The firm’s European product director, Phil Blair, said the Radar was “designed around a social and mobile lifestyle”, and our hands-on time with the device certainly suggested that it’s got enough oomph to make Windows Phone 7’s Mango update feel slick, with no hint of slowdown or juddering as we navigated the various menus and applications.

The Radar feels extremely sturdy as it’s hewn from one piece of metal, and its 137g weight is partnered with a 11mm depth, so it’s far more pocketable than its super-sized stablemate, the HTC Titan. It’s just a shame that, as with other HTC phones, the design doesn’t exactly scream innovation or adventure.

Instead, the Radar bears more than a passing resemblance to the Android-equipped Desire S and, while that’s no bad thing, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that HTC’s handsets are falling behind in the looks department.

The 3.8in touchscreen is a mite smaller than most other smartphones we’re seeing these days, but the 480 x 800 resolution is on a par with most rivals – which means the capacitive panel is extremely sharp.

The screen is responsive, and looked to be serving up vibrant colours, albeit under the dimmed lightning of HTC’s venue. And if you’re not keen on its white finish, don’t worry – it’ll be available in black or grey, too.

The usual 1GHz processor is installed, and it’s partnered with 512MB of RAM alongside all of the usual bells and whistles – GPS, the full range of positional sensors, 802.11n Wi-Fi and a 5-megapixel camera.

The Mango update is the big draw here, and it comes with several interesting enhancements: true multitasking is included, feeds from various social networks are now integrated into the People area, and Windows Phone 7’s familiar tiles now come with more dynamic features, such as notifications of when you receive an instant message on Facebook or the latest weather updates.

Elsewhere, there’s turn-by-turn navigation, QR-code scanning, and support for synchronisation of Office 365 documents – ideal for those who like to work on the move.

So, what do you think? Is this the handset that’ll convince you of Windows Phone 7’s merits, would you rather splash out on a Titan, or are you still wary? You’ve got until October to make your mind up – so let us know in the comments.

Truth be told, the sheer size of the Titan made it feel a little awkward in our hands, but HTC has worked its familiar magic on the hardware.

The device feels rock-solid, it comes with the familiar matte rear and glossy bezel around the screen, and it’s also been made from one machined piece of aluminium. Impressively, it’s also only 9.9mm thick at its widest point.

Under the hood is one of the beefiest specifications we’ve seen on a smartphone. The 1.5GHz processor makes short work of the most demanding applications, and there’s 512MB of RAM and up to 16GB of storage, as well as an 8-megapixel camera.

The result is silky smooth operation, with Windows Phone 7’s distinctive menus, tiles and graphical effects handled without disruption, and apps opening with the minimum of loading times.

One interesting inclusion is DLNA compatibility, which should make it easy to stream media from your phone to a TV, and is a feature that’s only been seen so far on one Windows handset – the LG Optimus 7.

The 4.7in panel should afford plenty of on-screen real estate, but we were a little disappointed to find the Titan only comes with a resolution of 480 x 800. While menus and apps look pin-sharp, it feels like a wasted opportunity; after all, that’s the same number of pixels as the smaller Radar, and even less than the 540 x 960, 4.3in screen fitted to HTC’s current Android flagship, the Sensation.

Still, HTC’s European product director Phil Blair, claimed that Windows Phone 7’s latest update, Mango, was “such a step forward it deserves a new update”, and fans of the OS will have plenty to look forward to when the Titan is unleashed in October.

Perfect fit, or just too big? Let us know what you think of the Titan on the comments below.

Not wanting to let Android have all the fun with its new Transformer, Asus has also introduced a Windows-powered tablet: the Eee Slate EP121.

It’s a hefty piece of kit, with a massive 12.1in screen and a 17mm-thick chassis weighing 1.15kg – almost twice as heavy as the iPad 2. Still, that makes room for some impressive hardware, with an Intel Core i5-470UM running at 1.33GHz and bringing two cores, Turbo Boost technology and Intel’s latest integrated graphics within a TDP of just 18W.

