Hello – My name is Chris Green, and I used to be a BlackBerry addict. Prior to this past weekend, it had been two and a quarter years since I kicked the habit.

Alas, I have relapsed. Despite being clean for such a long time, buoyed by a winning start to the Championship football season by QPR and one sugar too many in my afternoon cup of tea, I decided to have a BlackBerry hit. Just the one – after all, what harm could it do? Read more

There are few things that really amaze me on a Monday, but this piece of news really has.

Ikea, everyone’s favourite low-cost furniture and herring emporium, has decided to branch out into the mobile phone business.

The trouble is that the new service is similar to its furniture – very cheap, but you have to assemble the phone yourself. There will be a few screws missing, a lump of plastic shaped like a gunshot wound left over, and everything will be smothered in wood glue.

Of course, I’m kidding – a bit. Read more

Today is a special day in the IT PRO office, and not just because 25 July is IT PRO’s birthday - we are two today.

The big news is that today is International System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Being a SysAdmin is often a thankless task. Everyone complains when things go wrong, but rarely does someone contact the IT department to tell them what a good job they are doing. No wonder so many SysAdmins turn into the b****** operator from hell.

This is the day that all fellow SysAdmins worldwide will be showered with expensive gifts in appreciation of their diligent work. That said, there is a credit crunch on, so at the very least take a moment to go and visit your resident SysAdmin, tell them what a good job they are doing and how they are appreciated by the whole company. Maybe give them an appreciative hug.

OK - maybe not the hug bit.

The UK mobile phone-buying public have become used to getting their handsets for ‘free’ or at least heavily discounted over the SIM-free ticket price.

Of course, there is no such thing as free, but rather just deferred cost or hire purchase without the financial regulation. That Nokia N95 doesn’t really cost £29, but rather the £300 that has been subsidised off the top line will be recouped from you (plus a healthy profit) over the life of your 18 months £50-a-month airtime contract.

However, a USB 3G dongle is not an expensive bit of kit. The pay-as-you-go (PAYG) price on most networks is £49.99 inc VAT, and that price includes a profit margin. More money will be made from PAYG mobile data use, but as this revenue will be unpredictable - there is no safety net of a contract and guaranteed minimum recurring payments – the network needs to ensure it is not left out of pocket by selling you a discounted dongle that is subsequently lost, left in a drawer never to be used, or unlocked and used on another network.

Dongle contracts are a different matter. For example, I signed up last year to a two-year contract at £15 a month for my 3G USB dongle and service from 3. In return for signing my life away, I got the dongle for free. Given the cost of the dongle if bought outright, that isn’t much of a subsidy, even on a £15 data plan. If I’d gone for the higher £25 plan (or if I signed up now to 3’s new £30 plan) that’s even less of a subsidy and an even bigger profit margin for the network. However, I’m not bitter; this is the price you pay for being an early adopter. I’m also very impressed with the quality of the data service from 3. That said, I would much rather have the new Huawei E169G USB stick instead of the E220 ‘lozenge’ dongle (pictured) I have now.

Given that all the networks are now offering 3G dongles (O2 has finally joined the party), how do you differentiate your product from the competition? Read more

You are faced with the following dilemma:

• You are a major multi-national software company keen to take a good slice of the smartphone market.
• You have a smartphone platform that you’ve been working away on for years, but despite your best efforts and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, it’s still rubbish!
• You also have a pocket media player device and software platform that is technically excellent but has failed to set the iPod-dominated world alight.
• You’ve also recently bought the only company that successfully licensed your mobile phone operating system and actually made it useable.

So – what do you do?

Following Microsoft’s partner conference in the US last week, it seems the answer is clear – you combine all these elements together and make a smartphone based on the Zune software and user interface. Read more

I wanted to share with you some interesting photos that have come across my desk in the last few days.

The Skypephone, a product collaboration between Skype and mobile phone network 3, was our surprise hit mobile of 2007. Alongside the iPhone, it was the phone we recommended the most from all the products released last year.

The reasons for this were clear:

• It is cheap (£50 each or two for £90 at launch, now even cheaper)
• Build quality is excellent
• Skype integration is excellent
• Did I mention it was cheap?

Well now there’s a new Skypephone in the offing, and some photos of the new handset have been leaked.

Below is the Skypephone 2. Read more

Today is the official launch of Freesat, effectively the satellite TV version of the Freeview digital television service.

The concept is simple: Buy a cheap box from a high street retailer like Argos, Comet or an independent, either hook it up to an existing Sky digital dish or spend about £80 for a man in a van to come round and supply and fit a dish, plug in and start watching around 80 free to air TV channels, including HD channels.

But why do we need it? Read more

I’ve just had a press release flop into my inbox proclaiming that there have been one million downloads of the native Facebook client for RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones. Read more

This week I’ve been out in America covering a very large business intelligence user conference.

It has been a fascinating event, both in terms of the announcements being made at the show and the opportunity it has given me to talk to users, including many from the UK, about how they are deploying business intelligence (BI) in their organisations and about how BI has become so critical to day-to-day operations. Read more

A company’s web site is without a doubt one of its most important assets today. It is a source of information, a marketing tool and the company’s biggest retail outlet.

But a recent survey carried out by IT PRO and sponsored by Star Internet revealed some worrying facts about the state of web hosting customer support and reliability.

Twenty per cent of those surveyed only have access to customer and technical support during normal office hours (usually 9-5) Monday to Friday, which in the modern era is ludicrous considering some of the highest pressure points for web traffic are at the weekend and outside of work hours – when consumers come home from work and start using the web to shop, access information and entertainment.

Equally concerning, 40 per cent of our IT professionals surveyed complain that while they have access to out-of-hours support, they usually end up sitting on hold for exceptionally long periods of time.

Seventy per cent of our survey sample has no service level agreement (SLA) for their web hosting, meaning that there are no financial or other penalties in place for prolonged periods of failure or any agreed structure for planned downtime.

The lack of SLAs from providers is illustrated by the downtime suffered. Ten per cent have suffered two days worth of down time each in the last year, a massive amount of unplanned downtime for a company to have to deal with, particularly as in many cases, it affected email service as well.

However, few of our survey sample have taken steps to implement measures and backup services in the event that a business critical web site or email service goes down, with 60 per cent having no measures in place, 30 per cent with minimal backup options to turn to for web and email and only 10 per cent with heavy-duty resilience measures in place.