As the next twelve to twenty four months goes on there will come more and they will be even more commonplace in portable computing devices than they are now.  Windows 8 supports more types of sensor than ever before too with technologies such as Kinect, NFC and more being integrated directly into the platform.  But what is this going to do for the prices of the computers that we buy and is it even affordable to do so?

The latest rumour is that ASUS is testing Kinect sensors built into the bezel of laptops.  This type of integration won’t come as a surprise to many people and it’s only to be expected.  This type of technology isn’t cheap however and integrating it into a laptop will come at a cost penalty.  This is also at a time when PC makers are telling us that the profit margins on PCs and laptops are now so tight that they’re beginning to focus on the high-end computing devices such as ultrabooks in order to get us to part with more cash.

My own laptop contains a four-point capacitive touch screen, 3G SIM card slot, drop-sensing accelerometer, fingerprint reader, TPM chip and GPS.  It’s a high-end model yes, but when you think about where consumers are now with technology it’s likely that people will want to get these types of devices, along with Kinect, already integrated with their new computers, monitors and laptops, and that PC makers will capitalise on this fact to hike prices and push people towards buying even more expensive computers that improve their profit margins and balance sheets.

To be honest I firmly believe that some of these sensors are pretty much essential for work in the modern age.  3G/4G is one such example with mobile broadband now so ubiquitous.  GPS is also something that’s extremely useful in a mobile device and security systems such as biometric fingerprint readers and Trusted Platform Module chips are now essential for any business laptop.

Then we have to face the fact that by the time Windows 8 launches or at least early in 2013, over 80% of new laptops will ship with a multi-touch screen.  Next year’s consumer electronics show will be full of such devices and laptops packed with sensors and NFC readers of all description.  Each will have a use, every last one will be justifiable, and all will be more expensive than they are today.

So what is your attitude to sensors and extra tech on PCs?  Do you already have a laptop that includes some of these devices and do you use them?  I might not use my laptop’s GPS a lot but the 3G module is used several times a week.  Are you happy that the prices of laptops seems to be steadily rising, at the same time as many are predicting the death of the traditional desktop PC with a tower that’s easy to upgrade and cheap to build.  Why not let us know in the comments below.

You first need to be logged in to a Google account on your smartphone. You could obviously access most Google services directly on the phone, but sometimes you may want more screen estate, especially if a computer is available. That’s not a issue if you are working on your own computer, but what if you are on a public terminal or a friend’s house? You probably do not want to enter your log in information on the computer as a number of things can happen.

This includes a keylogger running on the PC, someone looking over your shoulders while entering your sign in details, forgetting to log out after you finish your session or configuring the sign in information to be saved on the computer.

If you have your smartphone at hand, you can perform the following steps instead. Visit http://goto.google.com/login. All you should see is a QR code on the page.

Scan the code with the camera of your smartphone. You should see the following screen on your phone.

Tap on Start with Google Mail or Start with iGoogle to load those pages in the web browser you have just scanned the QR code in. You can alternatively stop here to end the process without logging in, no harm done then.

Google Mail or iGoogle will be opened with the connected account, and without you having to enter your account username or password into the web browser or on the computer.

It needs to be noted that you will access data from the same account that you are logged in on the smartphone. There is no option, other than signing in into another account on the phone, to access a different account on the PC.

It is also important to log out of the service on the computer after you have finished using it. If you do not, the next user may be able to access your data.

Google Sesame can be quite useful in situations where you want to log in to your Google account on a computer that is not your own. Instead of having to enter your user data, you can simply use your smartphone to log in.

What’s your take on Google Sesame? Let me know in the comments? (via Caschy)

Update: Seems as if Google has pulled the plug on the new feature again. When you now visit the site where the QR code was initially displayed, you get the following message:

Hi there – thanks for your interest in our phone-based login experiment.

While we have concluded this particular experiment, we constantly experiment with new and more secure authentication mechanisms.

Stay tuned for something even better!

Dirk Balfanz, Google Security Team.

It is not clear why it has been removed by Google or whether it will be back at a later point in time.

But surely you don’t keep any sensitive information on your phone unless people really are interested in text messages from a loved one or emails from Groupon?  Here you’d be wrong again.  In this article I want to have a look through the different types of important information you keep on your smartphone, and look at ways you can keep it safe and secure.

So what information do you keep on your handset?

Contacts

You might not keep really sensitive details about yourself on your phones such as your Social Security number or bank details, but you do keep ever growing details about all your contacts.  These include their full names, address, email address and multiple phone numbers and, crucially information such their full date of birth (which is used in faking IDs and gaining access to accounts) and possibly family connections that are possibly giving up details such as their mother’s maiden name.  In short you are being entrusted with a huge amount of information on a huge number of people, all of which can be used for identity theft.

Email

It might not be possible for someone to discover your email password or to change it from your handset, though a good hacker might still find a way, but depending on what emails you store locally in your inbox they might reveal all manner of additional detail about you perhaps including at least partial credit card details if you’ve been shopping online.

Documents

More and more of us are keeping documents on our phones and with the inclusion of support for services such as Windows Live SkyDrive in Windows Phone, it’s becoming far easier to not know what important and sensitive documents you actually can access from your phone, maybe without even knowing the functionality is already there and switched on.  If you use DropBox on your phone for instance what documents are you storing in the cloud that can be easily and instantly accessed by someone who has physical access to your phone?

GPS Locations

As more and more of us use smartphones as GPS devices, what locations have you got stored in your phone?  Do you, for example have “Home” listed as a location?  If you do a thief could be directed straight to your home at the time when they know, if they’ve just stolen the handset, that you’re out.

How can you secure your handset?

Use a Password Lock

The most basic and simple way to lock your phone is to put a passcode on it, be this a physical numerical code or a swipe pattern.  Make it a good one though, definitely not an obvious pattern or the same code as you use for the PIN number on your bank card.  Having a code or pattern that’s a bit harder to do might be a little more inconvenient for you, but it comes with a great deal more peace of mind.

Write down your IMEI number

The phone’s unique identifier code, it’s 15 digit IMEI number can usually be found close to the SIM card slot and battery compartment in a phone.  Write down this IMEI number and keep it in a safe place at home in case you need to cancel the phone, it will make things quicker, or more important to report the phone as lost or stolen to the police.  Having the IMEI number will help make sure the handset can be quickly returned to you if it is found.  You can check the IMEI number on the phone itself by typing *#06# on the keypad.

