Evi is a new search application for Android and iOS that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language technology to query the web and deliver answers to your questions.

Although similar to Apple's Siri, Evi is purely focused on web search, rather than being fully integrated into the phone's operating system. Therefore, you cannot ask Evi to send a text message or add a calendar event, as you can with Siri. When Evi was launched by it's makers, True Knowledge, it met with an unexpected amount of popularity and consequently their servers were swamped. For much of the first couple of days the only answer Evi gave was "My servers are very slow in responding". However, the people behind the scenes are working hard to update their infrastructure and hopefully Evi will become more stable as time goes on. Oh, and it does seems to hammer your battery life.

Evi is up:

Evi is down:

When Evi is up and running, it (or she..?) works well. You can either type or talk your questions and the voice recognition is very good, if sometimes a little random, and answers are generally useful. She, I think we'll call Evi 'she' from now on, understands the context of your question, which is quite different from a dumb string of words pumped into a text box, the way most of us currently interact with search engines. For example, asking a traditional search engine "Where can I get a taxi " will results in a list of webpages based on that search string. Evi, however, will respond with a coherent paragraph with details of taxi firms near to you. Asking something specific, like "who was the Beatle's first drummer", will give you the actual answer, rather than a link to a webpage with the answer. If you want, Evi will read out the answer to you. The ultimate goal is for the whole experience to feel like asking a real person the same question. If Evi cannot find a complete answer to your question, she will suggest some web links. Links are also added to answers that may require further information and those that Evi suggests seem to be relevant.

So, being in possession of a shiny new Samsung Galaxy SII with copious internal memory and a 16gb SD card it was time to add a load of music. To control my music library I wanted to replace the stock music app, which is perfectly functional but dull, with an Android music player with a great interface and sound, solid album artwork support, some advanced tweaking options, a lock screen player that works when using a pattern login, an option to set the library folder so you don't get random audio files turning up, and, ideally, gapless playback.

Straight away I came up against a problem. At random times the SII would pause music playback. Obviously not ideal if it is to be used as my main music player. I thought there must be a background process running somewhere that was upsetting the playback now and then. Guessing that it may be the phone's motion sensors causing the problems, I went to the settings and disabled motion services. No difference. I tried updating the firmware, but I already had the latest version. After some research online it turned out that the culprit was Google Listen. I uninstalled it, found a new podcast app, and all was fine. Why Listen would could such a problem I have no idea.

The next problem I came across was that when viewed in the default music player 75% of the album artwork images were missing. OK, no problem, any player worth its salt should be able to download missing album art, so let's put that on the wish list.

The first app I tried was PowerAmp. It has many great features, such as a powerful graphic equaliser and support for many different file types, but I wasn't that impressed by the interface, which I think is a bit of a mess and confusing. It did try to download the missing album art, but was only partially successful and half of the ones it did download were wrong. You can manually select artwork, but even after doing this in player view many albums stubbornly refused to show the new artwork in album view. Still, it has many audio options to tweak and is generally a very slick app.

Yesterday late afternoon there was an amazing sunset in the UK. The sky was painted in various hues of mauve, purple, dark blues and reds. I sat there, looking out of the window and thinking I should go and take a photograph. By the time I had thought about where would be the best place to take it from, the moment had passed and I had missed my chance. Others were more organised though. I looked down at my phone and saw lots of tweets coming in about the sunset with some great photos attached. Wouldn't it be great to group them all together in one place and save them I thought. So I quickly set up a posterous site dedicated to that particular sunset. I chose posterous and not Facebook or Flickr or Google+ because it has a zero hassle join up process (all you have to do to post is send an email to 12012012sunset@posterous.com), generates a stand-alone website, supports posting by multiple people and handles photographs well. I gave the site a specific name, 12/01/20212 Sunset, rather than something more generic like Great Sunsets, so the site would be associated with a single point in time.

