Nuance is finally bringing out the version of Extended T9 that suggests features on your phone as well as words you’re trying to type. That’s only 20 months after I saw it at Mobile World Congress so you can colour me impatient, and today you can only download it for S60 devices and not Windows Mobile. Before the end of the year Nuance promises to announce a ’significant’ handset manufacturer and two operator deals for T9nav.

The way it works is that you just start typing, from the idle screen of the phone; if you type 258 you might be dialling a number that starts with 258, or you might be calling the Blue Note Cafe in Glastonbury, or you might be looking for ‘Blue Moon’ in your music library, or you might be trying to turn Bluetooth on. T9nav will give you a list of all those options and you can get things done with three or four clicks rather than navigating through menu after menu after menu after menu…

Michael Whers, the VP for evangelism at Nuance also showed me the voice control version, VSuite 3.x, which lets you say ’send a text to Chris Green’ plus a prototype dictation service that lets you dictate the text of the text, so to speak. The voice control runs on the handset, even on a basic feature phone, because there’s only so many commands you need to recognise; the dictation runs on a server in the cloud because you need a more powerful machine to recognise all the words you might want to use in a message. The real barrier to good voice recognition isn’t the phone - it’s the cheap headsets most people use which either have a cheap microphone or worse still, nose cancellation that just filters out the white noise and flattens the signal so much that voice recognition doesn’t work. Another prototype, Voice Search, lets you ask questions like ‘what hotels are there in Palo Alto, California’ and get not just a list of Web results but a list of Google Map links to the hotels.

Wehrs showed that running on an iPhone, although the app isn’t on the App Store for reasons he didn’t want to go into. He also pulled out another unreleased product; the HTC Star Trek flip phone running Windows Mobile Professional, with a Fake Cursor application to give you a mouse pointer so you can use the touch-screen interface without a touch screen on the device. As a dedicated Windows Mobile Standard user (you can have my HTC Excalibur when you pry it out of my hand and replace it with something in the same form factor that has 3G and GPS), I suspect this is a gimmick - the interface is designed for tapping with a stylus or a fingernail, but most of the applications I tried worked surprisingly well with the fake cursor. Don’t hold your breath though; it could be another 20 months before anything like this ships.
-Mary

Never heard of MWg? You’re not alone, but you might want to hunt down the Zinc II. For one thing, it’s cheaper than the HTC Touch Pro or TyTN II although it has much the same features. For another, it’s stylish and surprisingly sleek for a phone with a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

I’ve been swapping between the Zinc II, the TyTN II and my trusty HTC Excalibur (better known as the T-Mobile Dash) in an effort to fulfill my new year’s resolution about always having navigation with me. Google Maps does very well at location on some phones, but on my Excalibur it’s far from accurate so I’m looking for GPS. And while EDGE is OK for quick searches, I want 3G - mainly so I can use the phone as a modem with my laptop. I know built-in 3G is always better, to the tune of 25% better bandwidth, but not every laptop I use has it. I want Windows Mobile 6.1 for two things; threaded text messages and being able to search my email on Exchange Server from the phone inbox. I have a US Samsung BlackJack II which might be ideal - it’s the closest to the size of the Excalibur so far - but it’s very thoroughly locked to its US carrier.

The TyTN II is a great phone - and as the Stella from O2 it comes with CoPilot, which is my favourite GPS tool - but it’s just a bit too big and slab-like for me personally. Plus the tilt action is great for viewing the screen, but it covers the two action buttons on the keyboard. The Zinc II is a little bit lighter, a little bit smaller and a lot sleeker, with a soft-touch easy-grip rubberized coating and a flush screen - it’s a very comfortable handful even for those of us with smaller hands. It also has a faster processor, which means the camera doesn’t make you wait an age to take your snap and it doesn’t get bogged down with lots of apps running in the background.