It has 4GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD but, despite the lower-power parts included, battery life inevitably takes a hit. Asus claims that the EP121 will last for two-and-a-half hours when playing 1080p video.

The screen itself is bright and, using either a finger or the supplied stylus, our time with the machine revealed that the 1,280 x 800 panel is both responsive and accurate, and there was little lag to speak of. It feels a big step up from the sluggishness of Windows 7 tablets with Atom chips.

While we’ve never been keen on tablets sporting Windows 7, at this size it works quite well, and Asus will hopefully introduce some neat features to try and make the experience easier. For instance, an iPad-style home button at the bottom of the screen uses the Windows Aero theme’s 3D scrolling effect to switch between apps.

Asus ended our meeting by dropping a rather large bombshell, though – the Eee Slate EP121 will cost £999 inc VAT. At more than twice as much as an iPad 2, all that processing power inside will have to do the tempting.

We’ll have a full review next week, so keep checking the site for our verdict.

Yesterday, something remarkable happened. Our entire editorial team migrated to Ubuntu overnight and – by and large – it was business as usual. The website ran as normal, magazine copy was still written, we (just about) fulfilled our day jobs. (You can see how PC Pro’s Ubuntu day unfolded here.)

Several of the many excellent comments on yesterday’s live blog suggested our day-long experiment wasn’t a fair test; that no IT manager worth his space in the car park would migrate an entire office to a new operating system with almost no preparation or staff training. They were right. Yet what our somewhat reckless experiment revealed is that Ubuntu could cope. On a rag-bag selection of laptops and desktops, installed as a Windows “app”, a dual-boot or within a virtual machine, Ubuntu worked (sometimes at the second or third attempt) every time.

What our test also revealed is that the underlying operating system is becoming less and less relevant: what really matters are the applications. So much of our working lives are now spent in the web browser – updating the web CMS, scouring websites – that it really doesn’t matter if it’s Windows or Ubuntu propping the browser up. The Chrome and Firefox sync tools are so well implemented that you’re up and running with familiar bookmarks, extensions, search history and passwords within minutes.

What our somewhat reckless experiment revealed is that Ubuntu could cope

The single biggest complaint was the lack of viable alternative to Outlook. The built-in Evolution was too unreliable, and Thunderbird refused to play ball with our Exchange server. Tim even attempted to install Outlook 2010 using WINE, but hit a brick wall (earlier versions apparently work better). Could we work long-term without a decent way to search our bulging inboxes or to schedule a team meeting? No. But solutions exist if we did plot a permanent switch to Ubuntu, such as running Exchange email and calendars via Google Apps.

So are we going to take the plunge, wipe Windows, and make PC Pro an Ubuntu shop from now on? No. For starters, it would be irresponsible for us not to run on the operating system used by the vast majority of our readers, and so much of our day jobs involve testing Windows-only software and hardware that it simply wouldn’t be practical.

But are the team breathing a sigh of relief and wiping their Ubuntu installations? Or are they tempted to keep experiment with Linux in their professional and personal lives? I’ll let them answer for themselves.

Tim Danton, editor, writes:

My day on Ubuntu can be summarised in three words: liberating, fascinating, frustrating. Liberating because it was actually enjoyable to be forced to use a different OS than Windows. Several weeks ago I downloaded 10.04 and burned the CD, but hit a problem (I can’t now remember what) when I tried to install it on a home system. Yesterday’s experience will make me try again with a little more determination!

And it was fascinating to see a different way of doing things; you realise the gaps in your knowledge, between being a computing expert and a Windows expert. I wouldn’t describe myself as either, but yesterday definitely filled in a few gaps.

Ultimately, though, it was frustrating. I generally get through all my email in a day, dealing with it then deleting it or filing it away. Because Evolution proved so slow as to be unusable, and Outlook Web Access on Firefox or Chrome so aggravating, there are 50 extra emails sitting in my inbox. When Outlook popped up on my screen this morning, I gave a very satisfied sigh.

Darien Graham-Smith, technical editor, writes:

I already use the netbook edition of Ubuntu at home, and I’ve been using Unix-type systems on and off since my university days – so I was expecting to breeze through the experiment. But even if you’re au fait with the basics, switching from Windows or OS X to a fresh Ubuntu Desktop installation is a disorientating experience.