Setting up a multi-editor rich media website takes only a few clicks and shows how fluid the web has become since the advent of social media. I kept admin control at first, so I had to approve any pictures emailed in before they were posted, just to stop anything untoward turning up on the site. Setting up administrators and contributors for the site could be sorted out later, although it wasn't as straight forward as I thought it might be. I imagined I'd be able to add people who had emailed in posts as contributors, maybe administrators as well, with one click. It's not quite as easy as that on posterous, though it is hardly taxing.

The 12/01/2012 sunset posterous site also highlighted how hard it is to kick start something online. After much tweeting and linking there was a grand total of three photos submitted. Three. By contrast, the first photo had had 2,650 views by the following afternoon. I think this was mainly because it was called 'Sunset over London' and was ranking well for that search term on Google as people looked for photos of the sunset the next day. Why did so few people send in their photos when so many had taken them and tweeted them? Maybe there were unsure of what would happen to their photo, what they might be getting involved with, couldn't be bothered, just didn't want to, or any other multitude of possibilities. Anyway, the 12/01/2012 sunset was an interesting social media moment. An attempt to capture an event and create a permanent home for it on the web as soon as it happened.

Google have announced an overhaul of their search to include results from Google+, called 'Search plus Your World'. This update highlights the problems with online 'recommendation engines' and may end up alienating users accustomed to Google's previously economical layout of search result pages. To quote from the announcement: "Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you've never met.", well, yes it is. A library is full of publicly available books written by people I've never met. What's the problem with that?

I don't use Google+, so for me Search plus Your World could be called 'Search plus Random Stuff From A Network You Don't Want', or 'Search, Minus Half The Useful Stuff You Used To See With The Gap Filled With Google+ Posts'. The thing is, even if I did use Google+, the personal recommendation concept that underlies the new search is a flawed one. It seems to be based on the vague idea of some West Coast lunchtime get together involving young software engineers looking for the best place to get great coffee - "Wow, because my friend's Google+ posts are now in my search results I found an awesome coffee shop down the road.", or a business trip to an unfamiliar city - "I found a great restaurant that was recommended to me by Google because my friends had posted about it". If that coffee shop is so good and so local you probably know about it already. If that restaurant is so great it'll come up in search results anyway and will be in guidebooks.

Google presumes that just because our online network likes something, we should like it as well. I have friends I hang out with, both online and in the real world, but, while we obviously have some things in common, we also have quite different tastes, opinions, likes and dislikes. Sure, they may make a recommendation I might be interested in, like the bookshop in town is having a half-price sale, but that is quite different from having my capacity to find books for myself influenced by their opinions on a certain book, literary theme, or particular writer. I don't want to walk into a library and have to look at all the books they think are great before I can see any others. Having an association with someone, especially online, does not mean you agree with their opinions and tastes.

Having taken my own advice about getting the best upgrade deal on Vodafone, I am now the proud owner of a Samsung Galaxy S II. I'm still in the first 24 hours of use, so here are my first impressions of the phone and the differences I have noticed since moving from my old HTC Desire.

The S II is fast. Really fast. Applications install quickly, downloads blaze away and everything pings into view quickly and smoothly. The HTC Desire was no slouch, but the S II shows how things have really moved on in the last couple of years. Because of the shape of the S II, being a thin slab with rounded corners, it can sometimes be hard to know which way up it is when the screen is off. I have already picked it up upside down in a darkened room. It fits in the hand nicely, just about, although it may be a bit unwieldy for those of a more dainty frame. The textured back, incorporating the "it's so thin I'm sure I'm going to snap it while taking it off" cover makes it easy to grip on to and feels nice. The touch sensitive menu and back buttons at the bottom of the phone work well. I thought they might take longer to get used to after using hardware ones for so long. The fact that they are the right way round, menu on left, back on right, unlike some phones, such as the Xperia Arc S, is a bonus. The build quality of the S II is very good, giving an overall feel of a quality device.

I found the display a little dark at first, compared to the Desire, but maybe I just had that screen on too bright. Anyway, a bit of tweaking of the brightness can sort that out. However, I cannot find a way to have the automatic brightness setting on, so the S II will adapt to ambient light, with the default brightness set to a custom level at the same time.