That’s handy as with the TouchFLO-style Quick Menu launching from what I expected to be the Start button, I found it easier to launch a new app than get back to the one I’d been using. Swiping your finger across the screen to turn between the pages of buttons and tapping to open apps is a good way to work in Windows Mobile Professional; my nails work pretty well instead of a stylus but menus are still pretty tiny. 

The keyboard isn’t going to suit everyone. The keys are almost flush and don’t click down very far, but they have enough action so you know you’ve actually hit the key and not having discrete keys means - practically - that you won’t get dirt, dust and sesame seeds creeping under them. I’m used to the square layout of the Excalibur (and every BlackBerry I’ve ever known) and having the wide rows of keys slows me down until I adjust, plus the central spacebar isn’t quite in the right place for me. As always, secondary keys are distributed around the keyboard seemingly at random so you’re hunting for the dash and the @ symbol; it really is time we had a standard for this. But each key is outlined in blue light which is one, rather cool and two, really helpful in dim light.

MWg used to be O2 Asia’s device arm; they’ve expanded out to the US and Europe, renamed the company as the Mobile World Group and teamed up with gadget specialists Expansys. You’re not going to see the Zinc II on the high street unless they get another distribution deal, but it’s well worth checking out.
-Mary

The BallmerBot joined Bill Gates on stage at his last public keynote here at TechEd 2008  Developers in Orlando earlier this week. Waving an XBox Live lifetime subscription (Bill’s leaving gift from a grateful Microsoft, according to the latest version of the “Bill’s Last Day” video Microsoft first showed at CES), the robot waddled out of the wings looking like a cross between Johnny 5 and a Segway.

U-Bot 5’s new name may not be what the developers expected, but underneath the humour and the hype is a fascinating story of how PC technology and modern developer tools have simplified the development of what until recently would have been a very complex and very expensive piece of hardware.

Developed by UMass Amherst and using Microsoft’s Robotics Studio as a development platform, U-Bot 5 uses dynamic balancing to stay upright on its two oversized wheels. The three heavy batteries aren’t between the wheels as you might expect, instead they’re in the top of the robot, acting as part of the pendulum.

Most of the robot has been specially fabricated, with only the screen and the web cam coming off the shelf. While a balancing robot is impressive enough, one that can lift and carry is even more inspiring. The simple hands are able to grasp most objects, and even throw a baseball (or an egg…)

It’s an impressive piece of work. What’s more impressive is that the software components can be reused by the next generation of hardware. That’s where Robotics Studio comes in, as it mixes .NET development tools with a visual programming environment. The various pieces of hardware are treated as independent services - and the resulting application can be tested in simulation before being loaded onto the robot hardware. With several people developing software vying for robot-time can be an issue, and physics-based simulation lets code go through plenty of tests before it’s loaded onto the hardware.

There’s some manual control, coming from an XBox controller, though this really only sets the parameters the robot’s control software works within.

The whole thing is fascinating, as it means that complex robots can be developed quickly, reusing the software developed for earlier versions. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel everytime you change the hardware All you need to do is modifiy the underlying run times, load the existing components, and away you go…

It’s just a little disturbing when you see a small metal device wandering around chanting “Developers! Developers! Developers!” while waving its shiny metal arms.

 –Simon

No battery ever lasts long enough. The extended battery on the HP 2710 tablets we carry give us a full day of work, nine to ten hours or less if we turn on Wi-Fi. I’ve been typing since 8am this morning and online a few times and it’s now 1pm and I have four hours left. That’s just about acceptable, but it’s never enough - I’m wondering where the nearest power socket is. Two technologies we saw at the Future in Review conference this week could produce much longer battery life - if they ever make it to market.

Lithium ion batteries work by packing as much lithium as possible into the positive and negative electrodes inside the battery and them moving ions from them, through the electrolyte fluid and out to your device. The more lithium you can get into the electrode, the more ions you can get out of it. That’s how Yi Cui of Stanford is hoping to get a battery that lasts ten times longer. He’s replacing the usual copper electrodes with silicon, which can store ten times as many lithium ions .