The problem isn’t the OS so much as the applications. The lack of familiar office and productivity software doesn’t feel like a big problem on a netbook, but on a full-fat desktop you naturally want to make full use of your computer’s potential, and it’s painful to have to abandon industry standard applications in favour of more, shall we say, homely alternatives – if indeed such alternatives even exist. I love the responsiveness and stability of Ubuntu, and I’ll definitely be keeping it as my netbook OS; but if it’s to become a real general-purpose alternative it needs more support from outside of Canonical.

David Bayon, deputy reviews editor, writes:

The core Ubuntu experience was really rather refreshing. The interface is so clean and the workspaces so intuitive, and I love that the Software Centre gathers useful applications to pick and choose from – with no messy installations either. For a home environment, where a lot of what I do is browser-based, Ubuntu can certainly do the job, and I have every intention of putting it on my home laptop. I’ll dual-boot at first, but we’ll see how it goes.

Alas, work wasn’t quite so rosy, with one big barrier: email. Evolution proved sluggish and unreliable, and lacks all of the surrounding features that I’ve come to rely upon so desperately. Outlook is my email client, calendar, to do list, contact book and Twitter feed integrator, and – as I don’t delete things – an indexed directory of everyone I’ve ever had dealings with at PC Pro. I simply have too much invested to do without it. I also had big problems with the ATI graphics drivers when I tried to move Ubuntu to my work PC, meaning I couldn’t get my two monitors working properly.

Is it simpler to setup than Windows? I don’t think I could hand a clean install to my parents and expect them to get the kinks ironed out, put it that way, but I think they’d get used to the environment very quickly. And issues aside – or perhaps because of them – Ubuntu restores something that the ranks of sealed boxes in PC World are rapidly killing off: a genuine sense of exploration. And that’s priceless. Yet Ubuntu is free.

Jonathan Bray, reviews editor, writes:

Ubuntu day was a rollercoaster ride for me: up on top of the world in the morning, down by lunchtime, feeling sick by the end of the day. For the most part, I’m perfectly happy using it – at home it’s installed on a couple of laptops, the family has no problems with using either – but when it came to work everything fell apart.

I never managed to get the Evolution email client to play nicely with the office Exchange server, severely hampering productivity. Video playback is poorly supported – I had to boot back into Windows 7 to view footage from a camcorder I was testing. I managed to get it playing smoothly via MPlayer and the command line, but it never looked right.

So am I more or less likely to use it as a result of our experiment yesterday? At work, definitely not – I felt a joyful jolt in my chest this morning when that Windows symbol first appeared on my screen, not something I thought I’d ever admit to feeling. But at home, I’m going to continue experimenting. It’s quick, usable and nippy. I think, in time, I could even be persuaded to consider letting my dad loose on it.

Mike Jennings, senior staff writer, writes:

One day with Ubuntu taught me more than I’d ever known about the most popular open-source OS around today. It’s far more user-friendly than I’d ever given it credit for: the initial install was easier and quicker than Windows 7 and, once that’d finished, I found it incredibly easy to get going thanks to Chrome’s bookmark syncing, the range of pre-installed software and immediate internet connection.

Ubuntu certainly has its idiosyncracies, though. Every change I wanted to make to my PC was heralded by a little box that asked for authentication, and it sometimes wouldn’t disappear – and trying to activate the existing graphics driver meant my system wouldn’t boot. I wasted too much time  fiddling with drivers and the Terminal trying to get software to install, tutting at its strange UI quirks or simply rebooting my machine to see if an update had worked.

One thing that also struck me was the friendly, supportive community that rallied around the #ubuntupro hashtag. I was tweeting throughout the day, and every message was greeted with suggestions, tips, popular apps and more, with several problematic posts prompting three or four different solutions from knowledgable users. It’s by far the busiest day I’ve ever had on Twitter, and there was nary a negative message among the dozens I received.

