At a recent event I was wandering the convention floor when I came across this beautiful and unique-looking pod:

you can put a frigging X-Box in here

It’s called Ovei (not to be confused with Nokia’s Ovi), and it is primarily supposed to be used for education and relaxation. You get into the pod, close the door and you are completely insulated and soundproofed from the outside world in a non-claustrophobic way. There are unobtrusive speakers that can play your choice of music, and the lights change colour in a soft, lava lamp sort of way.

You can choose to use the Ovei as a place to do work, read, sleep, learn, meditate, or you can install a games console (I was assured that this is relatively easy to do) and play until you forget to eat for twelve hours. Their rep also told me that they have sold them to places as diverse as hospitals, for overworked doctors looking for a moment’s solace, and advertising agencies, for, em, overworked creatives in need of a moment of inspiration.

Prices range from approx £2K to £whatever, depending how cool and customisable you want your Ovei to be.

I got my phone stolen recently, and seeing that I was one of these foolish people who didn’t have insurance (always get insurance), my choices were fairly open as to what handset I’d pick up next. I still stand by my last post on the G2, and I have really come to love Android as an OS over the past few months, so I plumped for the T-Mobile Pulse as a replacement.

The Pulse is T-Mobile’s first pay-as-you-go Android handset, and it comes at a shade under £140 – very reasonable for a smartphone.  It is manufactured by Huawei, who seem to have even less problems white-labeling it than HTC – their brand name isn’t anywhere to be seen as the phone starts up. The handset itself is bigger than the G2, and is more generically iPhone-shaped rather than sporting anything such as the G2’s distinctive ‘lip’ design. The handset is made out of plastic, so while it is pretty tough, it couldn’t attract fingerprints any better if it was its mission in life.

The Pulse has a large colour screen, which makes for decent web browsing, and has the same Android features that make the OS great – syncing with Google contacts and calendar (wonderful when your phone’s been stolen) and the vast majority of apps will still work, including of course the pre-installed Google suite. Add to that WiFi and GPS, and you are more than good to go in pretty much any situation.

That said, there are some negatives with the Pulse. It can be slow when loading apps or processing anything remotely heavy, and the battery life is as shockingly bad as you would expect from a full colour touchscreen handset with the internet/GPS always on. The screen itself is unresponsive around the edges, and data input (despite the nice vibration you get when you press a key) is painful – a problem that’s endemic with any touchscreen I’ve used. Leading on from this, TouchPal keypad crashes and remains crashed once it stores a certain amount of predictive text words – a Godsend in some ways because I hate the thing.

Another annoyance is the headphone jack – not only is it at the top of the phone, but its 25mm instead of the standard 35mm. T-Mobile supplies you with an adapter, but it’s really not ideal, especially when playing media (video or music) on the Pulse is quite easy. The camera is also a bit rubbish – very blurry shots and no flash.

None of the above gripes really matter all that much in the grander scheme of things, as a budget level smartphone the Pulse looks good, runs Android well and does a more than admirable job for the price point.

It doesn’t get as much coverage as the iPhone App Store, but Android Marketplace is starting to pick up a head of steam with an ever-increasing number of excellent and useful apps on an ever-increasing number of handsets. In this post, I’ve picked 5 out of my top 10 so far:

Twitdroid

By far the best Android app for Twitter on Android, especially if you start off using the very limited HTC Peep app that comes pre-installed on the G2. It’s core functionality is excellent, and it has useful features such as threaded DMs, easy & non-awful retweeting, and synchronised saved searches. If you go Pro, there are fancy bits like integrated bit.ly support and colour themes for an extra £3.20 (roughly, the price is in euro), but there’s plenty in the free version to meet the needs of average Twitter user.

TasKiller

Does what it says on the tin; turns off any apps that you don’t need, windows taskmanager-style,  to have running anymore to preserve your very precious battery life.  Be careful what you turn off – if you don’t know what it is then leave it alone, as you may end up accidentally crashing TouchFlo or something equally important. There’s a lot of discussion on the usefulness of task manager apps and while Android is fairly hot on knowing when or how to close apps, TasKiller is useful for killing crashed apps and completely closing certain apps.

Google Suite

Cobviously a no-brainer on Android – Maps, Mail, Search come pre-installed and have saved my life on numerous occasions. GChat is also on there but I find I don’t use IM that much as I hate data input on a touchscreen.

