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Android has many positive attributes, yet one of the most common complaints I see or hear is regarding battery life. Admittedly, the battery life on my Hero and Desire have been poor to say the least. Maybe it’s the large screen estate, maybe it’s the always on network connection that’s nearly always doing something, maybe it’s something else entirely, but I think that nearly every Android user has stared at their handset and thought “There’s no way this is going to last till I get to a charger.”

Fear not, I have suffered and tried and tested and have thrown together a few tips for you to try and drag the remaining few minutes that you need out of the battery.

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Really this post needs no more than the headline.

When O2 announced their pricing for the iPhone 4 they also announced that existing customers could upgrade to the iPhone 4 early providing they paid a set fee for the remaining months on the contract and the upgrade cost of the handset.

There’s no “gesture of goodwill” aspect to this, they aren’t doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, this is purely business based. If people can’t upgrade they will take out another contract, potentially on a different network, costing them future revenues.

So why aren’t all the networks doing this? The most in demand handset on the planet finally reaches them and yet they still remain as inflexible as ever with the customer, holding them to increasingly lengthy fixed term contracts.

I find it difficult to understand how in an industry which needs customer retention they’re effectively setting themselves up for an exodus, as customers flock to to rivals in order to get the handset they want.

Time to wake up. Brand loyalty amongst mobile networks isn’t as strong as you may hope. We’re in the days of unlimited cross network minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited data (hang on, scrap that one), unless you’re limited by signal it doesn’t really matter who you’re with.

T-Mobile, Orange, 3, Voda, compete with O2 and ensure you keep the customer before he/she slips away.

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It’s just turned 4pm today and the England squad has been officially announced.

Goalkeepers: Joe Hart (Manchester City), David James (Portsmouth), Robert Green (West Ham).

Defenders: Jamie Carragher (Liverpool), Ashley Cole (Chelsea), Rio Ferdinand (Manchester United), Glen Johnson (Liverpool), Ledley King (Tottenham), John Terry (Chelsea), Matthew Upson (West Ham), Stephen Warnock (Aston Villa).

Midfielders: Gareth Barry (Manchester City), Michael Carrick (Manchester United), Joe Cole (Chelsea), Steven Gerrard (Liverpool), Frank Lampard (Chelsea), Aaron Lennon (Tottenham), James Milner (Aston Villa), Shaun Wright-Phillips (Manchester City).

Forwards: Peter Crouch (Tottenham), Jermain Defoe (Tottenham), Emile Heskey (Aston Villa), Wayne Rooney (Manchester United).

A few confusing decision there, there on for my view…

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While posting this story to my Facebook wall about a 132lb waitress who was told to go on weight probation, I was given my first ever CAPTCHA fail.

That’s a bit harsh Facebook…

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Back in September last year I signed up with the Broadband provider Plusnet. I read some good reviews, heard great feed back from Andy Snelson on Twitter (@_nanu_) and I was swung by their ‘Plusnet Pro‘ package, advertised at the time as being great for gamers due to a prioritised connection and low latency. Full line speed was offered across all types of traffic, they did not throttle or use traffic shaping on this package.

“Fantastico!” I shouted and I signed up with aplomb. My connection  even went live a whole 4 days early. What could possibly go wrong?

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Spotify for iPhone has updated to version 0.4.5, the changes seem to be starting to integrate some of the ‘social’ aspects that they brought in with the last major update to the desktop application.

See below for the change list from iTunes.

Auto correction isn’t great as you can see from my test below.

Kate ‘Mosh’ indeed.

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Big thanks to the BBC for my favourite story of the year so far.

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Manchester United are refreshing their kits for the coming season, here’s a spy shot of the kits that football-shirts.co.uk have stumbled upon.

Reminds me of kits from the 80′s. Note the change of sponsor, due to the recent recession AIG ended their contract with the club. AON, another American financial giant, have taken over with a £20 million per season four year deal.

What do you think of the new shirts?

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Spotify are rolling out a big update today and the major emphasis is on making your music more social and enabling you to share your listening habits across various other online services.

Users now will create  a profile and create friends lists with others who use the service. A drag and drop interface will allow you to suggest a track or playlist to your friends.

Your existing digital library can be imported into the Spotify program, meaning all your music is contained within one application.

A hefty dose of Facebook integration has been added too, something that I’m very interested in using although I’m not sure I want everyone to see what I’ve been listening to all the time…

The update will start rolling out from 9am GMT on 27/04/10. Feel free to add me as a friend, I’m munkimatt on there too.

UPDATE : @barneyc has written a very interesting post regarding some concerns he has with the new Spotify client. Well worth a read. While I’m not too bothered about playlists being automatically shared (I share a huge amount of my life online), I’m pretty annoyed at adverts slipping into my paid for subscription.

UPDATE 2 : He’s now saying he’s getting audio adverts. Yeesh…

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After one hugely positive story about Android today it almost seems fair we counter that with one of absolute utter incompetence regarding the operating system du jour. It’s like ‘bloggers karma’ or something.

Despite repeated confirmations that the HTC Hero would be upgraded to a newer base version of Android (so far 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1 have all been mentioned) it seems it’ll be stuck on poor old redundant 1.5 for a bit longer. Despite being rumoured to come out every month since the beginning of the year the update has officially been pushed back from late April (or as  it’s commonly know, now) to June onwards.

Now that sounds delightfully vague and with good reason. HTC issued a press statement to TechRadar regarding the delay with this beautiful little nugget;

“Starting in June, anyone owning an HTC Hero will receive an initial preparatory update, shortly followed by the full Éclair update.”

So it’s not actually coming in June, you’ll just get a little update in June which will prepare you for a bigger update which will happen at some indeterminate point in the future. By my current reckoning that’ll be around December 2097, at which point the rest of the world will be potentially on Android 137.6.

If I was a hugely cynical person I would say the HTC are holding back the update in order not to harm sales from their new Desire and Legend handsets.  But I’m not. Ahem.

Sorry Hero owners, no Google Navigation for you. Not unless you like a bit of fiddling around.

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