Excuse that headline, it’s almost as daft as the press release behind this blog entry which suggests that adults are forgetting how to write and spell due to using too many gadgets.

Under the title of ‘Gadget obsessed Britons need a lesson in writing’ the press release, ironically marketing a computer in a pen that digitally captures and syncs handwriting and audio together, it states that the results of a new survey is “sure to send shockwaves throughout English departments across the country”. Perhaps, but only if those departments are being run by five year olds as I doubt anyone older would be fooled by the old computers are evil argument no matter how it is wrapped up this time.

I’ve heard it all before, many times during the last 20 years or so I’ve spent as a professional journalist and author in fact: email is killing letter writing, social networking is killing relationships, computers are killing our ability to think. All of these arguments are equally absurd, no matter what the ’science’ being spouted to try and convince us otherwise.

Email has reinvented the art of letter writing, albeit in a new medium. Thing is that medium is so much better than the messenger pigeons, blokes on horseback and snail mail services that went before. Why is an email of less value simply because it is not written in ink on paper and does not take a week to arrive? This argument has always seemed arse about face to me. The arguments against social networking and computing in general fall apart just as quickly when exposed to even the flimsiest of serious examinations.

Which brings me nicely back to the Livescribe release and that claim that because only 16 percent of those asked write ‘by hand’ once a week or less we, as a nation, are forgetting how to write properly and spell for that matter. “80 percent of respondents agreed that the quality of Britons’ English skills had suffered due to the rise and popularity of gadgets such as smartphones over the last five years” it stated, matter of fact. The YouGov survey also revealed that 34 percent admitted to “inadvertently writing in ‘text speak’ in handwritten situations”.

“This survey points to a worrying precedent that suggests standards in writing and spelling in British adults are deteriorating in later life due to an over-reliance on technology programmes such as predictive texting. It implies that in the absence of these devices people are going to struggle to remember how to spell” said Dr Bernard Lamb, President of the Queen’s English Society.

Does it really? I don’t think so.

Let’s look at the 16 percent who write by hand only once a week at the most. What are they using when they send an email via their netbook or smartphone, their feet perhaps? I imagine they are using their fingers to be honest, so that’s a statistic you can safely flush into oblivion. I hardly ever use a pen these days, other than to sign my son’s homework book, does that signal my slow demise as a professional writer? Erm, nope.

OK, what about the 34 percent who, shock horror, used ‘text speak’ in a handwritten letter. Erm, so bleedin’ what? The thing about text speak, like it or loathe it, is that is has become a de facto part of the language now. So of course we are going to be finding ourselves writing it down out of habit. That is really not such a bad thing, upon reflection. If language did not change and evolve over time our correspondence would resemble some Shakespearian sonnet.

And as for the notion that without a gadget we will forget to spell, I’d like to see the scientific double blind trials operated over a period of time to back that statement up otherwise I’ll treat it as conjecture. A word I managed to spell without recourse to the spoil chicken on this here netbook oddly enough.

Finally, does it not strike anyone as strange that folk trying to sell you a gadget, albeit a pen shaped one, would resort to using a survey that suggests gadgets are creating a nation of retards in order so to do?

ROFL, LMAO etc…

So iPad pricing for the UK has been announced ahead of pre-orders being taken for the 28th May sale day, and somewhat predictably cries of ‘rip off Britain’ have rung out from much of the technology media. But are the prices really that out of step with the USA?

Well, let’s have a look at the facts rather than simply jerking of the knee. Here’s what an Apple iPad will cost in the UK:

The entry level WiFi only version is £429 for the 16GB version, £499 for the 32GB device and £599 for a 64GB iPad. Move to the other end of the scale with devices that add 3G to the mix and you are looking at £529 for the 16GB iPad, £599 for 32GB, and £699 for the range topping 64GB model.

All of those prices include VAT, and for me that’s the important part. So while a basic entry level iPad will cost you around £340 ($499) by the time you add VAT it starts to level out a bit at £399. On top of that you have to then factor in the cost of UK trading which, my international retail pals assure me accepted as being in the region of 7 percent. That brings the price up to £427 which is just a couple of quid difference, hardly a right royal rip off if you ask me.

