But I’ve got terrible news for all those companies: there is only one Apple. Tempting as it may be to start up your own ecosystem of apps and content, you need something truly compelling to make people sign up to it in the same way that tens of millions of people have signed their lives away to Apple.

Apple customers sign up to a brand with values they believe in, to a name that they will be happy to associate themselves with.

For a start, you need trust. Apple customers sign up to a brand with values they believe in, to a name that they will be happy to associate themselves with. You also need staggering amounts of content: from apps to movies to TV shows to music, Apple has this sewn up.

You need sexiness: if I’m going to buy your phone, it needs to look damn good. Finally, you need phenomenal ease of use. If you have to spend a minute explaining what your service does, or how you connect to it using your devices, then you’ve lost three-quarters of your potential customers.

Like them or loathe them, no other company can match Apple in these areas.

So when I look back at CES, despite all the excellent technology on show, I do so with a mix of fear and despondency.

The issue is typified by the likes of Samsung and Sony. Both made big plays at CES that suggest they think they could be an all-encompassing rival to Apple, whether it’s Samsung talking about the fact you can play Angry Birds on their TVs or Sony pointing out that its customers can watch movies a month earlier on their movie-download service. Sorry Sony, sorry Samsung: but it’s not enough.

Instead, we need either open standards or a compelling play by a company that can work with different partners. Obvious examples of the latter are Microsoft and Google, but even this has hints of idealism: think how difficult Microsoft has found it to make anyone else sign up to services such as Passport.

Nevertheless, I can’t see any alternative. Sony and Samsung both produce great hardware, and Sony – through its subsidiaries such as Sony Entertainment – own some phenomenal content. But they are light years away from the position where a critical mass of consumers sign up to the Sony or Samsung ecosystem in the same way that Apple customers do.

So, please, stop trying and start working with Google, Microsoft and Amazon to ensure that the products we buy from you work with all the different content providers. Focus on what your company is good at, not what Apple is good at.

Tablets have come in many shape and forms at this year’s CES, but there’s only one that’s made us go “wow”. And that tablet is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7.

It is, quite simply, drop dead gorgeous. Of course we can reel off the specs – it’s 7.9mm thin and weighs 340g  – but that doesn’t do it justice. When you pick it up for the first time your arm jumps up too quickly; it expects to be lifting something heavier.

The Tab’s 7.9mm thickness is truly remarkable too. If anything, it looks even thinner in the flesh.

This might lead cynics to think the Tab 7.7 is too fragile, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. A firm backing gives it a solid feel, and that’s backed up by a high quality finish; every bit as good as the iPad.

That lightness also means you can hold it for long periods without your arms growing tired (one of the iPad’s few flaws), and that you can chuck it into a bag without worrying about the extra weight.

Battery life sounds respectable too: Samsung claims ten hours of continuous video playback. Obviously we’d like more, but compromises have to be made to keep the weight and size down.

The Galaxy Tab 7.7 also boasts a terrific screen. Sony may have fallen out of love with OLED technology, but Samsung’s AMOLED screens produce eye-popping colours compared to the LCDs most people will be used to.

Then there’s the resolution. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to see 1,280 x 800 pixels in a 7.7in screen when seemingly all the phones announced at CES boast “HD” displays, but it works beautifully at this size. That means the interface is crisp and detailed, and helps photos and videos look great.

Naturally it’s quick to respond to commands. There is, after all, a 1.4GHz dual-core processor inside, and 1GB of RAM helps keep the OS flying along.

But this is one of the disappointments: Android OS 3.2 powers the Tab, and while we can hope/expect an Android 4 update, bitter experience has taught us never to assume.

One of the reasons for using 3.2 is that Samsung has heavily customised the interface with its “TouchWiz” design (and yes, the person who came up with the name TouchWiz should indeed be shot).

The only aspect of it we prefer over vanilla Android 3.2 Honeycomb is the “Mini Apps” tray, which gives quick access to “background” apps such as the task manager, calendar and music player.

We also like Samsung Apps. This is a so-called recommendation engine that essentially filters apps suitable for Honeycomb. Admittedly this feels like a kludge – surely such filtering should be Google’s job – but it’s very useful until the Android Market becomes easier to browse for tablet users.

We don’t think many people will be dumping their cameras and camcorders for the Tab’s built-in 3-megapixel camera, but it’s there with an LED flash and does support 720p recording. A 2-megapixel camera on the front is present for video calls too.

