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?

What has the iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre got in common? Yep, both seem to be somewhat tainted with buyer regret syndrome.

In the case of the iPhone 3GS there is the double whammy of battery life being rather shorter in use than expected together with the much reported overheating problems which can even apparently turn a white 3GS a fetching shade of pink.

But what about the Palm Pre, surely the hugely anticipated iPhone beater cannot be about to fall at the first hardware quality hurdle? Well according to reports coming out of the US where users have had a chance to play with the thing in earnest already, the news would appear to be yes it is.

Although Palm itself is keeping quiet about handset returns, assorted online support forums are starting to get noisy with complaints from users who are complaining that in the month since the Pre went on sale they have had problems with that large slide-out keyboard which looks so attractive to heavy texters and email users alike. These seem to revolve around it being wobbly and certain keys working loose very quickly. Some users are complaining that the device even shuts down when the keyboard slides out.

But the most noise of all would appear to be being caused by the case, which some users are reporting has poor sealing around the edge seams, and the screen. The screen being the most serious, not perhaps because of the ‘dead pixel’ complaints but rather of the folk who say it cracks very easily.

Reading the various forums makes for hugely interesting, if somewhat disturbing, reading. Especially when there are people who claim to be on their second, third and even fourth Palm Pre in the space of less than a month.

Of course, it is hard to know what to make of all this until Palm itself actually comments on the issue. The forum postings would seem to suggest, at the very least, that quality control could do with something of a kick up the arse to ensure that those units which are not 100% do not get sent out. The extent of the problems is proving just as hard quantify as the cause, with analysts claiming that the estimated return rate is well below average for a new smartphone.

You might think that it would be bad news for Palm, with so many problems being reported so quickly after launch. Yet the Palm Pre continues to get very highly rated reviews wherever they appear, and let’s not forget that the overheating iPhone fuss has not exactly slowed down sales of the 3GS which sold out last week in the UK and continues to be in very short supply, such is the demand for the device.

The silly thing is that when it comes to operating systems I tend to wait until the first service pack is available before taking the plunge and investing, safe in the knowledge that the initial bugs have been squashed at this point. Plenty of others do exactly the same. Yet when it comes to smartphones, well gadgets in general, I am just as likely as the next mug punter on the Clapham Omnibus to be lining up outside the Apple Store on the day of release with his hand wedged deep into his pocket fiddling with a huge wodge of cash.

Apple sold a million iPhone 3GS units in the first three days worldwide, and now it would have appear to have run out of them altogether in the UK. According to the stock update checker at the exclusive provider of the iPhone in the UK, O2, the iPhone 3GS is currently out of stock.

O2 says “Due to the phenomenal demand for the new iPhone 3GS, we’ve temporarily run out of stock online, over the phone and in our retail stores. We expect additional stock of the new iPhone 3GS to be available online, over the phone and in our retail stores at the end of this week.”

This despite a huge hoo-hah over the cost of the new iPhone, and in particular the spectacular double-barrel rip off that is the high price of tethering and the high price of data transfer outside of the UK. It also seems to suggest that the general public are either unaware, or simply do not believe, the ongoing reports of overheating problems facing the 3GS which have left some white units discoloured and some users complaining of the iPhone being too hot to hold when using GPS applications.

Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO who is now back at work following his liver transplant, says “Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning… iPhone momentum is stronger than ever.” Which is fine, but that momentum hits something of a brick wall when stocks run out while demand is still so high. Perhaps your first job back at your desk, or from bed if you are working at home today, should be getting those distribution lines sorted. Your second job might be investigating the overheating claims and giving us some kind of official comment. Just a thought.

I am cheating on my wife, with my iPhone. Dammit, I admit it, I sleep with my iPhone, OK?

When I finish working of a night, which is often around 2am, I tend to unwind by reading the latest news or catching up with Twitter in bed. The iPhone is the perfect device for this, small and unobtrusive enough (in terms of both light emission and, courtesy of the touch keyboard, noise) not to bother my other half.

So I was not altogether surprised to get a press release today which revealed that I am most certainly not alone in cuddling up to IT in bed. A survey by endpoint data outfit Credant Technologies reckons that 27 percent of folk take a mobile device of some sort, be it an iPhone, netbook or lappy, to bed with them. Of those people who do work in bed of a night, 57 percent spend anywhere up to 6 hours a week at it. Nor was I surprised to discover that the majority of bed workers admitted their partners thought it was a “very annoying habit.”

