Chasing Google Docs, Microsoft now lets you create and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents online for free on live.com. But they missed some usability testing steps

Microsoft has launched a web version of Office and unlike Office, it's completely free if you have a Hotmail account. That's remarkable on a number of levels it means that it's finally trying to fight Google on Google's turf or that it's trying to defend its turf on the PC. Which is it, Microsoft?

To find out, I dived right in. Just as Google requires you to log in with a Google account, Microsoft needs you to have a Live.com account (a Hotmail account will do). Fine.

The normal document options are there: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

I began with the Word Web App.

But where Google lets you create a document and just start typing, Office Online insists that you first give the document a name.

(And not just any name: it can't include any of the magick Windows-killing characters such as \ or :, nor can it start with the magick Unix-killing .).

By default (and with no option), the documents are created in the .docx format, which older version of Office can't read directly, though you can get free translators.

Fine; start typing. That's the easy part; and in many ways the setup is just the same as Google Docs. Typing, typing, typing

Next: across the top of the document are four tabs: File, Home (which you're in if you're editing), Insert and View.
Clicking Home gives a number of file-based options: open in Word, Save changes, Share the document with others, Properties [of the document], and then the also-rans: Give Feedback, Privacy [find out how it's protected], Terms of Use, Close. Now: have you noticed what's missing from that?

There's no option to upload a document or, at this time, to download it (though that will come later in our adventure). At this moment in the process, you can't get your content from your computer to the cloud, or vice-versa.

Well, actually, you can see later but it's not done from "inside" any of the programs. Unlike Google, again, where you can upload a document into an existing one at any time, and you can download a document as soon as or even before you've saved it.

This is a classic example where Microsoft hasn't thought about the user interface. One feels it's so busy protecting the Office monopoly on desktops that it can't give you the best experience, or even the best cloud-based experience, in case you stop buying Office.

Now, in the process of trying out the app, I clicked on the "View" tab. A fresh annoyance: a dialog box saying that the changes to my document haven't been saved, so do I want to abandon them?

The first thing it doesn't do, in Word: save regularly. (Though it does do this in the PowerPoint version. As we'll see, this is typical of the inconsistencies across the setup.)

This is a mad question. I'm in the cloud. What if I'm on a train and I lose my connection? Does Microsoft really need an explicit "save" order? But you can't proceed without it. By contrast, Google Docs also has a "View" tab (which shows you a layout version of the page) but its autosave invoked, one suspects, when you hit the button means you can flip between the "Edit" and "View" tabs without thinking about it.

Then I noticed another tab: "open in Word". Clicked on it, in the hope of getting an instant download. But ah, no, to do that you have to be "running a supported version of Microsoft Word and a browser that supports opening files directly from the Office Web Apps".

The next thing to try: sharing the document. This is a process that can be done from inside the document with Google; in Office Web Apps, it's a whole different place altogether. (You get a warning that you've leaving the page, so do you want to save your changes? Sighing, you agree that you do, while wondering if they've really never heard of Autosave in Redmond. Or never tried Google Apps?)

The Edit Permissions tabs is rather neat a slider from "some friends" to "friends" to "friends of friends" to "Everyone". Or you can specify people. Just as with Google, which enforces a Google account, your friends will need a Live.com account. But they're free, and mostly painless. However, you can't make a world-editable document which can actually be useful (we used one to crowdsource Oracle and Sun's list of takeovers last year, for instance).

Having saved the document, you then get the option to download it to your computer the left-hand sidebar in the "File" tab changes to include it.

This is, again, terrible design. Menus which don't have consistent contents are confusing to the user, because you don't know when a particular element is going to be there. (How should it be done? Have the "download document" option all the time, but either gray it out, or if someone invokes it before saving, prompt them to save or name the file.)

So I downloaded the file which came down with the most remarkable name. Instead of being test document1.docx it was called "test document1.docx" the quotes are there too. That's terrible, frankly. It wasn't called that when it started (because, you'll recall, I wasn't allowed to use any such extras in the filename).

I actually had to edit the filename (to remove the characters that would have been illegal in the cloud) before I could open it. Terrible piece of work, Microsoft.

So I turned to PowerPoint Web App, thinking that this would surely be awful. It turns out not to be the case: for a start, it saves automatically.

On seeing that, one's instant reaction is: "Why not do that in Word Web App too?" Possibly the answer is that these come from different programming teams but the lack of a consistent UI in a product that needs to be impressive, because it's competing against something from Google that's already there and is plenty good enough, is bad.

Again with PowerPoint Web App, there's the File/Home/Insert/View tabs. When you click on "File" you get told there's no save (but, Microsoft, why not just say "PowerPoint Web App saves your file regularly. Click to learn more" instead of making people go and read an explanation?). Still no Download option, you'll notice: again, you don't get that until you click on the View button. That, at least, is consistent but it's stupid. Why do I need to stop editing, do a save and view my work in order to download it?

Then we come to the other problem with Skydrive and the Web Apps: they're not always the snappiest. I got to see a lot of the "Loading " button. Fortunately, you can generally drive it along by simply reloading the web page. But again, given that this is a product in its earliest days, not in wide-scale adoption, is it really too hard to keep up with the user?

Uploading documents: It turns out that you can just not from inside any of the apps. (There must be a mental partition in the Microsoft mind: you're either in the filesystem, or you're editing a document. But what if you're inside a document and you need to add in another document? Google lets you do this, a direct injection; Microsoft doesn't. You'd have to open one document, copy the text, close it, open the second document, and paste. More steps, but of course completely logical if you're used to a desktop model. Except we're not on the desktop any more.

Next up: Excel Web App. This actually worked quite neatly. I uploaded a spreadsheet from my desktop to the files area, and then opened it though Office Web Apps complained it was in the "wrong" (I suspect Office 2007) format, and made a great play of converting it to a different one which I suspect was .xlsx, as there's no obvious difference between them seen in a list. (Another mistake, Microsofties. You need to see the suffixes of files online if they're stored and have the same names.)

Excel Web App runs smoothly, and is actually the best implementation of these three: you don't get bothered about the difference between "editing" and "viewing", you can download a snapshot or the entire spreadsheet, and it autosaves. That's more like it. It's even quite fast. And while it doesn't have the (desktop) option of inserting a chart unlike Google Docs, where you can it's tolerably good. I got the impression that the expectation was that this would be the most-used of the three.

On balance, though, this product has a long way to go. If you saw this and didn't know the brand name, you'd say that this was a company which didn't really get the web: where's the embed code, so you can include a spreadsheet or presentation in another web page? You'd say that it hasn't picked up on autosaving, that it seems to have learnt little or nothing from Google's implementation, and that it must have been done in a terrible rush, since the user interface (UI) quirks stand out like a sore thumb; you could get used to them, but you'd have to adapt to them, rather than using a program that smoothly tried to get out of your way.

If someone then whipped off the sheet and said "Look it's from Microsoft!" you might well say "oh, that explains it, then." I still find it amazing that with so many people, Microsoft can't get good UI designers. Or perhaps it can, but they're buried in layers of management too deep to effect change. That's a pity: Google needs some good competition in this space, like anyone. Office Web Apps aren't that, yet.

Office Web Apps from Microsoft

Pros: Free; works on range of browsers; supports wide range of functions, particularly in Excel. Can interact directly with newest version of Office.
Cons: Maddeningly and unnecessarily confusing and inconsistent UI; insists on saving in Office 2007 (.docx, xlsx, pptx) format; often slow; no charting option in Excel; no autosave in Word; no upload-into-file option; no "embed" function (to include a spreadsheet in a separate web page).
live.com

But how do they compare with the other networks? And how do they compare with previous prices?

Vodafone has - oops! - leaked details of its iPhone 4 pricing. Which, since you can pre-order them from Tuesday 15th, means that it's not much of a leak, but on the other hand you'd think the networks might have got their pricing out earlier.

The numbers were accidentally leaked by Vodafone and captured from its datasheets by Engadget (whence we've copied them) reader Liam Gladdy, and we've got them here now for you.

Note that the white version seems to be the 16GB one, and the black one is your 32GB one. Pore over the details and tell us your thoughts.

People have been talking about the coming mobile revolution for 20 years, but on a recent book tour with my Android phone, I realised it's finally here

I've just come back from a month-long, multi-city, US and Canada book tour for my new novel, For the Win. I've done book tours before, but this one was different: this was the tour with an Android Nexus One phone, and it was game-changing.

I've been told about the coming mobile revolution for 20 years now, but frankly, mobile phones are generally rubbish. The carriers are awful and abusive. The apps suck. And so on. Something's changed.

Take directions: Google Maps are, of course, the ne plus ultra of navigation, so having them in your pocket is powerful. But combine that with Android's stellar turn-by-turn directions, which incorporates Google's traffic data to get you round the terrible snarls, and things get really easy. What's more, the ability to program the map destination by speaking it (Google's various voice apps have given it improbably good voice-recognition performance, producing a training set that is wide and deep), or by photographing it on a printout (using the Google Goggles app that converts images to words to Google searches), felt futuristic and deeply right.

Young adult book tours involve a lot of school visits, often in deep suburbs that the media escorts supplied by your publisher aren't that familiar with (these escorts often come armed with confusing Mapquest printouts that seem to come from an earlier century). When you're not running late to a tour stop, you're often running early, with just enough time to stop for a cup of coffee and a snack. Add Google location search to that and you can avoid going to a petrol station or (even worse) McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts and find hidden gems that you'd have to be a local to get at otherwise. I ate better on this tour than I ever have before.