On the subject of calls, this first version of the Tab is going to be released in tandem with Verizon Wireless in the US, and there’s a 4G chip inside. There are no details for a similar 3G partnership in the UK yet, but we’re pretty confident discussions will be taking place.

Nor do we know how much the Galaxy Tab 7.7 will cost, but it’s notable that this first release only includes 16GB of storage; no doubt this is to keep a lid on the price. You can add up to 32GB more via the microSD card slot.

The final neat feature we should mention is the infrared port. This turns the Tab into a universal remote control, which may sound frivolous but is exactly the sort of thing people will end up using every day.

With Samsung already releasing some nice extra accessories – a keyboard dock, multimedia dock, a USB adapter that allows you to connect printers/mice/keyboards, and an HDMI adapter – it should be obvious why we think the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is the pick of the CES tablets.

Let’s just hope it lives up to our expectations when we eventually get one to test for ourselves.

I played the piano, lost a strange game involving multiplying insects (don’t ask) and then showed my considerable skill at losing by being heavily defeated at an excellent multiplayer game in the mould of Guitar Hero. Who needs dancing girls, cocktails or casinos?

The reason is a piece of innovation that’s bound to be copied quicker than the speed of my colleagues’ ears pricking up at the sound of dancing girls: a folding arm.

In this instance, a video is worth at least a thousand words:

The rest of the spec is almost irrelevant. Yes, it’s got a 27in display, an Intel Core processor, Nvidia GeForce graphics and up to 1TB of storage – but what matters is that arm!

Perhaps that simplifies it a little bit. Another key technical inclusion is support for ten-point multitouch. That means you can play sophisticated games with multiple players, plus any number of other applications: photo and video editing, maps, music creation to name but a few.

And it isn’t just for home use: the A720 would be absolutely perfect as a “front of office” PC for a trendy company. The A720 will be released with Windows 7, but the version I played with was running Windows 8 Developer, and it’s undoubtedly the best showpiece yet for Microsoft’s forthcoming OS.

Then we come to the Android TV

Now this one is a little more of a concept piece; it’s a 55in TV that will be released in China this year, along with a 42in version, and it looks terrific.

Its headline feature is that it runs Android Ice Cream Sandwich, and Lenovo has done some clever interface work – as seen by the photo.

Nor is it just a pretty face, with some equally clever work going into the remote. Want to perform a search? Then speak into it. Want to swipe left or right? Then sweep away with your finger using the remote’s built-in touch-sensitive area.

There’s also a 5-megapixel camera to bring in some interaction, and the inevitable tickbox of 3D.

Unfortunately the Lenovo rep was guarding the remote quite closely, so I couldn’t actually play with this one. But if and when this machine arrives in the PC Pro Labs, I’ll be asking for first dibs.

The phone watch is an idea that just isn’t going away, with a different spin of the concept produced pretty much every year at CES. But this time, Sony assures us, it’s really going to happen and it’s really going to be fabulous.

The video above shows some of the obvious limitations: if you’ve only got a tiny surface area on which to drag your fingers then it’s difficult to fit too much information on at any one time, and it’s also tricky to hit a tiny 60 x 60 pixel area on something as inherently unstable as your wrist.

Nevertheless, it does kind of work, and it’s worth noting that this screen is multitouch-enabled: press two fingers and it will go back one step. And we’re also pleased to see that it won’t only work with Sony phones (if you missed the news, Sony Ericsson phones are no more, having been sucked into Sony as a subsiduary); all you need is an Android phone with the appropriate app downloaded onto it.

Which leaves us with just one question: does anyone out there want one?

My late uncle and I were very different people. Despite being the two ‘fixers’ in the family, the ones who got the busted kettles and the snapped gear cables from the rest of the clan, we were poles apart in one area: our approach to warranties. Even though he would keep his cars going for 20 years, he had a very sharp understanding of what should be his responsibility, and what was down to the vendor.

Actually, that’s an understatement. Woe betide the firm whose slipshod customer handling captured his attention. Once the horn-rimmed specs and the Brylcreemed bonce were aimed in their direction, he would pursue them relentlessly, his measured drawl torturing their receptionists until they actually did put him through to the MD or the Company Secretary (which incidentally is still quite a good one to try, since chancers seldom know enough about company law and structure to try that route).