Edit Your Lock Wallpaper to add an ICE number

An ICE (In Case of Emergency) number can quite possibly save your life if you are involved in an accident or incapacitated and the emergency services can’t unlock your phone to call a relative or friend.  Unfortunately modern smartphones still don’t include support for ICE numbers but if you manually edit in a graphics package onto the image you use for your lock screen, it can be a great help in having your phone returned to you if it is found.

Use Anti-Malware Software

Malware and viruses on smartphones are becoming ever more common and regardless of how secure the platform might be, or how much vetting all the apps might go through, there’s no guarantee that malware won’t slip through the net.  Check the reviews online to see if the anti-malware software you’re buying is actually any good and preferably go for one of the big name companies such as AVG or Kaspersky for added peace of mind.

Use a Remote Management Service

Some smartphone platforms, including Windows Phone, come with a remote management service you can access online.  These services can allow you to remotely lock the phone, track it (even when locked) or even wipe it altogether and perform a hard reset if you suspect it is gone for good.  These services are accessed through any web browser and if your smartphone comes with such a service it is well worth signing up for it.

So what are your additional tips for keeping your smartphone, and its sensitive data safe and secure?  Write them in the comments here as we’d love to hear them.

A few website will offer a mobile version for smartphones, but when it comes to tablets you’re out of luck.  Out of luck that is unless the company has invested in an app for your specific device.  If they have you will have a far better experience navigating their site.  The differences between websites and apps can be huge, with the usability offered by device-specific apps far ahead of anything the company’s website can offer.

It’s interesting to note too that in the last couple of years the big players on the Internet have made absolutely no attempt to make their websites touch-friendly.  This is despite tablet computing taking off a big way and even the near-imminent arrival of the super-touch-friendly Windows 8 operating system.  Personally I find this disappointing and that it demonstrates a lack of understanding and vision on the part of these companies.

How many more people could they reach for instance if they made their websites more touch-friendly?  Certainly the disabled and the elderly are an enormous and mostly untapped market for Internet businesses.

So this got me thinking, which do you prefer?  From websites and their corresponding apps such as Facebook and Twitter, to Amazon, eBay and more we’re very interested to hear if you’ve begun to abandon company websites in favour of their much more user-friendly apps.  Alternatively are there companies that have provided apps for other platforms that are yet to accommodate your own platform?

Let us know in the comments as it’s clear this is not only an issue that is frustrating many web users, not just myself, but that is it a problem that is only going to get worse unless and until these companies embrace touch on their website themselves.

However, it does raise additional questions, the most important being do we now need websites at all?  If we are all going to be used to downloading and using apps on our smartphones, tablets and desktop computers through Apple’s app store for OS X and the forthcoming Windows 8 store, why do we still need the websites?  Surely a visit to amazon.com should just present you with a links to their various apps on their various platforms?

Tell us what you think in the comments.

I’ll start this conversation by getting all teary-eyed.  It’s a huge pity that two operating systems as capable as MeeGo and WebOS both seem to be on their way out forever.  We all know that the worldwide smartphone market is easily big enough to support them, but support is the issue as it costs millions for companies to develop and maintain these operating systems.  This is money that Nokia simply don’t have and that HP may not be willing to pay.

But what will this mean for you in the coming years?  For the moment people who have iPhones seem to want the next iPhone when their mobile contract ends, and people who are on Android seem to like it too.  Windows Phone hasn’t yet been around long enough for anyone to reach the end of their first contract using it but RIM’s Blackberry’s also have a loyal following.

There are several main reasons for smartphone loyalty.  These include people being resistant to change and not wanting to learn something new, just getting really comfortable with an operating system and also having paid a lot of money for all those apps you won’t be able to port to a new OS.

But loyalty and favouritism for the operating system isn’t the whole picture.  There is also loyalty to the handset manufacturer.  Many people love Nokia, or HTC because they’ve always had a good experience with their phones.  Many more people like Sony Ericsson (soon to be just Sony) for their gaming integration and so on.

In the end though we all tire of the mundane and want a change occasionally.  This could mean iPhone users jumping ship to Android or Blackberry users jumping ship to Windows Phone.  In short, it could mean anything and there are a whole lot of factors to consider.  There is also the question of if you have loyalty to any one manufacturer and how you feel about this?  I’m very fond of HTC but I’ve owned phones by LG, Sony and others and all have been very good too.

So I’m interested ot ask here what platform you are currently loyal to, if indeed you’re loyal to one at all and what other ones you would consider in the future if you’ve even thought that far ahead?  To start I’ll say I’m very loyal to Windows Phone but, as and when I get bored I’d consider either the iPhone or a BlackBerry.  This would be for several reasons, I’m not happy with the malware problem that still exists on Android and while I don’t like iOS very much, you can’t easily complain about Apple’s hardware.  For BlackBerry, they’d have to produce another handset similar to the Storm, a full touchscreen as I’d never want a full QWERTY keyboard.

So what are your preferences?

First issue that I would like to throw into the room is mobile access to Ghacks. There is currently no mobile version of Ghacks available. Mobile users access the same Ghacks site that desktop users access, which may be not the most appropriate version for them to view considering the differences in screen size and connection speed.

The first question that I have therefor is if you would like to see a version of Ghacks optimized for mobile devices such as iPhone or Android smartphones. Users who connect with those devices would benefit from faster page loading times and optimized layouts.

Are you accessing Ghacks sometimes from a mobile device? Let me know your thoughts about it please.

The second question that I have is about mobile coverage here on Ghacks. Roman recently send me an email which got me thinking that it would be nice to review great smartphone applications, tips, tricks and how-to guides as well as important phone updates.

I’m thinking of one article per day maximum to take into account the growing mobile niche. I was thinking of concentrating on iOS and Android coverage, but would like to get to know your opinion about it first. Do you think other phones or devices should be included in the coverage? Or would you want less coverage or no coverage at all here on Ghacks?

