Anybody know what this tag means? Spotted near Berkely Square in London, home to many investment companies.

It could be linked with a mobile tag mechanism and mapped via a mobile camera into something useful. However it looks more like a space invader than a 2D barcode!

What’s stopping the global spread of the download business? It’s not technology, it’s not design, it’s lawyers.

Having been playing around with the the iTunes store and enjoying the ease with which money flows off my card, I’ve now discovered that that the US store has not only cheaper, but has vastly more content as well. I doubt that it is Apple imposing this bizarre limitation. It must be the movie and music companies.

I can’t download any full-length movies from the UK. Whereas there’s a good selection on the US site. Turns out the Casino Royale soundtrack album I’ve just downloaded has several fewer tracks on it that the US equivalent. What the hell is happening?

This is just plain wrong - when will the media companies wake up to opening up?

I’ve said this before, but the real power of iTunes and the iPod aren’t the design and features; it’s the complete supply chain from iTunes to your ears with one click. As I’ve said before, I don’t really like the iPod design as I find the spinny thing clumsy, the absence of an obvious Back key irritating, as is the absence of an obvious OFF key.

However these gripes fade into nothing compared with the ease of grabbing a bit of music or a funny little film. I just downloaded two Pixar shorts. Boundin’ I already knew from when it prefixed the Incredibles. It was a joy to get hold of it, as I love that film. Then I downloaded For the Birds as it looked fun. It’s brilliant. Rush out and hit your credit card.

Now compare and contrast with your local friendly mobile phone. Vodafone have tons of music, but you can’t find anything unless it’s the latest pop hits. All the video on Vodafone (last time I looked) was like Jackass, or just the last three letters. And the two pieces of music I did download don’t play anymore as the phone tells me I don’t have the right to play it. Now I payed for it!

So I’ll join my voice to the chorus that started at 3GSM and is going to continue at CTIA that is calling for the mobie world to get it’s act together. Or become a dump pipe and get out of our way.

Congrats to goosync - a great piece of software that synchronizes my complex set of Google calendars with the built-in calendar app on the dreaded P990i. Rather than relying on downloadable code, this uses a proxy that converts between the phone’s sync protocol and the Google API.
Recommended!

Back in January we bought a new HP Photosmart C6180 printer/scanner/fax machine/ tea maker as our old printers had finally given up the unequal struggle.

The printer is fine, but the drivers with it are just awful. HP insist on “adding value” software of all kinds that you never, ever use. I doubt if anybody ever uses it. Even if they could figure out why they want a resident “Imaging Monitor”. The resident stuff usually hung on shutdown and did nothing visibly useful.

When installing the Vista machine I downloaded basic drivers that only do print and scan. Ideal. So I downloaded them for the XP machine too. Problems solved!

So far in the last few days my iPod has hung while syncing with the new version of iTunes, and now the MacBook hung completely. It’s been a while since that happened. Windows machines rock on solidly.

Compare and contrast with our mobile phones which crash/fail regularly. Especially the P990i. Why can’t they get the QA up to the same level?

We’ve got a new computer at home for my wife. She declared that she wanted a Windows machine - “not one of those complicated Macs”, quote. She wanted a laptop, but isn’t likely to use it outside the home, so I bought a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo something or other, with a 15.4″ screen, Dual Core Pentium 1.6GHz, WiFi, 1Gb and a large enough disk. - it turned up in time for her birthday from JohnLewis.com and comes with a two year guarantee for a miserly £499.

This machine has Windows Vista Home Basic on it. I like the idea of Basic as there’s probably less junk to deinstall before it becomes usable. I happened to have seen a road-side Apple ad claiming that Macs work right out the box while PCs “can be a little complex to set up”. Having set up two Macbooks last year I was looking forward to the comparison.

The packaging was not nearly as sexy as the Macbook, but it was functional. Very strange photo on the packaging, will take a picture and post it here. The computer had a lot more bags and protective stuff on it than the Mac had, so there’s some reduction in materials possible there.

