Psychological thriller Antman and current research into 'the social' in the ant world

It’s clear from the latest announcement in the UK of research into wood ants, due to be tagged in Derbyshire by researchers from York University, that there is an abiding interest among scientists in the ant world and, in particular, in what contributes to ‘the social’ in ant societies.

It is this ‘social’ dimension that the serial killer Antman explores and ultimately exploits in the most terrifying way in the eponymous novel Antman, the psychological thriller by Robert V. Adams. (published in a new edition 2012 by USA publisher www.taylorstreetbooks.com). The book can also be bought in paperback or as an ebook from Amazon.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19365505

Profit without purpose 'a recipe for disaster'

What an unlikely ally for me! Especially since the playwright Dennis Potter named the cancer that killed him ‘Rupert’, after Rupert Murdoch. This latest speech by Elisabeth Murchoch may not please her brother brother or her father (she is the second oldest of his 6 children), but it’s given me an opportunity to wave the flag once again on behalf of ethical writing and publishing.

Elisabeth Murdoch was delivering the keynote MacTaggart lecture at the MediaGaurdian Edinburgh International Television Festival on 23 August 2012. She said quite a lot about the phone hacking case and went on to say that as a consequence organisations involved in publishing must ‘discuss, affirm and institutionalise a rigorous set of values based on an explicit statement of purpose’. Yes! She also said that it isn’t sufficient to use money and profit as the baseline way of measuring everything. She added that an absence of purpose is a very dangerous thing for capitalism and freedom.

 

Ethics and writing

I’ve realised when reading the account of the session at the Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference (The Guardian 20 August 2012) that this was what I was waiting for – a debate, in effect, with an ethical and values dimension about the conditions in which writing takes place.

Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, criticised the structural bias in the literature prizes such as the Booker prize as ‘middle-class’ and this sparked off in me the renewed preoccupation I’ve had as an author not just of fiction but of non-fiction as well over the past 30 years – basically not wanting to follow tram lines laid down by somebody or by an organisation such as a mass publisher, reflecting values and principles I simply don’t hold.

So, what does this amount to in practice? In practice, for me and, reading this piece about the Edinburgh Festival it seems I’m not alone, it means not accepting the way something is constructed culturally, elsewhere – which more likely than not means somewhere where upper-class Englishness rules – as the set of rules and procedures by which what I write has to be judged and/or measured. And for me, of course, working as I have since the late 1960s with people who’ve been judged by other people as not acceptable, criminal, deviant, needing to be socially excluded, okay to be stigmatised and all those other ghastly terms that refer fundamentally to processes of differentiation that reinforce social inequalities and people’s sense of personal inadequacy.

Coming back to what Irving Welsh said, I think he argued that the globalisation of the culture in which we write makes it difficult to conceive of certain pieces of writing being published nowadays by London-based publishers. This, I imagine from my own experience of mass publishers producing my non-fiction – I have to rest with small publishers for my fiction at present – is because of the focus on marketing, the need to define products, the need to fit them into pre-described categories.

Another remark I took from the article relates to ideas that sociologists have talked about for years, which doesn’t make them less important, but, given all the ways in which media studies and degrees in the ‘ologies’ are rubbished by the right-wing press, enables ill-informed and prejudiced comment to snipe away without any basis in genuinely critical reflection, have identified ways in which globalisation, or universalism, has become to an extent tied to global capitalism – and needs authors and readers to challenge this trend, in their different ways.

A good deal of my time has been taken up over the past 12 years in trying to achieve the setting up by the trade union of writers in the UK, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, of the Writers’ Guild Books Cooperative. (www.writersguildbookscoop.co.uk ) I can’t at present engage in the further development of this, even though I still chair it, because I’m convalescing from a serious brain operation and engaging in follow-up treatment through chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, I think what I’ve just written sets out what might be the parameters for further debates by writers and their smaller and independent publishers to purse.

To me, there should be a statement by writers about what they mean by their own values and principles. These shouldn’t be imposed on them by external, oppressive or prejudiced and exclusionary forces, rooted in social or personal inequalities and/or attacking people’s personal or social identies as writers. There should be no hierarchical thinking hidden in the ways these statements are socially constructed, no pre-defined notion of what constitutes ‘good’ literature that is transposed from vantage points of privilege, social inequalities, class, gender, age, (dis)ability or geography.

And that is precisely what I wanted to say for today, about writers, the Writers' Guild Books Cooperative and my own frustrations about the narrowing of the tramlines of what can be written for mass publishers and ways of transforming the world of publishing beyond them.

