All companies want to keep your custom. Now, most companies try to win you over with brand loyalty, but the frustrating thing about tech companies is that they can use their technology to trap you. The very gadget or software that you’ve spent your hard earned money on, will make it as difficult as possible, for you to switch to an alternative.

The average iPhone owner for example, spends £80 in Apple’s App Store. When I recently switched to a Google Nexus One, I lost use of all £80 worth of my apps. That money is now wasted, those apps have absolutley no use to me anymore, because I cannot install them on my new phone.

Online stores are become more and more popular with handheld devices. I’m not talking about your ebuyer or bestbuy, I’m talking about your App Store or Market Place. The problem is, they’re all locked-down to some extent.

Fair enough, if I buy another android phone I can install all the apps I’ve bought on my Google Nexus One, as I did when I moved from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS. The same is probably true for Kindle to Kindle 2.

But what happens when Apple stop selling the iPhone, or someone releases a better eBook reader than the Kindle, or if Google end the Android project? All of your purchased applications, books, mp3s become useless.

We need to make things transferable!

This is the exact reason I used to rip my mp3s (before the magnificence that is Spotify), instead of paying for a service like Napster or Yahoo Music. Most of those services were DRM based. There were just too many restrictions on what you can or cannot do with the music you purchase.

So before you splash out on the iPad, Kindle or any other eBook reader – and before you upgrade to an iPhone, Nexus One or other smartphone – remember, the money you spend on books/apps/music for that device, may well be thrown away with the device.

Why should you have to hack your Kindle in order to read eBooks you obtained from somewhere other than Amazon (see: over-priced)? Why should you have to jailbreak your iPhone to use apps that Apple doesn’t want to ‘approve’? If you ask me, you shouldn’t,

iPhone app. Simples.

Today I purchased a Spotify Premium Membership, for the sole purpose of using the iPhone app. It’s great! I’ll write a review after giving it more time.

It’s just a shame there’s no alternative to the £10 monthly fee. The yearly package is the exact same price – but I hear this is out of Spotify’s hands. The music labels won’t allow them to give any discounts. Annoying, but that’s business sometimes I suppose.

It seems the letter U is not the only thing that gets lost in translation. I’ve discovered a really strange phenomenon between Windows and OS X.

For some reason, browsers on OS X display colours slightly differently to colours in Windows. What the hell is this all about?

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Get MMS and Tethering running on your iPhone:

So iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 5 is out … but before you go and upgrade, you may want to read on. MMS and Tethering are built into the current betas of OS 3.0, and we have discovered how to access them.Sporkings, May 2009

Checkout the whole article.