No longer a Luddite

After ten years of being behind the times, I have what can ony be described as a posh phone. IT's the HTC Desire HD. It is truly a stupendous piece of kit. Some of this is old news, of course, but the ability to be able to take great pictures, access the internet, receive emails in not-quite-real time, manage Twitter and Facebook accounts, and synchronise contacts so that you can see the same person's phone number, email, Facebook and Twitter all in the same place - that's space-age stuff (hardy surprising given that the computing power in one of these dwarfs that in Apollo XI). The Android operating system is great - although heavily tied in with Google. I have taken the plunge and am slowly migrating to Gmail from Hotmail (update your address books: eoghanlondon@gmail.com will reach me).

The only down side, and it is a massive downside, is the battery life. I'd been warned it was poor, but it is really abysmal. Circa 2002 the main selling points of upmarket phones were small size and lengthy battery life; nowadays phones are enormous with terrible battery life. Que sera.


All the same, it's an astonishing piece of engineering. I am very, very excited by it.

We also bought a new laptop today - not a particularly posh one, but more than adequate for our needs. A £9 copy of Microsoft Office (thanks MetBenefits) is now installed, and we're firing on all cylinders. One thing I noticed about it is that in contrast to computers a few years ago, it works straight out of the box with minimal installations and preamble required. In fact the only work that needs to be done is to uninstall all the junk that Packard Bell and Microsoft have shoved on there.