Our youngest runs up stairs, bursts into my room and flings their arms around me. “Three lights are back on!” they exclaim with a grin on their face. Friday evening has been salvaged, it seems. The internet service provider has redeemed itself.

Oh dear, we had a three-hour internet outage. For our kids, it’s an internet outrage. Their weekend’s ruined. It’s a human right. How will they survive? It’s the end of the world. Play a board game. “No thanks!” Read a book. “You’re joking, right?” I think we still have some DVDs. “What, and watch Happy …

It’s really strange listening to tech reviewers talking about gadgets that were launched only a couple of years ago as if that was a whole other era. “This was the standard of that period.” What on earth are you on about? You’re talking about 2020, not a hundred years ago. Granted, many of these reviewers …

So I think the Note20 is growing on me. Particularly entering text with the pen, as I am doing right now. It feels rather more fluid than thumb typing. Love the scratchy sound effect too. Overall, the phone does still feel a bit large for my liking, but maybe that’s just a consequence of using …

So Panos Panay is leaving Microsoft. No doubt Microsoft is keen to jetison its Surface business to throw everything at the AI revolution. Can Panos salvage anything in his new role with Amazon devices? A Fire Duo, perhaps? A dual-screen Kindle that reads like a book? We’ve rarely seen a visionary get so emotional about …

But there we are, for every argument of my own, there is a counter point. And here is the most compelling: At the touch of a button, that slab of glass and steel, no bigger that a pocket diary of old, becomes a fully functioning desktop computer. It’s a different paradigm altogether. Perhaps I’ll give …

I’m never going to spend over a thousand pounds on a phone. Or, well, on anything, other than a car. My previous phones have included an early budget Honor and a Nokia Windows phone. If others are content paying £40 a month for three years, I decided I could make do with a six year …

Not exactly impressed by Samsung’s backup feature for restoring a phone. Yes, it put back all the apps and files after her phone came back from repair. Great. But app and account passwords? Nope. So that’s my job for the day, as resident tech support, painstakingly entering each of them one at a time. Hugely …

I’ll take that as a sign. Just as I was contemplating devices with folding displays, the hinge on my wife’s flip phone started playing up. If she knew, she’d say I’d given her poor phone nazar, harming it with my envy. Maybe I did, who knows? On the other hand, maybe it was just timely …

Sometimes I do wonder whether some of the decisions of central digital services are really about accessibility and best practice, and not just an outcome of choosing a Python-based web framework which they find much harder to code for than legacy platforms. Some of their decisions seem to be a step backwards to me.

I very nearly caved in to my inner geek last night, concluding that I could somehow justify getting myself a Surface Duo, now three years old and almost affordable. Yes, it has had its share of critics, eviscerated for its extremely flaky software, though legend has it that it’s improved massively in the intervening years. …

Where would we be without YouTube, teaching us we can fix most of the stuff we might otherwise throw away? The latest, a leaking filter coffee machine. Were it not for helpful video uploaded by a helpful chap, this too would probably have ended up in landfill. But no, remove four screws, remove base, reconnect …