I have 2x New Trent 5000mAh battery chargers and 2x Philips SCE4430/05 battery chargers.

The New Trent 5000mAh will give me about 40% extra power on my iPad (which already enjoys a massive 10 hours battery power), or I can get around 3x full charges of my iPhone 4.

The Philips SCE4430/05 which I have previously mentioned here and here, will give me around 1x full charge of an iPhone 4. I actually do have 3x of these and not 2, although one requires a reverse adapter (which I conveniently forget) so I tend to not use this one so much.

So in essence if I take all 4x battery chargers out I can get a massive 8x full charges of an iPhone. For the most part I never usually have to charge up my iPad as I’m never away for more than 10 hours from an electrical plug socket, but it’s nice to know I have some power on tap if I need it.

For the most part if I’m only out and about for a few hours then I’ll take my Philips SCE4430/05 with me, or if I’m out for 5+ hours then I’ll carry around the New Trent 5000mAh charger. I usually keep at least one in the car, so if I need to I can run back to the car to get additional juice.

The great thing I like about both of these battery chargers is they have a standard USB socket on them, so pretty much any USB cable you have for a phone or gadget will connect into these devices. So no real need for these attachment bits that some chargers come with (and that you always happen to lose).

The Philips SCE4430/05 is great for putting into your shirt pocket with ease, the New Trent will fit into your shirt pocket and it’s the same dimensions of the iPhone 4, but a little heavier, so although you could put your iPhone 4 and New Trent charger into the same shirt pocket, it does look a bit on the bulky side.

I always pack at least one of the New Trent 5000mAh battery chargers into a bag I carry whether it’s an iPad bag, gadget bag or even my Messenger (over the shoulder) Laptop bag or rucksack. That way I always have something available fully charged and ready to go just in case I ever need it. You’d be surprised the amount of times you think, I’m running low on battery or I need a quick top-up. Whether it’s in meetings where you might have plug sockets but no charger plug lead to being out in the street, out on location photographing something or at a friends house.

The Noosy Micro SIM cutter by Lupo is a very good cutter, it comes in what resembles a mini single hole punch with 2x SIM card adapters. It’s a no fuss cutter, simply insert the SIM card (right side up) into the cutter end, then press down hard, and it cuts out a Micro SIM card for you that works really well in every device I have tried it in so far.

When cutting it does a very sharp precise cut so if you didn’t want to use the two supplied SIM adapters you can simply place the Micro SIM card that’s been cut out of the full size SIM card and place it back in the hole that remains in the main SIM card, and put a piece of sticky tape over it and still use it in a full SIM card device.

I purchased my SIM cutter from Amazon for around £12 + postage, some people might think that’s a lot to pay for a SIM cutter, but if you want precise cutting, the ability to still use the outer part of the SIM card as an adapter and a no hassle 2 second cutting action, then this is a great device and well worth the money. So far it hasn’t ruined a single SIM card!

The only gripe I would say is the two adapters provided are made out of a rubber like substance, so they bend quite a bit and I found the Micro SIM cards that were cut didn’t quite fit inside these as well as they should, but seriously you don’t need them. Just keep the outer part of the new Micro SIM card as an adapter.

It lead me to think about the complete SmartPhone series, currently the iPhone and Android phones are now dubbed the SmartPhone and the older style phones that didn’t have app installs or widgets are now classed as ‘feature phones’. The Orange C600 was a phone that straddled between both categories it had app support but it wasn’t a touch screen device.

It seems that the non-touch screen devices are on the way out, not many manufacturers make them now. All new devices are touch-screen devices, and most now don’t even sport a hardware keyboard. It’s kind of interesting being in the Tech World and seeing how things evolve year from year. It was only 4-5 years ago that phones like the Orange C600 were the in-phone, now it’s just a blast from the past relegated to the phone graveyard in the sky.

