• Man City, Man Utd… I don’t care who won it, except that the thought of Dame Alice Ferguson looking a bit miserable amuses me more than Mad Roberto looking down in the dumps. It also amuses me that everyone associated with ManUre thought they had it won until Man City were awarded an amount of injury time which is usually reserved for ManUre when they need a goal or two. In the end a few years of throwing money at the problem paid off for City. ManUre weren’t necessarily out-played, they were just out-spent.
• The real heroes were Swansea and Norwich. When you get promoted your one and only goal should be to stay up, get another season and build on it. The fact that they stayed up and did it comfortably is all-the-more impressive. Swansea played with style and flair, and Norwich battled hard. Well done to both of them. QPR also stayed up, despite Joey Barton and Djibril Cissé doing their best to jump up and down on the self-destruct button at every available opportunity.
• Newcastle pushed themselves to the brink of the big time, mostly thanks to the incredible Papiss Cissé – £10 million and thirteen goals in as many appearances. You can do your own sums about how much better value he has been compared to Fernando Torres and Andy Carroll, but you probably don’t need convincing.
• They may have won the FA Cup, and they may be in the Champions League final, but Chelski’s league season was pretty dismal by their standards. Having been in the top four continually since the 2002 / 2003 season, sixth place this time around is a big failure.
• Liverpool were mostly crap.
• Arsenal lost two big names (Fabregas and Nasri), brought in a few new players, and made some profit in the transfer market as a result. It also resulted in an abysmal start, winning just twice in the first seven games (including the horrendous 8-2 defeat at Old Trafford). That was followed by a run of seven wins in eight games, and later in the season nine wins in ten games.
• Robin van Persie scored most of the Arsenal goals, but there were some unsung heroes. Laurent Koscielny was Arsenal’s most improved player. During his first season he could have easily been described as a ‘buffoon’ – this season he was reliable and decisive, and scored the goal which beat West Brom and secured 3rd place. Yossi Benayoun was the other. On-loan from Chelski (that in itself is ironic given the league positions), Yossi didn’t get as many starts as he would have liked (although more than he ever got at Chelski), yet he never complained and just seemed all the more determined to play well when the chances came. His two goals in the final two goals were precious. Thanks Yossi, you’ll be fondly remembered.

The way I see it, Arsenal clinched 3rd place for two reasons…

1. Spurs choked – they spent a lot of the season in 3rd place. At one point they were twelve points ahead of Arsenal. It would take a big decline in form to let that slip, and Spurs were just the team to do it. Indeed Arsenal had a great run of form, but Spurs only had to keep up their good form to maintain the lead. They didn’t. Even at the tail end, when Arsenal to conspired to lose ground again, Spurs couldn’t capitalise.
2. Chelsea didn’t turn up – if for some bizarre reason you included Liverpool, you could say there were seven teams chasing the top four places. Man City and ManUre would be expected to be in there, leaving five teams chasing two places. And after nine games, with Chelski in 3rd place, you could have been forgiven for thinking that three teams were a dead cert, and wondering who the 4th would be. But then Chelski dropped to 4th, then 5th, back up to 3rd, down to 4th again, then 5th, and finally settled into 6th as Newcastle pushed them aside. True, Chelski had their minds on the FA Cup and Champions League, and these matches probably affected their approaches and team selections in league matches.

I don’t want to put a downer on Arsenal’s achievement – by October everyone was saying that Arsenal would struggle for 4th. After the dismal start, 4th would have been a great achievement, yet they snatched 3rd. That’s an improvement on last season of one place and two points. That’s progress. Yet I can’t help feeling that Arsenal were lucky that Spurs didn’t continue with their good form.

