F1: Melbourne "No Ferrari, No Grand Prix"

Ron Walker, organiser of the Australian Grand Prix has put another marker in the sand for the FIA, as the battle with the teams continues to rage despite apparent agreement several weeks ago.

Walker has made it clear that without the top teams, in particular Ferrari, there will be no Australian Grand Prix next year. With a similar declaration from Monaco and the near-certainty that Monza would follow suit the FIA's world championship is rapidly running out of races. Given the events of the last week - combatative statements from Moseley and denial of voting rights to the FOTA teams in the technical group - it seems F1 is still some way from a solution.

Its also clear that the vast majority of fans have had enough of the FIA and now actively want the teams to break away and form their own championship. The recent collapse of the A1 organisation seems to suggest that they could go and buy a ready made package all ready to go for next season and cause CVC, Ecclestone and the FIA serious problems.

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TG01 At Orange Outlets From Tomorrow

Orange have officially confirmed the Toshiba TG01 Windows Mobile Superphone (smartphone doesn't do the specs of this monster justice) and should have stock at all locations from tomorrow (July 10th). Pricing is interesting, with the phone being free on the £39 tariff. That's pretty good when you consider the damage the iPhone 3GS will do to your wallet - and this looks like a phone that could compete with that device on a level playing field, never mind with a significant price advantage.

Of course Toshiba have a long history of promising the moon and delivering a scrunched up ball of tin foil (see the G910, G800, G710, and in fact pretty much every Windows Mobile phone the company has launched) so this time I'm hoping that the serious nature of the competition out there will have focused the development team's minds and the result will be a mobile masterpiece.

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Chrome Becomes An OS, Microsoft In Its Targets

We knew it was coming eventually, but here is the final official announcement: Google is getting into operating systems and its tool of choice will be called Chrome OS. This news must be very worrying for Microsoft, whose OS is already under pressure from Linux and MacOS (both with very limited penetration). Google is a whole magnitude of a more worrying competitor and that's got to have Microsoft scrambling its top guns for an immediate response. Windows 7 has had a generally positive reception, but against a typically Google onslaught that may not be enough.

Chrome OS is a lightweight OS aimed at netbooks - I'm pretty sure its going to be little more than a shell for Chrome to run in, with all other applications running inside the browser. It will make its way onto laptops and desktops as well. Google have significant work to do to ensure that hardware support is up to scratch though, always a strong point in Windows' favour. You'd back Google to deliver though wouldn't you?

With things looking bad for Microsoft in the Netbook market, the smartphone arena slowly slipping away and cloud computing and open source both challenging its back end server technologies I wonder if its time for Microsoft to start moving to more all-encompassing products like the (very successful) Xbox and (less so) Zune.

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Techcrunch Puts Unfair Spin On Pre Sales

A lot of sites have picked up on a Techcrunch article which suggests that Palm's Pre sales aren't going well and reports from Sprint stores were bad because all had Pres available in stock. Which seems a strange thing to conclude from this research, after all we're talking about a device that's into its second month of sales, not a newly launched device. Really Sprint should be telling us the good news that everyone who wants a Pre should be able to get their hands on one quite easily.

The Techcrunch article references a piece of research by JNK which surveyed 50 stores. Given that this can be considered a representative sample how do the actual numbers stack up when transposed onto Sprints 1400 retail outlets?

The states that not all of the stores contacted were willing to discuss sales, however lets take these results and run with them for now. 40% reported fewer than 10 sales this week (560 stores if repeated across all Sprint's stores) 33% reported sales of 10-20 (462) and 16% reported 20-30 (212). Taking the mid-point of those sales figures this stacks out like this 2800 sales in the first group, 6930 in the second and 5300 in the last group. Assuming that the final 11% (154 stores) not accounted for in these numbers sold 35 devices each then that adds another 5390 sales. Altogether a weekly retail sales figure of 20,420 sales through Sprint stores alone, based on some pretty big assumptions admittedly. That's without Sprint's extensive third party sales network or online sales taken into account.

So I'd suggest that Palm are probably on target to hit its target of 1 million Pres in the first quarter of sales. Not a lot when compared to the iPhone's first week, but still pretty good for a company selling to such a restricted market in just one country.

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O2 Germany To Have Pre In October

Telefonica's German subsidiary has already upped the ante on launch details of the Pre, with Engadget finding a banner on their site proclaiming availability in October. Now I'm sure that the UK will get the Pre at least as early as Germany, which means around a three month wait before it lands.

