For many years, Castrol used the advertising tagline "Oils ain't oils" to spruik its particular brand of processed dinosaur. Possibly it still does -- I don't buy much motor oil or, for that matter, watch all that much commercial TV any more.

In any case, it jumped back up in my mind when Samsung announced its "5G" wireless network trials, in which it claims to have managed 1Gbps speeds over the air at a distance of 2km. That's pretty impressive stuff from a technology point of view, and naturally enough it reignited the debate over whether it was worth spending NBN-level money on fixed broadband at all.

The thing is, there's a load of unanswered questions in terms of both how Samsung has tested and how (and when) it would be deployed. As ITNews points out, it could be highly susceptible to rain problems. As I pointed out at length over at Fat Duck Tech, there are mountains of red tape, spectrum and power issues to overcome. As Adam points out, it's more likely to be a compliment to fixed line, not its replacement.

But even that's aside from a very simple and basic point. Want some 5G? I could sell you a plastic bucket with 5G written on the side of it, and it would be exactly as legitimate as the wireless solution that Samsung is currently testing. There's no such standard -- as yet -- and with 4G having been so heavily mucked with, to the point where it's an advertising term much more than a "standard", it's entirely feasible that there may never be a 5G "standard". What Samsung is essentially doing is drumming up some hype for a product which even it admits isn't going to be market ready before 2020, and that's at a level where carriers might start buying it, not where you might start flinging movies around on it.

For what it's worth, I've got the 5G plastic bucket ready to sell to carriers right now. Starting price is a very reasonable $1,000,000 per bucket. Check around -- you can't beat those prices for 5G today. Please, please, form an orderly queue. I've got plenty of 5G buckets for everyone.

Image: cogdogblog

Tablets are incredibly popular right now. Quite phenomenally popular for both work and play, but there's a problem there, and it's the fact that tablets aren't quite as good for productivity tasks as they're normally defined as an equivalent laptop or desktop. Yes, I know, Windows 8, but say "tablet" to most folks, and they'll think iPad or, increasingly, Android. They're full touch interfaces, and while there are some neat vertical apps that'll work better than straight notebook ones, and it is feasible to latch on any of a number of bluetooth keyboards, it's still not quite the same thing.

I've been testing out Acer's Chromebook C7 recently -- you can read my full review over at my new site, Fat Duck Tech -- and while I'm not entirely sold on the Chromebook for my own needs (because I'm a helpless tinkerer, and it's only as cheap as it is by being, well, cheap, it strikes me that it sits at an interesting intersection between a full-powered laptop -- which will typically cost more and require more maintenance tasks -- and a full powered tablet -- which can be had for similar prices and skips the maintenance issues for the most part in return for less flexibility.

The challenge there, of course, is that you have to be happy with both handing over info to Google, and the quality (or lack thereof) of Google's inbuilt apps. Chromebooks won't be for everyone, but there's arguably a niche in the budget space for those who want online productivity tools.

Apologies upfront for the lack of a column last week; personal matters intervened. Now, on with the show…

I was reminded last night at the Samsung Galaxy S4 launch -- you can watch my 30s worth of opinion on it here -- that there are plenty of premium smartphones out there at the moment. Indeed, I can't think of a period where we've seen quite so many "flagship" phones launched in such a short period of time. There are differences between Android handsets, but they can be subtle, especially when you consider that it's feasible to reskin Android to be just about anything, and the scale runs from low-end phones with terrible screens to high-end models with all the bells and whistles, and a price point to match. The same is true to a lesser extent in the Windows Phone world, albeit with Nokia doing much of the jostling in terms of hitting different price points. It's even partially true in the iPhone world, albeit only because Apple keeps the previous generation iPhone around to keep the budget US market happy.

Then there's the Z10. It's not only the flagship of the BB10 world, but it's also the only BB10 device you can buy, at least until the Q10 actually launches. Even then, that's a small market offering, pitched at the premium end of the market.

After a month using the Z10, I was rather split. There are aspects of the BB10 interface that do work well, and it's at least doing something different from the rest of the pack. At the same time, though, it's very clearly a device for the information junkies in the corporate world, something that was rather heavily highlighted by Blackberry itself at the BB10 launch. Consumers won't need -- or even access -- Blackberry Balance, for example. That doesn't mean that no consumers should consider it -- indeed, there's a strong argument here that those who "just want a phone" might find the simplicity of approach quite appealing. Then again, they may very well be the market that just buys the cheapest Android handsets instead. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a phone with a specific focus, especially if it can do so well, and the Z10 does perform those basic information tasks well. For my own purposes, though, I've jumped back to Android… at least for the time being.

Back when smartphones were just feature phones, and, for the sake of borrowing a fine writer's joke, small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, the number of additional things that your phone could do didn't matter that much. Yes, some of them could play games, but they were games that, due to a combination of processing power and keyboard layouts were about as enticing as those found on a BBC Micro, with roughly 1/3rd of the charm. Yeah, I have some nostalgia for the BBC Micro, given that I (somehow) got a GCSE pass in computing science way back in the day despite the very real handicap of not actually having a computing science teacher for the entire period of my GCSE study*, which meant that for a lot of that class, lessons were essentially all about this.

