Me, at Techradar:

Here’s how it works right now. Firm A makes an ebook reader and it’s the best ebook reader ever made – but the reviewers and the pundits and the potential purchasers all make frowny faces and say “That’s all very well, firm A, but just you wait until the Apple tablet huffs and puffs and blows your house down!”

Firm B makes an extraordinary HD netbook, and everybody says “Wow, that’s fantastic! But the Apple Tablet will deliver better battery life and also cut off your tails with a carving knife!”

Firm C makes a super-smart multimedia tablet that delivers astonishing sound quality, makes your penis bigger and cures cancer. “That’s great!” the world says. “But the Apple Tablet will bring your ancestors back from the dead, and grind your bones to make Steve Jobs’s bread!”

Have you seen the BMW-designed Mesh PC? It mings.

And then there are the Ferraris – the Acer Ferraris, that is. “Technology and innovation are driving forces behind man’s greatest achievements,” the blurb says.

“They are the foundations of past victories and the essences of future successes,” it continues. “Look, we’ve made a red laptop with a picture of a horse on it!” it really ought to add.

A fun wee piece I wrote for PC Plus has ventured online:

Back in the good old days, Microsoft did desktops, Google stuck to search and Apple made toys for people in polo necks. No more.

The superpowers of the technology world are at war, and like real wars, the battle is happening on several fronts. They’re fighting on the desktop, they’re fighting on mobile phones, they’re fighting in the browser and they’re fighting in your front room.

Who will prevail, and who will end up in a bunker?

Me, Techradar:

What they don’t seem to understand is that online privacy is like curtains: you don’t block the windows because you’re running a meth lab or a brothel in your house; you block them because you don’t want weirdoes peering through the window when you’re watching TV Burp.

Yes. Yes, it will. So what?

Look around you the next time you’re at a gig, or in an airport, or anywhere else large numbers of people are gathered. You’ll see loads of iPhones, many of them in the hands of idiots.

Smartphone apps are great – unless they’re putting you out of business. Today’s Techradar op/ed:

If you can scan the barcode on a flat-screen TV, a fridge, a Fimbles DVD or anything else you’re thinking of buying, you can instantly discover where there’s a better deal. It could be the shop next door, or a website. That’s seriously bad news for high street shops, because the internet will undercut them almost every time.

As you might have heard, Modern Warfare 2 – which comes out today – includes a bit where you’re doing terrorist things. It’s causing a bit of controversy, and of course I have an opinion on that.

What we’re seeing here is something much more interesting than mere headline chasing: it’s a dramatic example of how videogames are trying to grow up.

If we want our games to grow up with us, we need to be grown up in the way we react to them – and that includes dumping the “we must protect the children” crap when games come with an 18 certificate specifically saying they’re not suitable for kids.

Yes it is.

If it weren’t for Firefox, you’d be reading this in IE6 – the software equivalent of the horrible Trabants the East Germans tooled around in before the Berlin Wall came down. It’s a browser, certainly, in much the same way that a Trabant is a car. But the Trabant isn’t a great car, and IE6 certainly isn’t a great browser.