I "rooted" my Nexus One, breaking into the OS so that I could easily "tether" it to my laptop, using it as a 3G modem between tour stops (we didn't have to root my wife's matching phone, as Google supplied us with an unlocked developer handset). My typical tour day started at 5am with breakfast and work on the novel, then a 6am interview with someone in Europe, then pickup, two to four school visits with a short lunch break, three or four interviews, then a bookstore signing or a plane (or both). As busy as that sounds, there's actually a fair bit of dead time in it while sitting in the escort's car, trying to find the next stop.

This time round, I plugged the laptop into the cigarette lighter and the phone into the laptop this gave the phone a battery charge and the laptop internet access. And best of all, it meant that I could harvest those dead minutes to answer emails, keep on blogging, and generally stay abreast of things.

Which meant that I got lots more of the touring author's most precious commodity: sleep. On previous tours, returning to the hotel meant sitting down for three to four hours' worth of emails before bed, which cut my sleep time to less than four hours some nights. But this time round, I got back to the room completely caught up, and was able to flop down in bed, eat some minibar cashews, and hit the sack.

Travelling with your own internet source is brilliant. At Atlanta airport, I was stuck for four hours while a monster storm hammered the building with barrages of lightning. Immediately, every one of the expensive Wi-Fi networks in the building went dead as thousands of stranded travellers tried to use them all at once. I found a corner with a mains outlet, plugged in the laptop, tethered my phone, and enjoyed my own private network connection. It wasn't fast, but it was free and it worked.

I still have a US T-Mobile account from when I lived in the US, and I pay for the unlimited data plan there (which, like the Orange UK Sim I use here, has a bizarre and fraudulent definition of "unlimited" that includes a data cap). It's easily worth keeping the account alive for those times that I'm back in the US one day's 3G savings (not having to pay for expensive hotel and airport broadband) pays for a month's mobile service.

But when I travel to places where I don't have a Sim, such as France or Germany, where I'll be touring in September, it's not pretty. Orange charges nearly 1 per megabyte, and its bolt-on Euro traveller plans charge something like 30 for 30MB, and limit you to 30MB per month. I can't figure out who the putative customer for this is: the travelling exec who really needs email on the road, but receives a tiny trickle of email every day, apparently.

The most absurd part is when you take an Orange UK Sim to France (France Telecom being Orange's parent company) or a T-Mobile Sim to Germany (Deutsche Telekom has the same relationship to T-Mobile except in the UK, where it's a joint venture with France Telecom) and the company charges an extortionate roaming charge for using their parent company's network, on the grounds that they're "different companies".

Which is the fundamental paradox of mobile so long as the mobile carriers remain a part of mobile computing, it will only work for so long as you don't go anywhere.

Cory Doctorow's new novel, For The Win, is out now

The writer of the new Doctor Who games for PC and Mac describes how the process differs from writing for TV. And Josh Williams, CEO of location based social network Gowalla talks takeovers and the future of the service. Plus this week's tech news.

The veteran games publisher puts on an eccentric and enjoyable show, with glimpses of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Ghost Recon Future Soldier

Filled with Gallic flair, psychedelic assurance and a few moments of bewilderment, Ubisoft's E3 press conference provided a stark contrast to the rigid, gamer-friendly posturing of Microsoft and EA. The games were a mixed bag of clear triple-A superstars and bizarre experiments, but with amusingly snarky US TV presenter Joel McHale presenting it was certainly the most entertaining and unpredictable event of the pre-E3 run in.

The show was bookended by two awesome staged performances. First up was ex-Sega legend Tetsuya Mizuguchi showing off a new Kinetic-operated version of his surreal music shooter, Rez. Named Child of Eden, it's a familiar mix of hardcore blasting, trippy visuals and thumping beats, but this time the action is controlled with gestures, claps and kicks. He explained that his inspiration, once again, is synesthesia (the medical condition in which sensory experiences are muddled, so people "taste" colours and "see" sounds). It turned out to be prescient primer for the rest of the show.

The big-hitters were doubtless Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Ghost Recon Future Soldier. Ubisoft showed off in-game footage of the former for the first time, with Ezio arriving in 16th century Rome and getting into a highly staged scuffle with the Borgio clan. The character models are incredibly authentic, dripping in contemporary detail, and the fighting looks to be solid and gory. In one extended fight scene on the city battlements, Ezio takes on several soldiers, hacking, slashing and stabbing his way through in a whirl of blood and clashing blades. When a burly knight approaches at the conclusion, our Assassin hero chucks a massive battle-axe at his chest sending him flying across the screen. The E3 crowd cheered like the viewers of a gladiatorial contest.

Story-wise, Ezio is now a leader of his Assassin clan, older, wiser but still prone to mistakes. His power has not gone unnoticed by the corrupt Templars, who seek to hunt him down and destroy him. As well as sword combat, players will be able to grab special items, at one point controlling a cannon on the city battlements, shooting at a vast enemy army attempting to breach the walls with enormous siege machines. It's out on November 16. It looks lovely.

Next up was Shaun White's Skateboarding, which is about as far from a standard athlete-endorsed sports product as you can get. Instead of a rigidly authentic skate sim, it's a surreal futuristic fantasy in which an Orwellian organisation known as the Ministry has drained the world of colour and cheer. As a rebel skateboarder, players need to bring life back into the environments by creating their own skate runs through the city streets, discovering ramps and grind rails, and also creating their own grind paths on the fly using the analogue stick.

It's part Jet Set Radio, part Okami, but I can't say much else as the creative director, Nick Harper, is my brother-in-law. What I can say is that I was enormously proud of him. What you don't get from simply watching this array of highly staged conferences is the massive work and sheer panic that goes into them the multiple rehearsals and the concern about relying on early code at such a pivotal event. Nick told me that when the confident-looking Mizuguchi came backstage he breathed the biggest sigh of relief he'd ever seen.

Shaun White Skateboarding ushered in a selection of very offbeat titles. Battle Tag is a console version of the popular Lazer Tag game, which provides players with plastic guns and sensor vests so they can run around the house pretending to shoot each other. In this version, data is sent to the machine which keeps scores, performance data and stats from the scuffles. It looks like gamers can use little plastic markers to create their own game levels in and around the home, with players having to tag these during fights. I'm not sure I entirely understood what was going on, but each copy of the game will come with two guns and all the rest of the required equipment.

Next up came Innergy, presented by Ubisoft's accurately titled new concept director, Tommy Francois. It appears to be a deep breathing simulator, which comes complete an energy sensor that clips on the user's finger and monitors the pulse rate. The action involves guiding a bubble through a wavy rainbow landscape, by breathing in a controlled, relaxed manner. The visuals are hugely reminiscent of titles like Loco Roco and Katamari, and proved rather hypnotic in their own right. It's all about relaxation, and Francois claims that the impact on blood pressure of these exercises has the same impact on blood pressure as loosing 20 pounds. Hmm. This is clearly not aimed at the veteran gamer market and feels more like a mini-game or a section of a wider experience (perhaps it is; it wasn't that clear). But it does seem to work Nick told me that amid a backstage atmosphere of sheer nervousness, Francois was the picture of Zen-like calm.

We then saw two Kinetic titles. Motion Sport is a multi-event sports sim, complete with downhill skiing (in which you can physically chuck snow in your opponent's face), American football and "soccer". There was also more time for Your Shape Evolved, Ubisoft's promising fitness title, revealed during Microsoft's Kinect presentation on Sunday evening.

Next, Raving Rabbits Travel in Time, an amusing-looking new adventure for Ubisoft's cuddly Wii heroes, in which they interfere in key moment's of man's development. There's a great scene showing them in a tunnel beneath King Arthur's stone, holding on to the blade of the sword as the young legend tries to prise it out. Lots of knockabout comedy and brash visuals, and exclusive to Wii.

Fresh in-game footage of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier provided a stark contrast. Once again, Ubisoft claims to have grilled military experts and arms agencies throughout the world to discover the next generation of weaponry which they've then packed into their squad-based tactical shooter. Hence, players get a remote control mini-robot, like a bomb detector droid, but with a machine gun. There's also a shoulder mounted mini-grenade launcher and a cloaking device that renders you and your colleagues partially invisible. A quote on the screen claims that, "The future of the soldier is an F16 on legs", and that's certainly the feel this game is going for.

We're shown a level taking place in a rundown seaside town somewhere in Northern Europe (I didn't see any Kiss Me Quick hats so we can rule out a British resort). Here the squad must take out a group of enemy soldiers placed around and under a pier section. It's all about sneaking up and making silent kills with the cloaking device switched on. There's a great moment where producer Adrian Lacey creeps up behind a guy at a gun emplacement, and shoots him from behind, then holds him up so a passing enemy doesn't spot that his hombre has just been blasted. "That guy clearly isn't paying enough attention," quips McHale.

It looks like classic Ghost Recon, a slow-burning mix of stealthy progression and then fast, explosive shootouts. They show us another section when the player and his squad are holed up in a building as an enemy helicopter approaches, carrying what looks like some kind of robotic tank on a long chain beneath it. The player takes out the pilot with one shot and the chopper goes into a spin, flailing its cargo around the battlefield. It's beautifully staged.