But I'm getting off track. A modern smartphone needs modern smartphone applications, and everyone's needs are rather different. For many it's just Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Instagram. Or Angry Birds. Ask any of the companies behind those products and they'll no doubt point out how vital their particular applications are to our overall smartphone happiness.

What doesn't matter, in my view, are sheer app numbers. I'd rather have quality apps than I'm going to use than 57,000,000 apps, or whatever numbers your marketing department wishes to shout from the rooftops. That's the traditional cry against the Blackberry platform (and to a certain extent, Windows Phone as well), and it's not one that overly worries me on a personal level.

Most smartphone operating systems do cover the basics that many people use quite well, whether that's email (which I wrote about last week), social media or browsing, for that matter. Also, I've got to give Blackberry (the company, that is, not the Z10 i'm using right now) a bit of time on this one.

BB10 is a still a nascent platform, and as such it's early days. Personally, I can live without an Instagram app, but then I'm not a heavy Instagram user anyway. I can live with third party rather than official apps, too; there's no official Pandora app, for example, but the free Apollo app delivers my Pandora stations to my phone in an acceptable fashion. On the other hand, I find the lack of a standalone Evernote app quite vexatious.

Equally annoying over the the past week is the realisation that even when apps exist in Blackberry World, they're sometimes quite clunky. It reminds me rather of when Android was brand new and just emerging against the established Apple app market. Many of the same apps, but the Android ones either felt or were just plain unpolished in minor, but annoying ways. Line up enough annoyances and a phone stops being all that captivating to actually use.

To throw a first party example into the mix, the official Twitter app integrates heavily into the Blackberry Hub, in keeping with the idea that it should be a data junkie's one port of call. Within the Twitter app itself, things appear mostly like the existing apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone, with one small difference. Direct messages aren't delivered to the app at all. I mean ever. They'll turn up in the Blackberry Hub as part of your overall scrolling feed, but if you go looking for them in the app, they're not there. That's an annoyance if you're used to the previous app approach, and it's even not that efficient within the hub, given that your direct messages -- which you may wish to review entirely privately -- are just part of your general twitter feed in the hub instead. There's noticeable lag in getting twitter to actually show a reply from within the hub, making it less than optimal as a direct way to interface with Twitter.

Again, these are factors that may improve with time; I'd certainly hope so.

*I sometimes exaggerate for comic effect in my writing. This isn't one of those times; I did the computing GCSE with no formally trained computing teacher at all, and precious little teacher moderation of the class at all..

Here, have some mood music.

Now, the first thing you've got to do with a new smartphone is set it up for your own accounts, something I'd already done with a review Blackberry Z10 with very few problems. Having decided to spend a month using the Z10 as my day to day phone (go ahead and read last week's column if that has you scratching your head) I set to getting my usual accounts up and running. I knew there would be one bottleneck, in that I use 1Password to store all my complex passwords, and there's no Blackberry client for that, but that's at least a one-time problem, as I'd only have to enter each password once. Or so I thought.

Twitter and Facebook were set up easily, but my own email was much more problematic, which, based on my previous experience with all things Blackberry was an oddity indeed. If there's one thing that Blackberry does well, it's email, right?

Not always. On the review model, all I'd had to do was punch in my email address and password, but that didn't work with the unit I'm holding right now. It insisted on the advanced setup, but then baulked at actually saving the settings. Not once, not twice… not even a dozen times, despite all the settings being correct. Yes, I'm really that stubborn. The error messages seemed to suggest that the relevant ports on my email server weren't accessible, and that I should try again later, but testing from other devices on the same network showed that this wasn't so.

I did finally crack onto a solution, dropping it temporarily onto 3G data -- more expensive than my office Wi-Fi -- and watching it go through then. That was enough for it to save the settings, at which point it finally started to pull down my actual mail after more than fifteen setup attempts, and more than a small amount of stress. What's weird there is that putting it back on Wi-Fi didn't bring the problem back; it was just in initial setup and saving that it chucked a hissy fit.

I'm still admittedly getting used to the Blackberry being relatively slow on my email; every other time I've tested a Blackberry handset it's been via Blackberry's own excellent mail servers. You'd pay a fee for that (although that typically also allowed for unlimited browsing via RIM's own supplied browser), but it was always much faster than anything else around it. Now, the Z10 is just part of the gang; sometimes it gets a message first, and sometimes it gets a message after it's pinged through multiple tablets, other review phones and even my desktop PC. I'm not one of the hardcore Blackberry faithful, but I'm left pondering whether those that are find that an improvement; I can't help but feel that one of the things that used to make Blackberry truly exceptional seems to have been lost in the shift to Blackberry OS 10.