I’d also like to take the opportunity to ask writers who are passionate and knowledgeable in this field to come forward and apply for the job. Just leave a comment below and I will contact you. Please note that I need to take a look at a few sample articles.

Now it is your turn. Would you like to see a mobile version of Ghacks? And would you also like to see mobile coverage here on Ghacks?

Scientists and researchers have been saying for several years now that we’re getting too much email.  They began saying this when the Blackberry was gaining popularity and more and more people suddenly began using email on the move.  The complaint then was that we were all expected to be able to answer work email outside of work hours.  This wasn’t giving people adequate time to switch off from their daily lives and relax in their own private time.

The Blackberry soon became known as the ‘Crackberry’ as people became addicted to the email facility on the handsets.  Now though the situation has spread like an epidemic, not only to smartphones, but also to other connected devices such as tablets and netbooks.  Questions will need to be asked again though if we’re not spending too much time addicted to email (and other forms of messaging) and if it isn’t having a negative effect on our lives, and on society, that could begin to cause real social problems if left unchecked.

I was down the pub the other evening with a friend.  We sat down with our drinks and he spent a few minutes checking Facebook on his smartphone, and sending a few messages.  With nobody to talk to for a while I dived into my email.  Here we were, probably looking like two incredibly unfortunate individuals, not talking to each other or anyone else but instead locked to our phones, heads down and concentrating.  This only lasted for a few minutes fortunately and then we put them away.

It’s not an unusual experience though by any stretch of the imagination.  Wherever you go in modern daily life you’ll see exactly the same thing.  Everywhere there will be people checking their smartphones, as if the world has moved on considerably in the five minutes since they last checked it.

I will admit to being an email twitcher on my phone.  I’ll go and visit a friend but the phone will be out and all too all too often I’ll flick it on and do a quick email check.  This is despite the facts that the phone is set to automatically check for email every fifteen minutes and I don’t get that many exciting or interesting work or social emails every day anyway.  It’s a problem, and I know it.  I find myself feeling embarrassed that I clearly have a stronger connection to my email than I do to the person I’m visiting.

But what are the emails we’re all receiving and are they really that important anyway?  If I examine my own emails, I’ll wake up every day to a few Google alerts (for my work here) and emails from Groupon and perhaps some shopping websites telling me about offers.  I’ve long since switched off from the barrage of social networking emails inviting me to play this, or join that on Facebook and telling me that @person mentioned me on Twitter.

I’m lucky then, as a great many people will still be receiving five or six emails a day from Facebook.  Every one of them reminding them that they haven’t logged into their Facebook account and interacted with their friends in, oh, must have been at least half an hour.  That’s all the shopping emails are like too.  I’m hardly likely to forget that Debenhams exist on the high street and only really want to know when they’ve got a sale going on that’s relevant to me.  Alas this means I have to sign up for a barrage of emails that aren’t relevant to me in the slightest.

In recent days I’ve finally had enough and have been undergoing a cull, hitting unsubscribe on many of these emails.  I know though that it’s only a matter of time before more companies tempt me to sign up for email alerts, or that I wake up one morning and don’t feel there are enough emails there (an odd feeling that one) so I’ll go and sign up for another.

It should come as no surprise to you then that all of these companies hire psychologists to advise them on things exactly like this.  Email is becoming a major social problem, especially since they started playing with our heads to get our attention and to get us hooked.

It would be interesting to hear how many emails you receive every day, let us know in the comments.  Of that total try to answer these if you can.  How many are from companies marketing themselves, how many are from social networks, how many are from work (and outside of work hours) and, crucially, how many of them are actually relevant or important?

Modern smartphones have lock screens that swipe in one way or another.  Sometimes too they will have a pin unlock.  Now these pin unlock screens by law have to include a button to allow you to make an emergency call, 999, 911 or 112, without physically having to unlock the handset.  But what about people who don’t have a pin code on their phone?

Modern smartphones are quite complex, and easily customisable.  After you’ve used a smartphone for a period you’ll be completely comfortable with where things are and how you access them.  For people who have recently bought their phone, or just got an upgrade on their contract, this isn’t always the case though.  A friend of mine only yesterday had to make an emergency call, fortunately not a critical one, and found he had to swipe up the lock screen on his brand new Windows Phone, go into the People hub and then find the small icon that would bring up the call pad to allow him to make the call.  This took valuable time.  He wasn’t familiar with the handset though as he’d only had it for a day.

Then there are problems with ICE numbers.  For those of you who don’t know it’s useful to mark one of the contacts in your phone as ICE (In Case of Emergency).  This is an idea piloted by a UK Police force and it gives the emergency services a valuable contact to call in the case you are incapacitated, and it’s something that the emergency services will specifically look for on a handset.

With a traditional mobile phone you would just have a phone book of the people you like to call and who call you.  On a smartphone though there can be contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more in your list, and finding the appropriate person to call can prove difficult or even sometimes impossible.

Modern smartphones are set up in such a way as the lock screen will provide you with useful information such as the time, date and any forthcoming appointments you may have.  They’re not set up to show you ICE numbers though.  What’s more PIN screens, while allowing you access to make emergency calls, won’t allow you to call a next of kin, spouse or housemate in the event that you are hospitalised.

This all brings me back to traditional mobile phones.  These too came with optional pin codes that would have prevented you from accessing the contacts list, though many would have given the option to bring up owner information.  Here you could put a valuable second contact number for the emergency services.

I’ve spoken before about smartphone security, and how it needs to be brought front and centre of the smartphone experience to keep our data and personal information safe.  However there also needs to exist a way to keep us safe and protected in the event that a disaster occurs.

This is something that the main mobile OS manufacturers, Apple, Google, RIM and Microsoft need to consider more as they build more and more security into our handsets by default.  These updates, which are pretty much inevitable, will make it even harder for the emergency services to access our contacts information, or for strangers who may not have a phone of their own or be unfamiliar with your phone’s operating system, to use yours to make an emergency call.

Overall I’d like to think that my phone is set up to allow this, I use a Windows Phone.  As things stand though, there is no way at all for me to provide an ICE contact to people without leaving the handset permanently unlocked.  So it seems that I’m damned if I do, and doomed if I don’t!