It might be tricky for a novice, but Ubuntu is definitely getting better, which is why I’m considering installing Ubuntu’s lightweight laptop variant on my netbook, even if it won’t displace Windows on my work or home machines.

Some of the seven parts of the programme are relatively simple and clearly understood – for example, Microsoft and a grab-bag of hardware vendors have agreed a reference platform suitable for the construction of a pool of physical machines and virtual hosts to make up a private cloud. Other parts are frankly mind-boggling, like the cashback scheme. If you move to Hyper-V cloud and make it work for you, whether you’ve virtualised already or not, then Microsoft has some money for you.

There’s always a bit of a “brain gap” when it comes to announcements about virtualisation – it takes a while for listeners to get their heads around the concepts and bat back a few apposite questions, and I think Microsoft caught the assembled press throng well and truly on the hop with the cashback offer. Yes, it does extend beyond domestic US clients. Whether it’s conditional on making use of the new hardware freshly published on the Hyper-V Cloud compatibility framework list is an intriguing question. It’s also a bit too early to figure out things like return on investment since, there are no customers using this newly announced toolkit yet.

For whatever curious global-announcement type of reason, this year’s TechEd Keynote didn’t start until 4pm local time, which seemed to be all about an embargo on the story about Hyper-V Cloud – and the story was (from a selfish, egotistical columnist’s perspective) the usual Mashed Potato Speech – a whitish, bland smooth paste of words: long and exhausting exposition of very long product names used as part of very vague promises about very difficult achievements which, if it’s honest about it, Microsoft expects you to do all the heavy lifting to achieve.

I entirely understand its take on the matter; Microsoft believes it’s the only company that actually bestrides and has some understanding of the change to the role, workload and responsibilities of an internal .NET developer faced with the option of using Azure. But it is far from alone in facing the completely human problem of getting past the pasty and hard to distinguish product names, concepts and promises to grab people’s attention.

Keynotes are always a bit of an uphill struggle in the attention-span stakes, and putting it at 4pm after a Berliner lunch (mit bier) wasn’t a smart move. Even some of the demo guys were noticeably rushing their (faultless and entirely unencumbered) demos, which is why I almost missed the really big news.

The next major release of Azure is due Any Day Now. The Azure guy scampered rapidly over the salient points, but how about this one principal headline: Azure has a VM Role now. This, along with the virtual IP address services, means you really can make a .VHD file of a server (or anything) inside your company network, upload the VHD to Azure, and click “run”.

I bet there’s a fair number of techies who always thought that this was what Azure did, and who are a bit shocked to find it’s only just been made possible. I bet there will be lots of people who (quite fairly) presume that a product called “Hyper-V Cloud” is a bundling-up of this capability. In fact, it’s the opposite – it’s a toolbox to help you construct a Private Cloud of on-demand servers and VMs inside your business.

Despite the perils of juggling entirely abstract Mashed Potato concepts, product names and services, the announcement of Azure turning itself into a one-stop application shop and alternative to Amazon EC2 stood out in the day’s messages, as just the sort of first-step on the road that Microsoft faithful have felt has been missing.

As I entered my details this year I was pleased to notice that that particular data leak has been plugged. The information fields no longer support autocomplete, making it impossible to browse previously-entered information. A step up, surely, in security.

Sadly, the process remains fantastically insecure for other reasons. The computers themselves are regular Windows 7 laptops with full internet access – and they’re positioned facing away from the registration staff. So while it may no longer be possible to get information out of them directly, it’s a breeze to to download and install any software you wish (such as a keylogger or database scraper) without anyone being any the wiser. Indeed, since the registration machines are in a public lobby, you can just walk in off the street and start tampering with them.

Is this a serious problem? Admittedly, there’s probably a limit to how much havoc you can wreak on an IDF registration laptop. But if someone were to install an aggressive worm on one of these machines, it could easily spread to more sensitive systems, especially if the hardware ends up going back to Intel HQ. Good security practice means anticipating and eliminating risks like that.

Fundamentally, the lesson is the same as last time: when you build on an existing platform, your system inherits all the complexities and vulnerabilities of that platform. And, once again, this demonstration of that fact comes, poetically enough, from one of the pre-eminent producers of platform technology.