Too many folk appear to have completely missed the ‘including VAT’ element of the pricing announcement, not to mention that US pricing does not include local sales taxes which have to be added, and instead have jumped to the usual conclusion that Apple is just ripping us off on this side of the pond, which is a shame.

So, am I going to be buying one? No.

Is the price putting me off? Yes.

But that’s just because I can’t justify spending £700, plus another data plan, for a bigger version of the iPhone that I’m already quite happy with. OK, I appreciate that the iPad is actually a lot more than that, but you can see where I am coming from. When my iPhone data plan contract has expired, and Apple has released the second generation iPad devices with the bugs ironed out and additional functionality built in, I’ll be in the queue with my wallet open faster than an MP filling in an expenses claim.

A new study from the Customer Experience Board might serve to remind you that owning a computer is lot like being married, although I’m sure that was not the intention when it published results of it’s research in the Combating Computer Stress Syndrome report.

Let’s look at the meat of the report: 78 percent think they can handle any problems that might arise yet 64 percent of people say they have been stressed by the experience. Or how about the 94 percent of people who rely upon it to keep their lives together, yet 40 percent have resorted to using a support service?

Delving deeper, the causes of stress with tech support services are also remarkably similar to those within a marriage: long waiting times to get anything done, an inability to fix problems and a realisation of how damn expensive it all is.

If you really want more proof of why tech support is like a bad marriage then I present you with the evidence that the main causes of failure are an increase in stress, interruption to play time and a difficulty in purchasing things.

The report concludes that, in part, the problem of Computer Stress Syndrome can be exacerbated by the fact that many consumers are trying to cut costs by dealing with support issues by home-grown means. So, just as when a marriage goes wrong, most people either try and fix it themselves, ask a family friend to intervene or just ignore it and hope the problem will go away.

There’s a joke going around technology media circles at the moment: a Microsoft employee dropped a Kin prototype phone in a Californian bar, nobody noticed. It has a certain resonance, not least because Microsoft would quite likely happily kill for the sort of publicity being generated for Apple by the iPhone 4G dropped in a bar story currently on every newswire but which started over at Gizmodo.

While Apple has now apparently asked tech site Gizmodo, which supposedly purchased the prototype iPhone 4G from an individual who ‘found’ it in a bar, to give it’s phone back. Of course, Gizmodo is likely to be more than happy to oblige no matter how much it paid for the phone. Even if it paid $10,000 which is at the upper end of the guessing game scale (most sources suggest $5000 is nearer the mark) the site will have seen a huge return on investment in terms of the on-site advertising revenue on those pages breaking the news but also the longer term impact of the reputational kudos. The only spoiler has been some lingering doubt, much of it spread by other sites which one has to assume are jealous at not getting the thing themselves, over the provenance on the device. Some are claiming it is just another fake, one more hoax in the long history of iPhone development misdirection. If Apple want it back, and according to Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell it most certainly does, then it must be the real thing, no?

Meanwhile, Microsoft can only dream of the kind of media hysteria that has been unleashed over the last week as a result of that dropped prototype. The best it has managed so far, in relation to the badly named Kin phone (as in who would want that Kin Microsoft phone, speak it out loud for the full effect) has been some rather lame controversy concerning a promotional video showing some bloke taking photos of his man-boobs to share with the world. It encourages sexting, cry the usual suspects, and if it were a woman doing the up-blouse videoing then everyone would be up in arms about it. Of course, it wasn’t a woman, so nobody really cares that much. A bit like the Kin itself. No joke.

You might think that, given the sheer number of business applications available for the iPhone, the answer is a resounding yes. However, it does rather depend, of course on how you approach the question in the first place. If you enter the question arena from the door marked security then things take on an altogether different light. I have lost count of the number of security consultants who have been warning that one of the biggest dangers facing the average enterprise in terms of data loss and security impact potential is that posed by the rise of the smartphone.

Take the recent survey conducted by endpoint data leak prevention outfit DeviceLock, which took over seven months to compile. It asked whether more than a 1000 businesses had taken any steps to secure themselves against the security threat of iPhone usage. Less than 40 percent could confirm that they had, with an alarming number of people admitting that any iPhone threat is treated most definitely as a back burner security issue right now. In Western Europe and North America things were even worse, with 75 percent currently ignoring the iPhone security threat. Compare and contrast with Eastern Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific businesses where close to 60 percent had taken action already.