Here you can update and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents you have stored in the cloud and it’s the one feature I’ve been looking forward to the most.  I have for many years had spreadsheets that I want to use on the move and used this facility as far back at the late 90′s with handheld computers like the Psion Series 3.  Needless to say then I found that the omission of this feature from Windows Phone at launch, and the inability to be able to transfer and sync documents with PCs made the Office hub almost completely unusable for me, and a waste of time.

Now though I have full access to these spreadsheets.  I’ve stored them on SkyDrive ever since I first installed Office 2010 on my PCs.  The main reason for doing this was security, with the files not actually residing on my computers and hidden behind a password and encryption there, the theft of anything from my home wouldn’t reveal personal and critical financial data to others.  How could anyone resist the opportunity to make their financial data so secure!?  There was also the added benefit of having access to these spreadsheets on any device and from anywhere in the world.  This is something I have also found extremely useful when on trips and holidays.

What I really wanted though was to be able to carry these files around with me too, on my smartphone.  After all, this is what a smartphone is for isn’t it?

You would imagine then that now I have achieved spreadsheet nirvana I would be ecstatic and as happy as happy can be.  You might be surprised then to hear that I’m feeling quite the contrary.  In fact I’m now deeply concerned about the security of these files, and it all comes down the lack of adequate security features in the smartphone OS itself.

Now I won’t speak about iOS or Android here, though all smartphone and tablet operating systems have got some faults in this area.  I’ll concentrate here on Windows Phone.  With this operating system you have a simple choice between ease of use and secure and safe, but sadly it’s very difficult to have both together.

What upsets me so much is that true spreadsheet nirvana for me would be an incredibly simple thing to achieve, if only Microsoft would put in one or two tiny little features to the main lock screen on the OS and one more feature to their Office Live platform.

At the moment the way things stand is like this.  You have a choice of either a lock screen that you swipe up to unlock the phone, or a lock screen that swipes up to reveal a numeric keypad onto which you have to type a code.  The latter of these two options is fully secure but the former will just allow anybody access to all your files and data.

You would imagine then that I would have my phone behind a password, to be safe and secure.  I don’t do this though as I use my smartphone an lot, an awful lot in fact and for a great many different things.  The process of having to swipe the lock screen up and then type in a password is annoying, cumbersome and frankly too much to ask people to do.

This makes me think of Android phones I have used where unlocking the phone involves swiping your finger across the screen to make a pattern that you yourself can set.  This is what I would call secure and with this I would be very happy.  A very similar feature to this is being added to Windows 8, or so it appears, but so far (and we should remember that Mango is still in beta, though Microsoft have a history of only releasing ‘near final’ betas these days) there’s no similar feature in Mango at all.

What Mango does bring to the table is the option to only ask for the password after X minutes of inactivity.  The options only go up to 30 minutes however, which may seem fair enough.  It is at least a huge improvement over what we had before.  It’s not configurable enough for many people though and will need to be looked at.

Then there’s the problem that the phone will automatically show, on it’s Office hub main page, links to every file and document I store in Microsoft’s cloud services.  There’s no option to hide any or just show some.  It’s all or nothing with this OS!

The other problem resides with Microsoft’s Office Live service.  This service is still failing to support passwords on documents.  This would make the problem go away for me (though it still wouldn’t sort out everything else on my phone being easily accessible to a thief).  This means that anyone clicking a link to a file on my phone will find that the file just opens for them, straight away and without worry.

It amazes me then that security on Smartphones is still not being given the importance by many companies that it truly deserves.  We’re all doing more and more with our smartphones these days and many people are literally carrying their entire lives around in their pockets, unsecured and open to theft and abuse by anyone that finds or steals the handset.

This situation has simply got to change, and change quickly.  If Microsoft, Apple and Google are ever going to convince the world, especially business, that their smartphone platforms are ‘the way forward’ then they need to bring security front and centre.  Unless and until this happens we’re all in trouble.

Now people are beginning a wholesale move across to mobile devices, smartphones and tablets. Yet for some reason I’m still completely unable to phathom these devices still don’t seem to come with native printer support.

To make matters even more confusing, many modern printers have supported wireless connectivity now for several years, more than long enough to allow the mobile and tablet operating system manufacturers to pull their collective fingers out.

This constantly boggles and amazes me as there are all manner of things we want to do with our phones and tablets, from booking journeys to online shopping and email, where printing support would come in extremely handy. Yet, still nothing but stony silence from the major operating system manufacturers.

It doesn’t even strike me as technically difficult either. If you are connecting to a remote printer you will be doing so via wi-fi. The printer manufacturers would probably fall over backwards to add smartphone and tablet support to their driver-ranges, and it still doesn’t happen.

It’s not as if modern devices don’t have the storage and the processing power for these drivers. Many smartphones regularly come with at least 8Gb or 16Gb of storage and they’re now apperaring with dual-core processors.

So the great mystery continues. Why, unless we spend money on expensive third-party addons which may not even exist for your platform, are we being denied the one thing that was a cornerstone of the modern computing revolution? How is it that Microsoft, RIM, Apple and Google don’t see printing as being either important or relevant to our daily lives?

It’s not often I write a rhetorical article such as this. There is, sadly, no answer to this question at all and no hope that we’ll get some any time soon. It’s not a subject that any of the major operating system companies ever mention, despite printer manufacturers no doubt chomping at the bit to get into new markets and modern phones such as Nokia’s N8 coming with USB ports.

So we’re left in a strange place where the whole computing market is moving slowly and inexorably towards new forms of mobile computing and, at ever-increasing speed, away from the home office, while at the same time needing to keep the home office around for the next time we want to print a booking confirmation or an email.

Personally I find this situation immensely frustrating;after all, how hard can it be for printer manufacturers to come together to develop a single universal driver that will do the basics of text and photos (which is all we really need) that can then be bundled by default with modern smartphone and tablet operating systems. Such a driver would connect to compatible printers via wi-fi and, before you can say paper jam, there would be your hard copy… well, you know what I mean.

I’m really hoping that this situation resolves itself before too long so please, please show this article to every influential person you can find. I’d imaging you’ll probably have to hand them a device where they can read it on the screen though :/

The thing is though I’ve been doing both of these pretty much since 1986 and the concept really isn’t a new one at all.