I was a little taken aback to learn that 8 percent said they spend more time on mobile devices during the course of the evening than they do actually talking to their partners, however!

So what was the point of this survey and why did I get a copy? Because it was entitled “Laptop use in bed and the security implications” and had been designed to highlight the security implications of unsecured mobile devices. Presumably the implications of sleeping with an unsecured device, unsafe hex if you like.

And what were those implications? Here goes:

44 percent admitted they are holding important work documents on their mobile devices, and 54 percent of those were not encrypted. 20 percent added to the security problem by not using a secure wireless network while tapping away under the covers, the favoured bedtime connection option for 87 percent of those questioned. The problem being that 56 percent admitted they were moving company information around across it. Obviously hotel bed usage is high when it comes to sneaking a netbook under the covers, yet 47 percent did not bother checking if the hotel wireless network was secure or not first.

Michael Callahan, Vice President at Credant Technologies says “with increasing pressures on companies to comply with regulations, such as the Data Protection Act, we all have to respect our customers and employers by protecting the data held on our mobile devices, where ever we may be.”

HP has today sent letters to thousands of customers world-wide as part of a global recall concerning potentially dangerous notebook batteries. It has been more than two years since I last wrote about dangerous battery recalls but the issue is now right back in the media spotlight it would seem. The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission has apparently received reports of batteries overheating and ‘rupturing’ which have caused minor property damage due to fire.

Here is the recall letter that has gone out to customers:

Dear Valued HP Customer,

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and other safety regulatory authorities, on May 14, 2009, HP announced a worldwide voluntary recall and replacement program for some of the battery packs used in certain HP, HP Pavilion, HP Compaq and Compaq notebooks. HP customers affected by this program will be eligible to receive a replacement battery pack for each verified, recalled battery pack at no cost.

We are taking this action as part of our commitment to provide the highest quality of service to our notebook customers. We are proactively notifying you of this issue and are prepared to replace all verified, affected battery packs.

Note: This recall is unrelated to any previous battery pack recalls.

HP and the battery cell manufacturer believe that certain battery packs shipped in HP notebook PC products manufactured between August 2007 and January 2008 may pose a potential safety hazard to customers. The batteries can overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard.

To reduce the likelihood that a battery pack failure will cause damage, stop using your battery pack immediately…

When it comes to silly technology ideas, any contender for the stupidest gadget ever has got some tough competition to beat. My personal favourite has been, for the longest time, the Microsoft SPOT watch. However, I think I might just have found something even sillier: an iPod for your foetus.

Officially it is known as the Blaby for some reason I have yet to bother even trying to fathom. Perhaps iBaby was already taken, and BabyPod sounded too much like a kid carrying device for new age hippies.

Anyway, according to The Telegraph the Blaby consists of “a contoured belt that wraps around a mother’s waist with three inbuilt vibration speakers playing music into the womb.” The MP3 player is apparently stitched into the belt itself, and there is the inevitable USB adaptor to plug the thing in an upload suitable music so that the foetus can have a little dance. Boom, Boom, Shake the Womb perhaps?

Actually, it would seem that the Canadian inventor is thinking more of classical tunes to not only soothe the unborn child but also give it an intelligent boost. Oh yes, it is that old chestnut the Mozart Effect being brought back into the marketing mix once more.

Which is why this gadget is so silly on so many levels.

Level number one: why bother wearing a belt with speakers that ‘transmit the vibrations of music’ right through the mother and into the womb when those vibrations, otherwise known as sound, can be heard perfectly OK just by playing music in the same room as normal?

Level number two: the Mozart Effect has been pretty well debunked over the years. There is no real proof to substantiate claims that playing a child, even an unborn one, Mozart will produce an increase in spatial reasoning as the theory, or music in general acting as a catalyst for mental health as the inventor, suggests.

“This product is still in the prototype phase, so I have not yet put a price on to it, but I am hoping to attract some interest soon” inventor Geof Ramsay told the Daily Mail. I have been listening to Slipknot non-stop for an hour and my gadget marketing analyst skills have increased substantially as a result. My new found skills tell me that this is one product idea which should be aborted as soon as possible.