The novelty of video calling may have done little to entice customers to the 3G networks that mobile operators paid so much for back in 2000, but the offer of ubiquitous fast internet access is proving more popular. Adverts for mobile broadband are all over the place at the moment, but if the USB modems (or ‘dongles’) plastered across billboards and throughout newspapers all look the same, the deals from the different providers are anything but...

A few weeks ago I was handed Nokia’s new N810 to review. “Great,” I thought, “I quite liked the N800 – the previous version – so let’s see what Nokia has done to improve things.” I lived with it for a few days, carrying it around my home, travelling to and from London with it in my pocket, connecting via Wi-Fi in coffee-shops and using a Bluetooth phone when on over-ground trains. It was fun.

I then submitted my Nokia N810 review. I’d have liked to play with the gadget for longer and written more, but web publishing isn’t good with long deadlines – everyone wants reviews of tomorrow’s products yesterday, or before – and opinion varies on the optimum length for these online assessments. I was commissioned for around 1,000 words, so that’s what I submitted. And then came the backlash...

Anyone who’s ever used a laptop computer will know that they can get a little warm after just a few minutes. If you always work at a desk or table, this may be all you ever notice, but if you use a laptop on your lap, you could be outing your health at risk.

Sit with a very hot laptop on your thighs for any length of time and you run the risk of more than just a crease in your trousers. In 2002, a letter to The Lancet medical journal recounted the case of a 50-year old Swedish scientist who had burned a rather intimate part of his anatomy after using his laptop on his lap for an hour, apparently fully-clothed.

Whether the buzz about last year’s launches of the iPhone, Windows Vista, and third-party Facebook apps had more to do with mass-marketing campaigns than technological breakthroughs is debatable, but there will likely soon be plenty of mobile-related advances for even the most dyed-in-the-wool geek to get excited about.

Google plans for mainframe server farms with a simple internet connection free of charge may mean the masses could soon tap into apps previously reserved for government spy agencies and dark matter physicists. On a much smaller scale, manufacturers may be using nanowires to make handheld super computers within 10 years or so. And back in the present, Intel's plans for a quad-core laptop processor look set to complement terabyte-capacity 2.5in hard drives, making phenomenally capable portables a reality.

So will we soon hold the power of mainframe super computers in our pockets that will offer voice-activated beam-me-up Scotty commands to our mothership? We poked around to find out what to expect over the rest of 2008 -- and beyond.

If your regular morning routine is to open half a dozen websites and spend half an hour so seeing what’s new, you’ve probably realised that the amount of new information published each day can soon outstrip the amount of time you have available to read it.

An RSS reader is one way to distil several (or even hundreds) of websites down into a readily digestible form, but they’re not much use for monitoring other online info. With the explosion of web-based email services, mailing lists, forums, weather forecasts, stocks and shares reports, photo galleries, streaming videos, social networking sites and everything in between, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to keep on top of everything. Unless, that is, you exploit yet another cunning bit of web technology – the aggregator.

We've taken a look at the five leading aggregators -- NetVibes, PageFlakes, MyYahoo, iGoogle and Microsoft Live. See what we thought after the cut. 

Whether your laptop is fresh from the box or a few years old, to get the most from it you need to treat it with a little care and attention. A new laptop that's set up properly from the start will run smoothly for years, but older models that are starting to show their age can be given a new lease of life with a few simple tweaks. So, if you want to wring more from your battery or simply cut the time Windows takes to load, you'll find the advice you need right here.

With more than 10,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots located around the UK, the chances are you will always be reasonably close to a location offering cheap high-speed internet access. Hotspots are already commonplace in most major coffee shop chains, many pubs, airport lounges and departure waiting areas, train stations, shopping centres, libraries, restaurants, cinemas and gyms. Now hotspot providers are tacking one of the most complex untapped markets for Wi-Fi users -- moving trains.

Getting the latest edition of your paper sent direct to your handheld is a great way to keep up with current events. But how user-friendly are these mobile editions?

No matter how sophisticated e-ink displays and digital publishing become, it's hard to imagine a day when there isn't at least some demand for a cheap, disposable daily newspaper. That's not to say that printed paper is the best way to deliver news to everyone, of course, and newspaper publishers have realised that fact. The UK quality press has long since embraced the internet and offer everything from online versions of their print editions to dedicated web-only content, and much more besides.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project’s mission to empower children in poverty-stricken regions around the world by giving them a $100 laptop could not be more worthy. For the price of a university textbook, a child who might otherwise lack the pens, paper and books to go to school will have a learning tool with potential access to a vast amount of content.

But all is not well with this noble pursuit. The OLPC project’s founder and chairman, Nicholas Negroponte, who is on leave as director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory (where he was one of the founders and former head of its Media Laboratory), recently accused Intel of thwarting the campaign on national TV in the US.

If you've ever tried using WAP, you may be sceptical about the idea of web access on your mobile. It's time to put cynicism aside and look at the new breed of browsers and phones.  The mobile internet got off to a shaky start. When BT Cellnet (as it was then known) announced in 2000 that its new WAP-enabled phones would allow you to "Surf the internet. Surf the BT Cellnet", expectations were sky high.

Sadly the reality didn't match the hype. Six years on, it's a very different story. WAP has been largely forgotten and the current generation of phones and smartphones have web browsers that are every bit as capable as their PC counterparts. With many websites and online services now offering their own dedicated mobile content and HSDPA delivering broadband download speeds, the mobile internet is taking off at last.