The Orange C600 was great because it was a Windows Mobile device, you could install Windows Mobile (non-touch-screen) apps to it, it operated as a very good phone and synced your contacts natively from Outlook using ActiveSync. It was clean, simple and workable. How things have moved on…..

1) I wanted to get the iPad from the US before it was released in the UK and at that time the iPad WiFi version was the only one available at that time.

2) I typically find 3G too slow, and if I could find a HSDPA router and create a WiFi hotspot just for myself from that router then I could achieve much higher speeds on the iPad when surfing the internet, downloading photos, music, blogging and much more.

If you take a look at the speed test image below, you’ll see I managed to get 3.21 Mbps on 3G. This is typically what the iPad WiFi +3G will achieve as standard.

Now if I hook up my HSDPA router to the iPad, I am able to now get a whopping 9.06 Mbps. Which is actually faster than my 8 Mbps ADSL line at home.

I use the HTC HD2 as a HSDPA / 3G router with an application called WiFi Router for WinMobile 6.5. It means I have to carry two phones, my main iPhone 3GS along with the HD2 but it gets me the speeds I want. Most of my apps are on my iPhone and not the HD2 so I still can’t replace my iPhone with the HD2 yet.

I should start out by saying that the HD2 can support HSDPA where the iPhone 3GS can only support 3G. That aside, here’s a comparison now in a low signal area comparing all three.

Left to right are the HTC HD2 (WinMobile), HTC Desire (Android) and iPhone 3GS (iOS4). Each of these are on the O2 UK network.

Click to see full image

Looking at all three devices above you’ll see all are showing 1 signal strength bar now. The iPhone 3GS is very closely showing what other devices are showing. So was the iPhone signal strength algorithm wrong? It looks like it had been, now fixed in iOS 4.0.1

I still had a doubt in my mind that although wanting to be an early adopter of the iPad that I would probably also buy the WiFi+3G model. Not only for the ability to have internet access when out and about but also to have the GPS access through the 3G chip.

Why have I decided I don’t need it? What’s changed my mind?

Well, the first reason is I don’t need a 10″ WiFi+3G to use as a navigation device in car, the 10″ device is really too large for most to place on the windscreen of the car, and there are no mounts available yet either.

The second reason is that I’ve now found a WinMobile app that I have purchased on the HTC HD2 called WMWifiRouter which allows me to setup my HTC HD2 as a WiFi Router and I can then use WEP or WPA2 to connect the iPad directly to this over WiFi just like I would connect the iPad WiFi to any other WiFi router.

WMWifiRouter works extremely well and for anyone that wants the WiFi+3G model but can’t shell out the additional cost and you also have a WinMobile phone then this is a must purchase at €14.99. It’s not cheap compared to some of the apps in the Windows Market Place, but it’s well worth it when you think that WiFi access in a hotel for 24 hours can cost £15! All you need to ensure is that you already have a 3G data plan on your WinMobile phone and that’s it! Note for other users of the iPhone and iPod, you can use these devices to connect to the WMWifiRouter too.

To use WMWifiRouter you need the following on your mobile device:
- Windows Mobile 5: AKU 3.3 or newer
- Windows Mobile 6: 6.0, 6.1, 6.5 or 6.5.3
- Both a wifi and a cellular data connection
- An installed and working version of Internet Sharing

Thanks go to Roman for letting me know there were WiFi Router apps out for WinMobile

The Desire is still working well except one really big snag. The Android operating system only allows you to install apps to the main internal memory of the device. This unfortunately gets used up very quickly when you start installing 30 apps, having both your GMail and Exchange email synced to your device.

Why oh why won’t Android let you install apps to the SD card? This is a severe limitation of the operating system and seriously makes it less of a contender to the iPhone. If you take a look at the unlocked price of a HTC Desire at £439.99 inc vat and a 16gb iPhone 3GS PAYG at £449.00 inc vat, then why can’t HTC include a 16gb flash drive into the Desire at that price? Surely HTC are trying to maximise their profits. It’s not that they can’t do it technology wise, they’ve done it before on other devices like the HTC Touch Diamond that had a 4gb flash drive, and it works really well. In-fact, my HTC Touch Diamond is still running strong 18+ months later.