From miracle to routine: Using DNA to store books digitally

It is impossible to use DNA to encode the contents of a written document, yet it’s being done. This remarkable achievement takes the form of a book of more than 50,000 words plus some illustrations and a programme for the pc being stored using genetic material. As an aside from doing this, scientists involved assert that it could be cheaper to do it this way than to use ‘traditional’ digital means to store the data. This isn’t the case at present, but could happen with the development of DNA-based devices that could be held in the hand and could incorporate sequences of DNA that would simplify the stored data.

One particularly noteworthy advantage, according to the advocates of this approach, is that the stored data is robust and will not deteriorate. They claim it will be readable – I supposed based on the evidence of ancient DNA that has been found –  after thousands of years.

www.Richarddawkins.net/articles/646791-book-written-in-dna-code/

Not a political economy of book publishing

 This isn't reaally a political economy. It’s more a stream of consciousness. I’m not in the frame of mind to make this respectable by cloaking it in fancy language.

Let’s consider what is going on in the world of traditional and e book publishing. It is about time that we looked beyond merely the experience of the reader as consumer. We have to consider the perspectives of the other different major ‘stakeholders’ (I hate this Blairite word, but I guess it conveys what I mean) in the publishing industries. Because there are multiple industries, well, that I can identify. I tend to categorise them as follows. Although the situation is more complex, three categories suffice to get my meaning across:

1.     Largest, mass publishers. These are often global corporations who have steadily bought up many smaller publishers over the past couple of decades. They’re often content to shelter behind the original name of the company they’ve bought out. They do most of the big book deals with celebrity authors, they fill Waterstones and other major chains’ shop windows and they sell most of the books bought in the UK. Many of these publishers have spotted ways of promoting digital publishing and increasing sales and are chasing people they identify as potential high earners with particular e book titles, so as to maximise their profits from the very recent advances (the first Kindle was only produced by Amazon less than 3 years ago) in digital technology.

2.     Smaller, independent publishers. These are still numerous and often occupy niche markets, such as for particularly well-read groups of fairly traditional users of books and the authors who serve them. Examples that come to my mind – still trying to avoid naming names – are publishers of books on railways and historical trains, wartime, cookery and gardening. Often, the markets for the books are pretty impervious to short-term shifts in the economy, because the readers of these books – the way I see it anyway – tend to like to have them on the bookshelves to refer to.

3.     Self-publishers. It was a big jump above from huge global publishers to smaller, specialist publishers and it’s at least as big a jump to the world of self-publishing. There is a huge number of authors out there, most of whom have long since given up trying to obtain a contract with a mass, or even a smaller publisher. The Internet and digital advances made in publishing since the 1990s have served them well, in one important sense – they now have very cheap technology available on their desktops to produce their own books. And that’s what they are doing. They don’t need to take any notice of the comments of any independent person, whether a reviewer, an agent or a publisher. They can use Print on Demand (POD) and only create single copies for members of their family, or they can ask the local ‘bookshop’ – which in reality may be a village store or post office –  to hold a few copies on sale or return. They can be flexible over the content of the book. They may print it this month on a local history, get feedback from local people and produce an enlarged edition next month incorporating extra written material and photographs. This can all be in hard copy.

These self-publishing authors, of course, may be into traditional publishing through a local printer, they may use their own desktop publishing programme and send this off to one of thousands of Internet-based businesses ready to produce self-published books in any design and number the author wishes. They may do the whole job themselves, using a local print shop and finding a bookbinder who will put the whole lot together after they’ve produced a pile of paper with print on each page, edited to their own satisfaction.

So, where do we go from here? Well, the bad news is that the mass publishers and, probably many of the smaller publishers, are still likely to be interested mainly or wholly in profit. The good news, however, is that the self-publishing authors can go on more or less forever producing their own books or paying for others to produce them. Apart from being ripped off at the fringes of their marketplace by Vanity publishers (trying to maximise returns by charging extortionate prices for printing and publishing somebody’s book), there really is no way in which this market will change, of its own volition.

And a bit of me thinks, well done, independent authors, if you’re able to empower yourselves to the point where you can do this, keep away from authority figures in the world of mass, celebrity and high status publishing, keep away from profiteers, keep away from critics, keep away from people who are likely to discourage you before you’ve really got going. You could find this takes you in some as yet completely unknown direction that could give you and your future readers a great deal of pleasure. You could be on the threshold of a new world of publishing and authoring. You could become part of the these revolutions in publishing.