And now, a quick look ahead to the 2011 / 2012 season:

• Arsène Wenger has already signed Lukas Podolski, a striker from FC Köln. Given that Wenger usually waits for the last day of the transfer window to either a) pick up what’s left or b) do bugger all, this is a revelation.
• Hopefully Mr Podolski will play alongside Robin van Persie, who may consider staying now that Arsenal are back in the hat for the Champions League. And hopefully Robin will persuade Wenger to spend a bit more cash and show a bit more ambition.
• Arsenal have nineteen (yes, 19) players out on loan. Wenger needs to recall them and sell most of them, and use the money to buy players he’ll actually play. There are some worth keeping – for example, Carlos Vela. But after a very good spell at Real Sociedad I can’t imagine him wanting to come back and warm the bench, and then play the last few minutes of a game against the likes of Reading or Swansea.
• Wenger needs to let some players go. Some he could sell, like Chamakh and the hugely disappointing Gervinho. Some, like Djourou, could just be tossed into the nearest dustbin.
• Some players, like the promising Francis Coquelin, need more chances to shine.
• Wenger needs to strengthen the squad – statements like “having Diaby back from injury will be like a new signing” is somewhere between optimistic and misguided. Diaby couldn’t appear any more lazy if he brought a sun-lounger onto the pitch. Arsenal need an attacking midfielder, a defensive midfielder (Yann M’Vila?), a centre-back (to ensure Djourou doesn’t even make it to the bench let alone the pitch), another striker, and back-up for the right-back position as I think Bacary Sagna’s leg will snap twice next season.
• New assistant manager, the legend that is Steve Bould, should focus on some defensive training. Thomas Vermaelen should be reminded that, unless he’s coming up for a corner, he should be in Arsenal’s half defending. Tommy scored a few important goals during the season (I was there to see that last-second winner against Newcastle) but Arsenal conceded a few while he was gallivanting around the opposition’s penalty area rather than getting in the way of the opposition’s strikers in his own.

That’s all the football talk for now until… oooh… Euro 2012. That’ll be fun… right?

However, if you’re more than a casual user of Twitter, or use features such as lists, filters and trends, then you may want a dedicated Twitter client. And if you’re a Windows Phone owner the good news is that there’s plenty to choose from. Here’s a brief look at some of the clients available.

Click on the app icons to see a screenshot.

Twitter (free) – the ‘official’ Twitter app offers a good level of features, a tidy uncluttered user interface, easy access to lists (and the ability to create new lists and add people to them), a choice of photo service, viewing of trends, and the ability to choose a theme (light or dark) and font size. However, there are some missing features – there’s no support for a ‘live tile’ (an indicator on the start screen showing the number of unread mentions or messages) and no ability to mute / filter.

Birdsong (£0.79) – apart from a choice of theme and viewing of trends, this app offers all of the features of the Twitter app, but also includes the ability to configure the panorama interface by adding your choice of lists. It also allows you to see a random selection of tweets from your friends. Birdsong supposedly supports a live tile (it’s in the settings) but it’s never worked for me. Nevertheless, a very good app.

Rowi (£2.29 or a free ad-supported version) – a good functional client but lacks the ability to mute people. There’s a couple of nice touches… you can see thumbnails of tweeted pictures (click on them and they open) and clicking on a tweet or message brings up a floating menu of options. The home screen is configurable (you can add a variety of lists) and trends are there if you know where to look (tip: hit the search icon).

Carbon (£1.49) – this app includes support for trends, a filters feature to mute people or hashtags, and a view which can be switched to show lists or retweets. All-in-all Carbon is the most feature-rich client, and is easy to navigate – it’s a favourite with many people and I can see why. You can install a trial of Carbon, but a few features are revoked and it will nag you once in a while to purchase the full app.

gleek! (£1.49) – not only wins the award for the strangest name, but is also my favourite client. It’s somewhat different as it starts with an options page – new tweet, search, messages, trends, friends & faves, lists, each configured account, and gleeks (tweets from the gleek! account). You can however change this option and open the app straight into the timeline, mentions or retweets. There’s also an option to show ‘peeks’, which are random tweets. But what I really like about gleek! is the ability to pin different things to the start screen (my account, lists, trends, individual people, even direct access to a new tweet) and, new in version 1.5, the ability to colour-code friends to get more immediate visibility of them in the timeline.