Now I have used up almost all of other internal memory on the device, I have two options…Uninstall apps which I don’t want to do, or hard reset it to see if I clear out some other cache (again I don’t want to do this). It’s a bit depressing after 2 days usage of the HTC Desire that I’ve run out of memory.

After 3 days of usage although I really like the HTC Desire and the Android OS is starting to grow on me, and I can seriously see myself using the HTC Desire in daily life, I sadly can’t use it as my main device if it keeps running out of storage memory The iPhone 3GS clearly wins here. If HTC were to put a 16gb and 32gb flash drive in for the same price as the iPhone 3GS then this would be a serious contender to being a complete iPhone replacement.

The 2nd day is continuing to be great with the HTC Desire running Android OS 2.1. I’m finding more and more of my apps that I use on my iPhone on the Marketplace, but there’s still a heap of apps that aren’t on the marketplace or apps that I’m not prepared to purchase just yet because I have such an investment in the iPhone OS and iTunes.

I am really liking the HTC Desire, I think I could probably almost move across to this as my main device, but the games are severely lacking and in quality. Don’t get me wrong, there are some good games, but a lot of the games are very very basic that I’ve installed so far. Likewise a number of apps are pretty buggy, take Sky News for instance, it frequently hangs on the Desire. This is one of the downsides of the Android OS that each new OS and each new phone brings compatibility issues with it, worse than Windows Mobile!

The HD2, a fantastic device, lovely large screen, but the keyboard just isn’t that good. It mimicks what’s on the Desire but larger, but I constantly find that I type the wrong characters and the predicitive text doesn’t correct it anywhere near as much as it does on the Desire. The apps/games are seriously lacking from the Windows Market, Microsoft and developers have a long way to go to get it anywhere close to what Android has, and then a whole load more to get it to anywhere close to what the iPhone has.

So far although I love the size of the screen on the HD2, I just wouldn’t be able to use it as a proper device using it for Social Media, email, messenger and everything I do in my daily life. The Desire comes much much more closer to my experience on the iPhone, there’s one thing seriously annoying me and that’s the multi-tasking. It does do multi-tasking, but the problem is (like what Apple has suggested before about Android) is that if you try to multi-task then you find the device frequently slowing down or freezing just when you’re doing something important like typing a tweet or an email reply. This to me is unacceptable, and there has to be a somewhere inbetween level of allowing multi-tasking but not killing the processor, and I think from what we’ve seen so far of the iPhone OS4 preview, Apple probably have found that fine balance and this is where the iPhone OS4 will shine.

HTC Desire (Android)
- Has most of the apps I have installed onto the iPhone
- Facebook works well although doesn’t show my inbox for some reason
- Seesmic is a great Twitter experience on Android as it is on other platforms
- Android widgets work really well, love the ability to customise the desktops
- Gmail access works well although the Opera implementation of m.google.com is very poor (same on iPhone)
- Exchange Sync email/calendar/contacts works as well as the iPhone
- Friend Stream is good, but if you have Facebook and Twitter and follow a lot of people on Twitter it will override your Facebook contacts so I had to disable Twitter access, which was a shame
- Evernote works really well for all of my note taking
- Palringo works well for all of my messenger needs (same as iPhone)
- CoPilot (Satellite Navigation) works just as good as it does on iPhone
- Unfortunately no Skype access but I have installed Fring to do this instead
- Market Place is good, has lots of apps, hate the mixed $ vs £, I’m in UK so should just show £
- Market Place has a lot of apps but no where near as many as iPhone which is a real shame

