I've had my HTC Desire on Vodafone for three months now, so I thought it was time for a report.

Overall:
First off, I must say that the Desire is an awesome phone. It's fast, reliable and easy to use. The overall build quality is excellent. I've been impressed with Android and the 'Sense' interface that HTC add to it. Calls are clear and signal is strong. Making calls and sending texts is a breeze. The Gmail integration and contact management is excellent. The camera is fast and the quality of photos is very good. Battery life is average for a smartphone, so it needs charging every night, but if charge zapping widgets are disabled then it can be extended.

The screen is bright, clear and responsive. The built in web browser works fine. I had qualms about moving to a full touchscreen only keyboard, but the spelling correction software works very well and inputting text is quick and easy on the Desire.

I recently bought a Dell Vostro laptop, which I'm very pleased with. A great bit of kit. While shopping around I was surprised to see the screen size and body casing of most laptops in high street shops, that is, a shiny body and a 15.6 inch widescreen screen.

The thing is, most people use laptops for web browsing, sending emails, uploading photos, creating documents, etc and the widescreen format just isn't the best for that. If you want to watch movies, then great, but I would think that would account for a fraction of the use of laptops. Also, why do the manufacturers insist in covering LCD displays with highly reflective 'enhancing' coatings and then surrounding them with shiny, eye-strain inducing, black plastic?

The Internet isn't easy to use, despite all the efforts of software companies to simplify it. The web is complicated by its very nature and using it can be fraught with problems. These problems can be highlighted when you're using an instant online messaging service such as Twitter. Make a mistake and hundreds of people will see it. Instantly. There wasn't a word or phrase for this phenomenon, so I've invented a new one. Yes, yes I have, you can't stop me. 'Twonk'. There, there it is, as defined below:

Twonk - noun. A mistake made in the usage of Twitter.

Here are some of the variations I've come up with:

Auto-twonk - noun. A tweet containing words incorrectly auto-suggested by a virtual keyboard.

Career-twonk - noun. An offensive tweet posted from the poster's employer's account.

People from ancient civilizations would gaze up at the night sky and see a whole, finite Universe, probably with the Earth at the centre. Today we look up and see a tiny fraction of the stars from a small corner of our galaxy, as well as smudges of light coming from billions of stars in unimaginably distant galaxies.

Over the last few hundred years, the place of the human race in the Universe has grown smaller and smaller. Add modern Cosmological theories such as parallel, infinite and cyclical Universes to the mix and the scale of the Earth and mankind dwindles to the infinitesimal.

As Neil, the archetypal hippie from 'The Young Ones', once said, "If the World was an orange, it would be like, too small..", or, just maybe, a bit too big.

Tweepstats.com generates stats for twitter users, with details such as hashtags used, websites linked to and top words tweeted. Here are a few tips to get the most out of the site:

Google have launched their social media application 'Buzz' and it has been a great overnight success. I haven't really embraced it yet though, and here are the reasons why:

Gmail The main reason for Buzz's fast growth is also its Achilles' heel - it's seamlessly built into Gmail. This is great for Gmail users, but for everyone else? Convincing people to sign up to a new website is hard enough, but to get them to sign up to a new email account and all the associated Google stuff that goes with it, well, that might be harder. For many people it's going to be a deal breaker. They already have their email sorted out. No need for Gmail.

Apps The main players in the game, Twitter and Facebook, both have rich, stable APIs that allow programmers to build applications based upon their services. There's a whole array of apps for computers, mobile phones and games consoles. Google Buzz doesn't have this ecosystem yet, but a full API is coming very, very soon.

Need I have an extensive network on Twitter and public and private Facebook profiles. Do I really need Buzz as well? I don't think so. Not yet anyway..

Humans tweet and automated computer scripts tweet, but what about machines, what if they joined in? Would the automatic sharing of a virtualisation of mechanical events and real-time sensor data be a grand version of the Turing test or just an anthropomorphism of hardware?

Imaging you're running late for a train. You could glance at the twitter feed for your line and see real time updates from each train; "Just left Birmingham, 5 minutes late, four coaches.." In your feed would be your personal video recorder tweeting that it's about to record something. You realise you wanted to record a program, so you @reply to it and the program will be waiting for you when you get home.

From a user's point of view getting information from a twittering machine has several advantages. Many twitter feeds can be monitored at once. No need to run different apps on your iPhone to check the time of your taxi, train and plane when setting out on a journey. Just follow them on twitter to get all the updates together. Tweets are public and accessible from an array of devices and many users will probably have a twitter client running anyway.

The future is already here. Check out my Twitter list of machines that are tweeting right now, ranging from clocks and telescopes to bathroom scales and a cat flap.

I've been doing some coding based around the XML feeds from twitter.com for a while now and have hosted a twitter account analytics page which has become moderately popular. I thought it was now time to set up a dedicated website for it, so ladies and gentlemen, please welcome tweepstats.com, where you can find out the how, who, what and when of a twitter account. Enjoy.

There's been a lot of talk on the net recently about the new Nexus One phone by Google and quite a few reviewers have been underwhelmed by the launch of the handset. The point that has been missed though, I feel, is that it is an evolution of the smartphone, not a revolution.

The really important thing about the Nexus One is that it seems to be a smartphone that has finally got everything right in one package. Convergence has been coming for a while now, with phones taking over the role of MP3 players, sat navs, cameras and more, but there is always a catch, always a reason that a dedicated device is better than a smartphone: batteries that can't be replaced, lack of camera flash, etc. The Nexus One, on the face of it, looks like it has smoothed the edges and finally delivered a real convergent phone. Here are some reasons why: