Cheers Fring. The best of the best communication tool on your mobile phone. Period. The latest update installs flawlessly, works brilliantly and is still completely free. Wonderful. Netvibes Ginger. First rule of upgrades – don’t break anything. Second rule – improve, don’t just bloat. On both points the new Netvibes really delivers. And most impressively their tech support is responsive and helpful. Kudos. Wireless Finger Mouse. Nice update to the original wired model, installs cleanly and works well. Boos Archos TV+….

If ever you want proof of why Yahoo! is a shadow of its former self, you only have to look at Mybloglog.com, which Yahoo! bought a while back. I used to really like mybloglog, I liked Eric who founded the company too, and we spent a good time emailing back and forth about new features and bugs and stuff. The service was great back then, it worked and offered real value and the tech support was ace. Then Yahoo! bought…

I’m really getting tired of badly designed sign up forms. I spend a lot of time subscribing to various services, applications and stuff, and it’s amazing how many subscription forms are still really really rancid. Please web developers, take a course in form design UI or something, and stop wasting our time and brainpower. Specifically I cannot stand – Forms that display indecipherable captchas that you can’t read, contain both zero and the letter O, and thereby trap you in an endless refresh-fail hell! Forms…

The Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Imaging – Sony Alpha A700. The Sony marketing blurb cheekily asserts, ‘What you once called a photo album you can now call a portfolio’, and that’s a remarkably accurate assessment of the market positioning of this excellent 12.4 megapixel digital SLR camera. On the face of it, this is just another entrant into the increasingly crowded digital SLR market, as manufacturers desperately retreat from the advancing quality of cell phone cameras…

The Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Computing – Drobo. It’s hard to explain to techie types the appeal of this box, primarily because it looks expensive compared to supposed alternatives. But to those who have a real need for fail-safe, super super reliable data storage without any hassle whatsoever, this is the product to beat. The geeks can keep their complex RAID boxes, or their infinitely configurable but arcane NAS solutions, the rest of us will happily…

The Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Mobile – Nokia 6110 Navigator. It may not have the glamour, marketing spend and sheer all out glitz of other contenders in this sector, but this fairly plain-Jane product marks a significant turning point in the future direction of the mobile phone. For the first time ever, a conventional mainstream mobile phone handset exceeds the functionality of a personal computer out of the box. Not only can you download, install and…

The Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Software – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Although pitched at professional photographers, Lightroom has got so many things right that it really deserves to be on everyone’s shopping list if they have any kind of interest in digital photography. The $299.00 program costs many times more than most alternative products, but comes with the Adobe heritage, and what’s more comes with a user interface that is literally a breath of fresh air in…

The Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Web – CoveritLive. This was one heck of a hard decision because the field was crammed with potential winners. This was, after all, the year in which Web 2.0 found its wings at last and started to soar. Joost for its potential to massively disrupt the television status quo, the BBC iPlayer for moving so graciously and quickly to the more open Flash format, FotoFlexer for an absolutely superb free feature…

The Red Ferret Journal Product of the Year 2007: Green/Ethical – Kiva. Yep, it’s our award time again, and this year we’ve split them up into segments to make it easier to award to different types of products and services. These are obviously personal choices, so if you have any of your own recommendations to offer for a kind of Reader’s Choice in each category, please feel free to do so in the comments below each. I’ll be posting one…

Hmm…just watched the Story of Stuff, which, while clearly a little simplistic, is really quite interesting. As is the Money As Debt movie, which again tries to explain hugely complex issues in an accessible way. And it’s made me start to think (“danger, Will Robinson”). I’ve started to wonder just how long we can keep this pace of consumption going? I’m also wondering whether we should start to think about turning this juggernaut super-tanker of an economic system around and slowly…