Like many of the other Twitter clients you can change the font size in gleek! – it offers small for ‘Eagle Eyes’, normal for ‘Normal People’ and large for ‘Old Geezers’. It also allows the display of media ‘inline’, an option that can be turned off to preserve reading space and bandwidth.

I’ve added some extra gleek! screenshots here (click on the small images to see the larger versions)… above is a selection of live tiles (although I caught them at a time where there were no new updates), and to the right the colour-coding screen showing some of the accounts I’ve colour-coded. The timeline image above shows Camberley People colour-coded in pink, one of the nine colours to choose from.

Conclusion: you can see from the screenshots that the Twitter apps look remarkably similar, but there are granular differences in features. For many people the free Twitter client may be good enough. Birdsong and Rowi are good clients with a few extras and worth a look, but if you’re a power-user I’d say that it comes down to a fight between gleek! and Carbon. While Carbon has the fullest compliment of features, gleek! takes a refreshingly different approach. While it lacks the ability to select the image service (which personally doesn’t bother me) the colour-coding feature is unique and a real differentiator.

It’s only fair to mention that other Twitter clients are available, such as moTweets, Seesmic, Beezz (nice but hasn’t been updated for a year), TweetCaster, Mehdoh (very popular but development has stopped), and Peregrine. And possibly some others.

Correction: despite info to the contrary on WPCentral, development on Mehdoh hasn’t stopped. After swapping e-mails with developer Chris Field I now understand that version 2 is in beta with a heap of features promised. I’ll cover Mehdoh 2 in more detail when it ships a few weeks from now.

Some members of the British public found it difficult to keep calm last week. The primeval sheep instincts kicked in as the threat (not the actual occurrence) of a petrol tanker strike took hold and caused people to queue up, readying themselves for a crisis which may not happen (and now looks like it won’t). Our government showed their leadership by suggesting that people stockpile fuel in jerrycans, although they later considered it bad advice (mainly because it was). We’re not yet suffering the disintegration of society that created the dystopian world of Mad Max, but you can see how it starts. The day that the last drop of petrol is sold there’ll probably be some trouble kicking off towards the back of the queue.

Our team’s manager was quick to act with better advice – that being to work from home if there was no real need to come into the office. Well, I tend to roll with that flexible working strategy anyway- not because it affords me a lie-in (I wish), but because I can start work at 07:30, avoid the traffic and work undisturbed (apart from the dog barking and Mrs A pushing the vacuum cleaner around, but I can close the door). True, there are some days when it’s useful to be in the office to meet people, but I can plan to do this on particular days.

Key to Microsoft’s flexible working culture is the use of our own technology… Direct Access for access to the Microsoft intranet, and Lync for unified communications. From where I’m sitting now I see five (yes, five) Lync devices… the ThinkPad running Windows 7, the Acer tablet running Windows 8, the iMac (Lync for OS X), the Nokia Lumia 800 (Windows Phone) and finally the iPod touch. Depending on what I’m doing I tend to use the ThinkPad with a speakerphone or the iMac (which doesn’t need any additional equipment), but as was the case yesterday I sometimes use a wireless headset with the tablet. My frolleague Lewis will testify this makes for a great demo – although it isn’t really something a home user would utilise much, it can be a great working model for office workers moving between meetings and locations, and mobile workers who are on-site, in a depot, on the factory floor, on the shop floor, or even using 3G and outside dealing with an issue somewhere.

As flexible workers we have a telephony solution which provides one-to-one and one-to-many telephony, instant conference call set-up and access (none of that “who just joined?” nonsense), video, white-boarding, and application sharing. And of course the presence awareness is embedded in e-mail, collaborative places, search results and web applications for instant access. It’s part of the working culture and we all trust in it.

