Over the last month I've had so many 'fails' from (mostly) large companies that my twitter timeline has started to read like failblog. Have we given up?

Google recently launched Inbox by Gmail. Like all new Google Products, if you're a Google Apps user, you've been excluded with no indication from Google for how long. Here's a simple workaround.

Now that I've swapped my Windows Phone for a Nexus 4, I've discovered what a mess my Google Contacts are in once synced to Android and enabling Google+ to supplement contact data. It didn't matter too much on the Nexus 7 tablet, but on the phone it's more frequently used, so having the same contacts appear three times is a problem!

After the craziness of a previous Windows Phone blog entry ("Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer"), I thought it was worth posting an update, now that my "relationship" with Windows Phone has come to an end. Recently I placed an order for a Google/LG Nexus 4 Android phone...

I'm a huge fan of the Nexus 7, but one of the things that annoyed me from day one was the lack of landscape support on the homescreen. I almost always use the tablet in landscape mode, so when switching to an app I didn't already have in the open/recent apps list, I would have to hit the Home button; which flipped everything around temporarily. There was already a user-set orientation lock, and we knew Android could handle it (from other devices, and those with rooted devices changing build properties), so it always seemed like a really random restriction.

It's 2011, seemingly "the year of Social". We have Facetime, Google+ Hangouts/Huddles, Facebook video chat, Twitter and iMessage built into iOS, Messenger built into WP7. It sounds like we're making great progress in improving the way we can communicate with our friends. Super!