I had to chuckle today, whilst reading a piece on the BBC website, which detailed a perennial debate, which is better.. traditional methods or new technology. In the past horse has pitted itself against various forms of transport, trains, cars etc., in this case it was pigeon verses broadband. The contest was held in South Africa where a homing pigeon (well, they’re hardly going to use a feral one, it might spam everyone) with a 4Gb memory stick strapped to it’s leg (the 32Gb ones were too heavy, all those ones and noughts) and released at the same time as a 4Gb file was being transmitted to a system in a similar location to see which was fastest. The bird managed the 60 mile journey in two hours, whereas only 4% of the data had been transmitted in the same period. I don’t know what speed their broadband was operating at but the first part of the name doesn’t seem that appropriate.
Different website, different technology but one that was equally as confounding. I know, technologically, we’re in the convergence age where voice and data blend seamlessly on devices from mobile phones, through tablets and on to computers however it seems the camera manufacturers now want to get in on the act. Samsung have released a phone built around the Android operating system, the OS that powers a great number of today’s Smartphones as well as tablets. As you may know there are a wealthy of applications available of Google’s app store (over 600,00 back in July) many of which will be able to work on this new phone. Along with Wifi and GPS options, the user will (and this is the bizarre bit) be able to run the popular video and voice communication tool. We have phones that are pretending to be cameras and now cameras that are pretending to be phones, whatever next!
Andrew Skelton: 
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