We live in a world where competitive advantage and speedy resolution of issues are critical to success. Companies need to continue running their businesses without disruption. But disruptions come their way… two years ago it was a volcano (and who’d have seen that coming?), last Winter it was an extended period of snow, and this year we’ve seen that a strike (or even the threat of one) has the potential to disrupt. Yet I still talk to customers who have no unified communications strategy, or have major pieces of the puzzle missing. Unified communications is a major factor for flexible working, and flexible working creates a workforce that is agile, responsive and can continue working through adverse situations. I’ll leave you with two words: business continuity.

Yes, I do miss a few features in Notes, but there are plenty of things in Outlook which compensate for the odd missing feature (to be discussed another time). The feature I was missing most was the Notes ‘attention indicators’… those little blobs which told me whether the e-mail was only sent to me, me and a few people, or if I was copied. Notes zealots rejoice… Outlook doesn’t have that feature out of the box. But you can recreate it, or something like it.

The ability to create this feature is based on a) Outlook’s ability to categorise e-mails and display a coloured rectangle, and b) mail rules. The basic premise is that a set of rules will process incoming (or existing) e-mails and apply a category accordingly.

So first you need to create some categories… I created three named as follows and selected a colour:

1. E-mail just to me (dark blue)
2. E-mail to me and others (orange)
3. I’m just in the cc: field (yellow)

Then I created three rules. The first is named ‘Sent only to me’ – the condition is a simple selection from the list, ‘sent only to me’. The action for the rule is to assign to a category (#1 above). I then added some exceptions, basically to ensure that the category isn’t assigned to calendar entries – so I selected ‘except if it uses the form’ and then selected the calendar notice types (accept, appointment, decline, cancellation and request). To finish I added a name for the rule, selected for it to be active, and also selected the option for it to run the rule now on messages already in the inbox.

The second rule checks for e-mails sent to me and other people where my name is in the To field. The rule differs slightly… the condition is ‘where my name is in the To box’, the action is to assign a category (#2), and an extra exception is ‘except if only sent to me’. This ensures that the rule runs on e-mails where I’m in the To field but I’m not the only person.

The third rule highlights e-mails where I’m in the cc: field, so it’s the same as the first but the condition is ‘where my name is in the Cc box’.

Bear in mind that Outlook can run rules over existing e-mails (I don’t think Notes can) so you can run these rules over your entire mail box and see the categorisation. The result is seen in the image above.

My frolleagues Brett Johnson and Steve Green also suggested another way of doing this, based on conditional formatting. This allows the text of the message to be colourised and the font changed based on a wide variety of criteria, including the three situations mentioned above. I’m using this approach to clearly see e-mails from my manager. Brett uses it to colourise e-mail only sent to him as blue, cc:ed e-mails as green, and anything he adds a flag to as red.

I didn’t see the match live – we were out for the day – but my plan was to record it and watch it back at home. That plan was slightly scuppered when one of the moron DJs on Crapital Radio announced that Arsenal had gone 4-2 up, but that wasn’t the worst thing to hear. Back at home I started watching, not knowing the order of goals or the final score. After 33 minutes Spurs were 0-2 up. At that point it must have looked as dismal as it could get… trailing at home to your perennial underachieving rivals and the prospect of being 13 points behind them (a massive gulf to make up).

In 5 billion years time when the Sun begins the final stages of its life there’ll be no memory of the exact moment when the turning point occurred, but it probably will be remembered for a couple of seasons. It was as if some football version of Cupid suddenly fired 11 arrows into the backsides of the Arsenal team. Sagna scored, van Persie equalised, and not long after half-time a rejuvenated Rosicky put Arsenal ahead. A couple of quick goals from Walcott sealed the win, completing 5 goals in just 27 minutes of playing time. That closed the gap to 7 points and was the 3rd in a run of Premier League victories now totalling 7 on the trot after today’s 3-0 win over Aston Villa. In 4 weeks Arsenal have gone from 10 points behind Spurs to 3 points ahead with a superior goal difference.

