Google’s Android operating system seems to be gathering pace, with more and more phones emerging that run the Open Source mobile OS – in the past few months we’ve reviewed the Samsung i7500 Galaxy, HTC Hero and HTC Magic.

One phone that’s gathering momentum across the pond is the Motorola Droid and, from early previews, it’s easy to see why: as well as offering the numerous benefits of Android, it also has a sliding Qwerty keyboard, 3.7in capacitive touchscreen, 5mp camera, GPS and Wi-Fi. It’s also the first phone to ship with Google Maps Navigation installed.

In short, it sounds superb – but that’s not the most interesting thing about one of the most-hyped smartphones of the past several months.

The most interesting thing about Motorola’s new phone can actually be found on the Droid homepage. Look past the flashy graphics towards the copyright notices at the bottom of the screen – you know, the part that everyone usually ignores – and read the bottom line, which says:

“DROID is a trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. and its related companies. Used under license.”

So it appears that Motorola can’t call its new Android phone the Droid unless they pay a certain Mr. Lucas a hefty wodge of cash to stop him turning up at the Chicago firm’s HQ with a battery of lawyers.

Who knew that R2D2 could prove so profitable?

Thanks to Brian Sharp at WikiTravel for the R2D2 image.

One of the things you need as a Mac user is patience. Patience with PC users who think you’re an idiot. Patience with IT help desks that don’t know anything about Macs, despite claims they support them. Patience with software developers who don’t have Mac versions of their products.

Actually, that last one isn’t true, as despite the numerous and seemingly never-ending claims that the Mac doesn’t have the necessary applications, I’m still to find a Windows application that can’t be matched on the Mac.

On my Mac I use Microsoft Office with Adobe Photoshop. I have Skype, Firefox, TweetDeck and iTunes, and this PC I’m working on now is capable of running all of those applications too. So, I’m wondering what are all these applications that the PC has that my Mac doesn’t? It’s supposed to be one of the major benefits to having a PC, isn’t it? Plenty of people in the comments on this blogs have cited it as a reason they use PCs over Macs.

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Orange’s big unveiling of its iPhone tariffs has caused a bit of a kerfuffle, not least because its prices are almost identical to those of O2. A lot of people are up in arms about the promise of “unlimited browsing”, which in fact comes with a fair-use limit of 750MB.

But, ignoring the terrible decision to put an “unlimited” label on a very clearly capped tariff, is that amount of monthly data actually “fair-use”?

As discussed in this week’s podcast, there’s a very easy way for existing iPhone owners to find out if that data cap would prove troublesome. Just go to Settings -> General -> Usage, and take a look at your Cellular Network Data. I did just that, believing this cap would be encroaching at least a little on my roaming lifestyle, but I was in for a surprise. Read more

The first USB 3 external hard disk has arrived in the PC Pro Labs – a pre-production sample courtesy of our friends at Asus – and initial impressions are simply excellent.

The chart above may need a little explaining. The first two groups of results show how long it took, in seconds, to copy a folder of 3,000 small files, totalling 300MB in size, back and forth between a RAM disk and an external hard drive using various connections. The 650MB results are based on the same process using a single 650MB file.

The USB 2 and USB 3 figures were obtained by simply connecting the external drive first to a USB 2 port and then to a USB 3 one. The eSATA figures are from the A-Listed Iomega Professional External Hard Drive. Read more

I’ve had my first major concern with Windows 7, and it all stems from a news story that appeared  on this very site yesterday. Apparently, Windows 7 is susceptible to eight out of ten new viruses. This is something I rarely have to worry about on the Mac. No one is likely to write a virus that affects only 4% of the computing world.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t claim that bad things can’t happen to a Mac.  It’s just not a major worry. I have the firewall turned on and I don’t open suspect attachments from people I don’t know, but that’s as far as it goes. So the news that even the latest and greatest Microsoft OS is still at risk from hackers leaves me a little uneasy.

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From a marketing point of view, it’s an obvious message for Dixons to be pushing. But in reality, as we all know, one of the great merits of Windows 7 is that most of us don’t need a new PC to run it. I use it happily on an old Advent laptop with 1GB of RAM and a Pentium Dual-Core processor; David Bayon runs it on his Atom-powered Samsung NC10 netbook. If there was ever an edition of Windows that didn’t mean “time for a new PC”, this is it.

With Microsoft getting so much right in Windows 7, it’s a disappointment to see it permitting (perhaps even supporting) such a misleading marketing slogan. And I think it’s a mistake. In the coming years Windows is going to be increasingly threatened from multiple directions — by a buoyant Apple, by emergent operating systems such as Chrome OS and by cloud-based mobile computing. Surely as the battle grows Microsoft will want its best foot forward, in the shape of a satisfied user base. The last thing it will want is to be weighed down by still-lingering resentments over Vista.

Yet this slogan seems designed to deliver precisely that outcome. Dissatisfied customers won’t appreciate being told they must write off their old PC to escape their unsatisfactory OS. Many who can’t afford a new PC will stick with Vista and remain disgruntled with it. And those who know the truth – that any machine that runs Vista will run Windows 7 better – will resent Microsoft’s apparent collusion in an attempt to get them to waste money on an unnecessary new PC.