So having popped over the to BBC to talk about Snow Leopard to them

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mdnjn/World_Business_Report_28_08_2009 (I’m at 19:10), it was off to Apple to have a briefing and grab a copy of the OS.

And here it is, calling out, “install me!”.

If you’re a Mac head, you’ve no doubt already picked up a copy and installed it on your machine. What do you think so far?

If you’re wondering what the fuss is about, or just want to see what we think, or both, all being well, we’ll be publishing our first look review shortly, so check a bit back later.

This week Virgin came in to show off its new ‘Freedom’ netbook, at the media company jumps aboard the netbook bandwagon, giving away a machine if you sign up to a new broadband contract of a least £20 a month.For that you get a 10Mb/sec broadband connection, a mobile broadband dongle with a 1GB data cap.

Remember that’s a 24 month contract, and don’t be fooled by the ‘from £20 a month’ - that’s for the first three months only- and you also have to take a Virgin phone line at £11 a month. So unless you’re planning on giving up your BT line, it’s not necessarily the best value.

The  machine is actually one of the nicest netbook we’ve seen,with a super shiny lid display with a smooth gloss finish round the nearly flush bezel round the display.

The keyboard is of reasonable quality too, though it is a bit saggy in the middle, but the trackpad is large and the two buttons beneath it have a good click action.

Inside specs are a rather regular netbook - with a 1.6Ghz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM and Windows XP Home Edition.

It’s available in black or a rather vivid red finish, and comes suppliede with an equally garish red carry puch, and a range of customisable stickers, that give it an slightly forced, ‘add your own flair’ feel.

The main concern is over battery life, which Virgin itself says will only give you three hours or so, a far cry from the 10 hours you’ll get from the best machines out there.

Still, as long as you’ve decided to go with Virgin anyway it looks like a decent machine, but we wouldn’t recommend it let it sway you.

There’s been much coverage over O2 not once, not twice, but thrice, suffering from a network break down. And on the interwebs, and on Twitter there has been much virtual ‘wailing and nashing of teeth’. There was coverage when everyone on iPhone’s at Glastonbury had poor or no coverage, and equally I recall reading how no one could get online at a recent game at Lords due to the number of iPhones.

Was it in Apple’s brief when putting together the world’s most sophisticated phone to ensure that it was only available on networks that couldn’t cope with it? It’s frustrating  to know that you’re using a ‘breakthrough’ internet device’, only not be able to use it at all for its intended purpose - as in get online.

Still, it’s not as bad as in the US where it’s on AT&T, which has been a constant source of irritation to the elite digerati around San Francisco, who not only can’t get online, apparently can’t even make calls or texts when down-town due to network congestion. That is just rubbish

However, I had been wondering what all the fuss had been about, as I seemed to have been spared - until just last week, when I got the at the time mysterious and frustrating message, “Could not activate cellular data network: You are not subscribed to a cellular data service”. I thought this was rather odd, as I am.

A few minutes Googling solved my problem - it involved changing my APN settings (General>Network>Cellular Data Network) from ‘idata.o2.co.uk’ to - ‘mobile.o2.co.uk’ for both Cellular Data and MMS. Apparently these are the correct settings for any one using an iPhone on O2 not on an iPhone tariff. I have a SIM only tariff, which offers the same as the £35 per month- 600 minutes, 1,000 text and ‘unlimited’ web bolt-on. (There’s no visual voicemail, but then I’ve got Spinvox, and whether man or machine powered, it’s better).

Odd then that I’d been fine on the ‘idata’ settings for several months, even though I wasn’t on an iPhone tariff.  I then recalled that a  few days before when I’d plugged the old 3GS into iTunes I had been greeted with a message that iTunes wanted to install some “carrier specific settings.” - and now it wasn’t working. Co-incidence?

However, while making the changes gave me back 3G internet access, I noticed that the internet tethering option that was on the page had dissapeared. O2 will only rip you off for tethering if you’re on an actual iPhone tariff. By the way, if you have a phone such as a Nokia N95, you can use it for tethering for no extra cost, so why O2 feels it can charge  £14.68 for the privilege is just criminal.

I’m also concerned that  non iPhone tariff owners aren’t getting as much bandwidth a those on an iPhone contract. Coming out of the office I saw a ‘E’ for Edge, rather than 3G, which I’ve never seen before.

All this means that the news that O2 may be losing its exclusivity to T-Mobile is good news. I’ve heard anecdotally from someone with an unlocked 3GS that 3G performance is much better on T-Mobile in London than on O2, and while I can’t confirm it myself, I wouldn’t be suprised.

Should I unlock my 3GS and leave O2 for T-Mobile? I’m tempted.

When all’s said and done, Google is still the hottest ticket on the internet, and if you want some of the fun, then you need to jump aboard the roller coaster that is Google Chrome.

As revealed in this ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ style blog, there are three paths you can take - the ‘Stable’ path (worthy, but dull), the Beta Channel, (exciting), or if you’re just crazy man, the ‘Dev channel’.

The first is the latest official release, the second adds all the latest tested speed improvements and features enhancements can be sampled, while the third is where every little test feature than the boffins are Google are working on is chucked in. This be a scary place, so take care.

Having said that, Chrome’s latest Beta seems to be so fast, it’s tripping over itself like an IT girl at the end of a night out. In my tests I found it was coming a cropper with relatively innocuous pages - giving me the “aw, snap” message on an alarming basis. While we all want more speed, if it’s not stable it’s not going to be usable for most people.

