The iPhone, the ultimate smartphone. The phone that revolutionised the category. I’ve owned each and every model since the initial release in 2007. Four years and five models later, iOS has flourished into the most recognisable mobile operating system in the world. But guess what, I’m bored of it.

Each year Apple has added hundreds of new features that makes the iPhone arguable the most feature rich phone on the planet. Thousands upon thousands of apps, notifications, the new iCloud, a fantastic camera, it seemingly has it all. Right in front of you though, it’s essentially a four year old operating system. It’s kept the same look and feel that was introduced back in 2007. It does everything so well, so cleanly, it’s become stagnant, complacent in my mind. I find myself opening the same few apps each day, checking the same things, looking at the same screens. This is in no way a bad thing to some, it’s a phone you can rely on to deliver in almost all aspects (battery life excluded). What I wanted though, was something fresh, something to work with, something different. I’d looked at Android phones, but to me they’re an alter-ego to the iPhone, the Dark Sonic to iOS’s squeaky clean image.

When Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) landed, I took note, it looked different, like a new challenge. The main problem was hardware, nothing noteworthy available. Then along came Nokia, and after their deal with Microsoft, the Lumia 800 was born from the ashes of the N9. It looked like a nice handset, built quality was great, the specs were up there with the best. Why not give it a go? Well I did.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be using my blog to post a diary of my usage, how life with Windows Phone compares to the Apple iPhone. Stay tuned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6NHX8xdOJo

Imagine you are a small business owner hiring new staff during a recession. An odd decision perhaps, but you believe that by increasing output, you might have a chance of pulling your company out of the mire. Thing is, you don’t want to spend a lot of money on new software licences, which have to be added to every new machine that’s given to every new hire; it’s costly. So, what do you do? Take everything off your machines and put into The Cloud.

This is a vision that can apply to multi-national corporations as much as it applies to the savvy small business owner trying to get ahead in hard times. The point is it makes computing both robust – you’re relying on browser speed, not network speed – and flexible – employees aren’t weighed down dealing with a slow machine after a slow commute.

Let’s take another step. If a group of people are working on a particular project, giving them access to the network allows collaborative working from remote locations. Some employees can work from home, while others can work in their favourite coffee shops; then everyone comes together only when necessary.

When working from mobile broadband, the work you are doing no longer determines the device on which you work. iPhones and Microsoft Word don’t sound like the most cosy pair, but with a free app from Citrix, you can run Word documents on your iPhone. In that situation, you don’t even need to be worrying about elbow room in your local Starbucks.

The speed of mobile broadband can be an obstacle, especially when projects and documents are reaching those critical moments of pre-delivery completion. Pay as you go (PAYG) dongles face the worst of this with connection speeds of up to 3.4MEG per second. Note that you rarely get the full 3.4MEG. At best you may get half that, which is fine for running a single application on a lightweight browser like Google Chrome or Opera. If you choose to run the Cloud app alongside Facebook and Youtube, you might face some speed issues, which is frustrating.

Network security is a huge issue within Cloud Computing. The essence of the Cloud is making collaboration easier. You may not want to store you bank details in Dropbox.

The 3G network doesn’t have 100% coverage across the country, so it’s likely you’ll face patchy connection in some areas. The national rail network is one place you’ll definitely experience this.

Coverage and connection speeds will undoubtedly improve in the future, making Cloud Computing as indispensible as the internet itself.

This post was contributed by Marie-Paule Graham who writes on behalf of Broadband Genie and Mobile Phone Genie, the independent comparison websites for broadband, mobile broadband and mobile phones.

The new site is now fully active, but there may be a few misplaced images. It’ll take me a while to get it fully synced up. I hope you enjoy the new layout which is more social focused (ironically given the name). I have new share buttons above each post and also links to all my networking sites in the navi-bar.

