Art students are sometimes thought of as being "a bit different", often with a distinctive look and a flair for the visual unmatched by their peers. If the INQ Chat 3G was a person it would be an art student with its distinctive visual identity that sets it apart from other mobile phones. Like an art student it has to achieve this style without breaking the bank making it suitable for people who might want a stylish mobile phone but do not want to pay smartphone prices. The INQ Chat 3G comes with a physical keyboard and its functionality revolves around the idea of keeping people in touch through a range of services such as email, SMS, Twitter and Facebook so it may well appeal to the multiplatform chatterboxes amongst you. It also has some surprising features like GPS.

Just before Christmas I had a delivery of a large mysterious black box. There was no obvious way to open it, on the top was engraved “Nokia – connecting people” and on the front a mini usb socket. Also packaged was a USB lead and a card telling me that this was a Nokia “hackerbox” and telling me a web site to visit for clues on how to open it. I managed to connect up the box to my computer and got a terminal session going to “log in” to the box, admittedly I used Google to find out how to get in (as I am not very good at puzzles!). Dramatically, when the right command was issued, the top of the box popped open and a puff of smoke emerged. Inside was a the Nokia N900, a Linux powered mobile phone, accessories, a plastic fox and a nice bit of cake.

If you follow me on Twitter you will know that I have had some ups and downs with Novatel's 2352 Intellegent Mobile Hotspot. It was a rocky start, but the story has a happy ending. This is a small device that combines a mobile broadband modem with a WiFi hotspot allowing you to connect up to five devices to the Internet while out and about without the need to install drivers. It is along similar lines to 3's Mifi device, in fact outside the UK it is called a “Mifi”, so maybe we should just say “it's a Mifi”. I tried it out with various tests to see how it performs.

Smartphones are computers that happen to be able to make phone calls, and that leads to some interesting possibilities. I've been trying out the new HTC Hero thanks to the lovely folk at 3MobileBuzz who sent me one to have a look at for a week. The Hero uses Google's open source operating system Android, which is based on Linux and is optimised for smaller devices. HTC mobiles are available on many of the mobile phone networks, and they are not alone in using the Android operating system on certain models, manufacturers such as Motorola have recently joined them. The Hero is 3's first Android device and the model I looked at also has a bundled Spotify subscription (worth £9.99 per month), it currently costs £97.86 upfront with a two year contract that will cost you £35 per month, so this is toward the premium end of their range. Quite a bit of cash to hand over, but what do you get for your money?

Our relationship with the mobile phone is changing, and it is not just the high end phones that show evidence of this. The Sony Ericsson T715 is a new mid range phone available on 3 that comes preloaded with lots of features that will enable you to enjoy the web on the move, including built in Twitter and Facebook clients. You can also make calls and write texts on the phone, but that isn't very interesting; what is more interesting is that this is a great phone if you are into the "constant checking culture" now thought by 3 to be driving mobile broadband usage. Thanks to the kind folk at 3MobileBuzz I was able to try this phone out and see what it has to offer.

There was once a time when the computer industry was not really people orientated, instead the focus was on pushing data around and worrying about nothing but algorithms. Those days ended with the arrival of Web 2.0, the web changed forever, the model of top-down publishing of content was revolutionised by the idea of users generating content and maintaining connections with each other through social networks. Sites like Facebook and Twitter have brought the web alive as a social space, but what if you want to implement some of these ideas on your own site? This is where Michael Peacock's new book Drupal 6 Social Networking may come in very handy.

Netbooks have become a bit of a haven of innovation when it comes to operating system user experience design. While proprietary operating systems have settled for just working or not being unusably slow on netbooks, Linux distributions have become drivers of change, questioning the traditional approaches to a computer desktop and designing new experiences like the "Easy Mode" interface on the Xandros Asus EEE PCs, Ubuntu's Netbook Remix interface and Intel's Moblin project. Jolicloud is a derivative of Ubuntu Netbook Remix that aims to bring "the cloud" and your netbook closer than ever before by keeping all of your data on the web and using the operating system simply as a launcher for web apps. It is still an alpha at the moment, so it might change quite a lot before release, but thanks to Dan Monsieurle I managed to get an invite (which was needed at the time) and decided to take it for a test drive on my Asus EEE PC.

It can be quite a strange experience to read a book where you know you are not the target audience, I'm not a teacher or an academic, but I work for a university and use Drupal, and, of course, like most people have been on the receiving end of the education system! Despite this though I still enjoyed reading Drupal for Education and E-Learning by Bill Fitzgerald after being asked if I would review it by the publisher Packt Publishing. The book is not aimed at developers like me, but instead to those who want to use Drupal “to support teaching and learning” and to explore opportunities to use social media in the classroom in a safe way. You don't even need to know PHP. However, even though it has this non-techie targeting it could still prove very useful to many people using Drupal in other contexts. Occasionally though a tension would surface in the book between the desire to talk to a non developer audience and the subjects being discussed.

The Flip is an attempt to produce a simple to use video camera and last weekend my friend Amanda D'Silva and I took a borrowed Flip (thanks Will!) for a test drive and recorded a short video review of it (while sitting in the pub - so apologies for the background noise). It's not really a device for the hard core geek, but is very simple to use and fun. The whole package is designed to be friendly to those less confident with technology with technical information consigned to the bottom of the box! The device will record sixty minutes of video and to record you just press a big red button on the back and point it at what you want to film. You can see how we found it by watching our video. 

You'll notice that the video quality varies, this is because the video was filmed partly on the Flip and partly on a mobile phone (which has a lower resolution). The Flip records with a resolution of 640x480 which is not as good as DVD, but still better than VHS. You can plug the unit directly into your TV, and the results were pretty good. Pressing a catch on the side of the unit makes a USB connector pop out. The software for the device is installed from the camera itself, but unfortunately it only came in Windows and Mac versions, being an Ubuntu user this meant I could not test it,

No doubt the big tech story of the week has been the release of the new Google Chrome browser, Google's new entrant into the browser wars. Like many others I downloaded this and gave it a go to see what the fuss was about. So first gripe, the current beta is only for Windows, although we are being promised versions for Linux and the Mac. This is an interesting decision, maybe it was taken as they don't want to aim the product at "geeks"? However, as an old manager of mine used to say, let's "park that thought" for the moment and look at the browser itself. Google came up with a great way to explain their new browser and its features; they did this in the form of a comic book and this can been seen at: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/. I'm not really into comics or graphical novels, but this made a refreshing change from a white paper or a powerpoint-type presentation, although I must admit my attention was starting to stray at the end! This is well worth reading as it explains the whole project and its features very well.