That’s not news; we’ve known for 30 years that silicon stores more lithium, but it also swells up more than copper because of that - and when it swells up, the electrode breaks. Yi Cui’s breakthrough was using silicon nanowires that are much more supple; each wire is only 100 nanometres wide, but they’re very long. Silicon is also more stable than copper, so increasing the energy density doesn’t make it more likely for batteries to explode the way it does with current batteries. It doesn’t make it hotter either, because it’s the internal resistance of the battery that causes the heat, not the capacity.

Ten times as many lithium ions doesn’t mean ten times the battery life; by the time you add in the rest of the battery system, including the electrolytes and the packaging around it all, and some further developments that are still under wraps, you could get double the battery life of lithium ion today.

Startup Seeo is starting with the other half of the battery, replacing the electrolyte fluid with a plastic film that’s very like the polymers used to make motorcycle helmets. For one thing that means it’s much safer - no matter how hot the battery gets it won’t catch fire. But it also works with other battery chemistries than lithium; according to Seeo, some of the lithium replacements they’re looking at could give you 50 to 70 times the energy density of lithium, so you get a choice between smaller devices or longer battery life in the same size we lug around today.

We’ve seen a lot of new battery technologies over the years and few of them have made it to market. One promising zinc battery might finally show up in notebooks PCs this year, maybe, possibly - four years after I first saw it running a laptop. It’s not just that the chemistry might turn out not to work as well as it did in the lab. At the moment you can only charge a silicon lithium battery 100 times before it won’t charge enough to be worth using; that has to go up to 500 times before you’d think about putting it in a mobile phone you’d keep for two years and more like 1,000 for a notebook. Both Seeo and Yi Cui are aiming to charge as quickly as lithium ion, but they’re not there yet - silicon lithium batteries could take an hour to charge.

And hardware manufacturers have to see enough of a demand to change the power supply and charging system in a laptop or phone. Seeo’s lithium battery might fit into an existing device but that’s more about safety than longer battery life; a different chemistry will need a different charger. Silicon lithium batteries run at a slightly different wattage and the value that tells the system the battery is fully charged and doesn’t need more power is also different.

So are these new technologies going to languish the way others have? Maybe not. For one thing, people will pay more for longer battery life, so manufacturers have an incentive to switch. And for another, with the price of oil and petrol still rising, electric cars are looking more likely and both these technologies promise to scale up enough to power cars. When you can do that, a smaller battery for a phone or a PC almost comes for free.

Motorola has backed down from two big challenges this week. The announcements about support for LTE signal that WiMAX isn’t going as well as the company hoped, although they’re good news for users because it means we’ll get more than one system capable of true wireless broadband speeds up to 100Mbps.

Realistically, the future is going to be a mix of multiple wireless standards: mobile operators with investments in 3G have always been going to move to LTE - that’s what the name means, long-term evolution of GPRS and 3G. They’re going to use high-speed wi-fi and WiMAX as part of the back haul along with anything else they can lay their hands on, down to home broadband connections with femtocells. Fast Internet connectivity is expensive. That’s why the dirty little secret of 3G is that there isn’t a single mobile cell anywhere in the UK with more than 1Mbps of backhaul, so whether your HSDPA phone is 3.6 or 7.2Mbps it’s going to crawl along as shared DSL speed.

Fixing that will mean using a mesh of different technologies and WiMAX is only part of it. Motorola has done pretty well out of its WiMAX investments and supporting LTE is logical - but given the investment Motorola put into Clearwire’s US WiMAX service, the company must have hoped for more from WiMAX alone.

And then there’s the handset division losing money and market share hand over fist, which took down CEO Ed Zander and could easily scupper his successor, former CTO Greg Brown as well. The problem is there’s no sign of a new phone to give the company another success like RAZR. The real problem is, that’s actually business as usual at Motorola.

