Nick Jones

Readers may have noticed that from time to time in this blog I rail against bad design and poor usability. Naively, I’d imagined that some things were safe from these evils. For example, you wouldn’t believe that it was possible to design food badly would you? But, as with so many of my long-cherished illusions, [...]

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I managed to survive a whole week of vacation without a laptop or internet connection, probably for the first time in a decade. It wasn’t too bad, due mainly to regular glasses of German wine and beer which dulled the withdrawal symptoms a lot.  But I’m back online now and have toggled from withdrawal to [...]

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Sorry to re-open this topic but the marketing people out there are getting more irresponsible every day and need to be restrained. Preferably using chains. What’s really bugging me this week is the gratuitous use of the term “4G”. For me 4G has to comply with the ITU definition of a technology providing a peak performance of [...]

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I’m encouraged by the suggestions that ASUS may release a low cost two screen e-book reader in Europe. However, despite this I’m still not going to sell all my bookcases and go electronic. One reason is I just worked out that I can’t afford it. Let’s do some sums here…..
First the cost of e-books. A [...]

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One of the challenges netbooks face is that they are portable but not pocketable; or more precisely they are pocketable only for the rather small subset of people with a deeply challenged fashion sense. This is a serious problem because the more time a gadget spends in your presence the more likely you are to [...]

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Perhaps the most important skill for a politician is to understand society and the forces that mould it, one of which is technology. But politician’s understanding of the intersection of technology and society remains tragically poor as is illustrated by a couple of UK examples.
Disconnecting file sharers. The UK government has acted against the recommendations [...]

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My colleague Simon Mingay who leads our green IT and environmental sustainability research sent me this link to yet another article on “green” mobiles. Let me say up front that I totally support the idea of putting less bad stuff into the environment, whether the bad stuff is CO2 or polluting chemicals. But I am [...]

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Yesterday Google announced they were creating a new lightweight open source operating system for PCs and netbooks. It won’t be the same as Android, although parts may overlap with Android. Is this a good idea? Absolutely, it’s a great idea. As I wrote in a blog last year existing OSs have accumulated twenty years of architectural detritus, [...]

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In past blogs I have commented that I am deeply unimpressed by mobile devices with solar cells for charging. My suspicions about the effectiveness of these devices have been reinforced by a test and teardown of the Sharp SH002 reported by TechOn. The reviewers of this device found that it took 60 minutes to charge [...]

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I hate bad design. Bad design shows up in a lot of places, not just IT; badly designed products and processes are as frustrating as badly designed user interfaces. I’m sure one reason people get so enthusiastic about companies like Apple is because bad design is so common that good design is a novelty. Sad isn’t [...]

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