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Apple’s OS X has a good reputation for providing much better out of the box security than Microsoft Windows, in fact it’s one of the main reasons for running a Mac as opposed to a PC.
Is Apple generally better at designing secure products than other high tech companies out there? I’m not so sure…

I do a lot of online shopping and I use many websites that require some form of account that you log into, normally via a username and password combination. I’m very cautious and take security seriously, working as I do in the IT and more specifically Internet industry for over 10 years I know how to protect myself online.

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Filed under: internet
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Wandering through a shopping mall on Friday I spotted the new Google Android powered G1 phone at a T-Mobile store. So I decided to take a look as it could be a viable alternative to the iPhone if you don’t want the O2 network or can’t justify the £35pm entry point for the iPhone.
Initial impressions weren’t good, it had the same awful plasticky build quality of the old T-Mobile Vario (HTC Touch) with a screen that slides out of the way to reveal a proper keyboard. This slide out mechanism is not what I would call robust…
But the important aspect of this phone is the operating system and software which are supplied by Google, someone else may make better hardware in future if the platform takes off.
The Google Android system has all the features you’d expect of a modern smart phone, a full web browser, good email support, maps, an apps store etc. The features list is not the problem, but the implementation is. The iPhone was revolutionary not for any particular feature like the touch screen or maps, it was revolutionary due to the way it worked. The simplicity. It’s very obvious how to do almost anything. The Android platform takes advantage of keys to do some things and the touchscreen to do others. It’s never obvious which you need to use to do something. You find yourself scanning the keyboard for the appropriate key if you cant find what you want on screen, and then if you can’t find a button that does what you need you end up looking around the screen again for some sort of clue as to what to do next. It’s awful. It’s not much more user friendly than the original T-Mobile Vario which ran Windows Mobile 5(?) and that was an absolute nightmare, although the G1 isn’t as sluggish. If it worked well I could forgive the unfinished and very dated “look” that the interface has but as it stands I can’t find anything positive to say about this phone, apart from the price. Even the keyboard, which I thought might be a benefit over the iPhone really isn’t as it’s small size does not make for fast text entry, to be honest I doubt it’s any faster than the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone.
Hopefully Android will get better, that’s the beauty of software, but for now, unless you honestly can’t afford it, the iPhone remains very much the king of the hill.

Filed under: Gadgets
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I discovered something interesting this weekend.

I had a need for a new external USB hard drive and rather than buy my usual Western Digital MyPassport drive I decided to spend a little more and get a Toshiba drive. Why? Instead of being made of plastic it was made of brushed aluminium which I preferred.

When I got home I discovered it needed 2 USB ports to work (Toshiba supply a special USB Y cable for just this purpose) which is less than ideal and poor engineering by Toshiba in my opinion as many other drives work just fine with one USB port.

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Filed under: Computing
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