The original eye-catching mobile phone was the StarTAC. I had the analogue and digital versions and loved both (bearing in mind that this was when you had to learn the primitive user interface and put up with it). With the analogue CELLect data card I did email at 2400bps, sitting on a train to London downloading email from CIX to my HP OmniBook (the one with the mouse on a stick). As close to the name and style of the Star Trek communicator as possible, the sleek little flip-phone was iconic, hugely successful - and followed by a long line of failures.

The RAZR was another one-off success that the company milked shamelessly, diluting the exclusivity and confusing the market with multiple versions painting it pink for Valentines day and adding that ultimate admission of guilt in a user interface - a help system. Since then Motorola’s biggest hit has probably been the Q: a good Windows Mobile handset that came with a woefully inadequate battery and abandoned the European market to HTC and Samsung when it took far too long to bring out a 3G model. Leaving the GPS out of the UK model while keeping the extra-large case adds insult to injury.

The MOTOFONE should have been a huge success; just 9mm thick with a simple user interface, a battery life measured in weeks and an epaper display. It could have been the ideal phone for everyone who finds cryptic menu commands confusing - but Motorola pitched this combination of simplicity and sophistication at the developing world and saw it eclipsed by a rugged rubberised Nokia with a built-in torch.

The Z10 was about-face that should have been a warning. Motorola had abandoned Symbian to reduce the number of operating systems it was developing, pinning future hopes on mobile Linux and Windows Mobile. But last spring it turned around and released a Symbian phone to try and compete with Samsung’s onslaught in the high-end feature phone space. Samsung released half a dozen models with the same features, and so did LG and Sony Ericsson; Motorola had chosen a crowded market and a picture of Jason Bourne on the box wasn’t going to help.

Motorola is an object lesson for anyone expecting mobile Linux to sweep all other phones aside. Turns out, it’s not as cheap or as easy to make mobile Linux work as it sounds in theory. Motorola had one very successful Linux phone with a model you’ve probably never heard of, the MING. This is a stylish touch screen phone with two speaker wires running through the clear acrylic lid (turning necessity into art) and a finger-writing system that copes with the complex characters of Asian languages. It’s based on a Linux platform from Trolltech and it swept through the Asian market.

The reason Motorola hasn’t produced a range of successful Linux phones for the US or UK using the same platform might have something to do with Nokia buying Trolltech. Or it might just be that as far as phones go, Motorola is a one hit per decade wonder.

With nothing impressive on the way from Motorola until at least 2009, splitting the company in half is a good way to get the handset division ready for a quick sale without dragging down the backend division that’s making money with or without WiMAX. Maybe someone else struggling to build a mobile Linux handset could snap it up. I wonder what Palm is up to these days apart from poaching everyone from Apple?
-Mary

The more you can see, the more you can do. I used to work in front of two 17″ monitors; the gap between the screens where the bezel interrupted the view just vanished from my vision and all I saw was a lot of Web pages, Word documents, spreadsheets and emails. A couple of years back, I damaged my ankle and couldn’t comfortably sit at a desk for several months and even when I could, I found I preferred working in a big recliner chair. A 17″ laptop was ideal but mostly I work on 12″ or 12.1″ widescreen notebooks - currently it’s an HP 2710p because it has such excellent battery life. My elderly Athlon had started crashing every 20 minutes with a hardware failure and besides, I didn’t want to go back to XP, so I put up with the smaller, single screen. Occasionally I’ve tried two laptops side by side - usually when I was reviewing one of them - but the switch from keyboard to keyboard is very disruptive.
I’d seen the DisplayLink technology before but it was seeing the wireless USB setup at CES this year that gave me the inspiration. If I could link my notebook to my two 17″ screens by wireless USB I could easily go back to twin screens without worrying about dealing with yet another cable. So we started juggling the office, to put my chair closer to Simon’s desk and with a flat surface where monitors could stand. This involved replacing a wall-mounted bookcase that would have tapped me on the head and I spent a happy Easter weekend decoupaging a pair of wooden Ikea drawers to put the monitors at comfortable eye height (they’d sat by an open window during one rainy summer and got very grimy).

