Angry Imran is a smash hit

Angry Imran is going to keep me smiling for a long time. Basically catapult Imran Khan’s head across the screen to wipe out his opponents, a la Angry Birds. Hilarious. No doubt by writing this up for The Telegraph I will be accused of backing Imran Khan’s political campaign or of ridiculing the brutal nature of Pakistani politics. But what I hope this story shows is that Pakistan – despite everything – retains an anarchic sense of humour and has an exciting and growing band of software developers.

You can read more about the developers here.

Managing Contacts

Some of my gear from a previous trip, including 7 – my much loved and missed Palm Tx

The past few months has seen me forced into a bit of an IT overhaul after I had a load of computer gear stolen. Perhaps the biggest headache has been trying to work out the best way to manage my contacts.

For the past 10 years I’ve been using Palm computers, from the simple Palm m100 to the Palm Tx which was the one stolen from my car in January. It had a simple desktop, long battery life and – crucially – the ability to search by keyword.

But with Palm no longer making its own computers and with the PDA no longer in fashion, I’ve had to look for a different way to manage contacts.

The problem is that it’s all about the cloud these days. For journalists, that means a problem with security for contact details that might be sensitive. Then what happens if the service entrusted with my 3000 contacts suddenly stops operating overnight? And such a service is useless if internet access is sporadic – such as in Libya last year.

So I tried gist but packed it in pretty fast. Although it has a sophisticated way of keeping contacts up to date, its cloud-only service would leave me too vulnerable to dodgy internet connections when out and about. And what is an internet start-up that doesn’t charge for its service and is then taken over by RIM going to do with all my hard-earned contacts? Nothing good, I suspect.

In the end, though the most important thing for me is having all my contacts downloaded on to some sort of device that I can carry with me.

So I opted for Gmail. Not the sexiest of ideas, I grant you, but with Google Sync installed on my Blackberry it means that soon after I have entered new details via my internet-connected desktop they are entered into the address book on my handset. They are also transferred to my Android tablet (a Samsung, if you are interested).

The system is not perfect. My Blackberry 9900 has a pretty lame battery life. A day without being able to recharge would bring everything to a crashing halt. It’s a cloud-based system with all the security concerns that brings. And most irritating of all, I haven’t worked out how to do a keyword search on the BB address book. That’s not an issue if I have my tablet (offline) with me but – there are times when I won’t.

So, I’m still tempted to snap up a used Palm. Or does anyone have a better way of managing things?

My Motorola Xoom: Good but needs more apps

I don’t like Apple. They bring out a music player that locks you into its own online music store and its own music format. They bring out a smartphone, but control the software that goes on it. And so too the iPad, where developers have to have their “apps” approved before they go in the store. Maybe I’m just an aging idealist, but for me that goes against the punk ethos of the people who opened up the internet for ordinary users, with a philosophy that recognised how openness and freedom would promote collaboration and innovation.

So when it came to buying a tablet I was always going to opt for something running an Android operating system. OK, I know that Google is just as much an evil, profit-grabbing monolith as Apple. But at least Android is open for developers to make and sell their apps as they please without a bloke in a suit running the rule over them (although this may be changing).

So when the Motorola Xoom, running the Honeycomb version of Android designed for tablets, came out, I was an early customer. Which possibly was a mistake.

I bought it largely so I could read newspapers online. Most of their websites are cumbersome creatures: Thousands of stories offering little guidance on which to read first, and which to ignore. The website of my own paper, The Telegraph, often offers four or five versions of the same story – wire versions, updated wire versions, and one written by a correspodent. What I really want is an editor to take me through the world’s news, page by page, telling me what to read, just like they do in the paper version.

And having watched a colleague in Kabul read The Times on his iPad, it looked as if that is exactly what a newspaper app does.

The only problem is that Android versions seem to be very slow in arriving. I have the FT one, but that looks designed for phones. And an unofficial Guardian one, which also lacks any of the functionality of the tablet. I want to be able to leaf through The Telegraph and The Times on my tablet. But no sign yet, despite assurances that they are coming soon.

However, in many other ways my Xoom has displaced my laptop for much of the rest of my consumption of the web. And it’s down to some very neat apps.

Newsr is a beautifully designed way to keep up with my RSS feeds. To be honest, if I was going to manage the feeds, I’d probably switch back to my desktop computer. But to sit and read my Google Reader feeds, and maybe tweet the odd link, this is a simple and intuitive way to do it

Tweetcomb, by the same developer, is a very neat twitter client and streets ahead of the other ones which still seem to be for phone-sized screens

Pulse shows the power of the platform although is a bit too US-centric for my needs. It gathers feeds from a variety of news sites – from Fox News to The New Yorker – into a single app

The YouTube app also demonstrates just what a great platform the Xoom provides. But, there are still too few apps, compared with the thousands for the iPad. Most are still designed for smartphones, and have yet to be optimised for the tablet. And there’s another major catch here in Pakistan – I can only get the free apps, the paid-for ones are blocked, presumably because of the country’s non-existent copyright controls.

I have no idea about the hardware inside the thing, but as a whole the Xoom is fast enough and seems rugged enough to cope with the demands of my bumpy life. The iPad may have a better battery life, but as long as the Xoom lasts me four or five days at a charge – then who cares about the odd hour here or there?

Overall the Xoom has showed it has got what I need. I’ll always need something with a keyboard for writing. But a tablet is now so much more convenient in so many ways for reading and consuming the web that I will just have to wait for the developers to catch up and provide the apps.