Google have kindly sent me a gift. I can’t say it is a Christmas gift as the card was deliberately neutral and wished me the best for 2008. My guess is they sent the gift to many different countries and were wanting to keep religion well out of it.

Anyway, what they sent me was something I had not seen before, a credit card size flash memory device that plugs into a normal USB port. What is astounding is that the capacity is 2GB!

Very cool. Thanks Google, happy 2008 to you to. May it bring you many billions in profit and fewer lawsuits.

In a meeting last month Katie accused me of having a Crackberry addiction as she watched my eyes flick to my Blackberry when the little red light started blinking to tell me there was a new email message.

She was absolutely right, I loved my Blackberry. So when I got my new iPhone I wasn’t sure I would actually switch to it, as I had played with one the week it was launched and wasn’t sure about the email functionality, which is really my key requirement in a phone.

I could not have been more wrong. I am cured of my Crackberry habit, but it has been substituted with a serious addition to the iPhone. Here are 5 signs you may be addicted to your iPhone.

1. You check the weather on your iPhone rather instead of looking out the window.
2. You choose where you get your coffee based on their WiFi availability. You are even considering drinking Starbucks for this reason.
3. Your index finger is starting to get sore from the touch screen.
4. You nearly drive into the car in front of you because you were too busy checking Facebook on your iPhone.
5. Your data usage costs more than your voice calls on your cell phone bill from all the web browsing.

Technorati Tags: blackberry, crackberry, iphone

Well not for you, just for me. My esteemed business partner is in the US at the moment and has just picked us up a new Apple iPhone each and it should be in my hands by Tuesday.

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Apple recently dropped their price on the new iPhone only a couple of months after it was launched. This caused a massive backlash from all the early adopters who queued up outside Apple Stores all over the US the first day it went on sale.

Now they Apple is offering $100 US store credit to anyone who feels disaffected. I think this is extremely admirable of Apple, but what do these people expect? Of course you pay more for being an early adopter. This is the same with virtually any product, especially mobile phones and other consumer electronics. I’ll never forget buying my first PlayStation within months of it being released, I don’t even want to remember exactly how much I paid for it. Maybe I can get Sony to give me some store credit?

I’ve tried very hard to resist my early adopter urges in recent years as you also end up dealing with potential problems with new hardware. The iPhone is not immune from such issues.

You have to have a valid AT&T account number to get this, so too bad if you bought an iPhone and hacked it to use it on a different network.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone

I’ve had a play with the iPhone and I can’t see how I could replace my Blackberry with this. The killer app for me is still email and typing on the iPhone screen was not as quick as with the Blackberry qwerty keyboard. What I did love was the Safari web browser on the iPhone, however, you don’t get 3G only 2G, however, the browser is loading up an entire web page which is incredibly slow if you’re not on WiFi.

Now you can get the best of both worlds with the Opera Mini 4 browser. You get the Safari for iPhone style browsing but you can keep your 3G Blackberry.

Only available to Blackberry and Palm handsets, to install point your browser to:

mini.opera.com/beta

Technorati Tags: apple, blackberry, iphone, opera mini 4, crackberry

I found this in a whiskey distillery in Scotland. I think it is from the Victorian era. Hilarious!

Some smart people at MIT have apparently invented WiTricity. This would be so great if they crack this.

As a father I’m subjected to hours and hours of Winnie the Pooh viewing pleasure. I’ve long contended that all is not right with the furry inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood. Now it seems I was right. I found this article published in the Canada Medical Association Journal that confirms my suspicions.

In summary:

Pooh Bear
ADHC and OCD

Piglet
Generalised Anxiety Disorder

Rabbit

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Owl
Reading Disorder

The gloomiest diagnosis is for poor little Roo:

We especially worry about baby Roo. It is not his impulsivity or hyperactivity that concerns us, as we feel that those are probably age appropriate. We worry about the environment in which he is developing. Roo is growing up in a single-parent household, which puts him at high risk for Poorer Outcome. We predict we will someday see a delinquent, jaded, adolescent Roo hanging out late at night at the top of the forest, the ground littered with broken bottles of extract of malt and the butts of smoked thistles.

Google has announced its free in-home wireless broadband service.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the launch of Google TiSP (BETA)™, a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users’ plumbing systems. The Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP) project is a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system.

Despite all their success, it is reassuring to see that Google has a sense of humour, although they are taking a dig at a competitive bid for their municipal WiFi service in San Francisco. GigaOM has the details.

Technorati Tags: google, tisp

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