Amabuddy are doing something I seem to remember Scan Mobile doing back in 1999 - comparison shopping via mobiles.

With such limited screen space, aren't the lines between contextual advertising and interruptive advertising a bit blurred? I mean, if there's an ad on my phone screen then it's using space that I want to use for *my* stuff - I don't care how relevant it is.

Maybe what we need is the mobile equivalent of "press red for more" - a subtly advertised means of alerting users to the existing of further info, which they can choose to access, as opposed to shoving it on-screen and whining that it's "relevant".

Utter randomness - on this post I wrote ages ago about a taster course we were running at Evolution, there's an ongoing discussion about the origin of the Kelloggs Branflakes jingle "they're tasty tasty very very tasty"...

Rui Carmo on Palm moving to Linux for the underlying OS: "It's sad to realize that no matter what they run, nothing even comes close to the ease of use of older generations of Palms - and that's not something you fix by adding more complexity."

My gut feeling is scepticism too - if Palm is prepared to be a UI on top of someone elses OS, why not Symbian, which is designed from the ground up to be good for mobile? But then, isn't this exactly what Apple have done: take an OS renowned for its user interface and migrate that UI onto an underlying open-source OS?

I always liked Palm, their devices were beautiful. But I suspect that they were a victim of their own success; the original Palm guys seemed to get the idea that people wanted to do a small set of things (address book, calendar, etc.) and implemented this set of things incredibly well... but this meant that users of the devices only used them for these things and didn't want to go any further.

Orange have announced their 3G consumer launch and pricing.