I am the opposite. I fix (where I can), and like him I take great pleasure in diagnosis. However, I have a low opinion and equally low expectations of what happens when one tries to make a warranty’s promises stick. This is largely because my career in computing has spanned the period during which price of equipment has fallen so spectacularly as to leave me groping for metaphors.

I have a low opinion and equally low expectations of what happens when one tries to make a warranty’s promises stick

I can remember a DEC engineer turning up to put a memory upgrade in our VAX. He marched through the door and waved a plastic briefcase. “I’ve got a Testarossa in here!” he declared – meaning that the contents were worth the £60,000 of a then-hot Ferrari. This last month I’ve received 32 times that much RAM, shipped (and dropped) by the US Postal Service, for £250.

It’s difficult to run a perfect warranty upkeep process when prices are low and margins are tight. Unlike my Uncle, I have a “time is money” attitude (if he was the Obi-Wan Kenobi of our family then I’m more like Iggy Pop). When I start to see signs of undermanning or deliberate sandbagging during a server warranty claim and engineering visit, I will occasionally take the view that throwing money at the problem is worth it to keep the project on track or the service level up to scratch. Those who always take the opposite view are surprised when I sympathise, out of character, because I remember my Uncle and his completely different way of doing things.

However, I don’t think either of us would get very far pursuing warranty or fitness-for-purpose claims in the smartphone and app store business. App stores are supposed to be great, easy gateways for developers to reach new markets, and for users to benefit from an intermediary’s validation and quality control processes. However, there are plenty of opportunities for gaps between the promise and the reality.

One early example from last summer was a first generation Windows Mobile 7 phone. These could lock themselves completely as part of the ActiveSync system update, with a message of “take me to your dealer” for a complete factory reset and retry. I had one on test that duly bricked itself; it had a Vodafone PAYG SIM in it so I went to a Vodafone shop to get it sent away and reset. “Sorry,” they said, “not sold through us. Not our problem”. Despite asking around, I couldn’t find anyone who would actually do the necessary reset.

That was irritating, but not as irritating as Navigon’s Android satnav app. It costs a relatively whopping £60, and with Europe-wide maps it also demands at least an 8GB data card. Nevertheless, it seemed like an excellent deal for me, since I could sell my single-purpose satnav unit (also from Navigon) and come out of the overall deal about £20 in profit.

And a good deal it proved to be for the rest of the year, but then I didn’t travel for a bit so the Android phone got a rest. Next time I got it out, several apps (including Wyse’s excellent Pocket Cloud RDP client) had pending updates. Leaving it on charge and updating, I went to pack, and threw the travel kit in a lightweight laptop bag (pre-checked to remove sharp implements, tools and network cable testers – airport security people simply interpret them as Semtex, so far as I can tell).

So when I sat down in the hire car at Zurich airport, I got a nasty shock: “Activation failure,” said Navigon for Android. “There has been a connectivity failure.” While waiting in the queue to change to a more expensive car with included “Navi”, I proved there jolly well wasn’t a connectivity failure, by surfing the net and looking up the address to fire off a complaint, via the Android Market, to Navigon. I might as well have tucked my complaint in the Schnapps barrel of a passing St Bernard – it vanished.

I could go back to the credit card company and invoke the Sale of Goods Act – except it was an update, several months after the purchase, which interfered with the functionality of my property. I can’t even find a rollback button, which is the kind of thing one might expect after we’ve been through 40 years user interfaces and software delivery.

A truly international marketplace also means there’s little likelihood of a consistent approach to regulation. My Motorola DEFY picks up the central Android Market and the transaction is in sterling, so the actual relevant legal domicile for calling these people to account could be California (for Google), or the UK, or Germany (for Navigon) – except that the app store makes no provision for escalating this kind of failure.

So while app stores show every sign of being the way forward, my experience shows that the current invocations leave much to be desired when it comes to the traditional balance between the rights of the vendor and the rights of the customer. In fact, I’m thinking of proposing a new PC Pro award. I’ll call it the Customer Responsiveness APP Award – or CRAPPA for short.

ARM and Nvidia are major mobile players, so it pays to listen when the firms announce new technologies. The latest developments from both serve up an interesting similarity with regards to how these companies are tackling one of the biggest annoyances of the modern smartphone: inefficient batteries.