“While this website-administered poll has inherent limitations, the results do suggest that the iPhone threat to data security is being generally underestimated” said Ashot Oganesyan, DeviceLock CTO and Founder, who concludes “the variation in how the well-developed IT markets of the West view the iPhone threat versus the emerging IT markets of the East may be because Enterprise IT planners in the West are relying on the already-entrenched vendors, such as RIM and Microsoft, to ‘have their backs’ and not introduce such a device without the necessary security hooks in place for device-related policy enforcement and encryption”.

Whatever, history shows us that the most effective enterprise strategy for dealing with any mobile media is simply to establish clear policies with regard to these new devices and enforce those policies using whatever tools are available to them. It ain’t rocket science, but without it I fear that the continuing use of iPhones (and other smartphone devices) within the enterprise could quickly see iPhone security become a stellar security problem.

So a press release lands on my virtual desk this morning, informing me that I have ’so much freedom’ in my pocket and extolling the virtues of sharing the mobile 3G Internet. There is just one thing wrong with this enthusiastic release for a 3G router so I can share my mobile broadband connection around between friends, family and colleagues - and that’s the real world.

“The new Wireless Mobile Router 300N X2 enables the user to easily share wireless mobile 3G internet at any location such as a hotel, conference room, café or camping site” the email from the PR begins, and the release itself continues with such classic lines as “ideal for mobile users, who want to share mobile 3G internet with multiple users at any location”.

I particularly liked the optimism shown by Sitecom, whose product this is bigging up, when talking in terms of sharing ones “3G internet subscription with colleagues in a conference room or on a business trip, with fellow students at school or with family on the camping site”.

Have these people never actually bought a mobile phone, or indeed a 3G mobile broadband access dongle and used it for Internet related stuff? Have they never looked at the terms of the contract? Or do they live in some fantasy world where the words ‘usage cap’ and ‘monthly data limits’ have not been invented perhaps? Accessing the Internet courtesy of your mobile device is great, but exceed the monthly limit and you’ll find yourself either dumped into the world of no access (or at least no vaguely usable access) or the world of the ‘now the network provider can charge you at the truly exorbitant per Mb rate’ which is even worse.

I am fortunate in that pretty much everywhere I go my 3G connection is rubbish, meaning that I can stay within my monthly data cap. That said, when armed with a netbook and a 3G dongle in an area of decent reception and given a day with nothing better to do I am like most nerds in that I can do some serious damage to it by way of streaming video and some monster downloading sessions or perhaps a bit of chatting via Skype even.

Look, I am willing to admit that this mobile router looks impressive on paper: “two Internal High Performance Antennas to strengthen the range of the wireless network” which “reduce dead spots and guarantee expanded coverage at any location” and comes complete with 802.11n and WPA2 support via a one-button setup system.

But, and it’s a huge J-Lo booty sized but, why would anyone in their right mind want to share their 3G Internet access with anyone? Seriously, if you are on a camping trip with me bring your own Internet enabled mobile device. Honestly, if we are at a conference and your mobile phone won;t connect to the Internet well tough, should have bought a better mobile phone. And as for fellow students at school, gee whizz, if ever there’s a case for a stupid argument in a press release getting some kind of award then that has to be it.

Here’s the bottom line: buy your own 3G dongle, buy your own 3G mobile phone, use a WiFi hotspot.

So, to conclude, nice looking bit of kit which falls squarely into the for use by millionaires, tech philanthropists and idiots only.

Some might argue that a Swiss Army Knife is difficult enough to get into as it is, especially if you have little fat fingers like me. I have trouble opening the thing to get stuff out of horses hooves, for example, but luckily have never found myself in urgent need of this particular tool. Now Victorinox has added another tool to certain Swiss Army Knife models and is boasting about how difficult it is to open, in fact it recently offered a reward of $100,000 to anyone who could open it and the reward went unclaimed.