After beating Liverpool in the next Premier League match, Arsenal took on AC Milan for the second leg of the Champions League tie. Few believed that Arsenal could turn the result around, but clearly the players did, and mission impossible was looking possible with a 3-0 lead at half-time. Although the score stayed that way, an enormous amount of pride was restored.

There are now 8 league matches left for Arsenal, Spurs and Chelski, and 9 for Newcastle, so nothing is decided yet. Arsenal have some tricky games ahead – Man City and Chelski will be visiting the Emirates, and there’s potential banana skins at the away visits to West Brom and Stoke. But Arsenal have put themselves in a position where 3rd place is now in their own hands. Chelski and Liverpool, who have spent vast quantities of money for little return, can look at Arsenal’s position with envy. Mr Wenger still has his transfer pot, and there’s a lot of talk about Summer signings… but he’s proved that he doesn’t have to rush into purchases. Meanwhile I have to eat my own words, but on this occasion I’m happy to.

Arsene Wenger praised Arsenal’s commitment and felt they were “a bit unlucky” in their 2-0 FA Cup fifth-round defeat to Sunderland.

“a bit unlucky”… Arsenal have been more than a bit unlucky with injuries to their defenders this season, and just as it seemed they were getting near to a full compliment returning suddenly they’re looking decimated again. However, a make-shift defence doesn’t account for two games without a goal. If Wenger was happy with their commitment maybe he was watching a different game to me because I saw a group of fairly good players coming together as a poor team who look short on confidence and ideas and were outclassed for most of the match. Ramsey and Arteta looked lightweight against a physical team like Sunderland and the mis-match was exposed horribly on a pitch that looked like it was home to a herd of cattle a couple of hours earlier. Djourou simply isn’t good enough to player for Arsenal (there’s probably some language in which Djourou translates as “liability”) and once Squillaci (same translation, different language) came on for the injured Francis Coquelin the feeling of doom was firmly bedded in. Unlucky, yes, because Coquelin was looking lively and has impressed every time I’ve seen him play. He’s one to keep… one of just six.

Wenger can stand on the touchline flapping about like a demented albatross, but here’s the facts… two top players left the club and netted around £60 million. He’s spent a fraction of that. The only positives to come out of Wenger’s transfer dealings is that he bought a defender who, in times of being fit, will reduce the chances of Djourou and Squillaci ever gracing the pitch again, and he bought Chamberlain and is actually playing him. But the fact remains that Wenger has stuck with sub-standard players (see above, plus others) and has not invested the money in new talent. And therefore, what does he expect?

However… what if, just supposing, the directors have quietly requested that Wenger doesn’t spend all of the transfer kitty, and Wenger is playing the obedient boy and making do with less money than we all believe he has? If that’s the case, someone should come clean, because as it stands it looks like Wenger is failing the club… but perhaps it’s the board who are causing the lack of investment and progress. And if that’s the case, it’s not fair for Wenger to take the rap.

Whatever, Arsenal’s season is NOT over. 4th place is now a valuable prize to play for, and after the bad luck and bad form this season grabbing 4th place will almost feel like a trophy. With no 4th place and no Champions League the ability to retain top players (namely Robin van Persie) and attract new players will be dramatically reduced. And that’s something for Wenger and the board to consider, but a little too late to do anything about.

Verdict: keep Van Persie, Sagna, Vermaelen, Chamberlain, Coquelin and Wilshere. Okay, and Szczesny. Scrap the rest of them, and yes, that includes Walcott.

Ironically, this year, IBM have a keynote speaker in the form of Luis Suarez and they’re a sponsor, so maybe someone listened (I don’t know if I can take the credit). Anyway, Microsoft are also a sponsor this year, we’ll once more have a huge presence (showing Lync and also Exchange, Office 365 and mobile solutions), representation from a number of partners, and a number of theatre speaker slots featuring some of my learned colleagues. I have it on good authority that Nokia will also be there showing the much-praised Lumia phones.

