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Something of a “do they, don’t they” story at the moment – this was always one of the reasons I shied away from a Nokia Communicator in the days when I spent lots of time on planes. I wasted enough time flying without being able to use my PDA…

But now I’m toting a P800 – which has a radio-off flight mode – in theory at least, I’m OK. Although I can’t help feeling that the default approach from the airlines (or at least from the CAA – them not having to consider the opinions of passengers) will be “switch anything that looks like a phone off at all times”. I’m not sure how I’d start explaining to the cabin crew that, no, actually this isn’t a phone at the moment, it’s just a PDA…

IHT has an article about installing a city-wide wifi network in Paris, with two or three antennas outside each of the 372 Metro stations.

Which leads me to the depressing question of how likely that sort of thing is to happen in the UK, or not happen as it would seem. When Westminster Council proposed installing wifi coverage in its area, it seemed that the majority of reactions were wholly negative. And the Paris system is using fibre running in the Metro tunnels. Can you imagine the London Underground even contemplating such a thing?

It wasn’t me, it was them. Normal service is resumed, move along now, nothing to see…

Another story – Digital piracy saps music industry – that implies that all the music industries problems are down to piracy. Personally, I don’t get this. I’ve virtually stopped buying CDs, mainly because I don’t listen to that much music anymore. There are a number of reasons for this – having the time and the space to do it without inflicting my dubious taste on those around me, the fact that burning minidiscs is such a pain, my ears are the wrong shape for the majority of earbuds out there, I can no longer concentrate on what I’m supposed to be doing if there’s music in the background (is this me getting old?).

But underlying all this is the fact that there’s just not that much music out there that I really want to listen to – or at least not that much music out there that I’ve got the inclination to go out and find. The music biz doesn’t market to me, it seems – I’m not likely to buy Justin Timberlake or Brittany Spears or S Club 7 etc etc. So I tend not to listen to the radio, which means that I tend not to hear things that I think “must buy that”. But if I’m the demographic with the disposable income, doesn’t this imply that I’m the demographic that should be targetted?

Various sources are pointing to this – it’s a prototype of a personal server that (it says) may replace laptops and PDAs altogether. Basically it appears to be a large (capacity, if not physical size) hard disk with a bluetooth module bolted onto the side that runs as a web server.

My first reaction was “wow, want one”, but then a couple of minutes and reading an post about the iPod interface made me start to wonder. Isn’t Apple a lot closer to this already? The iPod is effectively a data storage device that has a reason to sit in your pocket. Bolt on a bluetooth module and a webserver, and there’s the pocket-sized personal server. This strikes me as one of those applications which is more likely to evolve from something that exists already than be introduced as a completely new device?