Just WTF am I going on about this time, you might be wondering although grateful that I’ve dropped the Swiss Cheese talk by now, so let me explain. The tool in question is a USB data drive and the reason it cannot be opened, at least by those not meant to open it, would be the Elliptical Curve and AES encryption that is employed to keep it shut. At CES in Las Vegas, Victorinox threw down a challenge and was so confident that nobody would be able to crack the encryption that it offered that $100K prize to anyone who did. It wasn’t at all surprised that the money went untouched, nor was it concerned about the adverse publicity if it had been. Apparently this Swiss Army Knife also comes with a self-destruct mechanism that would have detected the tampering and destroyed all the data anyway.

Andy Cordial, managing director of the storage systems integration specialist Origin Storage reckons the $100K reward was just the tip of the financial iceberg if anyone had managed the cracking in the couple of hours allotted to each entrant. “If a hacker manages to crack 128-bit AES technology” he says “governments would pay a lot more than $100,000 for the secret”.

Not, as I have said before, that cracked encryption is always a bad thing but in this case I’m glad that the Swiss Army Knife retained that hard earned reputation for being a great tool that’s hard to get into.

We’ve had the battle of the apps and now it’s the battle of the handset. But after all the hype, it has not been the greatest start for Google and the Nexus One phone - maybe we should be looking forward to the Nexus Two and all that might bring with it?

After all there has been the family of the late author Philip K. Dick apparently talking about suing Goggle for intellectual property infringement over the use of the name Nexus. Dick wrote the book ‘Do Androids’s Dream of Electric Sheep’ upon which the film Bladerunner was based, Any self-respecting geek will know that the replicants in the novel are Nexus 6 model androids. What with the Google Android OS and all, the link seems somewhat coincidental despite claiming it was used in the generic and original sense of the place where things converge. I doubt that Google will have much trouble in making any legal action go away, to be honest. However, it may have more trouble making some of the bad feeling of early adopters vanish.

It would appear that Google is learning the hard way that there is quite a difference between being a new media giant and a mobile phone supplier. Reports are coming in of forums being flooded with unhappy customers looking for support, and unfortunately often finding it. Unlike mobile operators which are well geared up to dealing with customer complaints and queries, Google is discovering that it just doesn’t have the kind of support setup that is required when selling this kind of hardware direct to the public. People are, it seems, unhappy about the email only support especially when it can take between one and two days to reply. People are also unhappy about the confusion over support when they approach their mobile network operator or the handset manufacturer, HTC, which seem to be playing a game of support switcheroo - referring customers to each other for help which isn’t forthcoming.

But some Americans are now getting a little hot under the unhappy collar because it has been rumoured that the European version of the Nexus One will be getting the multitouch support that has been much requested, and much moaned about in its absence. A reviewer in Germany is said to have been given a review model with just such support, in the form of iPhone-alike pinch-zooming, and even though this has been denied by Google on one Google Mobile help page it does point towards what we can expect to see in the Nexus Two.

Indeed, the Next Generation Nexus could also look to take on more than the iPhone if some reports are to be believed. Techwhack suggests that the Nexus Two could be aimed at taking on the Blackberry market by being enterprise ready and even come complete with a physical keyboard to replace the rather criticised virtual version found on the Nexus One.

Whatever shape and form the Nexus Two does take, I would suggest it needs to be a significant step up and offer something much more innovative that the Nexus One which has, to be honest, turned out to be just another Android from HTC albeit one carrying a Google logo on the back. Think of this as being just the first step towards speeding up Android hardware adoption, getting the Google branding out there in the mobile handset market. The Nexus One is no iPhone killer in any shape or form, but given the success in terms of both sales and media coverage I imagine that the Nexus Two and Nexus Three will arrive in fairly quick succession and Google will, as always, learn from its mistakes.

The big question is, of course, what would you like to see in terms of truly innovative functionality for the Nexus Two that might encourage you to actually buy one.

I thought I had experienced more than my fair share of Xbox 360 problems (see here and here for details and then add to that a failed DVD drive on a new machine for good measure) but a new survey would seem to suggest my life with the Xbox has been pretty much par for the course.

According to the Game Informer magazine survey of close to 5000 readers, the Nintendo Wii has a failure rate of just 6.8 percent, and the Sony PlayStation 3 a tad more on 10.6 percent. But the Microsoft Xbox 360 is likely to break five times as often as the PS3 on a stunningly poor failure rate of 54.2 percent.

