According to a recent AOL survey, almost half of UK web users will waste three years of their life searching the web without finding what they’re looking. We spend, on average, four hours online every day, but 55% of the Brits’ surveyed said at least a quarter of their time online is wasted as they search unproductively.

It tots up to an average of 15 days a year each, or 3 years in a lifetime, lost in cyberspace limbo. It’s not quite as much time as we spend queuing (4.5 years?!) But it is longer than the average family summer holiday.

Interestingly though, it’s not that the information/sought after item is necessarily difficult to find; it seems 68% of us don’t trust the information when we find it, and so search on in vain for material which seems more trustworthy.

83% of the 25-34year olds polled turned out to be ‘web wanderers’, getting lost online on a regular basis. The 55+ age group obviously know something they don’t; only 77% of them are wandering blindly down the Internet’s dark alleys and unmarked side streets.

But, while I’m appalled at the thought of losing more than 4 years to queues, I don’t find the net-related stats so hard to believe.
Quite often my most interesting discoveries are made while searching for something I may never find, possibly because the discoveries can be rather distracting! Obviously it’s not without its downsides – how many of these hours are being frustratingly snatched away by Splogs*, broken links and misleading search terms? But, when time allows, I’m usually happy to take the rough with the smooth, knowing that if I look long enough I’m sure to find something that was worth the wait, even if I have forgotten what I actually wanted by the time I get there.

* For more information on Splogs and how to fight them click here: http://www.fightsplog.com/

The photo site Flickr is great for a number of reasons - one of them being you can see what other’s photos have been taken with the LG Viewty, showing off its abilities.

This, for example, is a classy winter shot of ice on a tree branch:

21. Dezember 2007 by ernscht

The camera fares well indoors as well, as shown by this macro shot:

Xbox 360 Controller by Skyfall

And the indoor shots are proven with this dinky shot of a scale model:

New Rotterdam Central by jacco.org

I found all these photos and more at Flickr’s photos tagged with “Viewty”. There’s also a clutch of Viewty phone owners’ groups there - LG Viewty, Viewty KU 990 and Viewtyful. If you have a Viewty, join up and we’ll keep an eye out for your photos.

Time for another check in with our fellow bloggers to find out what they’ve been saying about their Viewtys.

(We might have to stop doing these soon – we don’t want all the praise going to our heads and making us smug!)

Simon at Zath Games got in touch to let us know he’d written his review and it seems he is also a fan:

“the first thing that you’ll notice about the LG Viewty is just how great this mobile phone actually looks and feels in your hand – it sits nicely in the hand, not being too big or heavy”

Particularly of the camera (a common theme now!)

“The camera that comes on the LG Viewty is one of the best that I’ve seen on a mobile phone boasting an impressive 5 megapixels of detail for your photos. It has good quality flash (the first camera I’ve actually owned to have one – smartphones don’t tend to have this feature)”
…
“with the LG Viewty KU990, you’ve basically got a great digital camera with built-in phone functionality!”

The team at Know Your Mobile were almost too kind in their review of “the 5 megapixel, HSDPA and touchscreen wonder phone”

Oh you guys..

“it matches many of the iPhone’s specs and in many cases exceeds them.”
…
“the Viewty is a definite step up from the Prada not just in terms of its feature set but also its build quality. The phone packs a bit of heft with its dimensions of 104mm by 55mm by 17mm and its 112 gramme weight. But it’s a nice, solid and expensive-feeling heft”
…
“our first impressions of the LG Viewty are that it seems like an excellent mobile phone that has been saddled with user interface that is potentially superb but still has some bugs to be ironed out.”

They go on, but we wouldn’t want to brag…

The BBC have published their list of technologies to watch out for in 2008 and some of it makes for interesting reading. Four of the five themes explored - blending offline/online, ultra-mobile PCs, widespread public wireless and mobile VoIP - illustrate the trend for computing power leaving the world of the desktop and the office and into your pocket, and the blurring of the distinction between offline and online.

Mobile VoIP and WiMAX public wireless go hand-in-hand and it’s very likely we will see more of both in the future, with demand for one driving likely to drive supply of the other. I don’t see either of these technologies totally dominating just yet - WiMAX have yet to gain a foothold in Europe and the investment demands means 3G services have a natural head start over it for providing high-speed mobile Internet. Mobile VoIP depends not just on bandwidth but also handset provision, and this too will take time to take off. Maybe one for 2009 rather than 2008?

The most interesting is the ultra-mobile computing. Thanks to Moore’s Law, and technologies such as flash memory and sharper, smaller LCD screens, notebook PCs are shrinking and shrinking, while mobile phones are able to pack a lot more power in. While we have long considered a computer as either a desktop unit, or a bulky laptop of a similar size and designed along the same lines, the design paradigm is really shifting rapidly to something very different, and ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) are the start of that.

UMPCs (like the Asus EEE pictured on the right) have ditched hard drives and optical drives in favour of solid-state storage and using wireless and USB, cutting the size down. Who knows what’s next for this kind of PC. Do they really need a keyboard or mouse pointer as input, with touchscreen technology ever advancing? Closer integration with mobile phones and other portable devices via wi-fi or Bluetooth is an obvious possibility - once these are aligned together in a “personal area network”, itself connected to the wider world all the time, does it even mean the “computer” is a single device any more?

Tie that in with the advances in web services and synchronising online and offline (which will become more and more essential), and our concept of what makes a “computer” may become a lot more fluid. No longer bound in a single device, our files, music, video and data can roam between devices within our network and across locations seamlessly, and our computer becomes a more virtual kind of machine, that is always at hand whether we are at home or away, independent of the hardware it’s running on.

Well, that’s one strand of thought about the future of technology. Why not add yours below in the comments?