When the iPad was announced, I told myself (and everyone else) that I would never get one. To me, the obvious lack of core features such as multi tasking (which is now hopefully coming soon in the iOS 4 update) and no widgets or anything (why not have a dashboard-like feature?) made it uninteresting.

However, when an iPad landed in my hands I decided to at least give it a go. And the conclusion is basically this: Its very easy to hate the iPad for all the things it doesnt do. However, its also extremely easy to love it for the things that it does do, because it does it so well. The device itself is beautiful, the OS is perfectly quick and responsive and there are lots of lovely applications which really utilize the screen real estate. On top of that, the battery life is awesome!

I will be sharing more impressions after Ive used it for a bit. But for now, feel free to take part with comments!

I admit, this is slightly old news now (3 days to be exact) but I feel its worth mentioning anyways. A new beta of Chrome is now available. Among the new features we find autofill for website forms. When you double click in a field or start typing, Chrome will make suggestions based on your autofill settings.

Further more, the synchronization feature has been improved. It now also syncs your extensions and autofill information as well. The user interface has also been freshened up a bit and one of the toolbars have gotten a new look.

The latest beta can be downloaded here

HTC has announced a press event September 15th. They're not saying anything more than that though, so the rest is up to your imagination. There are a few possibilities though. They way I see it, I think we're either going to see the HTC Desire HD, the Desire Z (Aka Vision) or the first Windows Phone 7 phone.

So, mark the date of in your calendars. Whatever it is, its probably going to be very interesting as its been a while since we've heard anything from HTC.

What are your thoughts? What do you think HTC will be showing off?

Google has repeatedly voiced out against task killers for Android. Applications available on the Android Market which lets the user manually or automatically shut down apps presumably to improve performance and increase battery life. The problem is that Android does this automatically. Using task killers actually just gets in the way of Android's memory management and can actually result in loss of data. Google has apparently decided that enough is enough and with Android 2.2, task killers wont work anymore as the feature used by task killers have been removed. Read on for more!

There has been a long time debate whether or not task killers for Android has any effect. True, using a task killer to shut down all running apps will give you a short lived burst of available RAM and tests have shown that you might actually be able to squeeze out a couple of extra minutes from your battery. However, we are talking a rather insignificant improvement.

The fact is that killing off services in Android can be unfortunate. Those services are often loaded with a lot of information and they are "sleeping" in the background without impacting battery usage. Killing off these services may result in loss of whatever information they were loaded with.

Android has a very solid system in place which basically shuts down applications when Android decides they are not needed anymore and or when available RAM is getting on the low side. Personally, I think this system works really great and is how multi tasking on a phone should be. I have never noticed my Nexus One getting sluggish and I find myself never thinking about the number of running applications at all. Android handles it all for me. Looking at Apple's iOS or Palm's WebOS, they all give the user a nice way to kill of tasks they dont want anymore. However, I think Android does better and handles it all for you. You never have to think about it your running tasks.

All this said, certain task killer applications available have nice features such as mass-uninstall of apps, back up features and such. However, I dont see any reason to use them to actually kill running apps. Android 2.2 even comes with a application management setting where you stop the apps you don't want should you feel the need to.

Do you use a task killer in Android? If so, please tell us why!

I must admit, I have never heard of Jolicloud before, but the final version of it is now available. Version 1.0. Jolicloud is a web-based Linux-distribution based on Ubuntu aimed towards netbooks. The core of Jolicloud consists mainly of Chromium and HTML 5 along with other essential Gnome based components.

Though the system is web based its still possible to save data to the local disk.

Jolicloud is developed for net books and you can find a list of compatible devices here

For more details and download. Go to jolicloud.com

Would love to hear your experiences should decide to try it out!