After a brief look at Driver: San Francisco, which seems to be melding classic cop chase gameplay with a Life on Mars-type plot (the hero, John Tanner, is in a coma and is imagining the whole thing. Huh?), there's a brief presentation by Ubi's CEO Yves Guillemot. He showed off a new project from legendary designer Michael Ancel. It's a visually gorgeous new Rayman game, but more on that in another post. The event ended with its key revelation a new Michael Jackson dancing and singing game, using music and dance moves from the late King of Pop's vast career, and supporting Kinect and PlayStation Move. The details were vague, but it looks like you'll be taught whole group routines, from hits like Beat It and Billie Jean, allowing you to get together with friends and pretend to be in Jackson's classic videos.

The cheering and applause echoed out through the vast auditorium of the Los Angeles Theatre. Jackson has still got it and Ubisoft, swaying between blockbuster releases and odd experiments (some promise to be successful, some perhaps less so) is still the unpredictable sometimes mystifying European art house provocateur of mainstream games publishing.

Xbox 360/PS3/Wii; 39.99; cert 3+; EA Sports

Famously, amid Tiger Woods' recent woes, his brand-partners abandoned him in droves but at least EA Sports stuck by him. And the latest version of the golf game that bears his name should provide him with some consolation, as it's very good. Although one aspect which, on the face of it, might add to his creeping paranoia strikes you when you see the packaging: for the first time, Tiger is joined on the cover by another pro golfer, Northern Irish hot-shot Rory McIlroy.

McIlroy's presence shouldn't be seen as evidence that EA Sports is hedging its bets on Brand Woods, though. Rather, it reflects the fact that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 contains a virtual facsimile of the Ryder Cup which will run this October at Celtic Manor in Wales, so a European poster-boy is required along with an American. The game's inclusion of the Ryder Cup should provide fans of the franchise with all the motivation they need to buy the latest iteration, and it is implemented in a commendably flexible manner: you can pretend to be Colin Montgomerie and pick a squad, then jump into whatever ongoing match takes your fancy after each hole. If you opt for the defaults (but choose the European team), you will be paired with McIlroy against Woods and Jim Furyk, at least in the initial stages of the tournament a daunting proposition.

However tempting, it's best not to jump straight into a Ryder Cup, as Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 has a new RPG-style Experience Points (XP) mechanism. You earn XP for things like hitting fairways and greens in regulation, plus sinking birdies and eagles. But great chunks of XP can be liberated by taking on Skills Challenges, fronted by various pros, in which, for example, you might have to match noted short-iron specialist Boo Weekley around the greens. You can then cash in your XP on a bewildering array of attributes (or virtual items in the Pro Shop), and it makes sense to improve your golfing skills before taking on the hopes of a continent in the Ryder Cup.

You can also play an entire PGA Tour season, emphasising that this is a very meaty game. Along with the XP, there is another new gameplay mechanic called Shot Focus, which lets you improve length and accuracy by adding power-boost to your shots, imparting spin in mid-air or seeing a preview of your putt's likely course. But this is finite, so you must use it sparingly (although it recharges over the course of a few holes).

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 looks absolutely stunning: at last, there is a clearly visible demarcation between fairway and rough, and the cloud-studded skies and camera angles are great to behold. There are also plenty of engine tweaks that make the game more true-to-life: the wind can now swing around from shot to shot, for example, and your ball will no longer automatically be dead in the centre of your aiming circle, even if you catch it perfectly. Hitting from the rough is more unpredictable. Two teams of 12 people can contest a Ryder Cup online, and there's a slightly gimmicky mode called True Aim, which gives you a view close to what a real golfer would see and makes you think more about yardages. A very classy effort, which should bring a rare smile to Tiger Woods' lips.

Rating: 4/5

Stephen Fry tweeted "Help. I'm stuck in a repeat loop" six times this morning. Trust him to make a joke of it, but after a period of delightfully smooth uptime, Twitter's wobbles in the past few days have made a lot of people very grumpy. So what's going on?

Well, it started with a not-very-sexy technical problem, as explained on Twitter's engineering blog. Despite spending "much of 2009 redesigning Twitter's runtime for scale", an internal networking problem caused a wave of problems from Saturday onwards.

Once that was sorted, a failed upgrade last night took Twitter down for several hours. "We're currently experiencing site availability issues resulting from the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching," said the Twitter status blog. That affected user counts, but those will be reinstated.

Twitter Places

What the downtime obscured was the launch of something much more interesting - a new location feature announced late yesterday. Twitter Places lets users tag tweets with locations, which you can see by clicking the link in tweets to display a map.

The location feature has been added to Twitter's API, so you'll start seeing it in third-party apps as they update. There's intergration with Foursquare and Gowalla, so check-ins will be combined with tweets of places that are mentioned.


Photo by Robert Scoble on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Twitter Places will slowly be rolled out to 65 different countries, so if you see the 'add your location' link when you're posting, you can start tagging with places.

It makes absolute sense for Twitter to do this. I'm hoping this will soothe the clumsy check-in procedure for both Foursquare and Gowalla. It's incredibly frustrating trying to check-in but having to wait for the app to refresh, the venue options to load, then doing the same with Foursquare or Gowalla (depending which you opened first), waiting for a bad data connection to resolve itself and hanging around the entrance trying to check-in while you're 'within range'...

All we really need is a queuing system, and centralised check-ins. Perhaps we will eventually be able to fire off a geo-tagged tweet to Twitter, that will auto check-in to Foursquare and/or Gowalla. We'll worry about check-in cheats later...

What a strange world we live in, where the dominant players in an industry can literally flip-flop overnight with the underdogs.

First, the FTC approves Apple's acquisition of Quattro Wireless without even blinking, so that it could enter the mobile-ad business, then meanwhile it makes Google (NSDQ: GOOG) wait months for approval to purchase AdMob. And now, just weeks after citing Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) as the reason why Google can purchase AdMob, the FTC is now preparing to review allegations that Apple is engaging in anti-competitive tactics to restrict rivals in the mobile-advertising market.


Photo by sam_churchill on Flickr. Some rights reserved

People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the FTC and U.S. Justice Department had been discussing which regulatory body should conduct the investigation.

Spokesman from either Apple or the FTC declined to speak to Bloomberg, however, the central issues appears to be whether recent actions taken by Apple will result in less competition in the burgeoning mobile ad market.

This week, Apple banned mobile ad networks, such as Google's AdMob, from collecting information like a person's location to provide more relevant advertising. The move prompted AdMob's CEO Omar Hamoui to write a blog post, saying that Apple is being anti-competitive: "The terms hurt both large and small developers by severely limiting their choice of how best to make money. And because advertising funds a huge number of free and low cost apps, these terms are bad for consumers as well," he wrote.

The way Apple wrote the terms doesn't seem to preclude most ad networks from collecting data, just mostly companies that also have a mobile handset business, like Google, or potentially Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) or Nokia (NYSE: NOK).

We'll be addressing some of these themes during our next conference, paidContent 2010 Mobile: Leveraging the Smartphone Boom, July 20 in New York City. You can find out more about the agenda and register at http://paidcontent.org/event/mobile2010/.

PSP; 29.99; cert 15+; Konami

The Sony PSP is almost the forgotten handheld console. Compared to the ever changing and ever popular Nintendo DS and iPhone/iPod Touch (and now the iPad), the PSP feels like yesterday's toy.

Last year's neat but commercially underperforming download-only PSPGo didn't help matters either and a skimpy release schedule shows publishers are not sold either. Which is a shame as the PSP has always been the best handheld for gamers who want the depth of a 360 or PS3 game on the go. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is a classic example. This is a truly epic PSP game with a lengthy main game supplemented by numerous objectives and challenges.

The meat of the game is the standard mission-based Metal Gear Solid action. So think lengthy cut-scenes, unfathomable plots and lots of sneaking and subtle dispatching of guards. The good news is that the cut-scenes and plot have both been toned down for this handheld instalment and you are never too far away from the action. Less impressive is the inability to save anywhere you can bet you'll be stuck fighting an end of level boss character while trying to jump off a bus or train. You will need as few distractions as possible too as some typical Metal Gear Solid difficulty spikes particularly in boss battles crop up more often than is enjoyable.

As always with Metal Gear games, stealth is key. Jumping in all guns blazing simply multiplies your threat and usually ends your mission. Mercy is rewarded too, with those enemies you have knocked out rather than shot getting scooped out of the battlefield and added to your growing back at base army. This army is crucial, with captured troops used for combat, intelligence and research. This ongoing development and the new gear you get from it is an addictive sidegame in itself.

The controls are a little fiddly though not in Monster Hunter league but there are plenty of configuration options. The graphics are generally impressive too, and prove that the PSP can more than hold its own.

Overall, there is a lot to like here. The depth of the game means this is a console game you play on your handheld rather than a perfectly created portable experience. But gamers would expect nothing less from the Metal Gear brand. Peacewalker may renew interest in the PSP or it may just be the last great game for the original PSP. Either way, this a must for PSP owners.

Rating: 4/5

Last week's security warnings are obviated by the new download - but mind you don't get saddled with unwanted anti-virus on the way

Following last week's warnings about a serious security vulnerability in Flash, Adobe has posted version 10.1 of its player - which seems to fix the vulnerability. If you're using Flash (and that's pretty much everyone except you iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad users), then you should update.