The main stumbling block at the moment, I can’t really afford it! Good ones go for well over £100 online, and after forking out the best part of £350 for a Google CR-48, things are a bit tight. What I do own though, is a fully boxed Psion Series 5mx (pictured above), fully boxed with Leather case etc! Turns out there was also a version of Linux made for this model.

Over at OpenPsion they have all the old files needed, dating back to 2006. There’s also a handful of apps like Firefox to run on it. I think this could be an interesting Saturday night. Time to bust out the 5mx!

Already been looking at guides into dual booting these things with Chrome OS and Ubuntu. I found this excellent walkthrough over at chromium.org. Looks like it’s fairly involved, but I love getting my hands dirty. Just have to wait for the thing to get shipped now. Hopefully I’ll get my hands on it by next weekend. Wonder if there’s anything I can do with the 2-years free 3G access? Doubt it.

Woke up this morning having left my MacBook open and downloading all night. Got ready for work, shut the MacBook lid and slipped it into my Waterfield sleeve (snug fit). Come lunchtime (aprrox 5hrs later), I go to get it out to practice a bit of coding only to find the back of my rucksack to be VERY warm (to say the least). At first I thought maybe there was a hot water pipe running where my bag was stowed. Wrong. Take the sleeve out and it too was hot hot. The poor Air was suffocating inside, the fan immediately coming on full blast. For some reason (unknown to me), it hadn’t gone into sleep mode when I shut the lid. The poor bastard had been stuck in my bag all morning running as hot as a the sun.

My immediate concern, after five hours in the material oven, was whether my pride and joy was now just a paperweight. I let it cool down then turned it on….. nothing. Held down the power button down for 10 seconds, then retried the power…. BOOOOOM. That reassuring tone. It was all working fine, but for the fact it had only 4% battery left. So I got no coding done after all. Goodnight.

The spec sheet isn’t all that impressive, an Atom processor, 16GB of storage, 2GB RAM, Intel GMA GPU. Nothing fancy. The Trackpad is meant to be unresponsive and the whole unit is just generally a bit slow (especially playing Flash video, surprise surprise). But that doesn’t stop me wanting to have a play with Google’s unique OS. Everything is stored online, from Word Processor apps to simple Photo Editing, you do it all online. The advantage of this is, you can access your work and files from pretty much anywhere, and it’s all saved automatically. The downside? You need some form of Internet connection, otherwise it’s pretty much a paperweight.

I’d love to get my hands on one of these, not just for testing purposes, but also because it could be a piece of history. The first ever public ‘prototype’ running Google Chrome OS. Must be worth keeping hold of? So if anybody out there fancies the risk of sending one to the UK then drop me a mail from the contact page.

I went for the 128GB FLASH version, which is the top end 11-inch model. When I first saw the spec I thought a 1.4GHz CPU was a bit paltry, and I was a bit miffed it still only had 2GB of RAM. Anyone who’s used Snow Leopard will know, 4GB is pretty much a minimum these days. To my surprise, on checking out I noticed a few BTO options, namely a 1.6GHz CPU and a 4GB RAM upgrade. These were immediately ticked. I was shocked to see this only changed the ship date to 3 days. In the past my BTO options usually delayed it by over a week.

So now I just sit back and wait, hopefully by this time next week I could be typing a blog post on my new Apple, dare I say, Netbook!

One thing I am looking forward to finding out is whether the new one will constantly crash my Time Capsule when synching (and even sometimes when streaming music) At least it’s a process of elimination, with a bit of profit thrown in for good measure! Will also be nice to have a much cooler unit, the original would get seriously hot, and seemed to suffer with stuttering menus and general unresponsiveness.

The hawk eyed of you Apple lovers will notice the Apple TV is the second product in my order! Well I decided on treating myself to the new Apple Battery Charger. It comes with 6xAA batteries, two each for my Keyboard, Magic TrackPad and Magic Mouse. Incidentally I do not have a shipping date yet, and a quick check on the Apple Store shows the Apple TV is now saying 3-4 Weeks! I guess I’ll just have to sit and wait. Keep you posted.