The printed word is quite well with me thanks Mr DIgital

I understand there is meant to be a complete jettisoning of the word on the old-fashioned page that you can touch, read and turn over to find another one with a flick of a couple of fingers and a thumb. This, apparently, is imminent, or as Karl Marx might have said, immanent. I have to admit to some confusion though, because day by day I meet people who haven’t yet bought a tablet or gone the next step and followed the logic of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and got rid of their traditional print-based books from their toilets, bedside cabinets, bookshelves and garages. So perhaps we’re at one of those moments in history, one of those turning points that, whilst when our descendants look back in a hundred years will be momentary, at this point it seems to be hung endlessly in the air around us, waiting for resolution.

What do we do then? Do we continue to read the book, carry it with us, lend it to friends? Do we continue to haunt old bookshops in those towns – York (almost medieval in their ancientness), Hay on Wye (home of the internationally renowned biggest bookshop to say nothing of the festival), Moffatt (at least 4 in the Lowlands alone) – and to gather up our finds and browse through them before stacking them away on crowded shelves when we return home.

Or do we follow the insistence of a colleague of mine who tells me to get rid of my books as soon as possible? He already has and he’s proved to himself and his world that he could manage without them in the first place. The Tablet is only his corroborating evidence, an accessory after the fact.

I’m just not ready. Just as I still buy a newspaper or two or three most days of the week and prefer to sit with a coffee anywhere and turn those pages over, sometimes finishing up with piles of untidy but fascinating journalism all over every nearby surface from things I’ve spotted, so I can’t see any comparison between this and the brief synopses on the internet of the vast richness of the writing I encompass in those couple of hours most days.

Clearly, there are different forms in which ‘the word’ is made available to us. You could argue that the advent of the e book adds to the richness of what’s available. You could also argue that putting various journals and newspapers on line, as well as summarising a host of TV sources of news, adds to the richness. But what I can’t rid my mind of is this nagging doubt that when at the end of reading my novel on the tablet, I still don’t own the book in a physical sense and I can’t pass it to the person I would like to borrow and read it as well and I can’t at the end of the process add it to those new shelves I’ve just installed in my study – the largest room in our house, spreading its books like a benign germ into other rooms when I need them by me – when I have these doubts about the e books, they don’t seem to be answered by any of this wonderful digital innovation. Maybe we have to wait until the bookless generation comes along that hasn’t experienced a hard covered or a paperback covered book in the hand and thinks the whole reason for having a printed page of words only existed in the amorphous past. Only then will people stop reading in the traditional way. And frankly, I hope that by then I’m beyond bothering.

Heretical reflections sparked by the problem of children being unable to improve their performance at mathematics

Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, has bold plans to return the return the primary school curriculum to what he regards as secure foundations for ensuring that children know enough, not only about mathematics (symbolically being able to recite their ‘times tables’ by the age of 9) but also about reciting poetry (by age 5) and, by September 2014, foreign languages.

It is tempting, of course, simply to dismiss these as unacceptably naive proposals that won’t enhance ‘real’ education. However, we shouldn’t discount the possibility that if children are provided with some basic knowledge it will enable them to build on this knowledge by progressive improvements in understanding, and consequently as they learn and develop gain in associated skills of being able to discuss, debate and present their grasp of these aspects with more self-confidence. Perhaps, rather than rubbishing the entire package, we should be examining carefully which aspects of which particular subject areas are likely to contain the germs of the most significant gains for pupils.

In this connection, I am reminded of a particularly valuable piece of learning I gained from a chance meeting with the late Ernest Polack the well-known public school housemaster and teacher, not only at Clifton Public School in Polack’s House. Ernest and I eventually persuaded the Home Office and Clifton College to allow us to exchange jobs for a month each – he lived in at the young offenders’ custody centre where I was assistant governor and then I returned to live in Polack’s House for a month and thereafter we continued exchanges, including trainees from custody and sixth formers from the school, over a period of years. One of the most significant things I learned was the emphasis of the curriculum in Polack’s House, not to say the school – not least on Wednesday afternoons devoted to sport and cultural activities and Saturday mornings devoted to developing public debating skills between the boys – which over the subsequent years I saw bearing fruit as pupils I knew won their positions in significant positions of government and enterprise throughout the British economy and in other countries. An extraordinary outcome of a privileged education, or an inspirational attempt at tackling social inequality at the same time? Ernest and I liked to think of this as both of these rather than just the former.