Have no fear if you ever lose your S II or have it stolen as it supports the excellent SamsungDive service. Once registered and activated on your phone, this allows you to find your phone, lock it and wipe it remotely via a web interface. The phone also supports the Android Backup service, which backs up the phone's settings, apps, etc to the cloud.

The S II is advertised as having 16GB of storage. What you actually get is 11.5GB of USB storage and around 2GB of phone storage, depending on what default apps etc your network installs. Having two types of storage inside the phone is a bit confusing at first as it's not obvious what the S II will put where, but it seems to be intelligent enough to decide where to save media and apps. With the option to add an SD card as well (I picked up a 16GB one for a steal on Amazon) there is more than enough memory available for even the most demanding user. Indeed, after the cramped confines of the HTC Desire it feels positively agoraphobic, with my apps and media banging around in a cavernous digital warehouse.

The TouchWiz interface that Samsung overlay on Android is much less conspicuous than HTC's Sense. In fact, it feels like a stock Android device. I thought I might miss Sense more than I have so far. The keyboard is basic and functional, but nothing special, so I have replaced it with the far superior SwiftKey X. One little gotcha; text on webpages would flow, to fit to the screen, by default in the HTC browser, but you have to turn this option on in the S II browser. Surprisingly, the S II has only 5 options in the wallpapers gallery, which I thought was a bit stingy to say the least. There are a couple of junk Vodafone apps pre-installed, but that seems to be the norm these days.

I have missed the trackball from the HTC Desire a bit. A few times I have found myself moving my finger over the bottom of the S II expecting the cursor to move on the screen. Also, the SII does not have a dedicated hardware search button, as the Desire did, and there have been times already when I have reached for it. You can bring up Google search by long pressing on the S II's menu key, but this doesn't seem to work in all scenarios, such as being in a phone settings menu. Strangely, the S II has no notification light flashing away green to tell you that it has a connection or orange when charging. Consequently you cannot tell if it is fully charged by glancing at it while plugged in. Every phone I have ever had before has had one.

So far the Galaxy S II is living up to its promise as a top of the range Android powerhouse. We will be spending many happy hours together..

I pick up my wife's shiny new Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S Android powered phone, select a photo, click on the share option, select the Xbox 360 and, hey presto, as if by magic (thanks to the phone's DLNA support) the photo appears on our TV. Wife is impressed. I move to the next photo and it turns up on the TV, but it is on it's side. I check the phone and it is the right way up, look back at the TV and scratch my head. Err.. Wife looks less impressed, loses interest and wanders off as I start tweaking settings and pounding through sub menus. I've just hit the last five percent. That part of technology that just doesn't quite work.

The last five percent is when all that processing power and computerised wizardry comes to a grinding halt when it oh so nearly got over the line. It's like recording a great song and then leaving a bum note on the last chorus or writing a classic novel but leaving spelling mistakes on the final page. The last five percent can come in many forms. It is the contact syncing software that works perfectly until it suddenly starts duplicating all your contacts. The website that will not accept your email address when you try to sign up. The sat nav that freezes just as you get near to your destination. The auto-correcting mobile phone keyboard that causes you to send gobbledygook messages. The... oh you get the picture. It can be infuriating and can taint our view of the 95% of technology that just works. It can also leave us feeling powerless. We have no idea, mostly, how the gadgets around us work, so modifying them to try to get rid of the last five percent problem is simply beyond us. If we do take on the challenge it can lead to countless hours of, mostly fruitless and frustrating, tweaking.

Software is made by humans and is therefore fallible, but you sometimes wonder if the last five percent of functionality is deliberately left flaky and unreliable, just for badness. Perhaps it is added in to leave us all wanting more and thinking that maybe the next upgrade will be the one that has that last little feature that we always wanted to work, but never quite did. But, of course, the last five percent is elusive, it is constantly just out of our reach. The latest upgrade just moves it somewhere else. As Bob Dylan once sang: "Talk about perfection, I ain't never seen none".

Sometimes my Twitter following list starts to grow out of control and the time comes to give it a trim, or maybe even a wholesale cull. Using a combination of online tools, such as ManageFlitter, as well as manually sorting through the list on Twitter, here are some of the things I look out for.