Today we started hooking things up. Turns out two screens will really need some kind of wall-mount, hopefully on an extending bracket at an angle.I don’t have the wireless USB connection just yet so I’ll save DisplayLink for when I get the wall-mount and want two external screens and put up with a VGA cable for now. I’ve already used a strip of Velcro to mate the power and Ethernet cables so one more isn’t much more unwieldy.

For now, there’s one monitor perched on my right. This isn’t the same as screens side by side - but it’s ideal for parking a PowerPoint I plan to refer to or a Webex meeting I’m taking notes on. It came in very handy juggling hotel details and conference schedules for a trip, and then for having the details of last-minute cash ISA deals where I wouldn’t get distracted by them while I was on the phone talking about the next version of Windows Mobile. I can put my inbox over there and have messages and documents I’m writing in front of me. 

And Vista (or the Intel graphics driver or most probably the combination of the two) does a really good job of handling applications on multiple windows  - far better than XP and my old Matrox card. With the Matrox card, I had one VGA port and one DVI port with a VGA adapter in. Absolutely fine  - except that I could only watch video on the left screen; video streams on the right screen were black boxes.  And Windows extended my desktop onto the second screen and pretended I had one huge monitor.  That meant maximising a window painted it across both screens and dialog boxes popped up in the ‘middle’ of the extended screen - cut in half between the two displays and very hard to absorb.

Now, applications maximise to fill the screen they’re on to start with and dialogs stay on the screen they belong with.  If I close an application, unplug the laptop and go out, come back to the office and open the same application - the window opens at the same size and on the same monitor as the last time.

Internet Explorer still has a bad habit of pushing new windows onto the other screen - it’s always wanted to sprawl over the whole desktop like a cat on a Sunday newspaper - but nine times out of ten, if a page opens a new window it’s something I want to work on straight away anyway or I would have forced it into a new tab. I shall update the release candidate of SP1 to the release version of SP1 soon and then I can install the beta of IE 8 and see if that’s any more polite.

I’ve only had a second monitor for about four hours and I’ve got twice as much tinkering and timewasting done as usual. Now I shall settle down to some real work and although I won’t get twice as much done, I’m certainly expecting the extra real estate to make a real difference.
-Mary

If you get a smartphone from work, you may not get exactly what you want, but at least the IT team will set it up for you and deal with things if you lose it.  Buy your own and you’re on your own - usually. Buy an i-mate Windows Mobile phone - I quite like the look of the new Ultimate 8502 as a replacement for my trusty HTC Excalibur as it adds HSDPA/HSUPA and GPS to the QWERTY smartphone - and you get I-Q Services.
 
I-Q is a free service on the Club i-mate Web site that lets you configure, manage and brick your phone over the air. Unlike some of the meaner handset manufacturers, i-mate ponies up the licence cost for the full apps for Mobile Office, but if you want to add Opera as your browser or a different IM tool you can choose what you want on the site and have it sent over the air to your phone. You can even put the apps into the ROM so they’re not taking up extra space. And if you lose the phone, you can go onto the site and lock it so it can’t be used; if you’re sure it’s been stolen you can shut it down permanently. The feature for that is in ROM so the thief can’t turn it off and they can’t pull data off by turning off the radio and connecting it to their PC - as long as their PC is online, the phone will get the kill command over the Internet. And if the thief tries installing a new ROM image on the phone to get it working again, they’ll be asked for a 15 digit code, without which the boot loader won’t load the boot image.

This is the kind of service a big customer might get from an operator; i-mate is running it for free for every user. CEO Jim Morrison thinks it will sell more phones; if you have the choice of two handsets with the same features and one of them comes with a free management service, I know which one most IT departments will pick.