Well, now the PC maker’s had time to think the matter through, another page has appeared on the Dell website, condensing the whole Windows vs Ubuntu debate into about 100 words.

From Dell’s perspective the choice is clear. You should choose Windows if (and I swear I’m not paraphrasing here):

• You are already using WINDOWS programs (e.g. Microsoft Office, iTunes etc) and want to continue using them
• You are familiar with WINDOWS and do not want to learn new programs for email, word processing etc
• You are new to using computers

And you should plump for Ubuntu if:

• You do not plan to use Microsoft WINDOWS
• You are interested in open source programming

So, just to get this highly complex argument straight: you should use Windows if you’ve already used Windows or have never used Windows. And you should only think about Ubuntu if you’re an open-source programmer. Got it?

By the way, I’m writing a feature on Ubuntu 10.04 vs Windows 7 for the next issue of PC Pro, on sale 21 August. I’m not sure I can match the degree of sophistication in Dell’s carefully thought-out analysis, but I’ll give it a go…

(Thanks to PC Pro blog reader rob997 for the tip-off.)

On Bing, Microsoft’s very handy and super-relevant search engine, it would seem that Anglian Windows has bought a featured spot that pops up to tell you about the new Government scrappage scheme – not the one that applies to cars, the one that applies to double glazing.

Except that “Windows” has to be one of the most frequently searched terms on the web  -  I put it in almost every search because I’m always looking for Network error messages and their fixes, and if I leave “Windows” out then I get five times as many hits about Linux, which I don’t need to see. I am very unlikely to go from my “Windows” search to Anglian for some new double-glazing, so quite why Anglian’s ad appears when I type terms such as “windows trust failure vmware” into Bing is a mystery.

Thank God they only pay when people click on the ad, or the Government may be bailing out another company.

But we techie types have some more modern rituals too. Online Christmas shopping, for example. Loading up your Sky+ Box or Windows Media Center with films you’ll never watch. And, of course, hiding away in the study while you get to grips with this year’s must-have PC game.

For many of us, these customs are as much a part of the Yuletide season as wassailing and mulled wine; yet the technology that makes them possible has only come into being within the past few decades. And as 2010 comes knocking, I find myself looking back over Christmases of the past and marvelling at the huge advances we’ve made within my lifetime to get here.

1980: The infancy of home computing

As Christmas 1980 came around my family had just acquired our first home computer — a Sinclair ZX80, arguably the first mass market home PC. It was sold on the promise of unparalleled flexibility, with adverts boasting that “you could use it to do quite literally anything from playing chess to running a power station.”

By today’s standards, though, it was impossibly limited. With its 1KB of RAM and 3.25MHz processor it could run only simple text-based BASIC programs. Graphics were limited to a black and white 64 x 48 grid, and the video subsystem was so slow that the screen went visibly blank before every redraw. In principle I could have hooked it up to the TV in the front room for Christmas day, but I don’t think the family would have been enthralled.

Needless to say, in 1980 there was no online shopping. The Internet was still purely an academic communications network, and though dial-up BBS services did exist, they were very much a niche service. At this point I don’t believe I had ever even laid eyes on a modem.

1985: The age of rubber keys

Step forward five years and I had graduated from the ZX80 to the ZX Spectrum 48K.

Like the ZX80, the Spectrum was marketed as a serious machine – “you’ll quickly be moving into the colourful world of professional-level computing”, promised the adverts — but like millions my age I used it almost exclusively for playing games. Loading software from tape was slow and flaky, but by the standard of the day it was a versatile and affordable system (costing £175 at launch) and the colourful graphics palette from which the system took its name was pretty enough to justify taking over the front-room TV on Christmas morning.

(In truth, though, since only two colours could be used within each 8×8 character square, many Spectrum games made very sparing use of colour, to avoid ugly “attribute clash”.)

It was possible to use a joystick to play Spectrum games, but you needed a special interface, and for kids my age those were expensive add-ons. So on Christmas Day 1985 I was using the rubber keys to control Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, Knight Lore and Jet Set Willy. What a year.