ARM’s recent announcement, big.LITTLE, pairs one of its high-end Cortex A15 MPCore chips alongside an entry-level Cortex A7, which consumes much less power. It’s designed to seamlessly takes over when a device is tackling low-intensity tasks, so the power-sucking A15 is reserved for intensive games and apps.

Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chipset, meanwhile, uses a near-identical approach: the four cores on the main chip can be turned on and off to tackle everything from basic web browsing to high-end games but, if the phone’s in standby mode or you’re running low-power apps, those four cores will shut down, with processing power provided by a “Companion Core”. It’s based on the same Cortex A9 used by the main Tegra 3 chip but, crucially, it runs at 500MHz instead of 1.4GHz.

They’re both designed with power saving in mind – in fact, low-power processors are one of the main pillars of ARM’s business – but the fact that these workarounds have to be considered at all merely serve to highlight just how little innovation occurs in the battery market.

It’s clear that lithium-ion power packs just aren’t keeping up with the demands of modern devices, with more powerful processors and bigger screens hampered by batteries that aren’t much bigger or more efficient than those included in phones from a couple of years ago. While components, screens and apps have become more sophisticated and impressive, batteries are stuck in a rut.

It doesn’t seem like the problem will be resolved any time soon, either. Nvidia and ARM might be tacking on chips to handle low-intensity tasks but, as soon as you ramp up four Tegra 3 cores, your phone’s longevity is likely going to plummet, especially if it’s used on devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Note, which has a whopping 5.3in screen.

One of the few drawbacks of modern smartphones is the daily charge: a ritual that sees people leaving phones attached to the mains at night or to their computers at work. Until a newer, more efficient type of battery arrives, this will continue to be the case – even if Nvidia and ARM are doing their best to give outdated lithium-ion hardware plenty of help.

We may have griped about the problems we had upgrading our iPhones to iOS 5, but at least those old handsets are being upgraded to Apple’s latest OS. A new piece of research published in the US suggests the majority of Android handset owners are being left behind by the ever-evolving Google operating system.

The research, by Michael DeGusta from TheUnderstatement.com, tracked every Android handset released in the US before July 2010, and then recorded how many of them had been updated to the latest version of the OS. The results were startling.

Only three of the 18 handsets had been updated to the latest version of Android.   Ten of the 18 were at least two major versions behind, and 11 of them had stopped getting any support updates less than a year after their release.

By the end of an 18-24 month mobile phone contract, the vast majority of Android handset owners will be left with a phone that has none of the latest features, and which poses a potential security risk

Amazingly, seven out of the 18 handsets had never run the latest version Android, having shipped with an outdated version of the OS and never caught up.

By the end of an 18-24 month mobile phone contract, the vast majority of Android handset owners will be left with a phone that has none of the latest features, and which poses a potential security risk because crucial OS patches are not being applied.

Compare and contrast that to Apple, which included the two-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 3GS in this month’s iOS update, and Microsoft, which has today confirmed that it’s delivered the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango update to “100% of eligible phones around the world, regardless of carrier”.

Apple, of course, updates handsets directly, while Microsoft tests updates with handset manufacturers and carriers, before pushing them out itself via Microsoft Update. Android updates, on the other hand, pass from Google to the phone manufacturer to the mobile network – and those extra links in the chain appear to be the problem.

As DeGusta states: “There’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible.”

“Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one.”

Android owners can, of course, root their phone to upgrade to the latest version of the OS themselves. But should Android owners really have to turn into low-grade hackers and risk invalidating their warranty just to get their hands on the latest software and features? No wonder Google bought Motorola…

That’s the kind of feature you expect to find on paid-for software such as Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop Elements, but there’s an app that’ll do the same thing for free on Android and iOS devices – TouchRetouch. Here’s how it’s worked its magic on one of my holiday snaps, with a couple of inconveniently-placed tourists removed from in front of this Cretan ruin:

Here’s the after picture, with those tourists in front of the ruin removed:

If you look closely then you’ll see it’s not perfect – the area of modification is just about evident. Still, it’s extremely impressive for a free app. There’s a paid version available, too, for a mere 62p. Upgrading allows you to output at the same image resolution as the original photo – both of the pics in this post are at 648 x 388 – alongside a Clone Stamp tool for advanced retouching.

Here’s another before and after shot, this time from last week’s LITS. It’s members of the PC Pro team recording our live podcast, and I don’t like the look of that lectern to the right of the stage.