There’s another security feature that i-mate hasn’t turned on yet. Some of the new models include GPS - Morrison says “every high end phone going forward will probably have GPS in”, because the $12 that it costs to put the chip in is peanuts compared to the value people put on GPS in a phone. And when you have GPS, then you have a phone that knows where it is and can report back. To avoid Big Brother spying, the tracking will only work when the phone has already been locked. The IT team can’t keep a sneaky eye on who is really with a customer and who is down the pub, because the first thing you’ll do if your phone suddenly locks up is contact the IT Team. Eventually, Morrison hopes, thieves would get the message that i-mate devices just aren’t worth stealing…

Everyone has to compare every smartphone to the iPhone (I think it’s an EU regulation or something). I’m fine with that as long as the comparison covers email search (BlackBerry and Windows Mobile 6 tied for equal honours, iPhone nowhere) as well as the stunning interface and graphics on the iPhone. NVIDIA’s Michael Rayfield thinks it’s fair. “We talk a lot about the iPhone not because of the device but because it redefined what’s good enough. It’s a computer that can make a phone call. It’s got a robust OS -  it’s got OS X, the whole stinking thing - and that’s necessary, we think, to have that going forward.”

A more powerful OS needs a more powerful processor, better graphics - and the same or better battery life as today’s phones. NVIDIA set the Portal Player team it bought to work on an application processor for phones (think of it as a very low power graphics card) and 800 man years later it’s announcing the APX 2500, a 750MHz ARM 11 processor that does hardware acceleration, 720p HD, transparency and 3D in an ultra low power version of the GeFORCE, so you can have the kind of user interface you get in Mac OS X and Vista (plus HD video playback on screen or through an HDMI connector onto a real screen). Rayfield says a phone using the processor should be able to play 10 hours of HD video or 100 hours of MP3s, so you can get on a plane to the US, watch a movie, listen to music the rest of the way and still have half your battery left for making calls when you land.

NVIDIA is pushing the processor for Windows Mobile phones first and then Linux and Symbian devices. It’s going to take a while to convince manufacturers and who then have to build phones and write applications and integrate NVIDIA’s UI or build their own (and this is far more complex programming than for current mobile phones). Some personal media players and navigation devices will come out using it at the end of this year and then some time in 2009, we could start seeing some really spiffy phones. At which point, you’ll definitely want them to be thief-proof.
-Mary

The Mac Air is cute, shiny, lightweight – and a true reflection of the Mac market in many ways.

Walking around the show floor at MacWorld shows the difference between the Mac and PC markets. There was the new Mac version of Office of course, Office 2008, which combines the logically arranged big icons of 2007 Office with the menus of every other version, adding the SmartArt and XML file formats without making a fuss about them. There was Bento, the build-your-own-catalogue tool for people who find FileMaker too complicated. There was Parallels, making an excellent business of putting Windows onto the Mac.

And then there were the colours. You can thank the Mac market for the different colour cases for iomega’s portable eGo hard drives, because Mac users are used to colours. We saw whale-print neoprene laptop sleeves, embroidered neoprene laptop sleeves, oversize purple leather handbags designed to take notebooks and more rubber, leather, plastic and metal iPod and iPhone cases than you could shake an unlocked iPhone at. Whatever your tastes in technology as personal jewellry, there’s a case to suit.

It’s great to see so much style; when I bought my Portégé 2000 back in 2001, I hunted high and low for a stylish, small case that didn’t make me feel like a corporate drone. I had to go to a Japanese stationery store in San Jose to find a protective sleeve and even then it was black. Now, whether your heart’s desire is a MacBook Air – the first Apple notebook in a very long time that you can truly call ultraportable – or a 17” MacBook Pro that needs its own wheeled suitcase, you can snap on a red cover or stick on a Van Gogh skin.

If your heart’s desire is a touchscreen Mac, that’s not quite as easy. You have to take your Mac to Axiotron and have it undergo major surgery to add a Wacom layer and remove the keyboard. (And if you want to use it in portrait mode, run BootCamp and Vista on it, as Apple hasn’t built screen rotation into the Leopard graphics drivers). If your heart’s desire is a MacBook Air and a second battery, you either need to be very skilled with a screwdriver (and we wouldn’t advise doing it on a transatlantic flight) or you have to go to BatteryGeek and buy an external battery that plugs into the MagSafe power port. You’ll have to wait until they make a new tip for the new MagSafe connector for the Air; Apple hasn’t licensed them the details of the MagSafe connector so they’re reverse engineering it, along with Nokia and dozens of other connectors.