• Inactive accounts: If you don't tweet for a long time I'll probably get around to unfollowing you, eventually. Probably.
• Marginal follow backs: There have been times that I have been followed, received the notification email and pondered for a while whether I should follow back or not. There have been cases where I thought 'Oh, go on then' and, as it has turned out, that was the wrong choice.
• Non responsives: Accounts that I have never had a Twitter conversation with, never retweeted or been retweeted by and rarely, if ever, found an interesting link via. It seems pointless maintaining these follows.
• Twitter follow limits: Sometimes some follows just have to go because of the Twitter following limit rules, which stop you from following more than (insert secret Twitter number here, but usually around 120)% of the number of people that follow you once you follow more than 2,000 people. With a lean and mean follow list I can become free from these limitations and reach out and find new people to follow.
• Noise: With a large following list my signal to noise ratio can get out of control and sometimes it becomes time to retune and refine.
• Specials: Some people on Twitter are worth following, but will never follow you back and are very unlikely to every respond to a reply. The likes of @rickygervais, for example. All follows are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Having had a while now to live with the December 2011 Xbox dashboard update, which brought many new features such as deep Kinect integration, Bing voice search, on demand streaming TV services, YouTube and more, as well as an entirely different interface, I have been generally impressed with it. However, Microsoft sold the update as making the Xbox the digital media centre hub of the future for people's living rooms. It has fallen somewhat short of that promise, in the UK at least, and here are some tweaks that I think could improve the user experience and, possibly, move it closer to achieving that goal.

• Customisation: Currently there is no way to move panels around, or decide which one, such as 'tv' or 'games' to make the default. So, everybody has the same layout, whether they use their Xbox mainly for gaming or watching streamed movies or whatever. It would be much more user friendly if this could be customised to a user's preferences, much like the start menu of a computer.
• Shortcuts: Following on from the customisation idea, why not have a 'favourites' panel that can be filled with shortcuts to favourite games, apps, saved searches etc.
• Search across all apps: Bing search on the Xbox works well, particularly with Kinect voice control, but it does not search everything. Content from some apps is searchable, while some is not. This may get better as apps are updated and search is further integrated, but, at the moment, search is less than all encompassing. The lack of search for TV, music and pictures from a connected Media Center PC is a glaring omission. I'm not sure if this will ever be implemented, as Microsoft seem to be going cold on the whole Media Center concept, but it would be great if it was. Indeed it was one the features on my wishlist for the update.
• Media Center as a TV option: Currently, in the UK anyway, the only live TV option is Sky. Microsoft have not included Media Center, which supports many kinds of TV tuners. It would also be an excellent way to promote sales of new Windows 7 PCs.
• Download option in streaming apps: While the new on demand streaming media apps on Xbox, such as 4oD, are generally very good and the picture quality is adequate, it would be nice to have a download option as well as a stream option, as Zune movies do. This would enable higher quality files and also make the apps usable for people with slower internet connections for whom streaming is just not possible.
• The apps concept: Apps are everywhere these days and now they have arrived on Xbox. However, they do make the Xbox experience a bit disjointed. You have to open up an app and look around to see if there is anything you want. Bing gives the promise of a unified search but, until all media in all apps can be searched, it is not there yet. Maybe a summary overview tab of what is available across all apps would make the whole experience more joined up. At the moment it just feels, well.. bitty.
• Media accounts: To access all the new features of Xbox you will need an Xbox Live Gold account. In a living room TV scenario though, whose account do you use? With personalised gamer profiles, YouTube accounts and so many social media services hooking into the Xbox experience this can be a problem on a shared Xbox. You wouldn't want your kids accidentally, or not, posting to your Twitter account or spending your Microsoft points. Also, you would want anybody to be able to view movies you have bought from a service such as Blinkbox without having to be logged in as you on the Xbox. What is required is a generic family or group account that can be shared amongst several people. It could even be a specific 'Xbox Live Media' account, that only gives access to services such as Zune and LoveFilm but is not tied to any gamer or social media profile and cannot access online gaming etc. Media accounts could even be bundled free with a family account pack or included with certain Xbox packages.