Dates are 6th and 7th of March – you can register here, which is a good idea because it’ll cost £30 if you just turn up on the day. And one other tip, take a packed lunch because the price of sandwiches in the venue is something to gasp at.

About this time last year, as I battled in vain to keep a customer on Lotus Notes, one of the big cheeses in their IT organisation told me that when the iPad 2 was released they’d stop buying laptops and start handing out iPads. I asked him three things:

1. How would the iPad owners print?
2. How would they receive a spreadsheet via e-mail, edit it, and send it on?
3. How would they manage an iPad without a computer to tether it to?

He drew a blank on all three. I was also going to ask why he was making a decision based on a product that hadn’t even been announced yet (and therefore didn’t have a set of detailed features), but I could see it was time to move on from that conversation. A year later, improvements to iOS and availability of apps have answered questions #1 and #3 (so I believe) but not #2 (if I’m wrong, I’ll willingly stand corrected). By the way, they did throw Notes out.

These days I’m frequently briefing customers on collaboration and business productivity, and the subject of consumerisation – bring your own device – always comes up… often before the slide appears, and sometimes before the presentation. Take yesterday for example, someone commented on the four iPads brought in by customer attendees and joked that the owners should put them away. I disagreed – here we see the leading edge of consumerisation and we have to embrace it. And it always provokes an interesting and passionate conversation.

Every time I touch on the subject of consumerisation I mention the Forbes article ‘I Want my iPad’ which discusses the pros and cons, and concludes that compromise is required on both sides (users and IT) and that generally consumerisation is often well worth the effort. A year after it was written I’m still advising people to read it.

Back to the BBC article… the overall theme is that the idea of consumerisation has changed in the years since we first heard the term. It was quite a few years ago (five or six, maybe more) that I first heard of companies considering giving their employees an allowance to buy a computer rather than taking the company-allocated standard, and thus allowing employees to put some of their own money in to buy better kit. Playground elitism moving into the workplace. In reality, I can’t remember dealing with any customer who went down this route, although the BBC article states that Cisco have. Having said that, some of that compromise that Forbes state as important seems to be not quite there yet:

If they choose to use an Apple Mac, the company won’t provide IT support.

You have a choice, but make sure you make the right choice. This is a strange path to take, as you’d think that the desire to own a MacBook Pro would be one of the driving factors for funded consumerisation.

Now if you mention consumerisation, it’s more likely to be understood as bringing a ‘device’ into work and allowing it to be connected to the company network / infrastructure and allowing it to access certain services. Good Technology are gleefully rubbing their hands, as one of the solutions to the work / personal dilemma is ‘sandboxing’ the corporate data, allowing it to be wiped while the user’s personal stuff (Facebook, Twitter, contacts, Angry Birds, the complete works of ABBA) remains. I hear Good’s solution mentioned frequently.

But despite all of these consumerisation / bring yer own device conversations, the one thing I haven’t encountered (apart from that poorly-researched conversation last year) is the notion that devices will erode desktop computers or laptops. My impression is that tablets and phones are still seen as companion devices, not replacements. The only exception is Windows tablets which can be docked, and therefore can take advantage of a physical keyboard and mouse. Hand-held tablets and phones with on-screen keyboards are fine for e-mail and web browsing, but I can’t see them being used for serious number-crunching spreadsheet work or detailed document creation. Some may point at reports of sales of tablets outstripping computers, but there’s no evidence of one eroding the other. Do you know an iPad owner who doesn’t also own a computer?

As a final thought, I will agree with the BBC article on two points. The rise of mobile devices is driving a greater availability of business-ready apps and shaping how development teams think about presenting data and processes. And that leads to the second point, which is the potential for a business to become more agile and responsive because the business-critical data and insight is more readibly available to the mobile worker.