LockMe

Once your Android phone gets stolen (as mine just did), it will dawn on you in the most sickening way that with one swipe of their finger, the scally now in possession of your handset has complete access to your life. LockMe adds in an extra layer of protection once you wake up your phone, requiring you to enter a pre-programmed pattern of your choosing (connecting dots) to unlock it. The pleasantly surprising part is that its free, I would normally expect to have to shell out for a security app.

Shazam

If you don’t know what Shazam is by now, you need to check it out – its made for anyone who has ever frustrated trying to remember the name of a song. Turn on your Shazam app, have it pick up a piece of the offending tune, and it’ll spit back out the song name and the artist. It has all the social sharing options you might expect, but its best used for settling debates or cheating in the music round of your local pub quiz (not that I would ever advocate that).

I’ll be back soon with Part Two.

I did it.  I quit my BlackBerry Curve 8300.  Gone are emails piped through an Enterprise server, the hard qwerty keyboard, a guaranteed sturdiness.  I’m not an unsatisfied BlackBerry user at all, and breaking up with RIM was very much “it’s not you, its me”.  The chance to upgrade to HTC’s G2 Touch (also known as the Hero) for T-Mobile was too good to pass up.

I can't get mine to stand up like this

The G2  is sleeker than its previous G1 incarnation, with a large touchscreen that takes up most of the front of the phone and a distinctive slight kink at the bottom which definitely helps avoid the screen getting scratched.  The back of the phone is covered in soft plastic, is very comfortable to hold and is a nice weight.  The phone has a proper headphone port as well as a 5 megapixel camera (but sadly no flash).  All other mod cons are included – GPS, gyroscope, wifi connectivity.

Its my first time to play around with Google’s Android OS – the user interface is simple & customisable, the navigation smooth and it has decent processing power (you can have many multiple apps running at once, with no noticeable affect on performance).  The touchscreen functionality is very intuitive, but the virtual keypad is frustrating and has me wishing for actual keys.  That said, anything is better than the fiddly, and frankly rubbish, trackball.

What I am loving is the full integration with Google – the Gmail interface on my phone is seamless, my phone contacts are my Gmail contacts, Google Talk is preinstalled and Google Maps is better than ever.  The only downside is that Google contacts create a contact for every email that comes into your inbox, whether you want it to or not.  Surfing the web is almost desktop quality, has the capability to run full sites rather than just cut down mobile versions, and adjusts the text to the size of the screen where it can.  The data connection leaves a lot to be desired in terms of reliability – but I’m not sure whether its the phone or T-Mobile’s network.

Android has its own app store, Marketplace, which comes pre-embedded in the G2.  Once you get past T-Mobile’s delightfully annoying content lock, there’s a good selection of free and paid-for apps – although app search is poor, especially considering the people behind it.  Once I got a good selection of apps up and running, I found it all comes at a cost – one working day’s heavy usage (especially of Twitter, browsing and using the GPS) and the battery is completely spent.  There are a few things you can do to combat this, foremost amongst which is installing apps such as TasKiller, which does what it says on the tin and allows you to turn off any and all apps that are running but you’re not using.

The G2 isn’t perfect, but the raft of features and great UI means I’m not going to get back together with BlackBerry – although I hope we can still be friends.

This advert makes me really, seriously uncomfortable.  I don’t know whether its the unnerving CGI, the fact that I can’t help but feel concerned that the babies are going to do themselves some serious physical damage breakdancing on tarmac, or that the ad’s creators were so lazy as to use such an obvious backing song as Rapper’s Delight.

Still, what do I know?  The video’s been watched more than 8.5 million times, putting it firmly in the category ‘viral sensation’, as marketing departments around the world scratch their heads trying to figure out why this one has caught on and theirs hasn’t.  I’m not sure there’s an obvious rhyme or reason as to why certain virals spread (such as the Cadbury’s Gorilla) and others don’t.  I do know that the Gorilla doesn’t directly make me want to eat chocolate and the babies don’t directly make me want to drink water.  The value these videos create is increasing the value/coolness of the brand itself in the minds of people who enjoy them, and make them something they choose to be associated with.

