A pretty funny report on TechRadar. Apparently, the UK price of the Xoom has just been updated. Dixons and Carphone Warehouse—who’d cunningly set the pre-order price of the Xoom to the same as the original equivalent iPad—have both realised the device isn’t entirely competitive since the iPad 2 came out. So what have they done? Clearly, sensible companies would realise that there’s still no really compelling answer to “why should I buy something other than an iPad?” and price accordingly.

Dixons has knocked 20 quid off the 32 GB Wi-Fi Xoom’s price, so you can pre-order your “real tablet” now for just £479.99. Meanwhile, Carphone Warehouse has dropped the price of the 3G model to £579.99.

I racked my brain for almost a microsecond before coming up with how they decided on these new prices. On the Apple Store, you’ll be shocked to see the 32 GB iPad 2 come in at £479 and the 3G model at £579. Which still means the Xoom is priced slightly higher, the idiots. But even in a direct comparison, if we ignore the piffling 99-pence extra, it’s effectively the same price for a device offering the vast majority of users an inferior experience, the double idiots.

Personally, I hope Apple changes the price of the iPad 2 three times over the next week, just to fuck with these guys.

As regular readers of Revert to Saved probably know, I’m Contributing Editor to Tap! magazine, Future’s spiffy bi-monhtly iOS publication. (I plan the games section and write quite a bit of it, too.) But today there’s some big news from the Future mothership:

Tap! is now going monthly.

Issue 4 will arrive in stores on May 12, and then subsequent issues will follow every four weeks. Personally, I’m thrilled at the development, because I know how much passion and effort goes into every page of the magazine. I’d like to publicly thank editor Christopher Phin for his faith in giving me an entire section to play with; also, thanks to each and every person who’s bought a copy of the mag so far, enabling us to now get you twice as much Tap! goodness every year.

Unsure on the upcoming referendum on the UK voting system? If so, The Observer’s Do we want a fairer election system? op-ed is well worth a read. It’s a balanced, fair piece, addressing most of the major concerns. Not least among them, the argument that coalition would be more likely under AV and OH MY GOD THE CURRENT COALITION IS EVIL ON TOAST AND FULL OF LYING SCUMBAGS. The Observer points out:

Lib Dem U-turns hardly advanced the public’s faith in politicians’ promises. But it is absurd to blame the fact of coalition, as if every manifesto of every winning party before 2010 was fastidiously implemented.

Coalitions are here to stay even under the current system. A hung parliament was elected because neither of the two biggest parties commanded enough support to be trusted alone in government. The idea that they should seek remedy for that decline by propping up a system that helps them cheat is lazy and arrogant.

And for the pro-reform people who are, bizarrely, considering ‘abstaining’ (i.e. not voting) or even voting for FPTP, because they’re not being given the option of AV+ or STV, or because AV has major problems of its own, The Observer has this to say:

AV is not perfect. No system captures the will of the people with photographic realism. The goal is a fair approximate, and FPTP fails utterly. It distorts, obstructs, obscures and perverts voter choices. It causes tens of thousands of votes to be wasted; it forces people to endorse candidates they don’t like, just to punish ones they like even less.

AV will not solve all of the problems of British democracy. It will not undo the harm of the expenses scandal, nor provoke a renaissance of civic participation. It is only a reform. It promises one thing: by taking account of multiple preferences, it would elect a parliament that more accurately describes the political complexion of the nation. That is a start.

Yesterday, I flagged buckets of stupid poured on to the internet by Dell and Microsoft execs who should know better. But someone then had to go and tell me about Brett Arends and his WSJ SmartMoney masterpiece Is That iPad 2 Really Worth $2,000?

Now, the smart people among you will have noticed the slight problem with Arends’s argument, in that even the most expensive iPad is a smidge over $800, and the cheapest model is $500. Aha! Arends has you there:

If I don’t spend that $500, I’ll invest it.

Right. In the stock market, which NEVER FAILS. And by the same token, we should all stop buying anything and invest the money, because there’s never any benefit in leveraging new technology, thereby investing in your life, rather than the stock market.

By all means argue that the iPad 2 is overpriced if you can back that up with an argument that isn’t “but a cheaper and better Android device will probably be released within six months”; similarly, if tablets aren’t for you and you prefer netbooks, fair enough. But don’t respond to someone asking whether you’re getting an iPad with “even if I did, I probably wouldn’t want to spend $2,000 on one,” because that makes you sound like a dick.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a great interview with Craig Mundie, in which the Microsoft ‘global chief research and strategy officer’ makes a firm, bold opinion about the future of computing, which Microsoft has been instrumental in for the past three decades:

I don’t know whether the big screen tablet pad category is going to remain with us or not.

It’s that kind of decisive thinking that’s helped Microsoft into a ‘back on the starting line’ position when it comes to mobile. Luckily, Mundie has some choice thinking on that area, showcasing his ‘global chief research and strategy officer’ credentials:

Mobile is something that you want to use while you’re moving, and portable is something that you move and then use.

I’m glad that’s been cleared up. So, Mundie, as ‘global chief research and strategy officer’, what is the future of computing? Where are things going? Steve Jobs is still on leave, so he can’t tell us. It’s all down to you!

I believe the successor to the desktop is the room.

The room? Look, I know you guys built a touchscreen table while Apple was busy wasting time on the iPhone, but a room? Clearly, I misheard you.

Instead of thinking that the computer is just something on the desk that you go and sit in front of, [in the] future basically the whole room is the computer and you go in it.

O… K… So the future of computing, as far as Microsoft is concerned, is this:

Image credit: Simon Pride, from the film Alien (1979)