Personally I've gone with Ion-based nettops running Ubuntu linux and XBMC with vdpau enabled. VDPAU offloads the video processing onto the onboard graphics and means that the machine can handle playing HD streams quite happily. It was pretty much off the shelf and required next to no special skills to get it working. The machines are cheap (£150 and up) and almost silent.

Yeah, it seems thats been fixed - the protected apps I wanted to put on but couldn't are all available to me now.

Just to make me look an idiot, the pay-for versions of the apps I was waiting for are now available - whups!

To be honest, as a Desire user, I think this review is overly harsh.

While I do agree with the screen complaints (the OLED screen is all but unviewable in direct sunlight) and the battery life isn't great (although I find it'll last the day with moderately heavy use (and thats before dicking around with sync settings and other various battery-improving tweaks)), the other complaints I diagree with - for example I much prefer the chat system on the Desire to the bubble-style conversations of the iPhone although obviously other people will prefer things the other way (and they can install Handcent or one of the myriad other progams that will bring that functionality.

He complains that on the iPhone there is a button to bring up the menu for any given app - this is true, but there is no guarentee it is in the same place or clearely labelled on each program - with the Desire you always go to the same place allowing for a more consistent experience. Personally I find that the phone has just the right number of buttons, even if it is a few more than the holy iPhone (home, menu, back, search and then power and volume keys

The standard keyboard is a bit tricky to use in portrait mode due to key size (especially for me - I'm 6'5 and fairly stocky) however what it does offer is *choice* - quite apart from the landscape mode keyboard (which I believe iPhone now allows globally?) there are two other portrait keyboards you can use instead - compact QWERTY (each key has two letters as with some blackberries) and then a Phone keypad. One feature that impressed me is that if you have accidentally added misspellings to the dictionary (which I have done more than once) you can delete words individually rather than just resetting the user dictionary (which is certainly what you used to have to do with the iPhone, but I must admit my info could be out of date here.

I do not see any of the complaintes about the sound quality of the phone - the earpiece is typical smartphone (which is to say good enough but easily beaten by the old dedicated phone handsets) and the speaker is pretty loud. Of course you'd never want to listen to music with it, but its good enough for spoken word stuff (audiobooks and stand-up comedy in my case).

I don't agree with his complaints about the trackpad either, although to be fair I've not tried to use it with wet fingers so I can't comment on that, however I have seen no unusual behaviour with it either (and to be honest I don't use the track pad much anyway, It's served more use as a camera shutter button than it as as a navigation device - while its nice to have the choice I find the touchscreen is just much easier.

To be fair there are some things that do annoy me with the phone, but its all minor things - for example in the media player I would like that in the media player it was possible to navigate back up the tree, but thats not always an option (for example if you pick a track from 'first principles' (ie fire up app, select artist then album then track) you can do it, but if you just tap on the media player widget it takes you to the currently selected track but if you want to change you have to navigate from those first principles again (with the exception of pickig a different track from the same album.) but its a pretty minor complaint, and the other things that annoy me are all little things as well.

One thing that is an issue currently is that a lot of pay-for apps are as yet unupdated for Android 2.1 and are just not there in the app store, which is really irritating to be in a position to download say a 'free' (whether ad-supported or somehow limited) version, want to buy the complete version and its just not there. Lack of Google Earth is particularly annoying.

Nokia's Symbian defaults to allowing signed apps only, however you can disable that quite easily and install what you will, and IIRC you can freely install Android applications - you don't *have* to use the Android store.

Dude, in factors of 88mph this thing goes to 11 ;)

You can just restore from a backup - I maintain a backup of all the really big games to save redownloading. When MW2 decided to re download following the beta activation I simply deleted stored data and ran the backup data installer, this installed fine and required no subsequent download or update.

More annoying is the lack of Steam Voice support atm (you can place a call, but the 'answer call' button doesn't work) and some people have reported issues with the Steam overlay too...

Sure but theres nothing stopping him slinging on a full GPS app like CoPilot onto the Nexus - that stashes all maps on the SD card.

That assumes some identifying information is being sent over to the person montioring the scanner - from the example images released I can't imagine anyone being able to identify their own mother from the picture let alone Harrison Ford...

However, "touchscreen not as accurate as iPhone" != "Shitty touchscreen". In a lot of ways I prefer the screens on the current crop of Android phones. Based on limit experience I've not noticed any difference in sensitivity in real world use, but prefer the higher res and image quality on the newest Android phones.

Published by Sega - the new one is being developed by the same dev house as the first, Rebellion \o/

Bear in mind this is the third PC iteration of Alien Vs Predator. The first was a good few years ago but (despite relatively primitive graphics by the standards of the day) was a superb FPS game. Piss scary and bastard hard in places too.

The sequel was a bit more mainstream, so not as hard but had a few innovations in too, such as the Alien game starting you out as a facehugger looking for an appropriate victim, then giving it the chestburster bit and so on.

Anyway, the first game came from the same dev house as this one, and I for one am really looking forward to it, not matter how fecking awful the movies one (although as somone else mentioned at least the sequel was appropriately violent :)

Not to mention the renting option - and a few places I've seen will generally discount a game by the price of the rental if you subsequently buy it.

Crap, other way round - we have slightly more channels open than you do, so you'd only really need to worry about it if you need to connect on something broadcasting on 12 or 13.

From what I recall the legal channels for wireless differ between the US and the UK. In the US (I think) channels 1-13 are legally available, while in the UK it's only 1-11. TBH I wouldn't bother changing anything especially as the routers OP will be connecting to will only be broadcasting in the legal range anyway :)