TechRadar UK Blogs: Tech Junkie

A casually dressed man called Luke with spiky hair and rolled up sleeves gave me the idea for this blog. He's one of the many reasons why Windows XP simply won't lay down and die a blue and green death.

When we saw him, Luke looked like he was sat in a cupboard. Actually it looked a bit like one of those interview rooms in The Bill. Mind you, it was certainly a cupboard with a view – onto the Centre Court at Wimbledon.

Luke was being interviewed for an edition of the BBC's Wimbledon Unplugged Online featurette. He looks after Hawk-Eye, the state-of-the-art auto-line judge system that players can ask to refer to should they disagree with a line call. And behind him, running the show, is a PC running Windows XP.

Windows XP is good enough for all this stuff. It works. And works rather well. Windows XP does almost everything anybody wants. And its ubiquity and stubbornness to die means that means Microsoft has to resort to other means to get everybody to want Vista.

The first hammer blow comes today of course – XP supply officially ends but for only a handful of low-cost PCs. Expect the PC sales statisticians to report a bumper month for sales. Mind you corporates with XP licenses won't worry; they can simply choose to continue with the OS.

Vista still fails to convince after SP1

Vista is undoubtedly more stable than it was thanks to SP1, but a few days with it is enough to convince it still cannot make the cut in the corporate space where robustness is money. It also hasn't garnered enough support in the enthusiast community, where DirectX 10 still hasn't convinced many.

One loophole Microsoft has also failed to close is that users can also opt to buy a machine with both XP and Vista installed and simply use the former.

Vista's problem is that it just doesn't appeal. And, as long as our existing PCs last and software continues to support it, that means there's absolutely no compelling reason to switch over from XP. Especially if your system is being watched by millions from Centre Court.

With all the iPhone chaos going on, I forgot to pass comment on AMD’s new Puma laptop platform. It doesn’t look especially good or especially bad, but it’s not picking up on the massive hint Intel keeps leaving it – branding is rather important.

AMD has now launched the Spider platform for performance computing as well as Puma – using those monikers for the press and other interested parties, but not actually marketing these platforms to joe public as anything whatsoever.

Using Turion branding for the AMD processor inside is all very well, but how is Mr Potential Purchaser supposed to know that AMD has had any other involvement in putting their new laptop together?

OK, so AMD can’t compete with Intel’s massive marketing budget, but having a name that people can remember and actually says ‘hey, we’ve done some work here’ can’t be a bad thing surely?

An interesting blog post by my colleague Chris Phin over at the MacFormat blog: “it quickly became clear that this launch was less about adding whizz-bang new features – 3G and GPS are really the only new additions – and more about selling (and this is a technical term) a shitload of iPhones.”

More interesting, however, is that we Brits are no longer the losers of the deal. No longer getting stuff last – and, as importantly, no longer paying through the nose for it. You can get the iPhone 3G free on certain tariffs while, as Chris points out – the iPhone’s $199 slated US price converts properly to pounds with O2’s £99 price point.

And then, of course, there's the tax - our price includes VAT - the US price doesn't. Ha! For once we really are first past the post. And another bonus - existing iPhone owners are looked after too. Could you ask for more? Well if you did, you must be Veruca Salt.

£99 on contract? Hey, we’re getting serious now. So Steve Jobs did what was expected and announced the 3G iPhone, or iPhone 3G as it’s officially called. And it would take a lot for its vital statistics not to turn heads - and for it not to be a resounding success. There are simply so many good things to talk about.

Yes, so there are a couple of caveats. A 2MP camera is nothing short of lame. Yep, ok, so I can count the number of times I’ve used my iPhone’s camera on my fingers, but smartphones need to compete - and this camera doesn’t compete.

And the battery needs to be good. Really good.

But the package looks awesome. Stevie J made a lot of it being faster (that’s 3G for you mate) than even other devices - 36 per cent in fact. If true, it’s pretty darn cool. And GPS support is now expected. And we’ve got it. The iPhone is a powerful mobile internet device - this gives it an extra dimension.

What's also excellent about O2's tariffs is that you can get the phone for free if you spend a certain amount while existing iPhone owners can jump on the bandwagon just by buying a new £99 iPhone.

And best of all? Unlimited data is still included - we were a little worried about that one...

So Steve Jobs’ Apple World Wide Developer Conference keynote is just minutes away. We already know we’ll get some announcement about the hardware of the 3G iPhone (read our predictions), but more exciting is the potential for the 2.0 firmware. 

It’s rather likely we’ll be able to download the version 2.0 firmware pretty swiftly after the keynote. And if we can, we’ll be getting hands on with it straight away. Let's not forget that the WWDC is an event for developers, so we're expecting a lot more on the software side of things. There have aslo been rumours of a new tweaked version of Mac OS X Leopard.

And should Mr Jobs announces the 3G iPhone, you can be pretty sure we’ll have the skinny on that (slightly fatter) one, too. Whatever he comes out with, there will be plenty to talk about...