Ernest served his 15 years as housemaster at Clifton College and then returned to his first love, Africa, where he was head of the international school in a prominent country, before returning, not to retirement, but to a comprehensive school in Bath. He was in many ways a visionary and undoubtedly was a very talented and yet modest person, a boundary crosser par excellence and he taught me a great deal about open-mindedness. So, I’m not for ditching the best of the traditional in schooling, and, despite my intuitive dislike of private education, I can’t turn my back on it entirely, when we have so much to learn from it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/back-to-basics/will/Gove’s/national/curriculum-overhaul-prepare children-for-the-future-7848765.html )

Academics to be able to publish their publicly funded research for free access via Internet

Momentous changes in the world of academic journal publishing seem likely to liberate potential readers from the exploitive burden hitherto, of having first to subscribe to an academic journal.

The change, basically, follows a recommendation by former university Vice-Chancellor Dame Professor Janet Finch and is reflected by an announcement by David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, that journal articles reporting on all research which is publicly funded should, from a couple of years time, be made available free to all readers on the Internet.

(https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/ictktn/articles/-/blogs/willetts-announces-plan-for-free-access-to-academic-research?ns_33_redirect=%2Fweb%2Fictktn%2Farticles%2F-%2Fblogs )

The change won’t take place until 2014. At present, British universities have to pay in the order of £200m annually to the publishers of these journals in subscriptions. In future the authors of the articles will be expected to pay some article processing charges (ACPs) which will cover the cost of putting their submitted work through the sometimes lengthy and time- and labour-consuming process of being peer reviewed, edited and made available online at no charge. As an indication of the kind of fee involved here, we shouldn’t become too complacent. It looks as though the typical cost of publishing an article could come to about £2000 per item, which is equivalent to the cost many a self-publisher pays for an entire book to be produce on a Print on Demand (POD) basis.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/free-access-british-scientific-research )

New versions of e book readers

Which has tested two e book readers available from Amazon under the Kindle label, as well as one from Sony. It isn’t long since all this family of Kindle’s started – in October 2009.  They’ve progressed so fast in technical terms in this should timespan. This entire area is becoming more and more competitive.

There are now four generations of Kindle. The first was the 2007, available only in the US. The second generation has a capacity of about 1,500 books and weighs in at 290g. The third generation of Kindle was launched in 2010, was available in a Wi Fi version or with 3G and you could store about 3,500 books on it, with enhanced batteries that would last about a month between recharging. The fourth generation of Kindle appeared in 2011 and holds less books – about 1,400 – but is cheapest at about £89 and also very light and convenient at 170g.

The newest, fourth generation, version of Kindle is the Amazon Kindle Touch. This has a touchscreen, built in loudspeakers and a headphone jack so that you can use it to support an audio-book. You can buy it with 3 Gigabytes so that you can buy and download a book whilst on the move. It holds a maximum of about 3,000 books and the battery should last about two months before it needs recharging. This represents more or less double the capacity of the original Kindle. The weight of this new Kindle is about 220g, which is about half the weight (well, 430g less) than the latest version of iPad. As far as I can tell, you can only use this to support e books in the Kindle Store run by Amazon. As far as I can tell as well, there is no way you can use this to borrow books from your local library.

The new Sony – PRS-T1 costs about £130. It also has a touchscreen, weighs only 165g and you use it to support viewing books produced in ePub. Normally, in the UK you borrow these from public libraries.

www.which.co.uk/whichkindle

Battle between some publishers and US government for the freedom to deliver e books

There’s a fair battle developing between Apple and the US government over e books. Basically, the US government, in a document published by its Department of Justice, is adopting the view that e book publishing is a selfish activity which operates against the public interest – not my words.  The conflict began in April. At that time, the US government accused Apple of conspiring to fix the price of e books using what has been called an ‘agency model’, along with a handful of other large publishers such as Harper Collins and Penguin Books, so as to compete more effectively with Amazon, which company now dominates this field. The stimulus was the intention of Amazon, apparently, to set the price of all its e books at £6.43, equivalent to $9.99. The plan would have been for Apple – at the same time as launching the iPad and the iBookstore – to set up agreements then permitting the publisher to take a cut of, say, 30% from sales at this price.

It appears that so far Macmillan, and Apple and Pearson – both owned by the global publishing corporation Pearson – are still opposed to the settlement imposed by the US government, whereas Simon and Schuster, Hachette and HarperCollins have accepted the government’s conditions.