Back then I was a huge fan of UK company Psion’s mobile computers, indeed I had a whole range of them. It started with the Organiser II, their second generation mobile device (though the first one that was genuinely useful) and moved on to the Series 3a, Series 3c and finally a Series 5.

Psion is the company that had already brought the world the first integrated office suite of Quill, Abacus, Archive and Easel for the ill-fated Sinclair QL business computer, just beating Apple’s Mac (though barely) and beating the equivalent on PC’s by a good year.

I thought I’d give you a quick tour of these devices (a trip down memory lane for some) and talk about why Psion’s handhelds were important and how they’re still influencing modern laptops and smartphones today.

Despite what some people might have you believe, the Palm Pilot was far from the first mobile computing device. By the time it launched in 1996, Psion had already been mass producing mobile computers for twelve years. The 1984 Organiser and the 1986 Organiser II, which many people still think of as the original model for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the BBC Television adaptation of the classic Douglas Adams novels, was a fantastic little machine.

It had two removable storage ports you could plug additional memory into, these were later wiped by removing a label over the chip and exposing them to ultra violet light for 30 minutes (I’ll bet you’ve never formatted a disk quite that way before!)

All of the software you would expect for a mobile computer was already there including a diary, contacts app, clock, alarms, calculator and the device was fully programmable. In fact there was quite an extensive user base who wrote custom apps, not just for the Organisers, but also for the Series 3 and Series 5 computers that followed them.

Three years still before the Palm Pilot was launched, Psion had moved to a clamshell design with full qwerty keyboard and larger screen. Their Series 3 handheld was an instant success and they could be seen being used by yuppies everywhere (I wasn’t a yuppie). Their programing language had evolved and was now even more powerful and flexible.  A variant of Basic, it focused on database creation and query and the Series 3 soon became home to a wide range of third-party professional apps from medical and industrial information to education, science and more.

At this point Psion began to diverge into industrial handhelds, and they still operate in this market today. Before they finally abandoned the home handheld market though they launched the Series 5. This computer had an ingenuous folding clamshell design where the keyboard slipped outwards from the case to maximise the available space. This keyboard was completely revolutionary and, although Palm was clearly winning the handheld wars by this point, laptops for years to come would owe some of their design and ingenuity to the Series 5.

The Series 5 also sported a touch screen, the first Psion handheld to do so and, as it featured more power and yet more additions to it’s native programming language, saw just as many practical applications as its predecessor.

The operating system for the Series 5, EPOC, which was written from the ground up for this device, was later renamed Symbian and still exists to this day in Nokia smartphones. Psion entered a strategic alliance in 1998 with Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson to bring the mobile OS to a wider market. The project was inevitably doomed and eventually Nokia bought the OS outright for use on its mobile phones.

As if the company’s innovations weren’t good enough by this point, in 1999 they released a sub-notebook device called, you guessed it, the Netbook.  This pre-dated modern netbooks by almost a decade and while it wasn’t a huge success, was still popular in business sporting several additional models including the company’s first full-colour device and one running Windows CE.

I don’t own any Psion devices any more but I do remember them fondly. With my Organiser II was able to keep a diary and planner, organise all my contacts and carry them with me and more. The Series 3 and Series 5 allowed me more control over my life with mobile spreadsheets and word processing documents. I was able to do financial planning and more on the move. So when you use your smartphone or tablet today, think back to how it all began with one small British innovator.

The device, which is rumoured to be called the Padfone, looks to be the second iteration we’ve seen of the PC in your pocket concept that Motorola recently pioneered with their Atrix mobile phone.

We can expect the device to be based on Android, though which version of the company’s OS is unclear.  Android is currently available in very different versions for phones and tablets, though its open-source nature makes it much easier for companies such as ASUS to modify it to suit their particular needs.

The next question is whether the tablet will be dumb without the phone docked.  This will be fairly likely but will keep the cost of the tablet down considerably as it will just require a screen and a dock, not a computer itself.  This could be a way for people to get a tablet for very little money.  That said the Motorola Atrix with its netbook dock as received unfavourable reviews so far.  The Atrix, in Motorola’s defence though, is a version 1 product and the first iteration of this type of device that we’ve yet seen.

The rise of mobile devices poses a new challenge for webmasters, who now have ensure that users who visit their sites from mobile devices have the best possible experience doing so.

Opera Mobile Emulator is one tool to aid webmasters in this task. The program emulates Opera Mobile running on various devices on a Windows desktop system.

You need to install Opera Mobile Emulator on Windows before it can be used. It opens up with a configuration screen that you can use to select a pre-configured profile or a custom profile for the emulator.

Available devices are Samsung Galaxy S, HTC Wilfdire, Motorola Droid X, LG Optimus One, Nokia N900 and about a dozen or so others. The resolution is automatically selected for those devices and all that is left for you to do is to click launch to start the emulator.

You can alternatively select custom from the profile drop down to configure a custom resolution, pixel density and input method (touch, keypad, tablet).

The emulator itself behaves like Opera Mobile would on the device, with the benefit that you can use the Windows keyboard and mouse to use it.

The idea behind the emulator is to give webmasters a tool at hand to verify that their websites display as good as possible on mobile devices. It can furthermore be used as a tool during web development to make sure that the website displays fine for a specific device or resolution.

Opera Mobile Emulator is an 11 Megabyte download for Windows, Linux and Mac. Webmasters who want to test how their websites display on various mobile devices should give it a try.

So what is this change I hear you cry. This will be the move to the computer in your pocket and, surprisingly, Microsoft seem to be ahead of the game this time. I say surprisingly because in recent years Microsoft have long been playing catch-up to their competitors and, frankly, making a bit of a mess of it. Windows Phone is the best example of how the company completely failed to bring the right product to market at the right time. Currently this smartphone sits with little over 3% market share and the company has huge volumes of work to do to catch up with the big boys.

When it comes to computing in your pocket though Microsoft could yet come up with a few surprises, and I fully expect that they will. The first indication of the computing in your pocket future took the form of the Motorola Atrix. This is a smartphone that can sit in a dock at the back of a netbook-style keyboard and screen assembly and be used as a desktop computer.

This Android powered phone has received great reviews as a phone but hasn’t been so well received as a netbook. That said it’s the first device of its kind and a very exciting prospect. We never expect version 1 products to tick all the right boxes anyway.