Obviously the viability of working from home depends on your job role, but advancements in technology (such as broadband and corporate-grade real-time collaboration incorporating document / desktop sharing and co-authoring) have made the premise of working from home more realistic and achievable over the past few years. A business adopting unified communications – offering integrated telephony, video and embedded presence awareness – further promotes the experience for home or mobile workers.

Anywhere Working isn’t just about working from home, it’s about working from wherever you find yourself, and therefore support for portable devices is also an important aspect. Last week I was at an off-site team meeting but had to join a customer call, so I used the venue’s WiFi, my Windows 7 tablet, and Lync telephony (and video) to join the meeting from a quiet corner. Anywhere Working is achievable with the right tools and infrastructure (and a connection).

The week commencing 27th of February has been designated Anywhere Working Week, during which businesses and individuals are invited to give flexible working a chance to make an impact. Stay tuned to the Anywhere Working site and also the Facebook page for more information. On the Anywhere Working Twitter account (@Anywhere_Work) you have the opportunity to win a Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse (that’s gotta be worth it).

I’ve said in the past that I’ve been unexcited by the iPad, and remember I said that before I joined Microsoft so it’s not a case of “oh, he would say that”. Would I have spent my own money on a Windows tablet? Before getting the W500 I would have said no… now I’m not so sure because it’s been incredibly useful since hitting the power-on button a couple of weeks before Christmas.

The W500 boasts Windows 7 Home Premium (which I could upgrade to Enterprise, but I haven’t yet), a dual-core processor, 2gb of RAM, a 32gb solid-state drive, a crystal-clear 1280 x 800 display and front and rear-facing cameras. Probably the one statistic in this list that stands out as a bit measly is the storage – after Windows and Office are installed there’s significantly less storage available – but there is an SD card slot and to be honest I won’t be storing loads of documents and content on the tablet. It also features a USB port (just the one) and an HDMI output.

The battery, according to Acer’s site, should last 6 hours – I’ve not tracked the battery time but it seems to last very well. The W500 is a little bit bigger than an iPad and just over 1.5 times the weight, but still light enough to travel with and not notice much difference.

Of course, if we’re comparing to an iPad the big difference is that this tablet runs Windows 7 (bit of an obvious statement). Running Windows is a big plus – I can run Outlook, Lync, Office, Skype and any choice of browser, play movies copied from the Archos 605 (yes, my beloved media player is alive and well and recording from Sky Plus) and print to our wireless HP Photosmart 5510. And I can access photos and files from other computers (e.g. my work ThinkPad and the iMac). Okay, I’m sure someone will point out that many of those things can be achieved with an iPad.

However, let’s be honest – Windows 7 was not designed with tablets in mind (come back later in the year and we’ll talk about Windows 8). The W500 uses some Acer modifications to Windows 7, including tweaks for finger-tip navigation and control, and an on-screen keyboard. Although some aspects of the finger-tip control take a bit of getting used to, the screen is extremely responsive and accurate. Using the tablet became much easier once I worked out that I could simply add an icon to the task bar to instantly open and hide the on-screen keyboard, and in most places where text entry is required the keyboard ‘prompter’ appears when you place your cursor (i.e. your finger) on the screen. Over the last couple of weeks my typing on the keyboard has improved considerably – the only real challenge is having to occasionally move the keyboard so that it’s not obscuring the part of the screen I’m typing into (that’s something the iPad has in its favour and is a major design consideration for Windows 8).

I’ve found the tablet very useful around the house – with the iMac and ThinkPad upstairs in my office it’s perfect for checking e-mail and browsing the web while downstairs. I also took it to New York before Christmas – its size is for perfect for hand luggage, and using Starbucks wi-fi I answered a few urgent e-mails and consulted our list of places to visit, and used it to offload some photos when my camera’s SD card filled up. On Christmas day the family were treated to the New York photos (all 316 of them) using the HDMI output, and I used the tablet to speak to the Florida branch of the Adams family via Skype.

I’ll let you know when I’ve upgraded the W500 to Windows 8…