I'm sure you'll find another job straight away

I was directed to the above beautiful piece of facebook failure last night, and while its easy to laugh (I am laughing incidentally) it’s also equally easy to make a slip like this.  Once you’ve plugged yourself in to social media, the golden rule of email etiquette applies – don’t write anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of a national newspaper.  Keep the moaning segregated to somewhere it can’t be used to give you the sack.

Giddy from just finishing David Ogilvy’s wonderful book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, I was excited to stumble across AMC and marketing agency Deep Focus’s Mad Men Yourself site.  Launched in preparation for Mad Men season 3 premiere in mid-August, the site allows you to create a personalised avatar for both ’suits’ and ’skirts’ in a variety of cool 50’s Madison Avenue style clothes and accessories.

The end output is an avatar of your character (small & large) as well as a scene of said avatar in a Mad Men setting, such as the bar, Sterling Cooper’s offices or even Don Draper’s House.

Peggy - hold my calls, get me a fresh martini and keep that weasel Pete out of my office

There isn’t anything technologically revolutionary about this at all, but there doesn’t have to be.  This is a well executed viral as it actively made me want to create a character for the setting and to share it with people.  I guess creating something like this is easier when you have a fundamentally cool product like Mad Men, but still – good show.

Whenever I head along to events like Mobile Monday London I always take a few days afterwards to digest what I’ve heard and do some follow-up reading (especially after Google had framed the event by announcing just two days before that the future in this space is mobile web). Last Monday’s event on the future of mobile apps was no different.

MoMo’s main speaker/sponsor was Patrick Mork of European company GetJar, the world’s biggest independent mobile app store (and who I also must confess I had never heard of).  Based on their experience and analysis of their customer base, here are the most interesting bits of data I think they have dug up:

• 75% of their users are under 25 (and therefore not the same age as the majority of people creating apps for them).  The majority of this number are male users who frequently return to the store.
• The biggest factor impacting on whether or not a user becomes a repeat user is the existence of a UX-driven ‘discoverability’ of new apps.
• Apps are not about smartphones – 70% of apps downloaded from their store are Java-based.
• Most apps have a very short lifespan and are seen as “bite-sized pieces of entertainment” unless they are providing long term utility ala Google Maps.
• The most downloaded apps appear to be utility-based, with email and IM aggregators and sharing apps proving to be the most popular.

But what of Google’s jab about apps being a flash in the pan and that mobile web being the eventual winner?  The following panel discussion eventually threw up the general consensus that at present it makes sense for the client to look at the customer and develop a solution on a platform that best serves their needs, handset and habits.  Joachim Hoffman of Fjord summed it up nicely by stating that Nokia’s new Sports Tracker, with its built in heart monitor, is a service that couldn’t be reliably serviced by mobile web.  Conversely Flirtomatic, the mobile flirting network, wouldn’t have the resources to run on anything OTHER than mobile web – the most popular handset amongst Flirto users (the N95) still only comes in at 5%.  The sheer costs of creating and maintaining apps across enough all users’ handsets would be immense, and would stimy the fast changes and turnaround times that are needed to keep the network fresh and up-to-date.  There was also a  feeling that casual gaming is going to catch up fast in terms of downloads and popularity (this prediction is already starting to be reflected in GetJar’s download stats).

As much as I love mobile web, and I do think its the horse with the best legs in the long term, I have to agree with an article that Malcolm Murphy wrote on Mobile Industry review last week - mobile web isn’t there yet. The loading times are poor, the browsers aren’t powerful enough and even though people claim to be using mobile web more on iPhone, and that its changing mobile web usage habits – the very same iPhone users consume a proportionally high level of apps. I like the Google email and maps apps on my BlackBerry, and I much prefer them to their mobile web counterparts.  With Vodafone to react to Apple and Nokia by becoming the first operator to soon launch their own app store, I don’t think that I’m alone in these feelings.

Sadly nobody at the event mentioned the Star Trek communicator app for iPhone, maybe next month?

UPDATE: Excellent Guardian article on the true economics of iPhone apps.

This viral anti-knife crime awareness campaign is a Met Police initiative through their Drop The Weapons website. Click on the video to start the story, and when prompted choose between different options to open up a the video in a new window, “choose your own adventure” style.

A beautiful video, but for those of you looking to do this yourselves good luck getting this stationery requisition through the office manager…

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.