The online scene was starting to take off, too: the Prism VTX 5000 modem, running at a sprightly 1200/75 baud rate, let Spectrum users connect to Prestel. You couldn’t buy presents as such, but you could check information such as weather reports and train times, and it was even possible to access your bank account — so long as you were a customer of the forward-looking Nottingham Building Society.

1990: Guru meditations and Megablasts

Skip on another half-decade and we were in another world. The computer of choice was now the Amiga 500, a machine light years ahead of the Spectrum.

The standard model used a 7.14MHz Motorola 68000 CPU, packed 512KB of internal RAM and ran a multi-tasking, mouse-driven OS. The graphics really had attained arcade quality, overshadowing the contemporary Sega Megadrive and NES consoles. Indeed, the Amiga’s graphical resolutions challenged the capabilities of the front-room TV, leading to flickery interlacing in the highest resolutions – and you needed an ugly external RF modulator to connect to a television at all.

Though the Amiga was most popular as a gaming platform, it also had a hand in kickstarting the media revolution. Media Center-type abilities were still a long way off, but partnered with NewTek’s Video Toaster suite the Amiga could serve as a powerful video-editing and production station. Famously, Amiga hardware was used to generate the special effects for the TV show Babylon 5.

Its sound capabilities were notable too: though limited to 8-bit audio, quality was exceptional by the standards of the time. One fondly-remembered game is the Bitmap Brothers’ game “Xenon 2: Megablast”, which featured a house track by Bomb the Bass as its theme music – and this, of course, was during the days of the 3½in floppy, before audio could simply be streamed from a CD.

1995: Windows breaks through

By 1995 another transformation had taken place. The Amiga was succumbing to a lingering death – the result of poor management rather than any technical weakness – and its place was being taken by the PC, made accessible to the mainstream for the first time by the arrival of Windows 95.

For many households, this was the first home computer that required its own monitor. And though this opened up graphical possibilities far beyond what a TV could handle, it also removed the home computer from the living room (I personally spent most of my first Christmas day as a PC owner hidden away in my bedroom). Thus was created an entertainment divide that to this day hasn’t been satisfactorily bridged.

Still, on premium PC systems with CD-ROM drives it was for the first time possible to play music and watch videos on your desktop. You were stuck with VCD media, though, as DVDs had yet to arrive on the scene.

A typical 1995 PC system might have been based on a Pentium processor running at 90MHz, with 8MB of RAM. For those who had come from the Amiga, these were big numbers; yet in everyday use these machines typically felt sluggish and underpowered, due in part to Windows 95’s heavy reliance on virtual memory (which wasn’t used at all by most Amiga models).

This – coupled with the increasing average age of home computer owners – perhaps explains a shift away from fast-moving action games towards less resource-intensive strategy and adventure games. Christmas 1995 might have found you playing games such as Colonization and Command & Conquer.

The online world was getting more grown-up too: the world wide web was now a few years old, and with a state of the art 28.8Kbits/sec modem you could send faxes and connect to services such as AOL and CompuServe. I wouldn’t have been allowed to do this on Christmas Day, though: leaving aside the £20 a month subscription fee, it would have tied up the phone line, preventing our various relatives from calling up to relay their seasonal wishes.

2000: Evolution, not revolution

Once Windows had established itself as a standard home OS, the pace of change appeared to slow to a crawl.

To be sure, hardware kept growing more powerful: the original Pentium processor matured into the Pentium III and 4, while AMD’s competing “Thunderbird” Athlon processor was gaining respect as a credible alternative. Graphics hardware from the likes of 3DFX and Matrox – as well as our friends ATI and Nvidia – was driving the PC to unprecedented heights of high-resolution 3D gaming.

All the same, the standard home desktop, running Windows 98 or Windows Me, still looked almost exactly the same as it had five years ago under Windows 95.