HTC HD2 (WinMobile)
- Only have a few apps installed
- Facebook works well (uses same Facebook app I was running on WM6.1)
- Peep is the Twitter client, works okay but severely limited, e.g. doesn’t use Twitter lists
- No Seesmic on WinMobile Market
- No widget support (HTC TouchFLO 3D instead)
- Gmail access works well although the Opera implementation of m.google.com is very poor (same on iPhone)
- Exchange Sync email/calendar/contacts works as well as the iPhone
- Disappointed that although HTC built into TouchFLO the Twitter app, there’s no Facebook app
- No Evernote in the Windows Market unfortunately so I can’t scan through my notes
- No Palringo for my messenger needs (very disappointing)
- CoPilot (Satellite Navigation) works just as good as it does on iPhone and comes with a Free 15 day trial
- Unfortunately no Skype access or Fring access (Very Disappointing)
- Market Place is only just starting out so not a lot of apps or games there, but more are being added.

Overall if I were to use one of these devices as a complete iPhone replacement, the closest one that would come to this is the HTC Desire (Android). The Desire comes very close to the iPhone experience, unfortunately although the HD2 looks really nice with the bigger screen and the TouchFLO UI it’s severely lacking third party applications from the Windows Market.

The thing I’m struggling with is the keyboard, the keyboard implementation both on the the HTC Desire and HTC HD2 are identical. I find the keys too close together, although it’s nice to have the vibration feedback on typing each character, I would have preferred an audible alert because I can see if you do a lot of typing the vibration (although small), will deplete your battery more. I also keep finding that I’m typing the wrong characters. Trying to reposition the cursor to go back and retype to correct a word one or more words prior is real finicky on both HTC Desire and HTC HD2. I really thing Apple have got this 100% right with the iPhone. Also the iPhone’s Copy / Paste is much better than on the HTC Desire and HTC HD2.

These are my initial observations after only 1 day, I will continue using both devices to see whether I would be able to use these as an iPhone replacement, but the iPhone so far is still the clear winner both from ease of use, but also beacuse of the sheer amount of iPhone App/Games that are available int he AppStore.

The Desire is a new Android device, so will be good to see Android OS 2.1 up close and the Sense UI. The HD2 isn’t really newn the I wanted to do a complete comparison between the latest Android, WinMobile and iPhone devices to do a head to head comparison.

If you have either the HTC Desire or the HTC HD2, what do you think of these devices?

Microsoft wants to wipe the slate clean with Windows Phone 7 to compete head to head with Apple and Google, and that means all new software and hardware. What’s most interesting in this is that now Microsoft has made that official. THe HD2 is a great device for Windows Mobile but will HD2 sales be negatively impacted by this?

The concept behind Refresh is simple – it is essentially a small box containing half a dozen cables and connectors, with a rubberised tray sat on top. Just sit your devices on the tray and plug in the connectors and you have a clutter-free method of charging multiple mobile gadgets simultaneously.

The connectors include a couple for iPhone and iPod, plus mini and micro USB (the latter is set to become the standard connector for mobile phones) and a couple of female USB ports that you can use to attach any additional proprietary connectors as well.

Refresh is suitable for office or home and the compact size of the unit, which measures 241 x 142 x 45mm, makes it a good fit on most desks.

Additional connectors can be purchased for the following devices/phones

- EX-001 Nokia
- EX-002 Sony Ericsson
- EX-003 LG
- EX-004 Samsung
- EX-005 Samsung
- EX-006 Mini USB
- EX-007 Micro USB
- EX-008 Various Brands
- EX-009 Palm
- EX-010 Sony PSP
- EX-011 Nintendo DS Lite
- EX-012 Motorola

The price is a little on the high side especially seeing that you have to manually plug in charger cables, it’s not like the PowerMat for instance.

Price: £75 / $89 from BlueLounge.com

The IvySkin Zappak battery back-up solution with dual-USB technology claims to be the world’s lightest and smallest with longest battery life and a built-in USB cable.

You can now charge your iPhone and iPod both at the same time when they run out of battery while you’re out on the go with dual-charging circuits.

The IvySkin Zappak battery pack is available from IvySkin for $49.99.