Don’t get me wrong, Dell don’t exactly *need* a tablet PC right now. For a start, they don’t have the OS for it and in reality, the iPad is also too pricey for the mainstream Dell audience to shell out. They aren’t going to buy it instead of a laptop, for example.

However, if Dell let Apple get a year’s head start without anything competitive to show in the area, they wouldn’t end up competing with just the iPad but the iPad 2, some kind of Google machine and likely something from the likes of HTC, HP and co. too.

With this in mind,  they had to do something and quick. Android was really all they had to play with so I can only assume they chucked it onto a few form factors before collapsing in tears at the horrors of Android 1.6 vs the slick and clearly tablet-ready iOS.

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By now, you’ll have seen the excellent recent Old Spice ads as well as the ingenious @oldspice followup campaign.

But the thing is, as good as they are, its not going to make me buy old spice. And I don’t think I’m the only one. They’re amusing precisely because they take the piss out of the OTT manliness traditionally associated with the brand.

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A few more observations now that I’ve been using it a while.

Naturally if you aren’t interested in iPads then you might want to give this one a miss…

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Time for a few early iPad thoughts (it arrived on Thursday, ahead of schedule!) Will try not to be too gushing and also to avoid topics I've seen discussed most frequently elsewhere. In no particular order:

• Its not a big iPod Touch- the relationship is the other way round. That device acts as a satellite to this one, a little outpost for the concept and technology. At times it almost feels like a little cute imitation, a knitted memento of its bigger brother.

• A pleasant unanticipated benefit has been that my iPhone battery lasts way longer. The time I used to spend fiddling with apps on the train has been displaced by eBooks and Wired magazine, leaving more juice in the most vital organ.

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Day in day out we’re bombarded with companies telling us how important it is to remove the barriers between us and our information.  The iPad, for instance, offers to put the web in the palm of your hands. No browser, no operating system, no hardware, just the web, flopping about in your control, an infinitely malleable quagmire of data cupped in your palm.

But is this really a good thing?

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Google’s little secret

I’m not going to lie to you, I don’t have much more to ask here than the question: What is Google Findy?

I stumbled upon it during a recent search but strangely it isn’t on Google, Bing or Yahoo anywhere.  Perhaps it’s just linked to The Scottish Business and Entrepreneurship Awards but that seems unlikely too…

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