There's some explanation of how to do that too at Microsoft's Clubhouse ("the place to have some fun by showing others what you know about Windows and to learn new tricks and tips every day" - no exclamation mark included, apparently). There we note some of the sneakier stuff involved in getting you to update your system:

"If you use the Adobe Flash Player Download Center, be careful to UNCHECK the box shown below. It is not needed for the Flash Player update!"

Sneaky, that - trying to get you to install McAfee Security Scan Plus when all you actually want is an update of Flash.

Jill Llewellyn's daughter wants a camera for her birthday, and she plans to share her photos on Facebook

For her 12th birthday my daughter would like a simple (cheapish!) digital camera that she can mainly use to take pictures of friends and get them onto Facebook. I assume this means loading pics onto the PC first and then transferring them to Facebook she has her own laptop connected to our wireless broadband. Have you any suggestions? I notice that a Fujifilm AX245W Pink digital camera is on offer at Tesco, down from 119.97 to 69.97. Tesco also has the Fujifilm FinePix Z70, down from 119 to 99, which can upload pics/video to Facebook and YouTube, though it's a bit more expensive than I'd like.
Jill Llewellyn

A good camera for young daughters, which I included in the Technology section's Christmas gift guide, is the pink Samsung ES55, which Amazon.co.uk is selling for 64.90. It's 13th on Amazon's bestsellers list for compacts, and ranks about 19,000 places higher than the Fujifilm AX245W in Electronics & Photo. (You can buy from other sources, of course.)

One of the Samsung ES55's advantages is the lithium ion battery, and the camera can optionally be recharged from a PC's USB port. The Fujifilm AX245W and many other compacts use AA batteries, which adds to the running costs.

Note that in both cases you will need to add an SD (Secure Digital) memory card. There are lots of cheap 2GB SDHD cards available, if you don't already have a spare.

Another disadvantage of both cameras and of most compacts nowadays is the lack of an optical viewfinder. Pictures have to be framed using the screen on the back, and this can be hard to see in sunlight.

Your daughter will need to transfer the pictures from the SD card to her computer before uploading them to an online service. Many laptops now have an SD card slot to make this easier. If not, she could use a small plug-in USB adaptor.

The Fujifilm Finepix Z70 aims to make it simpler to upload photos to Facebook and other sites. What you do is select images for uploading while they are still in the camera. Then, says Fujifilm's site, "When the FinePix Z70 is connected to a PC, the marked images are uploaded to the designated site, eliminating the need for time-consuming PC-based image processing or selection." For this to work, the PC has to be running the MyFinePix Studio software supplied with the camera.

But you're paying quite a lot for the convenience (compared with 65 for the ES55). For that sort of money, the Canon PowerShot A1100 is a better camera, and it has a viewfinder. Amazon.co.uk has it in pink for 103.92, reduced from 219.

You don't say if your daughter already has a Facebook account: many children do. However, Facebook's privacy policy states that users must be aged 13 or older, adding: "If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13, we will delete that information as quickly as possible." That could be a bit devastating for a child who has put a lot of effort into building up a profile and network of friends.

Either way, you must make sure that your daughter understands that Facebook does not store her original photos, and that she must not delete them from her PC. If she uploads a high resolution image measuring 3648 x 2736 pixels, Facebook will reduce it to about 720 x 540 pixels. In other words, it will throw away the 10MP image and show a 0.3MP image instead. This makes sense to Facebook because it stores billions of photos. However, it does mean that Facebook images are useless for making prints.

(Facebook users could resize their own prints to 720 pixels wide then upload the smaller versions, but I don't know anyone who does this manually.)

The low quality of Facebook photos is a great leveller, and many people send photos directly from their camera phones, without using a PC. The drawbacks are that smartphones can be expensive to buy and even more expensive to run, and even the best cannot match good cameras for flexibility and image quality. But it might be worth considering a cheaper touchscreen cameraphone such as the Pink Samsung Genio S3650, which costs 59.50 on Vodafone PAYG from Amazon.co.uk.

The Genio S3650 or Corby takes 2MP photos and has software to connect to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. It also has an FM radio, and it works as a video recorder, MP3 player, and games machine. Again, you will need to add an SD card for storage.

Finally, there's also another way of cutting out the PC stage: just add Wi-Fi to the camera. This can be done by using an Eye-Fi card, which combines wireless with 2GB to 8GB of memory in a tiny SD card. This is not a cheap option, at the moment, but I expect more cameras to have built-in Wi-Fi in the future.

Lost in a sea of irreconcilable needs? Look no further

Seat Ibiza 5dr FR TDI

Price 16,840
Top speed 130mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 8.2 seconds
Average consumption 60.1mpg
CO2 emissions 123g/km
Eco rating 8/10
Bound for Starbucks
In a word Agreeable

Sometimes although not that often one does have to feel a little sympathy for the car industry. Not only does everyone identify the car as the main cause of urban congestion and pollution, as well as a major contributor to global warming, but nearly everyone wants one, if they haven't already got one (in which case they probably want two).

And what many of us want is a small car with plenty of space, that doesn't burn much fuel but is also powerful and speedy, that feels fun to drive while being serious about carbon emissions, and looks good without appearing too conspicuous. Oh, and affordable, too.

Just a few years ago, those kinds of demands would have inspired nervous breakdowns in the most innovative designers, but now cars that go a long way to fitting that conflicting bill are in some sense a reality.

Take, for example, the Seat Ibiza FR TDI. A couple of years ago I drove an Ibiza 1.6 with a 0-62mph acceleration of 10.5 seconds and fuel consumption of 42.8mpg. The new Ibiza FR TDI, with an admittedly larger two-litre engine, gets to 62mph in 8.2 seconds and has an average fuel consumption of 60.1mpg. OK, it's true that it's almost six grand more expensive, but still, that's a pretty dramatic improvement in statistics.

But stepping back from the figures, what about its figure? The Ibiza tries hard but no one would accuse it of being a thing of great beauty. It conforms to the standard hatchback shape, and while there is a lot to recommend that shape in terms of ergonomics and ease, it is now rivalled only by the facade of Starbucks and the generic roundabout as the dullest form of design on the planet.

Still, most of us are willing to tolerate its ubiquity as a payoff for its convenience. And the interior offers its own laudable attempt at compensation. It's clean, unfussy, with a pleasing attention to detail, and there's plenty of light, thanks to the sunroof. That said, you're not going to invite the neighbours to sit in it for the pure joy of the experience.

You might, though, invite them for a drive, because the Ibiza FR TDI is a surprisingly frisky little ride that should surpass most cars in its class and hold up against plenty of so-called hot hatches. The Ibiza is more a cool hatch, which is of course a contradiction in terms, in particular when the hatch in question is a diesel. Perhaps better to say there are a great many hatches, including those with petrol engines, that are far less cool.

So if you want a car, but you're lost in a sea of irreconcilable needs, the Ibiza might be the compromising island for which you've been searching.

Email addresses obtained by hackers after a breach of AT&T website

The White House chief of staff is believed to be among 114,000 iPad owners, including chief executives and military officials, whose personal details have been exposed through a breach of the website of the US phone network AT&T.

AT&T acknowledged the leak but said the risk was limited to the subscriber's email address and that the issue had been "escalated to the highest levels of the company". UK customers are not thought to have been affected or to be vulnerable to the same attack.

The names and email addresses of those involved apparently includes Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, members of the US Senate and House of Representatives, staff at Nasa and the department of homeland security, the New York Times, Viacom, Time Warner, bankers and venture capitalists.

It will be an embarrassment to Apple, which has sold more than 2m of the tablet computers since they went on sale in the US at the start of April, and late last month internationally. The iPad comes in two main versions, one with 3G and one without. The news that the 3G version could have been liable to hacking could depress sales of the more profitable version. It will also increase friction between Apple and AT&T, which has had the exclusive rights to sell the iPhone since 2007, and now the 3G-enabled iPad in the US. The exclusivity is believed to be a five-year deal but many Apple fans have accused AT&T's network of being unable to support their growing demand for bandwidth.

The Gawker website, which says it has seen details of the email addresses provided in a foot-high printout suggests that the flaw makes any of those people vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking. The breach was demonstrated by a team of hackers calling themselves Goatse Security, who have previously pointed to weaknesses in web browsers. They were able to use a flaw in the AT&T website to get the email address of any AT&T subscriber by providing a piece of data called an ICC-IDS, used to identify the SIM card belonging to that subscriber.

The team sent data to the site pretending to be each of a huge sequence of ICC-IDS devices, and requested the email address. They say they also shared the knowledge of the hack with others, until AT&T closed the breach a few days ago.

An AT&T spokesman said: "AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC-IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC-IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device. This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature [on the website] that provided the e-mail addresses.

"The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T. We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC-IDS may have been obtained."

"We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologise to our customers who were impacted."

Apple did not have any statement.

If the hackers have discovered a flaw that was widespread in AT&T's handling of the ICC-ID system, then it is possible that every owner in the US with an iPhone 3GS or a 3G iPad may have had their email address lifted by the group, and possibly others.

Only iPads which use 3G networking would be vulnerable to the hack, and although any device which uses a SIM will have an ICC-ID, it is not known whether the British networks which provide connectivity for the iPad would have the same flaw as AT&T's website.

Loss of DiggBar and change to Google's ranking algorithm may have had an impact on social bookmarking site

The famous American baseball manager Yogi Berra was also famous for his gnomic even Zen-like remarks such as "when you come to a fork in the road, take it" and "nobody goes there any more it's too crowded".