In incremental ways, though, these new releases of Windows did reflect the changing role of the in PC. The most obvious upgrade was Internet Explorer: the original release of Windows 95 hadn’t included a browser, but within a few years the internet had become a huge mainstream business. Microsoft infamously bundled Internet Explorer into Windows 98 and Me, and even tried to make the Windows Explorer mimic the browser with its disastrous “single-click” mode.

Whether you chose Internet Explorer or the cutting-edge Mozilla browser – still very much in beta at this stage – it was now possible to place orders online with “e-tailers” such as Amazon, Dabs and even Sainsbury’s. By 2000 those in the know were doing their Christmas (and everyday) shopping via 56k modem connections. ADSL had yet to be rolled out in the UK, though trials were underway.

And with Windows Me the PC continued its metamorphosis into a general purpose media station. This was the first edition of Windows to bundle Windows Movie Maker, turning video editing from a specialist usage into a standard application. Media Player was upgraded to make use of online media information, and the DVD Player application no longer required special decoder hardware.

It’s also notable that Christmas photographs were now starting to be taken on digital, rather than film-based cameras: typically these would have been two- or three-megapixel images, shot on a chunky compact camera with a fixed-focus lens, but this was enough to give the PC another media-type role, editing and organising photographs.

PCs were still largely banished from the front room: some graphics cards promised “TV output”, but in reality this normally meant an S-video connector that only the most expensive televisions could accept.

Still, laptops were by now starting to percolate into the mainstream, so this Christmas I was at least able to play Hearts from the comfort of the sofa. I couldn’t browse the web from there, though: while 802.11b had been standardised during 1999, almost no domestic hardware yet supported wireless connections.

2005: Today’s tech starts to emerge

By 2005, home computing had all but reached the form in which we know it today. Laptops and desktops were by now running Windows XP, still today the most popular OS among PC Pro readers. The familiar Core 2 Duo processor was just around the corner, although if you’d bought a top-of-the-range PC for Christmas 2005 it would have come with a Prescott Pentium 4, the first mainstream processor to use the LGA 775 socket. 64-bit support was becoming standard too, though the new Windows XP 64-bit Edition hadn’t found wide acceptance (and never would).

Internet access had matured too: ADSL and cable broadband had become almost ubiquitous in London and the home counties, though less populated areas were still waiting to be hooked up. Wireless routers were becoming common too, thanks to the rise of laptops (by some measures they would overtake desktop sales within two years). I believe 2005 was the first Christmas I enjoyed with the assistance of an always-on wireless broadband connection.

The actual business of browsing the web in 2005 was very similar to today, though those who hadn’t jumped to Firefox 1.5 were still stuck with the pokey Internet Explorer 6. At this point YouTube was still a small independent startup, Facebook was open only to students and Twitter didn’t exist at all.

2005 also saw the arrival of Windows XP Media Center Edition, aimed at putting the PC back into the front room. The platform never did satisfactorily learn to connect to a standard television, but the rise of HDTV sets with digital inputs made that a moot point. Dedicated Media Center PCs didn’t exactly transform the market, but with their ability to record live TV for later viewing and play user music and media on demand they set the scene for modern services such as Spotify and BBC iPlayer.

For early adopters, at least, the technological pieces of today’s Christmas pie were finally falling into place.

And what of the future?

Technology is an industry that never stands still, and since 2005 we’ve seen Windows 7, netbooks, iPhones and DSLRs all arrive in the mainstream. And, of course, it won’t stop there. No one can really predict the technologies that will become a part of Christmases to come, but 3D Blu-ray, motion-sensing game controllers and domestic projectors have all been touted as marvels to come.

Personally, one trend which I think will continue is the re-establishment of the PC as a home entertainment hub. Intel’s 32nm Westmere processors promise to pack massive computational power and HD graphics into a tiny platform with tiny power consumption, opening the door to the most efficient and unobtrusive media PCs yet. With broadband becoming almost a given in UK households, I reckon the potential of  on-demand video, games and services is ready to explode. And personally I can’t wait: just think, if you don’t fancy next Christmas’ Bond film, you could just flick over to a different one.

What do you think? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Are my recollections wildly at variance with your own? Let me know your thoughts about what’s to come. And they do say that Christmas is a time for sharing, so why not share with us your own fond memories of the technology of Christmases past?