If your heart’s desire is a 7” ultramobile, or a computer built right into a TV screen rather than an extra box (no matter how stylish the box), or any other niche form factor, there isn’t a Mac for you. That’s not a criticism of Apple; Apple is making computers for the largest audience it can get. It can’t afford to be HP, Dell, OQO, Motion Computing and Asus rolled into one. Apple isn’t going to license the Mac OS (or lets VMWare and Parallels virtualise it on non-Mac hardware) because that means supporting a lot of different hardware and writing a lot of different drivers. The choice isn’t what style of machine, it’s which Mac and what colour accessories.

The PC market is about choice in a different way. The Toshiba Portégé R500 is lighter than the Air even with an optical drive in the case and as thin as the thickest slice of the Air; it doesn’t look nearly as sleek but it was available last summer, and it wasn’t the first ultraportable PC, just the lightest one so far. Hardly any of them have looked as good as a Mac and while you can get stick-on skins for every HP laptop – and the new Artist’s Edition has gorgeous colours and designs printed right into the case – you can’t get a purple brushed metal clip-on case custom built to fit. By definition, Mac users don’t need the range of hardware choice you get with the PC (or they’d have bought a PC instead) and PC users will continue to envy Mac users their stylish design and colourful accessories

At least the lime-green neoprene sleeves will look good on my shiny white Toshiba R400 tablet…

Between the queues and the crowds and the firehouse of information, CES quickly turns into a blur. Yesterday things kicked off gently with Logitech announcing new products over a leisurely lunch – a Squeezebox with an iPod-style remote control, a tiny keyboard with built-in scroll wheel for running a media center or driving a presentation, a Bluetooth version of the MX Revolution mouse that gets you through a multi-page PDF more ergonomically and time to chat about trends. The CES Unveiled preview was less a queue and more a moving herd of journalists, grazing on the buffet and crowding past the stands. SSD capacity is going up but prices are still at the level where you have to care a lot about TCO and data safety to find them good value.

One of the points that came up again and again while we were researching future IT trends at the end of last year is that video is coming to business – presentations, training and chat as well as video conferencing. This brings up lots of issues around storage and search and regulatory compliance, but there’s also the question of how good this video is going to look. You can drive a spreadsheet, you can knock together a presentation – but could you edit a video? Video editing is going to get as accessible as image editing soon and Pinnacle is hoping to get market share by giving away a simple video editing package, but technologies like auto-summarising, search and index, facial recognition and embedded metadata are going to take some of the work out of watching video.

HD camcorders are going to get small and cheap this year, but Casio is putting video into a camera in a way that could completely change the way you take pictures. A good digital camera will have a burst mode that’s gets 10 shots in a second; the new 6 megapixel $999 Exilim Pro EX-F1 will take 60. It’s a lightweight EVF model rather than a DSLR, it takes around 300 shots on a single battery charge – and it’s much more likely that those will be the shots you want. You can either shoot away and pick later or preview the shot and choose the frame you want –put the preview in slow motion so you can find it more easily. The flash can’t quite keep up but you can still get 30 frames per second with flash.

Burst mode is great when you’re prepared and pointing the right way but you still have to get your finger on the shutter button. The EX-F1 can pre-record images so that when you press the shutter button it saves a preset number of frames before and after, which does away with shutter lag pretty comprehensively. There’s a five second version on the pocket-sized Exilim s10, which also has an ‘autoshutter’ feature that presses the button for you when the subject isn’t moving, the camera isn’t shaking, the subject is front and centre, the person you’re photographing – or when you make it into the frame after you set the timer.