Google don’t seem to be too concentrated on the prospect of dual devices at the moment. They’re OS product line-up has even become a little fragmented with Chrome OS now gearing up for release and Android being steered towards touch-only desktop devices.

Of Microsoft’s other competitors Apple seems best-placed to compete in this arena. Their iOS smartphone operating system is already based on their successful OS X desktop operating system and the news that the company is planning to port an iOS-style user interface to their desktop computers could show a hint of the way forward for all of us.

It’s with Windows 8 and Microsoft’s move to ARM processors though where the most interesting developments lie. In research most people have answered that they’d most like to be using Windows on mobile devices. This is despite Microsoft’s disasterous history with phones and tablets.

With an ARM-powered Windows we have the glint that we might just see a proper desktop OS available as a secondary interface on a smartphone when you plug your phone into an appropriate dock, be that on a dumb screen and keyboard affair or on your own desktop instead of a PC case.

Either way we can fully expect not be carrying around slimmed down computing devices in a year or two and instead be expecting to be carrying full computing devices with quad-core processors, large volumes of storage and full desktop apps. This is a hugely exciting prospect and one that futurologists were getting excited about twenty years ago.

This future is now just outside our doors, the question remains will people embrace it?

Why?  They’ve noticed the upsurge in popularity for the games of old.  Call it nostalgia if you like but emulators for classic computers can now be found all over the place and 67% of all smartphone users now say they use their handset for gaming.

The new kit would see the return of the squidgy keyboard but with no computer inside.  Instead there would be a Bluetooth system to pair the keyboard with your phone.

Quite how this will work with a mobile phone screen remains to be seen however some smartphones, such as Nokia’s N8, are now being equipped with HDMI ports so that you can plug them directly into a modern TV.

It’s all jolly exciting as once again we could be enjoying the likes of JetPack, Manic Miner or Death Chase (three of my personal favourites) the way they were originally intended to be enjoyed.

There has been a resurgence in recent years of nostalgia gaming.  This was boosted by the Nintendo Wii which demonstrated that graphics didn’t have to be cutting-edge for a game to be enjoyable.  Smartphones capitalised on this and now games such as Angry Birds are everywhere and some of the most popular games around.

Last year the Commodore 64 was reborn as a low-powered PC.  It wasn’t really a Commodore 64 though.  We await the release of the new Speccy eagerly, at least I do, and it will be great to experience the games on that keyboard again.

I don’t have an iPhone, I’ve got an HTC Mozart Windows Phone.  This phone has a screen resolution of 480 x 800 pixels.  This is a bit less than the iPhone 4 but it’s the norm for modern smartphones.  I don’t worry about looking at pixels, I haven’t worried about that for a few years now to be honest.  The display on my phone is excellent.  The display on the iPhone 4 is even better, in fact I can genuinely say it’s the best smartphone display I’ve ever seen.

Apple have a knack for taking tachnology and making it perfect, sorry, you fell off your chair again.  They made the MP3 player perfect, the smartphone perfect and the ultraportable laptop perfect, the tablet computer perfect and let’s not forget they many years ago now made the first perfect living-room computer.  As a technology innovator Apple have long since relegated the likes of Sony and Bang and Olufsen, not just to second and third place, but somewhere even further down the line.  It’s very clear that Apple are streets ahead of their nearest competition.  Look, why do you just go and sit on a chair with arms on it?  Comfy now?  Okay.

So why do I believe that companies, and I include Apple in this, should stop trying to compete with the Retina display and just leave our screen resolutions the way they are?  I believe this because DVD-Audio failed spectacularly not long after first being released to the world.

DVD-Audio offered much more fidelity than the lossy CD format could ever achieve.  The sound quality was far higher than CD and some audiophiles and lovers of classical music claimed miracles, that they could hear individual horns playing in the brass section.  In truth this was all in their imagination.  Science proved that the Human ear really couldn’t tell the difference between CD and DVD-Audio, and that the extra fidelity was lost on us because much of it was outside the ability of the Human ear to hear.  I would imagine that many DVD-Audio collections are now the properly of the household dog as a result.

I believe we’re at the same point with smartphone display technology.  We’re very quickly reaching the limits of what the Human eye can distinguish.  If I already don’t notice pixels on my 480 x 800 resolution screen, and might not notice anything at all on a Retina display, what’s the point of trying to beat it?

There’s a serious health concern here too with displays, that we didn’t get with DVD-Audio.  The hardware manufacturers like to be able to improve their display equipment year on year to have the very latest and best ‘stuff’.  They don’t like leaving one technology in use for more than three years and just won’t leave it more than five.

If they were just making improvements to readability, reducing eyestrain and headaches and the like I’d applaud that but no, the goal, at least at the moment is in squeezing more and more pixels onto a display.  Now while we can zoom in and out of pages on modern smartphones, by default the text we have to read is getting smaller.

This can only result in generations of people who may suffer from eyestrain and with technology changing at a maximum of every five years, that’s another five or six major changes before I retire.  We have an increasingly elderly population in the world now thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, though for some reason the big technology firms still seem to be ignoring this fact.

There isn’t a single modern smartphone that has an interface aimed at the elderly, or that’s even easily customisable for the elderly.  The market is with the young, the money is with the young and the technology companies are following the money.

Eventually though, whole generations of people who have grown up using smartphones will get older, and may suffer from eyesight problems due to years and years of squinting at tiny text on small screens.  I remember when I was young specifically being advised by my parents and elders not to try to read tiny text to avoid damaging my eyes.

So where does this all fit in with my saying that companies should stop trying to squeeze ever-more pixels onto our smartphones?  The focus now, if you’ll excuse the pun, should be on improving the overall quality of the handsets and doing whatever can be done to try to avoid creating generations of people with sight problems.  Moves towards better quality and faster-refreshing eInk displays that can go into smartphones, screens that are easily viewable in direct sunlight without having to squint at it and so on.  The world needs technology companies to accept that we’re all getting older and innovate accordingly.

If all technology companies don’t accept this, and accept it within the next few years, we could end up with a situation where generations of people will go through the last few decades of their life not having any technology that’s designed for them.  Instead they’ll have to adapt, wear glasses, squint and become frustrated, all because the companies making the hardware are chasing the next big technological achievement and the next big thing.