That's an improvement on the vague 'Christmas' availabilty announced this morning but still not as good as it could be...

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Xperia Outguns Touch Pro 2, Just

Well I've had the Touch Pro 2 for a week or so now and, despite initial positive impressions, I'm going to have to say that HTC haven't managed to dethrone the Xperia as my favourite smartphone.

Yes it has a better keyboard and yes it does have a larger screen but for my taste there are too many compromises borne of a desire to compete with the iPhone that in the end impact on what Windows Mobile has to offer.

TouchFlo3D is a very nice interface to play with or to show off to your iPhone owning friends - and for people who are looking for an iPhone competitor it does make a good case. It just interferes with the Windows Mobile way of working a little too much for me and also makes the performance a little less snappy than the X1.

The X1's panels are much less intrusive and can either be used extensively or not at all. I have SPB's Mobile Shell panel set as my default but I'll occasionally use one of the other panels as my home screen when conditions dictate. Mobile Shell is probably my favourite application, its fast, very intuitive and manages to work with Windows Mobile rather than against it. I suspect those who have used Windows Mobile for the longest time will prefer the X1's way of doing things to the TP2.

The lack of a 5-way pad on the TP2 isn't a deal breaker, but its presence - along with the excellent optical mouse on the X1 is just a better solution. Other areas where the X1 manages to steal the honours are in the presence of both a headphone jack and camera button, as I've mentioned before.

There are some interface elements which HTC have improved - finger friendly menus and a clone of the iPhone soft keyboard - but a quick search at XDA-Developers will find the same tools for the X1.

In the real world I'd be happy to have either of these as my primary phone, but in the privileged position of being able to choose between them I'll take the X1. At least until WM6.5 arrives for the TP2 this autumn...

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O2 Confirms Pre By Christmas

As expected O2 have confirmed that they will have exclusive rights to sell the Palm Pre in the UK and it will be on the shelves by Christmas. With the majority of iPhone 3G early adopters being free of their iPhone contract around Christmas O2 will now have a complete range of smartphones to offer them at renewal time.

It'll be interesting to see how the different subsidy levels stack up, but I'd imagine it would suit Palm to sweeten the deal and incentivise O2's sales force to swap a potential iPhone 3GS purchase to a Pre.

I'm a little disappointed that the Pre is still so far away from landing in the UK, at least it will give Palm a chance to iron out some of its problems and deliver an even more competitive device come Christmas.

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Why Apple Will Cave Over Multitasking

The arrival of push notifications on the iPhone has prompted all sorts of arguments and counter-arguments about which is better: multitasking or notification. Apple and its devotees are absolute in their belief that notifications services are the way to go because they use less battery and less processor time.

In fact the real reason why Apple have implemented push notifications on the iPhone is that they use less memory because the iPhone is horrendously underspecified in this regard and, until Apple can deploy a better specified iPhone, they can't afford to compromise the platform's stability by allowing third-party programs to attempt to run in the background.

Other manufacturers have solved this issue by deploying devices with a much beefier RAM specification to allow multiple applications to run. I have no doubts that Apple will follow suit.

Why? Because other than for messaging services push notifications don't really fill the gap of multitasking. Ask anybody who has tried to run last.fm or Pandora as the music app on their iPhone. And of course with GPS pretty much standard on every phone its only a matter of time before being able to push your location back to a service will become an indispensible tool.

Lets be honest, Apple has a track record of decrying features, at least until they've worked out how to do them - I don't expect that multitasking will be any different. Only not for owners of the current iPhone range.

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'Wall' Of Dolphins Off Welsh Coast

How about this mile long 'superpod' of dolphins filmed by the Sea Trust off the coast of Pembrokeshire? That's one very impressive sight, even if no-one really knows why dolphin pods come together in this way.

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Apple: Don't Use Your iPhone For Too Long Or When Its Hot Outside

Apple have all but confirmed heat related problems with the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G when running iPhone OS3 by updating its advisory on the use of the iPhone in warm climates. In particular they advise that the acceptable temperature range for use is between 0 and 35 degrees and that use of intensive applications such as GPS or listening to music could cause the device temperature to spike and trigger the attached warning message.

None of this is new of course, all electronic devices have safe operating ranges. Nonetheless the adverse publicity around discolouration of white iPhones probably needs a rapid response from Apple to avoid the sort of negative publicity which would kill sales of any other company's products.

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