On Sunday night, the SD card in my phone became corrupt when I plugged it in to my PC (I don’t know why) – but that’s a story for another day. It was when I was fixing it that I realised about how Windows, in the past 5 or 6 years, has moved gradually into a truly consumer-space operating system.

What do I mean by this?

Well think back to the days of Windows XP. It really was the do-it-all operating system – developers could get right down into the system internals and hack around as they pleased with their apps, and you could get a lot of applications which bypassed OS components to perform functionality for you; in this case, formatting bad memory cards.

The latest version of Microsoft’s IDE for development on Windows and other Microsoft platforms has recently been released, which is Visual Studio 2010.

You may have seen my post some time ago about the long list of new features and improvements that have made it into the latest version.

At the recent UK Tech Days event, Microsoft’s GM for Visual Studio gave a presentation on building great Windows 7 apps with Visual Studio. He made lots of good points, and mentioned lots of cool features. Well worth checking out the video, which I have embedded below.

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Well that didn’t last long.

Engadget is reporting Windows Phone 7 Series has now been officially renamed to Windows Phone 7 – which is considerably easier to pronounce, remember, and it also actually makes some kind of sense.

Here’s to simpler product names!

I’ve had my little Dell Mini 9 “netbook” (I hate that term… let’s call it a “subnotebook”?) for just over half a year now, and I have to say I am really really enjoying using it.

There has been a real market shift in recent years – powered by the chip makers producing more energy efficient and powerful processors – towards smaller laptops. The Mini 9 is just about as small as you can get here without getting ridiculous.

So it’s the morning after another massive Apple announcement. The dust has settled, the fanboys have washed their underwear, and the public are taking their first look through the misty sunrise at the fabled Apple Tablet.

First impressions of the blogosphere and Twitter, however, were generally negative. #iTampon is still a (mocking) Trending Topic in the UK.

The cause of most of this negativity seems to be that the iPad is not doing things people wanted it to do, or suitably replacing other devices they wanted it to.

But as Steve Jobs said yesterday, the iPad is not about replacing your existing devices; it’s an entirely new paradigm in computing.

Here’s why people who expect the iPad to replace various devices in their lives have got entirely the wrong idea.