The case Apple proposes is that by going into e book publishing it has represented enhanced innovative practice which benefits people who write and read the e books. This amounts to saying that the agency model proposed by Apple has the advantages of diversifying the range of possible platforms (using tablets, presumably, since these seem to date to be the preferred mode of delivering e books) reflecting the benefits of enhanced competition, presumably in a variety of prices of different means of delivery which in the longer term will enhance the quality, interests and products of publishing itself as an industry.

Living and speaking in the fast lane

We live at a fast pace in an action society. In August 2012 we live in the aura of the London Olympics. Is it any wonder nouns are becoming verbs all around us. I’m about to coffee and while I’m doing that I may biscuit as well. I was going to sideline this, or maybe sidetrack, but alternatively I afterthought. Perhaps I could teacake instead. Or maybe muffin. Cheese or cinnamon, that’s the problem now. Hardly time to pause and decide. I might simply iced water and lemon instead.

Reviews of books and other products by Amazon

Well, Amazon have a stable of reviewers. They call these, apparently, ‘customer reviewers’. They seem to be employed by the firm rather than at the beck and call of the customer. No doubt about that. Apparently they give free comments and suggestions and feedback to the website. The aim of this, no doubt, is to improve marketability of the ‘products’. That, on the face of it, sounds predictable and fair enough. After all, their task is to give people using the Amazon site the opportunity to read their critiques. Subsequently, Amazon ensure that the readers can give feedback on how helpful, or not, their critical comments have been.

Apparently, there are two types of reviewers: classic and new. If you’re a classic reviewer it appears that you’ll have been providing these reviews for Amazon for at least 3 years and possibly for much more than a decade.

It seems that the new reviewers aren’t just tending to cover books. They’ve been able to extend their range across the huge and growing diversity of other products supplied by Amazon.

Apparently, there is a problem of plagiarism amongst reviewers. Interestingly, some reviews bear striking resemblance to each other. Attempts are made by reviewers whose work is ‘borrowed’ in this way to ensure that Amazon pick up the issue and tackle it. Thereby, presumably, the credibility of the review system isn’t dented too significantly.

To date, Amazon appears to have sustained the unitary system of ranking products such as books along a single dimension with criteria to support judgements at each level.

Launch of Kindle DX worldwide by Amazon and some of the then competitors

We need to bear in mind that it was only in 2009 that Amazon launched the Kindle 2 and only in  2010 that they brought the Kindle DX onto the market, globally. The DX featured a nearly 10 inch screen that auto-rotated. I can hardly believe I’m writing this. It sounds like advertising copy for Amazon and I don’t intend that. I’m just trying to recapture for myself the mood of this particular market less than 3 years ago.

At that time, in 2010, there were other competitors.

There was Plastic Logic QUE proReader, made in the UK. This weighed almost half a kilo and was designed to handle files in major formats such as PDF. The 4 gigabyte version could handle about 35,000 documents and cost about £400. The 8 gigabyte version handled up to 75,000 documents and cost about £600.

There was something called a Skiff Reader. It featured a touch-sensitive screen and something called the largest e-ink display. There was Wi-fi connectivity and the link with the Skiff store selling the device and also the ability to draw on 3 gigabytes of memory of supplied documents through this link. It was only available in the US in 2010, though.

I wasn’t convinced at the time that devices such as these competed with the Kindle. Amazon’s market dominance in the book selling field paid off in those recent days and has been a continuing feature since then. I wouldn’t say all the competition has been knocked off the shelf, but Amazon is a powerful, some would say the powerful, player.

And now Evi up against the Siri by Apple

And now Evi up against the Siri by Apple

I have to confess this review I found in The Observer (26 Feb 2012) is pretty much a mystery to me. That’s one good reason, I find from experience, to write about it. Somebody is sure to enlighten me. I write, after all, not as an expert by as what I call an expert through experience, which means most of the time not an expert at all, but feeling my way forward in this extremely confusing and often baffling new world of devices, techniques and means, which I can’t help but find exciting.

So, here is the helper to the talking mobile phone which is able to understand different English accents. Unbelievable. How close is that to anything I’ve ever known and how close is it to my world of writing?

Well, the existing Siri produced by Apple already appears to be a talking device and now this new Evi, created somewhere in or around Cambridge – which I gather is absolutely brimming with these small companies eager to innovate and change the world – can search for the geography of where a particular business is located and then can match to a regional or local accent. How amazing is that! According to the founder of True Knowledge, William Tunstall-Pedoe who created the company, Evi is capable of holding millions of simultaneous conversations and is actually self-aware. In contrast, he maintains, Siri simply relies on other services knowing things. Evi knows the answer and the user can follow up with further questions. Evi works out new facts by drawing on what it already has in its knowledge and also can reason, which means for instance that it can use satellite information to figure out wider and contextual information.

