TEMPLE OF STEVE, Regent Street, Friday (MSBBC) — If you thought the Google Nexus One phone would do your homework, get your girlfriend back onside and fellate you, I’m afraid you’re in for unexpected disappointment.

The Nexus One is Android-powered, does browse the web very nicely and support most feasible applications and is an open platform that anyone can write for without being messed around disgracefully by iPhone Application Approvals. It also claims to be able to transmit real-time “voice chat” to other telephones, though I’ll believe that when I see it. But it singularly fails to knock Steve Jobs into a cocked hat.

It achieves not being vapourware. But consider its deficiencies:

• Not made by Apple
• Not blessed by Steve Jobs
• Not iTunes-compatible
• Can’t possibly measure up to the Apple Tablet
• Not restricted to applications blessed personally by the holy urine of Our Lord in Cupertino.

I’m also concerned at the rumours that the Nexus One samples the user’s DNA from fingerprints and sends it to Google’s advertising department for analysis. This seems implausible, but my contact in Redmond assures me this is the case.

Mary-Jo Enderle, reporting for MSZDnet, quite rightly marked the device down for not merely not running Windows 7, but not even trying to. Apparently it runs one of those “ARM” chips that use no power and have incredibly long battery life, instead of running a proper computer chip that lets you use Office 2007, is guaranteed compatible with all your viruses, has a battery life of twenty minutes and doubles as a hand warmer in this weather.

Philip K. Dick’s estate is also suing Google to atomic dust, on the quite reasonable claim that Mr Dick invented the Latin word “nexus” back in the days of the Roman Empire. I can’t see how they won’t win this one — it’s the sort of case that intellectual property laws were created for. If the estate lost this case, it’s quite possible Philip K. Dick would never write another word again.

And my dead grandmother insisted on an HTC Touch. Apparently Windows Mobile is all that will keep her happy where she is now.

Having nothing to actually report, we asked NewsTechnica’s editorial team to reach deep into their crystal balls to fill space blathering about the year ahead. What they found will shock and appall you.

1. The holographic DVD gives you 2000-line super-high-definition images and seventeen hours of video, or eight Libraries of Congress, on each five-inch silver disc. All movies come with a copy of the Library of Congress just thrown in, because they can. Throw away your thousands of horrible, obsolete old Blu-Rays! The new discs are DRM-locked to your retina for the protection of the artists. Piracy detected during the scanning is dealt with by blinding the pirate. But the quality is so incredibly amazing that everyone repurchases their movie collection at twice the price and no-one bothers with YouTube ever again.

2. Super-High-Definition Television presents you Katie Price’s individual nostril hairs and perked-up nipples in 2000-line 3D as she chows down on a kangaroo’s anus. Sky offers to block such images from your television for a small surcharge.

3. The old media giants work out the secret of business success on the Internet: be blatant, unrepentant, sperm-burping syphilitic gutter whores and proud of it, as has worked so well for the tech press over the past decade. The New York Times sells sponsorship for individual editorial paragraphs.

4. Microsoft Windows 8 fixes all the problems with that icky old Windows 7. It has a database file system! And no virus problems! And a cute fish on the desktop! XP is discontinued in 2011, for sure, definitely. Someone accidentally looks for something with Bing.

5. Google continues to be the quintessence of not evil. The new services you can gain access to by giving a DNA sample for their targeted advertising department to analyse are completely optional and the DNA remains entirely your property.

6. Linux runs your television, microwave, toaster, car, camera, phone, garage door opener and dildo, but geeks still fail to comprehend why you want a Macintosh for the computer you actually use in front of you.

7. People who get laid already get laid more by using the Internet. You keep reading 4chan.

8. A device to reach through the Internet and slap people for being bloody idiots will, despite massive customer demand, still fail to be invented.

9. Record companies rebound as blogcore, the older brother of MySpace indie, is declared a creeping plague and sufferers are quarantined away from their keyboards, though Neutral Milk Hotel outbreaks are reported treatable with Zovirax. Lady Gaga announces a hostile takeover of Ticketmaster and Live Nation and forces Madonna’s back catalogue to be rereleased with all vocals autotuned. Several new audio formats with ridiculously higher quality than MP3 are introduced, none gaining any significant following. Apple continues to sell the only MP3 players anyone actually wants.

10. Earth President Barack Obama introduces a bill to subsidise the realisation of the great American Dream, the flying car, with a set of jet packs for the whole family. The bill is filibustered by Republicans hotly maintaining that to leave the surface of the earth is a heretical defiance of Our Lord that can only lead to socialised flying car death panels staffed by climate change Muslims. The Democrats back down on the plans, having been convinced by the behaviour of the Teabaggers that too much of humanity is too damn stupid to be trusted with any technology more complicated than scissors. Rounded plastic ones.

     

DAS BUNKER, Redmond, Friday (MSBBC) — Cheap netbooks are too limited and no-one will want them any more, say high-ticket vendors at the mere 103% increase in netbook sales in 2009 over 2008.

The small, portable computers sold in stupendous numbers in 2009, but industry watchers have been convinced by Microsoft and Intel to say that their popularity is waning. “No-one is buying a 10-inch netbook that costs £500 and runs Windows 7,” said Stuart Miles of Pocket Unit. “So everyone will go back to expensive iPhones and full-sized laptops, any day now. This ‘internet’ thing is just a fad too.”

What people are looking for now, he believes, is a machine that can keep up with the demands of contemporary web users. A small netbook running Windows 7 Dumbass Edition™, which runs up to three applications at a time and holds your data hostage until you cough up eighty quid to run a fourth, is “thoroughly inadequate” to the task. “Linux, of course, doesn’t exist, wasn’t the impetus for cheap netbooks and didn’t cripple Microsoft’s bottom line for the last three years by providing actual competition for the first time in decades. So it’s not like it can do twice as much in half the space.”

Ian Drew, spokesman for chip designer ARM Holdings, also believes netbooks are in for a shake-up. “Apparently, netbooks that weigh nothing, run twice as fast and have an all-day battery but don’t run Windows are a problem for ARM, not for Microsoft,” he said, lighting a cigar off a fifty-pound note.

Mr Miles believes tablets will take up the mantle from the netbook. “If we carefully define tablets as ‘not netbooks,’ even though they’re made by the same companies with the same technology running the same software, we can claim the netbook is dead even though people are suddenly realising how stupidly huge, unwieldy and heavy even a fourteen-inch laptop is. It’s all about picking your terms rather than, e.g., selling what people actually want instead of what you’d like them to want. Also, if you whack in a 3G modem it’s suddenly a phone instead, and never mind the Mini 9.”

“Clap your hands if you don’t believe in netbooks,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Marketers! Marketers! Marketers! Marketers!”