Casio is using video to get better still images but the EX-F1 can also shoot 1080i HD video at 60fps – or a lower resolution at 300, 600 or 1200fps. That catches motion you couldn’t see with the naked eye and give you the kind of amazing shots you used to only see on TV. When you burst a balloon full of water what you see is the water falling; when you video it at 1200fps you see the water holding the shape of the balloon before it succumbs to gravity. HD video is easier to look at because the detail makes it look more real; high speed video shows you something you couldn’t see otherwise.

I narrowly avoided having an argument with a friend about touch screens the other night. We were talking about the new OQO model e2, an adorably small and functional ultra-mobile PC. It’s available with the ordinary version of XP, the tablet version or with Vista Ultimate (which the CEO Dennis Moore tells me he prefers because he’s getting more battery life). All versions have the active digitizer touch screen, but only the ones with tablet software come with the active pen you need to use it.

If you’re not writing on screen, the mini joystick on the slide-out keyboard and the finger-sensitive strips beside and blow the screen let you scroll and move the mouse pointer as normal. My colleague hadn’t realized there was a touch screen at all until I lent him the pen from my HP 2710p tablet to try with it and then he started telling me he’d rather have it work with the standard stylus from his Palm PDA. Yes, but…

For a start, Windows - XP or Vista  - isn’t geared up for finger touch.

Try doing anything apart from opening the Start menu and selecting an icon with your finger? Radio buttons, checkboxes, even menu items are designed to be selected with a mouse pointer - your finger is going to press three or four of them at once. The Media Center interface is a good size for fingers because it’s designed to be driven by a remote control, but I use my PC for a lot more than viewing media. The Origami pack for UMPCs gives you nice finger-sized buttons - but it’s like the interface on the HTC touch, barely skin deep. As soon as you open an application, you’re back to needing the fine resolution of a mouse or pen. HP does rather better with the finger interface on the TouchSmart PC, which I miss hugely now it’s no longer in our kitchen, because there are apps and tools in it to do a lot more - including a family calendar and sticky notes. But eventually, I’m browsing a Web site and ticking boxes and with a finger it’s frustrating.

The TouchSmart is the only finger-touch device that gives you the hints you get with a mouse or an active pen - hover behavior that changes icons, lights up menus and generally lets you know that yes, you do have the pointer in the right place. That’s because it uses four cameras to detect where your finger is. Active digitisers do need a special pen; passive touch screens put more of the workings as a layer over the screen - which means a passive touch screen will never be as bright or clear as an active screen. The sampling resolution is higher too; so writing on an active touch screen can be as fluid as writing with a real ink pen. And while most tablet pens are like a cheap biro, Cross makes a line of tablet pens that feel like a fountain pen.

And then there’s being able to write on the screen with the pen without having the side of your hand writing right alongside it. There’s a technique called blunt touch blocking that it supposed to stop that - ignoring the blunt touch of your hand in favour of the precise touch of the pen. Usually it means you have to press harder with the stylus and you’ll still get some random scribbles. I’ve only ever used one passive touch screen that got the blunt touch blocking right, the Tablet Kiosk UMPC.

Vista improves on the handwriting recognition of XP significantly, and it learns when you correct the recognition - you don’t sit around training the PC. It also introduces pen flicks - gestures that let you copy, paste, delete, scroll or do any eight things you fancy by flicking the pen up, down, sideways and to the four quarters. That only works with an active pen.

My friend might have been saying he wanted a screen he could touch with his finger for pushing the few buttons that are the right size. There are dual-touch screens that work with both finger and active pen and they would give him what he wants - the ability to write with a pen or tap with your finger. This would increase an already high price - but if you think the Eee PC is a bargain and the OQO is overpriced, you’re not the customers OQO is building for (adding an expensive array microphone wouldn’t put off the people who need the functionality it will deliver, Dennis pointed out). But what he was really saying was that he hasn’t seen the point of an active pen because there have been so few successful tablet PCs for the mass market. The OQO e2 still isn’t for the mass market - but if you do get the point of an active pen you’ll love it.

Mary