The latter seems to be the case for Digg, the site that exploded into web consciousness in 2004 and 2005 as part of the new wave of web 2.0 sites that, rather than telling you what you should read, let their readers determine what the day's most interesting stories were. Digg, founded by Kevin Rose, quickly outstripped Slashdot, the "news for nerds" site where editors picked and chose from among user-contributed links to post on to its news pages. And instead of sites being "slashdotted" by a flurry of clicks from Slashdot, they would stagger under the weight of Digg traffic as readers in their thousands followed links. BusinessWeek featured a lank-haired, stubble-faced Rose asking how he could have built a site of such (speculative) value so quickly. The $40m of venture capital it has attracted testifies to the excitement about its future prospects.

Now, the latest figures from compete.com, one of the many web metric measurement agencies, suggests that between March and April, Digg lost a third of its visitors from 38 million in March 2010 to 24.7 million in April below the 26 million it was claiming in 2008 when we interviewed Rose.

Why? The suggested reasons vary. One comment pointed to Rose's killing-off in April of the year-old "DiggBar", which meant that any links you clicked on were actually framed inside the digg.com site so people stayed longer. More important, anyone outside who clicked on a http://diggurl would be taken to the Digg site not the site being linked to. In killing the bar, Rose said that it had been "bad for the internet". But doing so may have been bad for Digg: if clicking on those links no longer takes you to Digg, there go loads of visitors.

A separate suggestion, via Twitter by Nick Halstead, is that tweaks in March and April to Google's ranking algorithm meant that Digg fell in its search results and that half Digg's traffic comes from Google.

Quite possibly both are correct. But either means that Digg's influence on news sites, which have over the past four years become familiar with incorporating Digg buttons all over their content and surreptitiously "digging" their content through various accounts, is on the wane. The drop in visitors can't be reversed without restoring the DiggBar, which Rose isn't going to do.

So just as you thought you were getting a handle on "social news", and which sites are important, the focus changes again. If Digg's visitors are indeed below the 2008 number, and the DiggBar was inflating visitor numbers, then it's unlikely there's any way back. Just as in American politics, there are no second acts on the web: the examples of Bebo, AOL, MySpace, Friends Reunited and many others show that it's OK to stop growing; what's not OK is to shrink, because you lose advertising income and can't increase your rates. Result: a death spiral.

Certainly, 24.7 million visitors in a month is a more-than-respectable number: but it's also an inflection point, where on Compete.com's graphs it begins to cross over with the rising traffic to twitter.com. But in fact, Twitter is already far bigger than Digg, because those compete.com figures only measure what desktop browsers do not mobiles, the mobile internet or API traffic via dedicated applications such as Tweetdeck or Twitter's official iPhone app. It's probably not an accident that a notably tidier Rose shorter hair, no stubble showed off in a video the other day how he wants to reshape Digg: when you log in you'll have "people you follow", who'll post links that you can "digg" to your followers and perhaps set off a chain reaction to find the stories of the day.

Looking at it, one thought that it looked exactly like Twitter, with perhaps a little more data. Rose as much as admitted it: "Because we're only links and news, we cut out all the miscellaneous status updates that you see on other sites," he says. So, Twitter without the gossip sociability? That's not quite closing the sale, Kevin.

Berra's other impenetrable aphorism may yet turn out to be the fate of Digg: it came to a fork in the road, and took it. But everyone else took the other one. For news sites, it means another adjustment to a new landscape. For Digg, it could mean life or death. Shall we give it a year?

Abdullah Gul tweets his disapproval and says officials will look at ways of reopening access

The Turkish president has used his Twitter account to condemn the country's ban on YouTube and some Google services.

In separate tweets, Abdullah Gul said he did not approve of the bans and had instructed officials to examine legal ways of reopening access.

Courts have blocked access to YouTube since 2008 after Greek users posted videos alleging that Ataturk was homosexual.

Last week Turkey extended the ban to some Google pages using the same internet protocol addresses as YouTube.

In January the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe urged Turkey to abolish or reform a law allowing it to block around 3,700 Internet sites.

Websites can be blocked under article 5651 of the Turkish penal code for a range of offences including insulting Ataturk, child pornography and encouraging suicide.

After reading nearly all of the documents at the centre of the UEA hacked emails, Guardian environment writer Fred Pearce discusses his new book which he claims is the definitive account of the scandal. The Climate Files is out this week.

In our regular Science Weekly podcast, Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith gives his view on the whole episode.

Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science.

Email scienceweeklypodcast@gmail.com.

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Listen back through our archive.

Subscribe free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed).

The Information Architects team have come up with a way of looking at Twitter that echoes maps of how the universe began

Back at the dawn of microblogging time, when Twitter had only just started, there were only three users who mattered: Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey - the three key people behind the service. Now there are more than a hundred million users - but the key influencers in this huge network can be quite easily identified.

Now the team at Information Architects have decided to come up with a neat Twitter visualisation, akin to The Independent's classic 1992 "How the universe began" graphic, of the top 140 Twitter influencers, "sorted by #name #handle #category #influence #activity" and by when they joined the service (which determines how close to the centre they are).

The size of the blob indicates how many followers; "influence" is measured by... actually, they don't explain, though possibly it's using something like the Twiinfluence algorithm.

Interesting to see who's in there: Stone and Williams, of course, but also latecomer Marissa Mayer (VP of search product and user experience at Google), who only joined in July 2009, and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google (December 2009) - and of course there's always Bill Gates, who didn't get on board until January 2010. And of course Stephen Fry and indeed Jonathan Ross.

You can get the PDF (1.1MB) or buy it from them for $99 because, as they remark, "we're convinced that our print is way superior to what you can do with your plotter". And you will need a plotter - the graphic is 84cm by 119cm.

We're happy to see that @guardiantech is in there, showing up in something like the place where Kappa Velorum would be in the Milky Way. (We've highlighted it below to help.)

Does this make any difference? Well.. it might do, if this list of the top 140 were made into a list. Anybody up for that, we wonder?

Last week the government released the massive Coins database. Find out what we know now
Coins explorer

The Coins (Combined Online Information System) data release continues. Here are the key points so far:

1. More data

On Friday the Liberal-Conservative Coalition government released another three years of data - which means we now have every financial year from 2005/06 to 2009/10 - and you can use our Coins explorer to help navigate around the data

2. Overspends at the National Audit Office

The National Audit Office spent more than 60m on the refurbishment works to its Grade II listed art deco offices in Victoria, central London, which included marble flooring and leather sofas; and nearly 20m on temporary accommodation while the works were carried out, between 2008 - 2010. Some 2.33m was spent on furniture alone. The NAO is in charge of monitoring government spending.

3. The government's bad debts

Government was owed tens of millions of pounds in unpaid student loans and overpaid benefits last year.

4. COINS is too complicated

George Osborne announced that COINS would be redesigned next year to make it easier to use

5. The government spends a lot of money on consultants

1.8bn spent on consultancy by government departments, up from 1.5bn in the previous year.

6. We now know a lot more about government spending

Spending: 60bn public expenditure in March before the election - in August (the lowest month) it was 44.3bn
European parliament: 6.8m spent on goods and services for members of the European parliament
Swine flu: 100m tackling the flu pandemic
Westminster: 25m net cost of the House of Commons
Academies: 31.83m spent by the Department for Children, Schools and Families
Lost legal fees: 111m Ministry of Justice provision for unbilled legal fees in October - up from 73m in April last year
Counter-terrorism: 4m Office of security and counter terrorism payments to local authorities

7. The Guardian's specialists have been through the first release of data

You find out more on what our specialists found here.

8. The list of suppliers to one major government department

Courtesy of Where does my money go? we've seen that the only way to get detailed spending out of Whitehall is still to put in a Freedom of Information request. They put in a request to the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs to ask them how much they had spent on individual suppliers - which is missing from Coins. The results are fantastically detailed - we've put them on a spreadsheet which you can download here, or roll through them below.

They're asking for help to put in more requests so that we can fill in the Coins holes - get involved via a Google spreadsheet. Does this mean we're still going to need to perform copious FoI requests in future?

9. We know more about how the government categorises public spending

Lisa Evans at Where Does My Money Go? has also put together a list of programme object groups just for energy infrastructure, transport and tackling climate change. There's also an interesting freedom of information request now for more details about government department's bank accounts.

10. COINS is not comparable to other government finance publications

Lisa Evans writes about the the machinations of how the database came to be made public.

I'll tell you the story of the COINS database, which is a store of public spending and planning data, and you can judge for yourself how similar the story is to a gripping TV show.

The way COINS is described in documentation is that it's a store for government spending records. In the background to reports on public expenditure, like the PESA report, and many of the Office of National statistics reports on government spending, the guidance says the reports rely heavily on COINS data.

I asked for the COINS schema, but what I got was the dimensions of the OLAP database and no description of the fields meant, so that was the first mystery. Then I requests and got the COINS training notes, but with all the screen shots and lots of the descriptions redacted, so this was the second mystery.

When I met some people from the Treasury to talk about COINS some more and they told me about the thousands of spending codes in COINS, which I then requested, but with a number of them redacted, this was the third mystery.