According to the survey, the Xbox 360 was also the most used of the three consoles with it being used between 3 to 5 hours every day by 40 percent of users, while 37 percent of PS3 owners said the same. Most Wii players, 41 percent, played for less than 1 hour per day meanwhile.

So, given my own poor experience with the Xbox 360 have I stopped playing? No. Have I vowed never to buy another Xbox? No. In fact, despite all the problems with the hardware it has one thing going for it that is like a drug to games players: games. Yep, the games just keep me coming back for more. In fact, my Sony PS3 sees more use as the family Blu-ray player than it does for actual game-play it has to be said. My view seems to tally with the Game Informer survey as only 3.8 percent of Xbox 360 owners said that enough was enough and hardware failures meant they were giving up on the console.

Does that give Microsoft a pass? Not on your nelly. Come on Microsoft, play the game and get your hardware act together. I honestly cannot imagine any other manufacturer of any other hardware in any other genre surviving this kind of failure rate.

Last month I published an editorial about ‘the problem with the Palm Pre‘ which concentrated on handset returns due to build-quality issues. Things would appear to have gone from bad to worse, but this time it is the double whammy of privacy problems and the Apple iPhone 3GS that seem to be to blame.

The 3GS has been an undoubted success, with 02 selling out within a week and Apple claiming a million units sold in the first three days alone. Although it has had it’s problems, such as the much publicised hot handset issue and complaints about poor battery life. Now it seems that the heat might be coming off of Apple as it gets turned up on Palm and the Pre.

Could this be the start of a Palm Pre media backlash I wonder? Certainly that feeling of undying love, so prevalent as reviewers flocked to the ‘iPhone killer’ phone has been blunted somewhat by a row over user privacy.

It all started, as so many good stories do these days, with a blog entry which detailed how one otherwise happy user noticed that his Palm Pre was, well, phoning home every now and then. He investigated the WebOS code, the browser-focussed operating system that drives the Pre, and discovered that his Pre was sending his GPS location to Palm as well as detailing which applications he ran and for how long. It was, the blogger says, doing all this every day. Nothing illegal going on here, it is all covered in the Palm Pre privacy policy that users of the handset agree to when they get started with the smartphone after all. But anything that is hidden away in legalese or detailed in the kind of document that most people should, but don’t, read is pretty much guaranteed to get the blogosphere yelling. Which means that the mainstream media is not going to be far behind, and it all adds up to bad publicity at the worse time for Palm.

Especially as it comes at the same time as reports are circulating that Pre sales are plummeting as a result of the iPhone 3GS effect. An analyst for Morgan Joseph has apparently advised clients to sell, rather than hold, Palm stocks. Ilya Grozovsky is reported as noting Pre sales were around 100,000 units in July which was half of the June figure, and predicting even lower numbers for August. Grozovsky says this points to a price cut soon, which could be good news for smartphone buyers but bad for Palm shareholders.

As for the privacy allegations, Palm remains adamant that it takes privacy seriously and provides a way for Pre users to disable the data collection that has been blogged about. To be fair, read the Palm privacy policy and it does make it quite clear that when using location based service “we will collect, transmit, maintain, process, and use your location and usage data (including both real time geographic information and information that can be used to approximate location) in order to provide location based and related services, and to enhance your device experience” which is pretty much what I would expect for such a device. Do iPhone users imagine anything different when using location based services on their 3GS for example? I know I don’t, it is part and parcel of using such a device to perform such a job. While I am not advocating that Scott McNealy was right when, 10 years ago now, he said that you have zero privacy and should get over it, I do concur with Google which, when forced into a corner by Mr and Mrs Boring conceded that complete privacy no longer exists.

I’m not talking about ID Card privacy stuff or those behind he user’s back Phorm and BT snooping trials, but rather your every day interaction with things technological. Unless you are a sandals and ponytail type who thrives on mung beans and bongos while shunning technology and the modern world. Which would mean you are not reading this, so I guess not. My privacy is important to me, but mainly from the perspective that I want to choose how I control it - and that means that if I want to know which way I am facing in my office without looking out the window and don’t mind sharing that information with Apple and Google then I’ll probably hit the compass icon a couple of times on my 3GS. Palm Pre users make the same kind of decisions, balancing the myth of total privacy against the fact of technological functionality.

Don’t they?