Let’s give Evi and its creator Tunstall-Pedoe full credit. After all, he has already created that software item that is able to solve cryptic crossword clues. Apparently, this was used by Dan Brown to generate the anagrams in his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. That’s enough for me. I know which of these two – Evi and Siri – I find more intriguing and impressive.

There has never been a better time to self-publish

I used to worry myself that traditional, including ‘mass’ publishers, and major chains of booksellers such as Waterstone’s weren’t sufficiently interested in the writings of relatively unknown and new authors, attempting to break into the mainstream of publishing and bookselling. However, over time I’ve realised that the ‘mass’ economy of the mainstream of ‘celebrity’ and ‘established’ authors is somewhat the victim of its own prioritising of sales over quality of writing. In other words, the mainstream, including the mass market is very much driven by what maximises profits for publishers and bookshops, rather than by the intrinsic merits of the content of the writing, which over decades I’ve become convinced is what motivates authors. And what better history could there be to inform this, with many if not most of our greatest living and dead authors in the UK beginning their writing careers by self-publishing? I’m sure we can all think of many examples.

So, rather than us beating ourselves as authors about our failure to break into this much vaunted mainstream of mass publishing, we should reframe our view of the entire publishing and bookselling industry and recognise that the internet and all the Print on Demand, ebook and self-publishing opportunities that it offers have offered us on a plate the means to empower ourselves and do things our way.

As a postscript, we can look at the way the success of various recently published ebooks that haven’t gone down the traditional routes to mainstream publishing have created waves among large, including global publishers. They’re started focusing on what is being self-published in the hope, presumably, of picking up the next cash-generator. If nothing else, this makes me smile. It’s such an ironic comment on their attitude to date, which basically has been looking down their noses. Now suddenly some of them have woken up and smelled the coffee. One mass publisher whose name I won’t mention is writing to authors on my US publisher’s list asking them to get in touch and provide inside information on various things. I, for one, won’t be giving anything away. In my case, this is bliss. It enables me to get on with my life as a writer rather than pretending I’m anything else as well.

iPad, Google Nexus 7 and Microsoft Surface Table

iPad, Google Nexus 7 and Microsoft Surface Tablet

An early review of the latest iPad in Which (May 2012) provides a useful baseline for assessments of the relative merits of other products. The review notes that this new version has pretty much the same appearance as its predecessor iPad2. However, the images are sharper on the screen because the resolution is higher – in fact, doubled. You can by in three capacities – 16, 32 and 64 gigabyte.

The review judges that this represents a considerable improvement on iPad1, on the grounds of the screen being easier (sharper) to read and the colours better. You have to bear in mind that if you set the brightness higher then this reduces the life of the battery. Potentially, on the highest setting it may last just over 5 hours. But at normal settings it should last more than twice this.

The main drawback is that the iPad2 needs a heavier battery with more capacity – about 51g heavier than the previous model as a consequence.  Also, it won’t function on the faster 4G LTE mobile networks due to be launched in the UK. I wish I knew what an LTE mobile network is. Sorry, at the limits of my extremely limited knowledge here.

Anyway, on with the reviews. The latest tablets to be reviewed by Which (August 2012) shouldn’t be ignored.

First is the Google Nexus 7. This is a 7-inch tablet produced by Google and Asus and it’s not to be ignored. The main reason for this is the affordable price. At £169 for the 8 gigabyte and £199 for the twice as powerful 16 gigabyte version it is as fast as any Android and uses the latest (version 4.1) Android operating system. Also, it is smaller than the iPad and about half its weight (340g). This makes it easier to handle.

The main drawback is that although you can watch or read already downloaded material on it you can’t browse or stream material whilst on the move. Also there’s no expansion slot to increase the memory.

Second is the Surface Table by Microsoft. This retails at approximately £400. It’s the first tablet to be produced by Microsoft. It’s main attraction is that it uses the state of the moment Windows 8 operating system with which few of us have yet become acquainted. The tablet will have two versions of this. The upmarket one is Pro, selling at something around £750, which is designed with business in mind. The more basic version is RT which will be selling somewhere around the price of an IPad - £400 ish. Actually, it is quite heavy – about half as heavy again as the iPad.