Then, on Friday 4th June, we got the COINS data itself, well a sample from this year, and some COINS guidance(PDF) to go with it. The guidance says:

It is possible that you won't be able to recreate the numbers that Treasury or ONS have published. This is because:

COINS has a single structure that is updated to reflect the latest classification of spend and organisation of government. The snapshots taken by the Treasury at defined points (e.g. to enable reports to be published) contain certain key fields, which then reference the latest structure. Any changes to the structure since the report was published may mean that it is not possible to recreate published figures;
of the time difference between the publication of aggregated information and this release of data, with the potential that data have been updated between the differing points in time.
Not all the data used to calculate these numbers are sourced from COINS.

So it's not possible to check the figures against the published reports, like PESA, to check we understand the data published. Another mystery.

So, effectively we can't compare Coins with other government data reports.

But, thanks to blogger Martin Budden - there may be a way of comparing. He has written two blog posts about COINS, one giving a brief overview of the COINS data format, and the second about how I used COINS to generate some of the PESA (Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses) reports. You can see more of what he's done with Coins at http://github.com/martinbudden/coins.

And, just for context, here's an interactive showing last year's overall spending by department.

Email us at coinsdata@guardian.co.uk if there's more you've found - or would like to know.

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After details of the UK Supreme Court's expensive website emerged, another FOI request has shown how the CPS site has spent more than expected for the past five years

Another day, another Freedom of Information (FOI) request revealing a quite extraordinary spend on a government website.

The latest one: the site for the Crown Prosecution Service for England and Wales, where development and running costs amounted to 370,000 in its five years, from launch (relaunch?) in 2004/5 up to 2008/9 - including 121,965 in the 2008/09 year alone.

That's to add to the discovery that the website for the new UK Supreme Court cost - which, as we noted late last week, cost a total of 360,000.

Kudos to Henry Kitt, who has been putting down a series of FOI requests along these lines to try to shine some light on what looks like a murky mess of the commissioning, building and running of government websites.

As Simon Dickson (who has done some website development for the UK government) points out, for the Supreme Court contract, fulfilled by Logica without a tender, you get a website with "pretty basic errors" in its HTML, no RSS feed, and which seems to consist almost entirely of PDFs - without even a basic press notice.

As Dickson comments, "You need to ask yourself whether 360,000 seems like a fair price for such a website. I'd suggest it isn't. Even with a significant allocation for design, I'd have thought you could produce a similar result - with better functionality - for 95% less. If there's more going on behind the scenes than is obvious from the front end, perhaps they might like to explain what. This is a perfect example of why I'm not scared of all the talk about massive public sector spending cuts."

So now we move on to the CPS site. What do we find in that FOI response? First, the costs breakdown:

• 2004/05 - 70,020.60
• 2005/06 - 49,407.55
• 2006/07 - 70,626.16
• 2007/08 - 58,016.85
• 2008/09 - 121,965.19

Well. That's a lot of money. Keep reading on, though, because you haven't found out yet how much the original tender was for. It'll make your jaw drop.

"Q: Where the costs have been incurred with external providers, please list the companies in question."

"A: The CPS IT Business partner Logica UK Ltd provides hosting and support of the CPS corporate website whilst ECRU provide web publishing support."

Logica, eh?

So how did Logica get that gig? Kitt asks:

"Q: I would also be grateful to receive full disclosure of the tendering process including proposals of all unsuccessful bidders. Please also detail future budget allocations for public websites where these have been considered."

"A: The information you have requested in questions five and six are exempt from disclosure by virtue of sections 41 and 43 (2) of the Act."

"Information provided in confidence is exempt information if it was obtained by the public authority from any other person (including another public authority) and the disclosure of the information to the public (otherwise under this Act) by the public authority holding it would constitute a breach of confidence by that or any other person..... Section 43 (2) of the Act provides that, information is exempt information if its disclosure under this Act would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of any person (including the public authority holding it). This is a qualified exemption and will require the balance of the public interest test."

Indeed it will. Surely the CPS needs to show that there's a public interest in *not* revealing more details about the tendering process. That is, there was one, right?

Back to the FOI result:

"The CPS acknowledges that there is a strong public interest in the need for transparency in the accountability of public funds and the way in which public money is being used effectively. In addition, to ensure that government departments are getting value for money when purchasing goods and services. However, the CPS considers that the public interest factors against disclosure outweigh the public interest for disclosing."

Show your working, then, CPS, for considering that:

"Releasing information may have a detrimental impact on the ability of the CPS to obtain the appropriate suppliers to cater for the specialist needs and requirements of the organisation. Further more the CPS position could be weakened when buying from a competitive environment if it were to reveal information falling within the procurement process. Such information could be potentially useful to future suppliers when proposing services to the CPS, which would adversely affect the effective use of public money. Disclosure could make companies or individuals reluctant to provide the CPS with commercially sensitive information in the future and consequently undermine the ability of the department to fulfil its role."

So the CPS is saying that if future companies put in a tender to do the work, they might not like the idea that others could see what they're bidding, or what they're bidding for, and how they allocated resources.

Hang on, though, there's more:

"You may be interested that a tendering exercise was carried out for a three year contract, estimated total value 45,000. Due to the value, a full Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) exercise was not undertaken. Seven suppliers were asked to bid after being identified as potentially suitable by the Central Office of Information (COI) and the CPS Communications Directorate. Only two bids were received and the contract was awarded to ECRU. "

Er, just a minute. A 45,000 three-year contract that spent more than that in every single year for the past five years? That sounds like project management gone horribly wrong at the very least.

We'd love to know who the failed bidder was - any clues?

In the meantime, we'll ask Logica if it can explain how the numbers grew so far, so fast.

Update: Afua Hirsch, our legal affairs correspondent, points out that the UK Supreme Court blog, which is not affiliated with the UK Supreme Court (it's actually run by the lawyers Olswang), provides far more useful coverage. And it has an RSS feed, too.

It looked horrible, and users hated it. Even so, Google persisted with it for hours - and only stopped it because of a 'bug'

Google ended its experiment to put a picture on its front page whether you wanted one or not only 14 hours into its 24-hour experiment, blaming the decision on a bug which meant that an explanatory link wasn't included.

The problem was caused when it added a World Cup doodle - which of course would look like a mess of pottage if you had chosen a picture for your background.

Really, Google? A bug meant you didn't include a link? And you didn't spot that during testing? Mmm.

In the blogpost originally posted to explain the use of the image, an update by Marissa Mayer, the head of search products and user experience, now notes:

Update June 10, 11:31AM: Last week, we launched the ability to set an image of users' choosing as the background for the Google homepage. Today, we ran a special 'doodle' that showcased this functionality by featuring a series of images as the background for our homepage. We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today's series early. We appreciate your feedback and patience as we experiment and iterate.

Judging by the number (and negative attitude) of the comments that we saw on our own post, and the fact that for some time "remove google background image" was appearing on Google Trends, this looks like an experiment that just went wrong. Either that, or as Simon Jary suggests over at PC Advisor, it was a means of making people think, when they went to look at Microsoft's Bing, that it was just horrible.

Either way, Google has probably got a few more people to sign up with it (to change the awful images), and perhaps made them think Bing isn't the thing. Or it has driven them into the arms of Safari or Opera, which didn't display the image for us. (Thankfully.) Chalk it up to experience, Marissa. And never do it again.

If you don't like Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), odds are you won't find much to like when Steve Ballmer talks. If you like Microsoft, you probably still won't and that's a shame. The Microsoft chief executive and chief software architect Ray Ozzie opened the last day of D8.


Photo by Rain Rannu on Flickr. Some rights reserved

The latter owned the quality-to-noise ratio but Ballmer, who can sound incoherent as he accuses Google (NSDQ: GOOG) of being with its dual OS efforts, came through with some points that needed to be made amidst all the verbiage. The best sum-up I've heard so far came from Rob Glaser, chairman of RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK) and a Microsoft alum in a tweet about a conversation during the session: "Guy asks me "Is Microsoft empire about to crumble?" Me: "Yes, like the British empire, not the Soviet."

Some bits from Ballmer; three videos embedded below.

Explaining why he thinks we're moving towards a era of general devices that can be used like appliances: "I don't think the whole world is going to be able to afford five devices a person." That may work in the "bubble world of Terranea," the resort just south of Los Angeles where D8 was held, he added, but not for most people. That's a reminder some people need to hear.

Ballmer tried to avoid letting the competition - Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). in this case - own all the definitions. "The real question is, 'what's a PC?'" For Ballmer, it includes shifting form factors that get smaller, lighter, faster. He's right: it's to the competition's benefit to make the category seem more narrow.

On mobile, Ballmer says it's about the value of "excellent execution." He didn't sugarcoat how much Microsoft has slipped: "We were ahead of this game. Now we find ourselves #5 in the market." He went into more detail in the segment in the video.

As for RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), Ballmer says, "The thing people miss about them is how good a job they've done on the consumer side."

Man of the moment Dennis Crowley, the Foursquare founder, spoke at the Mashable Summit this week, and gave the beginnings of some interesting answers in this brief voxpop afterwards.

He said venues have been extremely positive about the various marketing deals being set up on the service, because it helps them interact with their customers.

The difference between Foursquare and a Facebook page for a business, for example, is significant; brands need to devote quite a bit of time to curating that page online because Facebook is about maintaining relationships and contacts, and sharing information. Foursquare is much simpler, a status game where all the user needs to do is check-in and the venue, well, doesn't really need to do anything apart from watch who's regular, the time they come in and try and anything else that can inform their marketing accordingly. It is a social network, but one that continues "after you've closed the laptop," as Crowley put it.

