As an avid reader of this blog you might have noticed that, contrary to many others of what I like to call my tech blog writing buddies, I am not too fond of Apple products. Now, I am by no means totally against them, hell, I even own an iPod Touch. But I have always seen it as not much more than a rather slick mp3 player which incidentally also allows me to access the Internets once in a while or play that one or other game. I was never really tempted to upgrade this to an iPhone, let alone become so entranced with Apple that I would gladly pay for their albeit slickly designed, overpriced and ultimately underfeatured computer products.

Lately though, I have felt the need to upgrade my mobile phone to something more full-featured. With me using an operating system (Linux) that Apple can’t or won’t support, an iPhone was out of the question (among other issues like Apple’s iron fist when it comes to what shall and what shall not be run on their devices). So instead, I opted for the HTC Desire, an Android powered phone. As luck would have it, I quickly found a carrier that sells it, ordered the beast and a week later my trembling hands were unboxing.

This is not the HTC Desire. This is just the box in which it came.

In case you think me calling that device a beast was just a playful way of trying to spruce up my writing, you were only half right. That thing really is a beast. With a 1GHz processor it’s way faster than any other smartphone on the market right now. Which reminds me that not so long ago (approximately 10 years) I was still using a computer that had a mere 300MHz. Yes, you read that right. Today? I’m using a mobile phone that has thrice the power. Hail to the processor gods!

Anyway, as I mentioned above, the Desire runs on Android, Google’s own mobile operating system. There’s a marketplace very similar to the Apple appstore which at the time of this writing holds roughly 40,000 applications. Which is about 39,950 more than I will ever need. But people like choices, and I guess that’s what Android is all about. If you want, you can replace every application on your phone with applications from the market and guess what? Neither Google nor HTC will care. And they won’t even revoke your warranty either.

There’s one problem I have with the Desire and that, of course, is its battery life. If you use all the stuff smartphones are famous for, you know, like surfing, taking pictures, sending emails, watching videos, listening to music and such, the HTC’s battery will crap out after approximately three hours. You can of course use the resources sensibly, in which case I’ve heard people mention battery times up to three days. Be that as it may, I am still wondering what the battery industry is doing all day long. I mean, it’s not as if they didn’t have time work on the durability of batteries for the last fucking century.

At last, you might be wondering what the headline is all about. Basically, I just wanted to lure you in. I don’t think there’ll ever be a smartphone to rule us all. Because there are more important things in life than gadgets. Like drinking, food and daytime television.

Tupalo.com, the Vienna-based service for what’s cool around your neighborhood, yesterday announced a partnership with Herold, the Austrian service for business listings.

It’s a great move for the little company and I’m really happy for them.

And while I don’t believe in things like good and evil, I do have a bit of a queasy feeling when it comes to Herold. Not so long ago, they were getting a thorough beating when they announced the availability of a CD-ROM that contained the data of more than 4 million private people. While it’s legal, people were and still are up in arms about it. Which I totally understand.

Now, while I do believe Mike from Tupalo when he announces on their blog that they “will still continue as the lightweight, independent company we’ve always been”, I wonder whether people will still feel the same way, now that a company with such a backstory is part of the game.

I’m convinced that from a business perspective, the partnership between Tupalo and Herold was one of the best things that could have happened to them. Whether it’ll put off users concerned about their private data and how it’ll be treated, remains to be seen.

Here’s a service for everyone who’s always wanted their own website but didn’t know how and what to put on it. Chi.mp solves these problems for you.

First of all, you get a free domain name, ending in .mp. Now, it’s not the prettiest top level domain, but apparently the company reached an agreement with the government of the CNMI (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) that basically allows them and only them to register domains ending in .mp.

So after signing up, you’re the proud owner of a domain name. In a way. But more about this later.

With your new domain name, you also get a full-fledged personal website complete with a lifestream, the option of creating different versions for different contacts and a contact manager for the services you’ve hooked up to your site, like Flickr, Facebook or Twitter.

It’s fairly customizable, but in the end it’s basically a standalone profile that identifies you on the web. Your .mp domain also doubles an OpenID, which I think is a splendid idea. When you’re done configuring and hooking up your other services to the site, it will look like this.

It’s all very easy to configure, obviously geared toward people who haven’t yet created profiles on every social network there is (someone like me, in case you’ve missed that).

Oh, and a word about the domain name. The whole service is free, for the time being, including that .mp domain name. That is, it’s free if you use the rest of the Chi.mp service, but if you want to use your domain for something else, say a website about your anime collector’s dolls, you need to buy it for 20 USD a year. But considering that the whole idea behind Chi.mp is the creation of a profile and the interaction between all the .mp profiles created, buying that domain-name seems pointless. Especially if you can get ordinary .com domains for much less.

The service is still in private beta, so if you feel you’d like to try it out, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll send you an invitation (make sure to use a valid email-address or the invitation key will never reach you).

Update: All the invites are gone, sorry. But do leave a comment anyway.