Well let me tell you, the next big thing is the population explosion of older people, and that crowd will be bigger than you.

The best way to start is to discuss why I went with Windows Phone 7.  I want to be frank here, I both love and hate smartphones with equal measure.  I like being able to do a little light web browsing and check and update Facebook and Twitter, but primarily I want a phone to be a phone.  This is the overriding concern I have about modern smartphones, they’re simply not phones first!

So what do I mean by this.  Well I discounted both iOS and Android because the former monopolises your main screen with icons for maps, games, utilities and more while relegating the actual phone features to a couple of small icons on the screen.  The latter is even worse, treating your phone’s screen like a desktop with a mouse cursor and widgets.  I have enough trouble sometimes with my desktop on my PC at home.  The last thing I wanted to do was translate those problems onto a tiny 4 inch screen and exacerbate them further.

Windows Phone on the other hand does things differently.  You don’t, for example, ever have to go into a Facebook app if you don’t want to.  All the information you need about your friends is right there in your contacts lists (we can also look forward to twitter and other services being integrated here in the future).  The OS also prioritises the phone functions of the device.  While any smartphone OS will live or die on the quality and quantity of the apps available for it, Windows Phone shunts these off, by default, to a second screen.  This is where I want them to be.

The other reason for wanting a phone that works in this way is that I use my mobile phone mostly as a clock and calendar.  For the last couple of years I’ve been struggling along with an HTC Touch HD Windows Mobile handset.  I’ve upgraded the firmware many times to try and make the thing more usable and some firmware implementations have almost worked in that regard.  The thing I’ve always liked the most about it though is simply being able to switch it on and see at a glance the time and any forthcoming appointments.  Android can do this, but with widgets, the iPhone won’t do this at all, and I believe Windows Phone does this best of all.

Then there were the Symbian handsets from Nokia and Sony Ericsson.  These were all discounted early on because the OS is simply not up to the polish that iOS, Android and Windows Phone have.  Palm’s WebOS was also discounted because the OS is in such a dubious place right now that future updates and support are uncertain.

The HTC Mozart Windows Phone

So what about the handsets?  Here is where I faced a real problem because without a shadow of a doubt, the iPhone and many of the current Android handsets are much better than the first batch of Windows Phones.  Phones such as the HTC Desire have been picked up by many of my friends because they’re just so good.  Indeed I’ve been very impressed by the build quality of HTC handsets in general.  The iPhone 4 though is also a fantastic piece of design and a wonderful handset I’d be delighted to have in my pocket.  It had to be a Windows Phone though so I had to make a choice.

My own carrier in the UK is Orange which gave me a choice of three.  The HTC Mozart, the Samsung Omnia 7 and the LG Optimus 7.  The LG was out straight away as I feel the plasticky buttons along the bottom of the screen are both cheap (in look and feel) and will eventually break.  Both the Mozart and the Omnia are excellent handsets but I wasn’t strictly tied to Orange so I had a look at the other carriers.

The HD 7 I felt had a very poor screen, it felt pale and washed out, so this was discounted early on.  The only other handset available was the HTC Trophy on Vodafone that feels like the poor cousin of the Mozart.  So sticking with Orange it was.

This is where the choice became very difficult and let me tell you why.  I had a Mozart for 10 days a couple of months ago when Microsoft sent me a review unit.  It’s a lovely phone, the gorgeous metal case and its smallish size make it an absolute pleasure to pick up and hold.  Because it’s not too big, with a 3.7 inch screen, it feels like a phone and not a computer too.

There is one major flaw with the Mozart though and it almost became a deal-breaker for me.  Because Windows Phone will let your switch off the phone simply by pressing and holding the power button, with no on-screen prompt to turn it off as well, this is exactly what happened every time I sat down to put my shoes on (I keep my phone in my front trouser pocket).  It is hugely irritating finding out your phone has switched off AGAIN just because you’ve sat down and leant forward!

This made me seriously consider the Omnia 7, one of only two Windows Phone handsets (and the only one in the UK) to come with an AMOLED screen.

This screen is an absolute joy.  It’s incredibly bright and the contrast is clear between blacks and whites.  But even this fantastic AMOLED screen isn’t without its problems.  At 4 inches it’s a little large for its resolution and a sort of fuzzy pixellation can occur around the edges of icons and the Windows Phone live tiles on the front screen.

It’s not noticable at a distance but for close work, which is what you do with a mobile phone most of the time, I knew that looking at these fuzzy edges and knowing that the operating system is really drawing a straight line, would annoy me.

There was also the build quality of the phone.  It’s made from solid-feeling metal but has a cheapness to the edging and the back that just could have been done better.  It’s just not up to HTC’s high standards and the large Samsung logo plastered across the front is too large to have to look at every day for the next couple of years.

Even so it was a close run thing.  The Mozart’s power button issue meant I had to consider the Omnia very seriously indeed (the Omnia’s power button is on the side), taking friends to my local Orange store to see it for themselves and reading review after review of it online (I’d already had a Mozart so knew what to expect with that handset).

In the end the HTC Mozart simply came out with more pros than the Samsung.  The only other choice was to wait and see what additional handsets came down the line in the next few months.  It was at this point though that I looked back at Windows Mobile 6.5 on my HTC Touch HD and knew I had to run away screaming and embrace a new handset whatever it’s foibles.

There can be no doubt that the second generation of Windows Phone handsets will improve on and fix these problems and be far better.  They will probably challenge the current crop of Android handsets, though whether anything will be a serious challenger to the hardware of the iPhone in the next few years is debatable at this point.

So there it is, laid out in bare metal for you why I chose my Mozart.  It can be such a difficult decision these days choosing a handset and the reason I wanted to write this up as an article is two-fold.  Firstly there may be some of you out there about to go through the same agony, but also because it’s just supposed to be a phone…  Why should this be a difficult choice?

There is no doubt that smartphones have made choosing handsets increasingly difficult, but I’m happy with mine now and it should be delivered tomorrow  :)  You can read my full in-depth review of the HTC Mozart and the Windows Phone 7 operating system at our sister site Windows7News.