Location tools are going to be very big indeed, particularly because there is an obvious commercial incentive for both the venue and the consumer.

And because they are going to be so big, there is massive competition in this space. Using both Foursquare and Gowalla, I'm constantly comparing and contrasting features between the two - what does work and what doesn't. And so are Foursquare's competitors, because reviews tool Yelp has controversially introduced kings, barons and dukes to its functionality. It might be the greatest form of flattery, but it also shows a remarkable lack of imagination.

It's shame this came out after the Mashable event, but we can only hope Crowley has a pop on his Tumblr, like he did last time.

Disconnecting downloaders will alienate the entertainment industry's most loyal customers

With the passage into law of the dread Digital Economy Act comes Ofcom's guidelines that are the first step toward rules for when and how rightsholders will be able to disconnect entire families from the internet because someone on or near their premises is accused of copyright infringement.

Consumer rights groups and privacy groups such as the Open Rights Group, the Citizens Advice Bureau, Which, and Consumer Focus participated in the process, making the Ofcom rules as good as possible (an exercise that, unfortunately, is a little like making the guillotine as comfortable as possible).

But this isn't the last word in the copyfight not even close. Because disconnection for downloaders will only serve to alienate entertainment industry customers (remember that the most avid downloaders are also the most avid buyers "most avid" being the operative word here the 20% of customers who account for 80% of sales, downloading, concert tickets, box-office revenue, DVDs, T-shirts, action figures, etc). And because those who download most avidly will simply change tactics.

The entertainment industry's capacity to gather evidence and make accusations against downloaders relies on the fact that, at present, most downloading systems don't bother to encrypt the traffic or disguise the user's identity. Neither of these things are very hard to do, though both are computationally more expensive than the alternative. But, in case you haven't noticed, computation is getting cheaper all the time.

Once non-anonymous, non-encrypted downloading bears a significant risk, downloaders will simple switch to anonymised, encrypted alternatives.

For example, SSL-based proxies like Sweden's IPREDator (use of which is also a tonic against identity thieves and other creeps who may be monitoring your network connection) provide a nigh-impenetrable layer of misdirection that confounds anyone hoping to trace a download session back to a user. And services like Easynews.com provide encrypted access to enormous libraries of material including infringing copies of popular shows, music and movies.

So why worry? If users won't be deterred from downloading and may even be driven to start taking care to protect their connections from snoops and creeps then how bad will the Digital Economy Act be?

Bad.

Because the naive user who only downloads occasionally will still be in harm's way, as will his family or housemates if his connection is disconnected by an entertainment bully.

And because once the state decides that it has a duty to police the internet to maximise the profits of a few entertainment companies (no matter what the public expense), it sets itself on a path of ever-more-restrictive measures. Once disconnection drives downloaders to make use of SSL-based proxies, watch for Big Content to inveigle their friends in parliament to enact laws prohibiting the use of virtual private networks never mind that these are the best practice of anyone trying to safeguard a corporate or organisational network.

Once the Act drives downloaders to use SSL-encrypted services that are harder to monitor, watch for the entertainment lobby to ask for great swaths of the internet to be blocked by the Great Firewall of Britain that the Act also provides for.

Once you swallow a spider to catch a fly, you're on a course to swallow a bird to catch the spider, a cat to catch the bird, and so on until you swallow a horse and every toddler knows that happens next.

The culture secretary wants us to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe. That's going to take some doing - such as surpassing Lithuania

The new culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that he wants - in the lifetime of this parliament (that's five years maximum) - to roll out broadband to remote areas which do not have high-speed internet access.

Here's what he said, again: "We are now ranked 33rd in the world when it comes to broadband speed, with an average that is nearly five times slower than South Korea", he said. "Within this parliament we want Britain to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe."

I'm sure that he's absolutely honest in that desire; note that he's expressing a want, not an objective. However, I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that by the end of this parliament we will not have the best superfast broadband network in Europe, no matter how much we might want one.

Presently, the best superfast broadband network - defined as the country which has the largest number of homes with fibre connections "to the home", aka FTTH - is (drum roll) Lithuania.

Eh? Yes, Lithuania is in the lead of the FTTH race at present, with 18% penetration. Sweden, Norway and Slovenia are above 10%. There's also Italy, France, the Netherlands and Denmark all making waves in FTTH. Quoth FTTH council Europe president Karel Helsen: "It is up to Germany and [the] UK to increase their efforts to follow as soon as possible."

Still, there is some good news from Fibrecity Holdings, which announced in May that "it intends to build the next Fibrecity networks, which will result in more than one million homes and businesses being connected to its fibre optic network over the next four years delivering standard speeds of 100Mbps and boosts of up to 1Gbps through the largest fibre to the home initiative in the UK."

Note that "intends". And note that it's not saying quite how much it might cost. Or how it's going to be paid for. Nor where the 1m homes are.

This is the crux with high-speed broadband: it's easiest to build it in cities, but the people who will really benefit from it are the people in rural constituencies.

The former fact means that telecoms companies are happy to pay for the building of the urban FTTH (and FTTC - fibre to the cabinet, the box on your street where the line are routed) networks, because they can charge people for the higher speeds they offer; you don't have to lay a lot of cable to get the payback. By contrast in rural areas, you have to lay a lot of cable (which is very labour-intensive, as well as capital-intensive) to pass relatively few homes. That means that rural areas don't get high-speed broadband (or even in some cases broadband) because it's not economic for the networks to build out to them. After all, if you had a choice of laying 500m of cable and passing 50 homes, or 500m of cable and not even passing 1 home, which would you go for in running your business?

Certainly Hunt's heart is in the right place. In the speech, he says: "It is a scandal that nearly 3 million households in this country still cannot access 2 Mbps broadband speeds, and less than 1% of the country is able to access the internet using modern fibre optic technology compared to an OECD average of around 10%. Some people ask why we need these speeds when the iPlayer can manage on less than one Mpbs. They are missing the point. Superfast broadband is not simply about doing the same things faster. It's about doing totally new things creating a platform on which a whole generation of new businesses can thrive. The Federation of Small Businesses has estimated that a superfast network could add 18 billion to GDP and create 60,000 jobs. NESTA thinks it could be ten times that 600,000 new jobs."

And a lot of those probably in rural locations - or at least not requiring people to shift from their present location, as superfast connections can let you collaborate remotely, rather than having to slow in all the time.

But that choice for telcos - 500m past 50 homes, or past one? - is an obvious one.

That's why building rural broadband, and especially building high-speed networks in rural constituencies, requires subsidy of some sort. The irony was that the Labour administration was prepared to fund this from the "outside in" - paying for those at the extremes of the network (basically, the Tory constituencies) to get connected, and so getting the telcos to pay for the bridging cost. The Tories, by contrast, were happy to push from the limits of the build (basically, Labour constituencies) outwards - but didn't, and I suspect still don't, like the idea of subsidies.

As we noted in March, the Tories' manifesto commitments weren't very helpful for rural communities.

Quite which model Hunt is looking for isn't clear. He said: "Government must ensure we do not open up a new digital divide between the urban areas most attractive to infrastructure providers and rural communities were superfast broadband may never be viable." OK, fair enough. Afterwards he added: "These rural broadband pilots will help us understand the level of government support that is necessary."

That's going to be quite a lot. The broadband consultancy Point Topic did a calculation which we wrote about earlier in the year: it reckoned it would require a subsidy of about 130m every year. Hunt says that the 250m "digital switchover" money from the BBC is going to be available for this. That would cover the bill; but is it going to be enough to get telecoms companies (actually, BT, because the capital and operational expenditure involved in rolling out fibre through over such large distances requires the sort of organisation that only BT can presently call on) to install it?

The comparison with South Korea, too, is false. That's a highly urban country, with the population very concentrated into cities, while the UK is (by comparison) far more evenly spread.

Still, it's good for Hunt to have ambitions. He says that "Broadband Delivery UK the organisation which will be the delivery vehicle for these policies and accountable to me will hold an industry event on 15th July to provide further details, and to describe how the procurement of these testing projects will be achieved." We'll certainly look to be there and find out more - especially to see how many "notspots" (above) can be filled in by 2015.

It lacks a PVR and Wi-Fi access, but the iPlayer is the saving grace of this Freeview box

With World Cup fever about to engulf the land just as Freeview HD launches, you can expect a flood of devices that pump Freeview HD to your telly in the next few weeks. One of the first is the nice but clunkily named i-CAN Easy HD, a small white plastic box (wait, white? Isn't white a bit last-century?) that includes not only that Freeview HD tuner, but what is also for me its killer app: the BBC iPlayer.

The Freeview stuff first: the HD picture seemed really not bad at all to my untrained eye on my 32in Full-HD Panasonic telly. At the moment, of course, HD content is limited to a couple of channels (BBC HD, Channel 4 HD and ITV 1 HD) and it's only available in some parts of the country. However, most of the time you'll be watching standard-def pictures, and I found those a bit soft and occasionally blocky. Sit far enough away from your telly, though, and that won't be a problem.

There's a comprehensive EPG and the onscreen menus are clear, though I thought the graphics were rather cartoon-like. However, they walk you clearly through the set-up and the box is up and running quickly. I had one minor irritation which was that I couldn't find how to turn off the default setting for subtitles, which is that they are on, and had to turn them off every single time I changed the channel. Apparently that's easy to fix a pity I didn't find that setting, though.