See? Gone:

Once again, it’s not perfect – there’s some pixellation where the app has struggled with the glow of the lamp that was behind the lectern. But even so, for a free app – that’s pretty impressive, right?

Google’s motto may be “don’t be evil” — but when it comes to confronting Apple, it seems “see no evil” is the rule.

For while Apple has been unleashing a patent war against manufacturers of Android devices such as HTC and Samsung, Google has – publicly at least – turned a blind eye, appearing less keen to rock the boat than the captain of the QE2.

Apple has hardly qualified for the George Cross either, picking its fights with licensees rather than Google itself, even though many of the disputed patents appear to relate directly to Android.

Now it seems Google is actively urging its partners to do its dirty work. HTC has this morning launched a new lawsuit against Apple – using nine patents quietly slipped to the handset maker by none other than Google. Those patents include four acquired during the recent takeover of Motorola, according to Bloomberg. Google won’t reveal how much HTC paid for them, but I suspect the loose change in my pocket would have covered it.

Is this the most cowardly “battle” in legal history? Apple has a problem with Android, but won’t tackle its maker head-on; while Google relies on its mates to tackle the playground bully instead of standing up for itself.

This is one of those rare cases where I hope both sides lose.

With a 5.3in, 1,280 x 800 Super AMOLED display beaming forth, the Galaxy Note immediately grabs the attention. The display is eye-searingly bright, and colours are as rich and saturated as we’ve come to expect from Samsung’s Super AMOLED technology. The huge resolution gives the Galaxy Note a super crisp 285 ppi (pixels per inch) pixel density, which leaves it not too far behind the 326ppi of Apple’s iPhone 4 Retina display.

Small hands will struggle with the Galaxy Note’s 83mm width – not to mention the fact that persons of a smaller stature will look like they’re holding a full-sized tablet to their ear – but this giant smartphone felt perfectly manageable in my larger palms. The 9.65mm thickness gives the Galaxy Note a slim, dainty profile, and while Samsung made no mention of weight, it didn’t feel it unduly heavy.

There’s a trick hidden in the Galaxy Note’s bottom corner, however: a removable stylus that Samsung’s dubbed the S Pen.

This stylus partners with Samsung’s S Note software for making handwritten notes or even artistic sketches. It’s possible to choose from a variety of pen/brush types and thicknesses with the drop-down menu, and thanks to the Galaxy Note’s sizeable screen, inking feels natural and comfortable.

While it’s easy to scribble handwritten notes, or doodle to your heart’s content, you can also import pictures onto the canvas. While any photograph will do, it’s possible to grab a screenshot – from Google Maps, for instance – and then directly annotate it with the S Pen.

Basic handwriting recognition also allows you to use the S Pen within the Note’s messaging application. In our brief time with the Galaxy Note, however, it appeared that only single words could be converted, and there was a noticeable pause as the recognition process took place. Clearly, the Galaxy Note’s handwriting recogniton still has some way to go. Still, with Samsung planning to release the S Pen SDK to app developers, there’s a potentially bright future for pen-driven apps.

Happily, though, the S Pen makes a great partner with the pre-installed Swype keyboard – without a finger to obscure the view, we found it quicker to tap texts than ever.

Samsung’s also trying to tout the Note as a hybrid business device. With Juniper Networks’ Junos Pulse installed as standard – an SSL-enabled VPN service – and that high-resolution screen making remote desktop operation entirely feasible, the Galaxy Note is potentially more capable than a standard smartphone.

Going by the range of accessories on show, Samsung’s keen to stress the Note’s versatility. In addition to swish leather cases, larger styluses, docking stations and vehicle mounts, the appearance of Bluetooth keyboards seems to suggest that the Note is capable of much more than just phone, SMS and internet duties.

There’s no doubting the Galaxy Note’s potential. With a dual-core 1.4Ghz processor powering Google’s Android 2.3; 16GB or 32GB of internal memory; wireless networking that includes Bluetooth 3 and reaches up to dual-band 802.11n;  an 8-megapixel rear and 2-megapixel front-facing camera; GPS; and Full-HD video recording at 30fps, the Galaxy Note can hold its own against any smartphone on the market today.

But with no set price or mention of a release date, we’ll just have to sit patiently and wait for our very own review unit to arrive. Only then will we be able to tell whether Samsung’s over-sized smartphone is a genuine star in the making.