I’m optimistic that batteries are finally beginning to offer longer life again. In the last few weeks I’ve been on some long calls using my N95 8Gb and a Samsung bluetooth earpiece and the performance has been excellent. In one instance the tiny ear-bud Samsung had not been used for six weeks but gave 75 minutes of service. For the same call, the N95 did not show any change in the battery level. Similarly, my Canon 450D sits in my home office for weeks at a time unused and then cheerful takes hundreds of pictures before showing signs of battery fatique.  

Nokia CA-100C

Originally uploaded by Richard M Marshall

I should have bought one of these years ago, and I’d recommend anyone with a Nokia device who travels to get one. It’s a USB charger for your phone and weighs only a gram or two.

Perfect example of specialisation - it does exactly what you want, no more, no less.

It’s still November, but everyone from Piano Covers Online to Screwfix are firing out gift ideas for your nearest and dearest. Although I don’t think my wife would like a Belle Minipac Compaction Plate for her Christmas, the tasteful tones of John Lewis direct marketing might provide some inspiration. And I receive an endless stream of special offers from several suppliers of desirable photographic equipment.

Having been reading about social objects this morning, it dawns on me that these carefully prepared, relevant and targeted e-mails  are ideal for starting dialogues. Perhaps with the retailer, perhaps with my friends and family.

So this is a long-winded way of saying that these promotions, when appropriate, do actually work.

A classy week for Google’s QA department, if it has one. Two cracking problems this week. We can only assume it does, but borrowing from the world of mobile they are overridden by marketing and others to launch anyway.

The one I came across was an awful Catch-22 on the Outlook/Google calender sync application. My Vista machine asked it I wanted to run a file called Gooupd.tmp (or something like that, it started Goo and end in .tmp). Instant reaction was that this was some kind of inept virus/trojan trying to install itself. Checking on the path to the file it was in the Goosync directory. So I let it run. It wanted me to exit Outlook to run the update, fair enough, but Outlook 2007 on Vista at least runs as a background process all the time. The only way to exit is it logout and in again as simply killing it with task manager leaves the data file in a mess. But of course, logging out kills the update. And there’s no other other way of making it happen. Catch-22.

The other problem is now called the root console bug. When I first  heard that text keyed on the G1 keypad went straight into a root console I thought it was a very fresh urban legend.  However it’s not - there’s an official release to fix it. While not many people are going to SMS rm -rf / to their mates, it’s still an amazingly sloppy piece of releasing.

Part of our release process is always remove all debugging. Even stuff that you “know” won’t ever be visible, take it out. Clearly the Android team did not apply this simple rule. Perhaps they had been on a death march and were asleep on their feet. Perhaps marketing (and T-Mobile) decreed that it had to go no matter how broken.

Sigh. Mobile rules apply again.

Most people will have already consigned it to the scrap pile, but according to the BBC, support for Windows 3.1 has finally been withdrawn. I can’t imagine that many people are still using it for desktop computing, but having worked in operating systems in the past I know that people continue using systems long beyond the expected lifetime. Worse, businesses and business critical systems become dependent on it, along with source-less software and hardware so old it is literally falling apart. When doing new stuff with technology isn’t your main focus, pretty much anything that gets the job done will do!

This picture has now almost overtaken the picture of the TVR as my top-view image on Flickr. And all because of tags. Meg Pickard found it and asked that I add it to the Guardian recession monitor photos group, and the volume picked up from then.

I met a media chap the other day who told me I didn’t look like or sound like a techie and he meant that as a deep and sincere compliment. So I took it that way, and in any case I like to have artistic aspirations in writing, theatre, art and photography so it tickled my own conceits.

However it is good to see mobile companies beginning to value the developers that drive the adoption of new services. We’ve seen the App Store with its deluge of torches and tip calculators, the Android Challenge and it’s dismal winners, and the utterly dull BlackBerry investments. Nokia have been running developer competitions for years, but usually restricted to games.

Now Sony Ericsson are running a competition for X1 “panels”, which sounds like a great promotional vehicle for smaller or individual developers.

Find out more here.

I was discussing an interesting conundrum with blogger Peter Evers this week. We both found that the things that were the most exciting and bloggable were, unfortunately, confidential or commercially sensitive. Today eMarketer talks about “blogger moms” which is an excrutiating terms, but, I guess picks up a group of people who have axes to grind but no affiliation. Looking at bloggers in mobile it’s noticeable that most people are recording what other people are doing, not about their own business.

The closest historical model we have to this is the newspaper column written by industry figures. I’ve been a magazine columnist and it’s hard work producing something consistently interesting and on-topic even once a month (although to be fair to myself I often wrote feature articles for the same title). While blogging is quick and low overhead compared to professional publishing, it still takes time and effort which is hard to find.

I wonder where the final balance will fall.

Somewhat over ten years ago I wrote some fiction which included holiday homes coming with broadband and video conferencing equipment so that harried entrepreneurs could keep in touch with their work while their families had real holidays. I was reminded of this last week when even the small flat we had taken for the week had internet access as well as a fabulous view across the bay (La Rade) at Villefranche-sur-Mer.

This connection is, of course, very useful for checking opening times, locations, events and the weather. (Not that the weather forecasts were ever correct. It was, however, impossible to resist pulling down e-mail. Easier not to answer, helped by Orange/Wannadoo blocking SMTP traffic. Sigh. Why do they insist on doing that? It is not a spam relay, it’s an authenticated connection for heavens sake. No doubt it is easy enough to look up the right SMTP server, and changing settings is easy when you know how to do it, but how many normal users do?

That’s probably why webmail services like gmail and hotmail  are so popular - nothing to configure or understand.It just works. So turns out that conventional e-mail isn’t consumer-ready either. Sigh.

No, not a complaint about roaming charges! I’m off on holiday for a week and I’m unlikely to have web access, so there won’t be any updates.