Where this box really shines, though, is with the iPlayer, which feels as though it's been set free by being beamed straight to your telly rather than you having to watch EastEnders on your laptop. The interface is easy to navigate and assuming your broadband connection can cope with it it will also deliver high-def content. It stuttered a bit for me, which I put down to the flakiness of wireless streaming, but it was really very good overall.

Mind you, you have to connect it to your router, and therein lies something I find infuriating. Why aren't devices like this equipped with Wi-Fi? This box, like every other piece of internet-capable TV equipment, comes with an Ethernet port. Now, I don't know about you, but my telly is nowhere near my router; and I do not want to sling great lengths of CAT-5 cable around my flat. Which means that you have to buy a wireless bridge Belkin does one for about 35 and set that up. I have a D-Link bridge with four ports but that is both expensive and surprisingly tricky to put on your network.

The remote is a bit confusing as it has various buttons that don't yet have a function, suggesting further clever tricks to come. And it, like a couple of other things about this box (like turning off the subtitles), isn't very intuitive you'll need to refer to the manual more times than you might like.

The biggest niggle of this box is that isn't a PVR if you want to record or archive material you'll need to add another piece of kit to the collection under your television. But if you want HD Freeview for a reasonable price ( 129), then this is a very good option. And having the iPlayer on it is just sublime.

Pros: HD content, the iPlayer, small and neat

Cons: Not a PVR, cartoony graphics, annoying remote, no Wi-Fi, not always intuitive

Advanced Digital Broadcast

Four idealistic students at New York University have raised $200,000 to fund a project building a more privacy-centric social network.

Diaspora isn't likely to take Facebook down just yet, but after a very flattering introduction in the New York Times a few weeks back the group watched hundreds of small donations flood in - more than 6,400 donations have been pledged so far - and in less than one month. Zuckerberg himself is rumoured to have contributed.

The four wrote on Monday that they had expected to scrape an initial $10,000 together through Kickstarter, the creative project funding site, from friends and family - but recognise they have "struck a chord with the world and identified a problem which needs to be solved".

That 'problem' is the need for what they describe as a "privacy-aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network".

"You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work," wrote the team: Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitromirskiy.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg was given a grilling by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at the D8 conference yesterday; what MarketWatch described as his "Nixon moment".

"Zuckerberg, literally squirmed in his seat, took off his famous hoodie sweatshirt and had a Richard Nixon-like moment under the grilling... Sweat literally dripped from his face as he mostly dodged giving specific answers about the backlash stemming from the popular social network's recent privacy changes that caused ire among users. Zuckerberg also mostly dodged specific answers about how the backlash stemming from another recent privacy uproar affected him personally."

Watch Zuckerberg answering key questions on privacy; as John Paczkowski says in the introduction "if you're looking to straightforward answers to those questions, you're going to be disappointed".

Man arrested by armed police at St Aelred's Catholic Technology College following warning of internet threat from America

Armed police were sent to a Merseyside school to investigate internet threats of an apparently imminent gun rampage after they received an alert from the FBI.

More than 1,000 students, some taking their GCSEs, were said to be in the school, which local media claimed was in virtual "lockdown" during the scare.

A 19-year-old man was arrested and later bailed over the incident concerning St Aelred's Catholic Technology College at Newton-le-Willows on Friday. It came after the FBI picked up a menacing posting on Facebook.

Headteacher Edward Marr sent parents a letter, saying: "Police officers attended school at 8am on Friday morning. They had a photograph from the internet and asked if I could identify a person on it.

"It emerged that a threat had been made against the school which had been picked up by the FBI in America and passed eventually, as the school was identified, to Merseyside police.

Chief Supt Chris Armitt, of Merseyside police, defended a decision not to close the school immediately.

He told BBC Radio Merseyside: "We received some information between 1am and 2am. That information was imprecise and we had to clarify what the information meant and what it related to."

The St Helens Star said web users had also alerted police after internet chatroom discussions about apparent threats. It reported there had been an internet image showing a gun-toting man with a hand-written message reading: "Tomorrow last day of school. We gonna fuck up the bullies and leave this world 11/06/2010."

Another message said: "Tested it at firing range, we have two shotguns as well, it's locked in but tomorrow I have a key. St Aelred's Catholic Technology College, England, watch BBC."

What's happened to us? We used to be a nation of complainers. Now, we don't seem to care. The British Board of Film Classification has released its annual report, revealing the fewest complaints for years: just 365 emails and letters, and not all of them moans. Top of the list was not a movie but a game: 12 complaints for Modern Warfare 2. Lars von Trier's Antichrist, with its scenes of genital mutilation, got 10 complaints, although none from people who had seen it.

Gamesblog gets its hands on Nintendo's wonderful 3D gaming handheld, and tries out Metal Gear, Resident Evil and Kid Icarus!

Nintendo didn't mess around at E3. Having shown off an array of intriguing titles featuring a nostalgic cast of the company's most cherished characters, CEO Satoru Iwata then revealed the Nintendo 3DS, a handheld console complete with glasses-free 3D technology.

As with the Nintendo DS, the console features two screens. At the top is the 3.5" display that provides the 3D visuals, while at the bottom there's a slightly smaller touch screen display. On the right-hand side is a slider that controls the level of the 3D graphical effect it can even be switched off completely. On the left-hand side of the touch screen there's an analogue controller and a D-pad, while the usual four-button array sits on the right. There are also three cameras, one above the screens, and two on the other side, which will allow users to take 3D digital photographs a fantastic little feature.

Iwata-san didn't confirm any technical details, but mentioned that the graphics processor has been updated since the Nintendo DS, allowing for better visuals. The device also contains an accelerometer and a gyro sensor for full motion controls. A subscription free wi-fi service is also included, which keeps 3DS owners connected at all times and automatically downloading game data and other extras whenever they become available.

Alongside the announcement of Nintendo's Kid Icarus Uprising, an RPG adventure designed exclusively for the device, dozens of developers and publishers were revealed to have games in development. Highlights include DJ Hero, Resident Evil Revelations, Metal Gear Solid, Ridge Racer and Saint's Row. Nintendo is also working on Mario Kart 3DS, Paper Mario 3DS and Animal Crossing 3DS among several others. The release date is set for this Winter.

After the press event, key members of the media were ushered into a backstage area to get hands-on sessions with several game demos. Somehow, Gamesblog snuck in, as well.

And yes, it works beautifully. Nintendo is almost certain to have used an off-the-shelf lenticular screen technology, already seen in several mobile phones and laptops. You can perceive 3D only if the console is directly in front of you, but this is fine for handheld gaming. I actually found it pretty adaptable in terms of viewing from different vertical positions. It was much more sensitive if the handheld was turned slightly to the left or right, but really, it coped perfectly with the slight shifts and jerks you'd get on a morning commute.

I saw short, essentially non-interactive, demos of several titles. Kid Icarus, once a 2D platformer with RPG elements, is now a lovely bright 3D adventure, with some gorgeous aerial sequences. When the angelic lead character flies through the clouds with the ground far below, there's an amazing sense of depth and scale, totally at odds with the relatively small size of the screen (an effect that Iwata-san hinted at in his presentation).

We were also allowed to see a short demo of Resident Evil Revelations, a 3DS-exclusive from Capcom. The action seems to take place on a giant ocean liner amid a terrifying storm. On board are Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine who seem to be coming to blows over some typically obtuse Resi plot point, while a shady prisoner looks on. This time, we could use the analogue stick to look around the scene, using short smooth wiping motions on the button. It's also possible to zoom in and out using the A and B buttons.

The longest demo was a 3DS version of Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater. From a first-person perspective, we join Snake crawling through the undergrowth of a jungle back in 1964, encountering the odd exotic animal as leaves flutter around the character. At one point he triggers a trap which sends a spiked log rolling quickly toward the camera, before it bounces over. The sense of depth here, and the way the 3D visuals allow you to pick out different levels of the foliage, make this impressively dramatic.

My favourite bit was when Snake stands up and walks over a rope bridge. At this point the demo allowed me to pan the camera all around him, getting an awesome 3D view. It's hard to describe, but in some ways this 3D Snake resembles a beautifully painted Games Workshop figurine.

The most interactive demo was Nintendogs + Cats, a new 3DS version of the classic pet sim from Shigeru Miyamoto. Here I could choose from three puppies, a beagle, golden retriever or Yorkshire terrier, then watch my canine pal gambol about a 3D room. If the dog comes up and lean on the screen, you can pet it by stroking the touch screen. It's also possible to select from a series of items to share with the dog. There's a ball and a boomerang to throw (using a wipe on the touch screen), and, as in the original, you can dress the poor thing up; items included a Mario cap, woollen hat and a selection of sunglasses. You can even give your unfortunate pooch a pompadour haircut.

Nintendo was also showing off a basic version of the photography software, allowing users to take photos and use the analogue stick to shift the two versions of the image until it worked as a 3D photo with a separated background. This could well prove to be a key selling point in the casual sector it's just so much fun.

Finally, there were a couple of movie trailers on show. Nintendo has forged deals with Disney, Dreamworks and Warner to make a selection of 3D animated movies available on 3DS via digital download. There are no details yet, but I saw Disney's new Tangled movie and the effect was spot on. My sons will love it.

Rich colours, a robust 3D experience and some intriguing games, this was my moment of the E3 experience so far. There are three days of the main show to go though...