Once out, it’s an attactive enough, functional metal and grey box. Open it up, huge screen and small keyboard. Only complaint on the keyboard was that there HOME key is to the right of the DEL key, so guess what I kept pressing!

Plug in network and power, and off it goes. Starting the Mac gives a rather over the top theatrical experience with graphics and music. Vista’s installation was much more restrained. Vista asked me fewer questions than the OSX startup, and it didn’t try and cross sell me any services, unlike the .mac sign up.

The most noticable feature of the Vista setup was that, unlike the Mac, the various restarts, formats, etc were brutaly exposed, often leaving the user with a completely blank screen and a worrying feeling it’s all gone wrong. The Mac filled those times with flashy graphics.

Once up and running, the user management and login process are almost indistinguishable between Vista and OSX. Once logged in, the experience is basically like XP with round edges, with a few exceptions. The control panel mechanism seems to have been changed slightly, which means that you have to open your eyes while doing sys admin. Probably not a bad thing. The Basic rule had worked - the only thing needing deinstalling was Norton Decelerator, which was duely removed and replaced with AVG.

So what about Vista? First impression is that it is very fast. The Macbook with an identical processor felt sluggish in comparison. Internet connectivity could be taken from granted - it just happened - and I was downloading and installing things like Skype very, very easily. The installers are soooo much easier than those wierdo virtual disk things that OSX uses.

Of the two strange things I noticed, the first was that when you try and run anything that needs the slightest bit privileged access, or a downloaded application that hasn’t been used before, it blanks the screen for a moment to get your attention and then asks if it is ok to continue. It’s very annoying when setting up a new machine, but I can see the utility of it.

The second is that Windows Update installed a new “High Definition Audio Driver” on the first round of updates, and now the machine complains of “Wrong driver” when you log in. Can’t find any way of rolling back the driver, and only found one other person on the web with the same problem - and no solution.
This new computer was replacing my elder daughter’s elderly Vaio, which had suffered like most teenage-owned computers - tons of random junk installing itself. I’ve met several non-technical people complaining of this problem and wringing their hands as they didn’t know what to do. This new solution will ensure that doesn’t happen.

The new user interface is fine, nothing remarkable, really, and it comes with the mandatory widgets. Rather more elegant than the Mac ones, especially since these only start up when they have acquired all their data and are fully rendered. I particularly like the photo album widget. The Windows Explorer window comes up with the file tree on all the time, of which I fully approve. And on previous versions of Windows I had to go round changing the defaults on the Explorer - on Vista they were just right.

The only downsides, so far, have both been on the hardware. It’s claiming to have 750Mb, not 1Gb, despite reseating the memory. Sigh. Looks like a hardware fault. The other one drove me to read the manual - turning on the WiFi. Vista calmly told me that it couldn’t configure WiFi as it was turned off. But it couldn’t tell me how to turn it on. I had to read the manual - Fn-F2 to enable/disable WiFi. Once done it was a dawdle to set up, although the WEP/WPA/Who Knows options for security baffle me each time I use them, let alone an ordinary consumer.

One thing I did notice on Vista that perturbed me, but not for technical reasons. Shutdown has now been hidden off a submenu, driving users to put their machines in Standby. Can’t help feeling that promoting proper switch off would be more ecologically sound!

Conclusion: Vista initial use could be a little smoother, more cinematic, but otherwise it seems to be a very fast and friendly new version. The driver issue is a bit vexatious, however, and that needs looking at.

How about a company that rents sofas while you wait for an order to arrive?

I just love their slogan - taking the wait off your feet.

Unfortunately they only operate in London. Perhaps there’s a franchise opportunity in there!

Check out Jim Cook’s newly-launched news site devoted to mobile advertising.

The gorgeous new LG Prada phone on display on the Rue St Honore in Paris. Sadly no real phones, just this very fashionable black and white display taking up an entire vitrine.