum going, especially with the wealth of Apps available for it.

So while I immediately spoilt my own thunder, having finally played with a Pre first hand, if only for a few minutes, there’s no doubt that it will gain a lot of fans when it does eventually make it over here.

It actually impressed as soon as I picked it up off its very cool charging base – ‘the Touchstone’ – onto which the devices snaps via a magnet and charges is through the case – just by contact.

The actually phone is a smaller, rounder affair than the iPhone, and has deliberately been designed in this pebble-like manner so that it’s easy to hold in the hand.

Round the edges it’s got an on/off button and a headphone socket a USB port at the top and not much else. Round the back there’s a speakerphone. The screen is bright and clear, even though it’s a conventional LED and not a OLED screen, as sported by some newer Samsungs. The resolution of 320 x 480 is fine for the size of the screen (3.1inches) though. I was a little surprised to hear though that it only has 8GB of built in memory and no expansion slot – perhaps Palm will take a leaf out of Apple’s book and offer larger capacity versions too.

The Web OS is definitely the most impressive part of the phone though. The Pre is the first phone to support full multi-touch in the same manner as the iPhone, and zooming in and around photos worked very nicely. Gesture support is great, and works from the bezel around the screen, not just on it – thus by swiping backwards underneath takes you to a previous menu. Swiping open apps off, or cards,  off the top of the screen closes them down, which is neat.

My favourite feature was swiping upwards from the bezel, which brings up a ribbon of icons, showing apps that you can switch to and it’s done with a really swish animation. When you move to your app, the one you’re in doesn’t shut down, aka’ the iPhone. Seeing the Pre’s multi-tasking in action actually made the iPhone nestling in my pocket suddenly seem rather old.

In fact, if multi-tasking doesn’t come to the iPhone next year, I’m off, and I suspect a great number of others will be too.

Moving round the phone, applications and images all seemed smooth, without any lagging issues.

The ‘Synergy’ feature was impressive, as it beings contact information from a number of different sources into one view – so for example, Facebook data is pulled into the contact, taking their profile image and other relevant data – so if they’ve got a Facebook picture, you’ll have their picture right there, which saves you having to do it. That’s neat.

The messaging page is also impressive, letting you select multiple methods of contacting people from one screen, such as GTalk, or SMS. I also like the calendar feature – which compresses down unfilled time sports so you can more easily see what’s happening on one screen.

All in all, it’s looks like a very, very nice phone indeed. The multi-tasking is its most impressive feature, and being able to easily switch been running apps in an elegant fashion is great. Though it’s also its Achilles heel, as it’s said to be responsible for the poor battery life.

All in all, I want to get my hands on one of these to see if it’s good enough to make me want to part with my iPhone. It might even leave me with a decision to make. Though no iPhones will be harmed in the making of it.

I have to say that I’m amazed and slightly appalled by the lengths Microsoft is going to get people to use Internet Explorer 8.

Firstly, it’s claiming that without it, woman are in danger of throwing up on their husbands, and secondly, that if you don’t download it, yes – children are going to starve!

Let’s start at the beginning. Microsoft has been running a campaign to promote Internet Explorer 8, which is fair enough. As part of that it’s been running a series of ‘amusing’ video ads, featuring Dean Caine, who found fame as Superman in the 90s TV show he did with Terri Hatcher. (just in case you were wondering).

One particular ad was intended to promote the private browsing feature and did this by showing a women inadvertently discovering something on her husband computer, (presumably porn) that makes her instantaneously projectile vomit – over said husband. Haha.

On the face of it, this is a bold move from Microsoft to do something a little bit more adventurous than its usual rather staid adverts, but it’s clearly lost its bottle. As CNET reports, it has removed the ad as some people had , “found it offensive”.

However all is not lost, as you can still see this mildly amusing clip on YouTube. Naturally.

However, in my research I was keen to discover what Microsoft had removed the ad from – and what I discovered was its horendous “browserforthebetter” web site. To my sheer amazement, on this site it says that for every download of Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft will “donate 8 meals to “Feeding America” to help accelerate an end to hunger in this country. And while it’s doing it, it even throws in the ‘word’ accelerate’ to further promote a browser feature. Nice.

Excuse me, is it just me, or is this a bit sick?

This comes across as desperate - that Microsoft is feeding (see what I did there?) on our emotions to make us download its software. And by the way, it will only donate those ‘8 meals’ if the download is from that exact site – so all those millions of downloads from Windows Update, won’t be feeding the hungry. How fair.

So reading the press release, Microsoft is helping children who have to rely on free or reduced price school meals in term time and don’t get access to them in the summer break. OK, it’s a good cause, but please Microsoft, do you have do it this way? Are those who prefer Firefox, or heck, just use Windows Update, complicit in starving children?

Come on. Naturally I downloaded it, so I didn’t leave the site feeling that I would burn in hell, and hey, it doesn’t say you have to even run the installer. And I’ve got it anyway – through Windows Update (ooh, how could you!).