Chrome also simply isn’t as compatible as IE or Firefox -take this very Wordpress page I’m typing into - in Chrome the visual elements tab doesn’t work, so there are no ‘Bold’, Italics’ icons’ etc - just cold plain code buttons.

To put those speed claims to the test, we perhaps rather unfairly ran the V8 javascript test. This is Google’s own Javascript engine, and not surprisingly, Chrome comes out on top by some margin.

V8 benchmark (higher is better)
1. Chrome Beta 3.0.195.6 - 3018
2. Firefox 3.5.2 - 328
3. Opera - 188
4 . Internet Explorer 8 - 86.4 (IE was so slow, a box popped up that a script was causing the page to load slowly).

Running the independent Sunspider Javascript benchmark gives us this:

Sunspider 0.9 (lower is better)
1. Chrome Beta 3.0.195.6 - 922.6ms
2. Firefox 3.5.2 - 1318.4
3. Opera - 4173
4. Internet Explorer 8 - 5781

So it matches.

In terms of new features, it’s actually nicked a Windows 7 feature - you can not only drag tabs into new windows, but they will now snap to the sides of your monitor for easy comparing.

You can also now drag the thumbnails around that are present on the new Tab page, remove them or pin them so they stay even if you don’t visit it that regularly.

There’s also now a range of themes, (look in, Options>Personal Stuff), and in typical fashion most of them are quite awful - but fun. I’ve gone for the  excessively shiny, Chrome coloured one.

They’ve also added in some HTML5 features, which helps it compete with what Mozilla is doing with Firefox and the Omnibox has been improved with some new icons to show more clearly what the origin of the item is.

All in all, good to see Google improving things - but while speed is nice’an’all, I’ll be sticking to Firefox until Chrome gets a little less wobbly on its legs.

Microsoft recently made Office 2010 available as a technical preview for a limited audience, and having been invited to take part I thought it would be rude not to.

As its very early days, (it’s not expected to be released until next year), I thought it would be prudent to install it alongside Office 2007. However, that plan was thwarted when the installer told me that the Office 2010 64-bit version I was trying to install would not play with Office 2007 32-bit on my system at the same time.

I therefore plucked up the courage, and uninstalled Office 2007.  I’m now running a beta of Office 2010 on the Windows 7 RC. And it’s pretty much my main system. Hmm, don’t try this at home kids.

In fact the main issue I’m having is that Xobni, the Outlook plugin I love so much, isn’t working for me. A quick search pulls up the fact that some have got Xobni working with Outlook 2010 - but it’s not working for me. I even tried the old school, uninstall, reboot and reinstall approach. But still nada, it won’t appear.

This is slightly ironic as I’ve been evangelising the usefulness of Xobni to colleges and they’ve told me I was spot on - so to no longer be able to run it myself is well, a shame.

Xobni has said that it will start testing on Outlook 2010 when version 1.8 Xobni is out, which it is, so hopefully there might be an update soon. But at the moment I’m having to live without it.

Other issues  I’ve faced with Office 2010 are both Word and Outlook crashing unexpectedly, which didn’t happen before and some other oddities, such as a message when I launch Outlook saying that it’s not the default mail client, even though it is.

Word also warned about opening a file, as it claimed it ‘originated from an Internet location’, which made no sense as it was merely an email attachment. Is that what it meant? If so, it’s going to be doing a lot of complaining, as quite a lot of people will be getting their documents, from, “an Internet location”. If not, are we going back to paper and hand delivery?

Other than that, I like the new look and feel, especially of the now ribbon equipped Outlook 2010, and the new feature to be able to save your paste formatting style is handy too.

If only my Xobni worked…

RIM popped in to Dennis towers today to show off its latest handset - the Blackberry Curve 8520. Compared to the likes of the Bold and the Storm, it’s a low end handset, but claims that it’s targeting both consumer and low-end business users.

Having had a quick look I think it’s going to succeed. It’s a 3G-less and GPS-less device but the advantage is that it’s smaller and lighter. It doesn’t quite have the premium feel of the bold, but it feels reasonably well put together.

The major change is that Blackberry has done away with the wheel in the centre and replaced it with a mini trackpad. Using this was a little odd at first, but I quickly got used to it, and as the RIM PR Manager explained, it does mean one less moving part to go wrong..

Also new is that the buttons down the sides and intriguingly the media controls at the top, are set flush into rubber edges.

Screen quality looks fine, but certainly not as vibrant as it is on the Bold. The Curve is now available for pre order from Carphone Warehouse for free on Orange for £35 - with a £10 a month cashback offer. So actually £25 a month. Why not just make it £25 a month? I have no idea.

We’ll run a full review of the Curve 8520 next week.

A couple of the broadsheets have picked up on an amusing incident on live TV on Sunday, where Sir Mike Jackson, the former head of the British army, was defeated by a mobile phone.

This was during an interview with  Stephanie Flanders, the BBC’s economics editor, who was forced to tell him to, “turn that phone off”.

Sir Mike’s first mistake was to go live on air with a mobile phone in his pocket. His second mistake was to not have it on silent. His third mistake was to not know how to  reject a call when it did ring.

As you can see in the short clip below though -he did show a cool head in analysing the situation and realising that when he couldn’t turn it off, hurling it away like a ticking grenade would be the best, and luckily for us, most entertaining option.

We can sympathise at least. It’s not the first time I’ve been tempted to deal with technology through the immediate application of physics and our esteemed Editor Maggie, very nearly did the same thing when reviewing the no less than infuriating Toshiba TG01.