and what are you supposed to do with the keyboard once you've unplugged it

are you going to carry it around with you? then you're better off buying a laptop

are you going to leave it at home? buy an iPad instead

but which has the bigger installed base

most people here seem to be overlooking the simple fact that the reason not many people bought a laptop last year isn't because they don't want one any more; it's because they already have one

it's a pipe dream at the moment

Myself and my colleagues are fairly extensive users of word and excel and also the google equivalents. we only use the google ones when we're prepared to sacrifice just about everything to have an interactive document (usually something with very short lifespan like a to-do list or a discussion)

Even with google's proven ability to stun the market with web apps that were light years ahead of the competition (search, maps, gmail), google office apps haven't really closed the gap with proper office in the last 5 years and if google can't do it, nobody can (and yes I've used office online too).

If you're writing a proper document, you'll want to be sitting in front of a proper keyboard. that means you're already running windows, osx, or linux, and those already have perfectly acceptable office apps on. everything else is just playing around.

OMG - a way to get free MP3s online

I've been waiting for years for that to happen

Am I missing something here?

It only allows me to find stuff I've already found before?? Now I know my memory isn't that great, but most of my web surfing is to find things I _haven't_ found before

Missed the boat

If you're already on Windows 7 you're sitting pretty (relatively speaking) because you've got a nice stable platform with XP mode for some legacy apps, and you can safely ignore the abortion that is Windows 8. If you're planning a migration from XP now, you've got to decide whether to go with the already-superseded 7, the unusable 8, or hold on till the last minute and bank everything on the fact that 9 will be another good'un

Type A and B ports

Being an apple product, I imagine having both type of ports would be useful - simply plug both ends of a standard printer cable in at the same time and watch it disappear up its own arse.

Seriously though it's an interesting point whether a tablet is seen as a host or a device. Surtace has a USB A so it clearly thinks it's a computer you plug devices into; most other tablets have a mini or micro USB meaning they consider themselves devices that can be plugged into a host.

Out of touch?

A phone that small would be good for nothing ... except maybe making and receiving phone calls?

how about a modern computer?

I'd like to see a comparison of how long a typical PC (or even a phone) would take to break the code using the same inputs

wasted opportunity

done properly, sandboxed java in a browser (or any other language for that matter) could have been a whole lot better than the kind of buggy javascript web sites we've got at the moment.

HD Graphics ?

What I don't understand is how they're going to make HD graphics work with windows apps on such a small screen. Displayed at the native resolution, existing apps will be unusably small but if they do the iPad retina trick of presenting it to apps as half the resolution (960x540), they'll be too big to fit on the screen

+1 me too

sorry - couldn't help myself

I've got one and it's kludgy

only when you actually use it for a while do you fully appreciate that trying to make something that's a laptop and a tablet at the same time is just never going to work

I think they've probably done as good a job in the execution as anyone could have done with the aims they set themselves, but the whole concept is pointless

The reason firefox users don't upgrade

Simple - firefox versions come out as often as chrome but it's as painful to upgrade as IE - the worst of both worlds

What sort of idiot would use a format that could only be read by a...

oh yeah... answered my own question there :-)

strategy schmategy

All these big companies have one corporate strategy - make as much money from your customers as possible. The technology (whether hardware, software or services) is just a side-effect of that.

They may have slightly different ideas about how to do it but most of them employ similarly talented people educated in the same universities coming up with the same ideas and all just trying to think of ways to lock users in and differentiate themselves from the competition.

If apple's or google's or microsoft's business model was naturally superior to the others, everyone would have adopted the same model; the plain fact is that there's just a big pile of luck involved, not some kind of mastermind visionary strategy that only Jobs or Zuckerberg could possibly have come up with

who gives a s**t ?

Like most reg readers I detest and ignore/block all adverts regardless of the medium and how carefully they have been targeted at me. Advertising is basically trying to sell you something you don't want to buy which is scamming.

If this change makes advertising less effective, companies will have to rely less on advertising and start to think of sensible business models instead which is fine by me.

If this change means we need far more adverts to make people pay attention, that will just make more people hate adverts more and again will hasten the demise of adverts.

Is this really tech news?

Is it news at all? looks like something that should be in the pages of 'take a break'

"...erodes the overall value of the social network"

hmm... and exactly what "value" is there in knowing when David Beckham has taken a dump?

android syncs across devices?

hmm, I was just bemoaning the inability of my android phone to sync the calendar with my gmail account and wondering about switching to apple, thinking "well it's expensive but at least the basics would work seamlessly"

So maybe I'm better off sitting where I am and waiting for android to get better. What I really want for android though is an app that makes it work as a mobile phone - that's the thing Nokia always understood and I miss it like crazy.

beware the cheap brother printers

The last printer I bought was a cheap brother inkjet. I bought it because the printer and the inks were cheap but it periodically cleans itself when not used so it will use up a set of cartridges in 6 months if you leave it on standby even if you don't print a thing. If you don't print very much, the cost per page is v high.

You could unplug it from the mains when not using it but then it does a full deep clean when you power it back on, so if you do that every week you're no better off.