Image credits: ZX80 by Daniel Ryde; ZX Spectrum 48K by Daniel Ryde; Amiga via http://www.flickr.com/photos/quagmirez31/; CD-ROM via http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vincent1969; Pentium 4 processor via http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sting; iPhone by Ed Schipul

No really; the ubiquitous key, which has been implicated in incidents of corporate data loss around the world, now occupies a central role in Microsoft’s view of corporate security.

Far from being the main means by which secrets slip out of your organisation, the Microsoft security technique depends on carrying your BitLocker keys around on a USB stick.

This is a great leap forward, and I can foresee lots of corporates finding themselves strongly obliged to take up BitLocker, especially when you consider the surprising hard line being taken by the Information Commissioner, as reported in this BBC article. Let’s put the headline conclusion up here so you bear it in mind: if your company loses data, then it’s half a million quid as a fine.

Now; remember the provisions of Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. This is that interesting bit of law that cropped up post 9/11, which requires those who carry data encrypted on some computing device, to provide the decryption keys to law enforcement on request. So let’s see what happens when we take these two laws, and add them to BitLocker’s method of operation.

BitLocker encrypts the entire of the hard drive of a Windows PC. All that goes on the USB key is the personal part of your decryption key – that’s a two-part key process, so your password is an important part of it. If your machine has a TPM security chip onboard, then there’s no USB key requirement; but with USB or TPM, there’s two ways to fall foul of The Law here.

First, allow me to reveal an enforcement scenario I’ve been through personally, then explain the ways you can be in bother if this happens to you while in possession of company kit.

The scenario is to drive through a part of London (or another big city) in the middle of a security scare which hasn’t yet reached the news, but certainly has reached the police forces. I’ve been through this three times, and the pattern is always the same: once stopped, the constabulary jump straight to the terrorism laws and parrot out their “we can now do whatever we want” mantra, which essentially means you have to wait for them to prove to their satisfaction that you aren’t loaded with binary explosive, drugs, or your tax disc isn’t expired.

So let’s say you’re stopped in this way, and in the back of the car is a laptop, borrowed from the common pool at work.

The first and simplest way to fall foul of the law is for that laptop to have multiple user profiles on it, only one of which is yours. You don’t know the passwords to the other profiles.

The second way is for you to have the laptop, and for it to contain only your profile – but you have forgotten the USB key (if it doesn’t have a TPM inside) or (if it does have a TPM) some ill has befallen it and it is asking for the TPM recvoery password. You don’t know this, because it’s centrally administered as part of your company domain’s Group Policy.

That’s how BitLocker is supposed to work; that’s what is required by the Information Commissioner, to stop you carelessly losing your firm’s information, whether it is 25 million patient records or the war plans for the Defence Of Pinner.

So, your over-excited constable ferrets his way through your car, emboldened by his anti-terrorism brief, and his hand falls upon the laptop. “What’s the password?” he asks. “No idea”, you reply. In the words of that famous board game – do not pass go. Do not collect £200. Go direct to jail…

I know, this is an extreme scenario – but what the law says is not “temporarily unable to provide passwords until the IT helpdesk arrives in the morning”, or “unable to unlock the PC due to being absent minded and having the passwords somewhere down the back of the sofa on a ‘Hello Kitty’ USB stick” – it says that if you don’t provide the passwords, that’s you nicked, that is.

What’s worse is that the Information Commissioners Get Tough policy on inadvertent leaks might make an over-excited IT manager actually refuse to divulge those passwords, down the phone to someone who CLAIMS they are a custody sergeant…

I would agree with those who say that this is the nature of the game when it comes to taking responsibility for data about people, which you’re carrying about in the course of your work: but I am rather concerned that the confluence of these two laws – which do not seem to contradict one another as they sit in the body of statute – add up to a nasty trap for those who are likely to end up both guilty, and fired, for trivial errors which do not add up to the crimes these laws are designed to deter.

The IT business – as found in corporates – needs to think through the impact of these regulations, and in some depth.