For a great many people this will be when they’re due an upgrade on their mobile contract or when they buy a new handset and so, for them, Windows Phone 7 will always have had it.  For the rest of us early adopters it will be interesting to see if we really need it in the intervening time.

After all, while this has been a massive bone of contention with bloggers and journalists so far, nobody who has actually had a phone so far has announced it’s an issue at all.  This could therefore turn out to be a major non event.

Microsoft have already shown off the new feature to CNET.  It will work by letting a user click and hold on a particular word.  The feature will then allow you to expand your selection.  While the paste feature isn’t yet finalised we expect it to work in a very similar manner.

Just one problem- the availability of informational networks doesn’t actually mean that the information is cheap. A recent trend in consumer complaints has been that of contesting data bills incurred while traveling abroad. Since we all know that most people are too meek to voice their displeasure at most things, this can only mean one thing: we are all getting ripped off!

Take, for example, the case of Paul Martinez, a resident of Boston, Massachusetts who took a weekend trip to Toronto for a baseball game. His total time in Canada was less than 48 hours. His total time using his handheld device was less than two hours. His bill? $675. Ouch, that’s a lot of popcorn and peanuts.

Martinez isn’t alone in getting stuck with a massive bill. The problem is that wireless don’t have to restate their terms of roaming, using foreign networks, or extra charges once you have signed the agreement. They’ve done their job and if we don’t read the fine print, that’s really all of our problem. By not knowing the details, consumers set themselves up to be gouged.

For every guy like Martinez who is willing to talk about his bill there are a hundred others that don’t say anything. The data companies are making money hand over fist and they aren’t likely to change the way they do things.

One way to keep yourself from getting into trouble is to call your phone carrier before you travel. Companies like AT&T offer data plans that are only slightly higher for international use than they are in your home country. At the very least, call your carrier before any travel.

A second precaution is to either shut your phone off or put it in flight mode when you are not using it. This keeps you from being charged for incoming calls, e-mails, and texts.

If you are using a wi-fi device, make certain that you have configured it properly so that you are actually using the wi-fi and not a secondary data connection. On some phones the applications each have to be set individually, so make sure you have everything figured out before you cross any borders.

There are also a number of ways that you can limit your phone use while traveling or save on spending too much. One is to use VOIP (voice over internet protocol) services like Skype, Pingo, and Google Voice for calling back home. If you are using wi-fi, you can actually use your hand-held device for this but otherwise you will find most cyber-cafes abroad are set up for using them. All three services offer cheap calling plans with access numbers in just about every country you may travel in. International calls cost as little as $.02 per minute. You’d have to do a lot of talking to get a $700 phone bill with that rate.

Another factor to be aware of is that often you won’t be able to use your device at all when you are traveling overseas. Many carriers have ‘locks’ on their phones which will prevent use outside of the home country. These can be hacked fairly easily, but if your phone is operating on a different band (for example the USA uses CDMA while most of Europe uses GSM networks) , then there is nothing you can do but put your phone away or buy a new phone while you travel.

If buying a new phone sounds unreasonable, think again. Cheap phones can be bought for anywhere from $10 to $1000 in most countries. Since most countries operate using SIM cards, you may need to get a new SIM in the countries you are visiting. This is usually a cost of something like $20 and includes anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour of prepaid talking time. So, you can spend about $40 and have enough cell juice for most trips and a new phone as a souvenir when you go home.

Most Americans aren’t aware that most of the world uses prepaid services and that they are significantly cheaper than the expensive contracts which are used in the USA. In addition, the USA is one of the few countries that charges you both ways- incoming and outgoing. In civilized nations, no one would think to charge you for someone else deciding to call you. So, getting a new phone and SIM while abroad can be liberating for US citizens and useful for everyone else.

Of course, the other side of this is that those traveling to the States are in for a nasty surprise when they purchase data. Pre-paying in the USA is both more expensive and less efficient than in other countries.

All of this will help you to understand why a big phone bill could come your way if you don’t think ahead about your data usage and cell use before traveling abroad. For Americans using i-Phones, a good solution is to purchase an international data plan from AT&T or Verizon which can be bought in terms of monthly time or in terms of kilobytes.

Also, make sure that you do all of your downloading before you leave your home country. You never know how much it’s going to cost you to use data networks. Talk to your cell carrier/data provider before you travel. Find out if they will notify you when you reach certain limits. In many cases you can request this even if the company does not provide it as a regular service.

Probably the best suggestion is that you put your phone away when you travel. Enjoy the world, your phone will still be there when you get back home.

The malware takes the form of a game that spies on the smartphone’s owner and was built using the standard software toolkits that are available  to everyone.  In a report on the experiment today, Experts says that this makes the malware much harder to spot.

There is evidence that criminals are now beginning to target smartphones with their complete lack of virus protection, in order to gain personal details that can be used for identity theft and other crimes.

Chris Wysopal, the co-founder and head of technology at security firm Veracode, who helped the BBC develop its malware, said that smartphones are not at the point PCs were at in 1999, at the birth of the popular internet.

“At that time malicious programs were a nuisance. A decade on and they are big business, he said, with gangs of criminals churning out malware that tries to steal saleable information.”  He said.  “Mobiles offered a potentially more tempting target to those criminals.”

Simeon Coney, of mobile security form Adaptive mobile said…

“In a mobile network the device is intrinsically linked to a payment plan, to a user’s credit,” he said. Nothing happens on a mobile network, no call is made or text is sent, without money changing hands.  Criminals have tapped into that revenue stream by getting phone owners to dial or contact premium rate numbers. Now they are turning their attention to applications and the lucrative information they scoop up.”

The Java application from the BBC was put together in only a few weeks and  gathered contacts, text messages and also gathered the phones’ location.  IT then sent this information to a specially set-up email address.

The malware was only 250 lines of code, with the entire program only 1500 lines of code.  The BBC say in their report that there can be benefits to the way some phone OS manufacturers vet programs.  Apple vets every program for the iPhone and iPad and Blackberry maker RIM and Google can easily switch off malicious applications through use of a code-signing system.  Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system will also see all programs vetted.

The last time the BBC conducted an experiment like this they took control of a botnet, but when the experiment was over left a message on the screens of the infected PCs worldwide and instructed the botnet to self-destruct.