As we head into 2011, I’m running a whole bunch of kit with the main items being;

Phone

I’ve had the HTC Mozart running Windows Phone 7 for about 5-6 weeks now and I’m really loving it – mainly I’m using it as a phone (!) and I’m finding that performance, battery life, voice and text are all really strong but I also use it as a connected device mainly running Maps (love maps on the phone), Seesmic and Messenger on it and the integrated search functionality which I find a lot more useful than being presented with a web browser. From time to time I drop into IE as well but it’s only as a last resort as I’d rather use a dedicated app for whatever I’m trying to get done.

I don’t use the phone too much for music or video as it doesn’t have a tonne of storage on it but I do have it sync’ing certain sets of photos.

As an aside, when it comes to music I’m a bit binary. Either a device can store all my music or it can’t. If it can’t then I can’t generally be bothered to figure out which music I do/don’t want on that particular device so I tend not to put music on the device at all.

I also don’t use it for games but that’s really because I’m not really a big video game player.

One of the unexpected upsides of the WP7 is using the Zune software to manage sync’ing – I’ve found that to be a really positive experience and it knocks iTunes into a cocked hat (ok, I know that’s not necessarily saying much) but it’s a big thumbs up to whoever worked on the sync’ing experience for Zune<->WP7.

Verdict: 9/10. Hold!

Music Player

For music, I have the old, classic iPod and I can’t see me replacing it unless it breaks. It’s got 80GB and easily fits all my music onto it and the battery life lasts for ages so I’m happy with that.

Verdict: 7/10. Hold ( the UI is quite clunky on these old iPods but I’m keeping it ).

Slate

I recently took a long holiday and wanted a lightweight computing device to read stuff on and I got a 32GB WIFI iPad for that and I’ve been really pleased with it ( especially since the update brought along multi-tasking ). It’s a nice device ( if a bit on the expensive side ) but it does come with that “locked in” feeling every now and again.

Primarily, I’ve used the iPad for Photos, Maps, Twitter, RSS reading, Windows Live Messenger ( including uploading photos to Windows Live ), Skype calls, newspaper reading ( the Telegraph seems to be the best free example of this ) and I’ve also used it quite a lot for watching TV/films on planes.

Mostly, I’m spending my time in apps and not the browser but I still find myself in Safari from time to time. One of the things I’ve been most impressed with about the iPad is its battery life and, particularly, its battery life while watching video.

Once again, because the 32GB doesn’t fit my entire music collection, I’ve avoided putting any music on the iPad at all but I figure it I’m carrying around the iPad then I’ve probably got a bag with me and I can drop the iPod into it so there’s not really much point in having the music duplicated.

Where I’ve found the iPad limited is in the iTunes experience ( I don’t find the sync process much fun ) and also in the locked-down nature of the device. As a simple example, I found the process of getting a photograph from a camera to Windows Live something of a challenge on the iPad and took a little bit of figuring out as in;

1. Buy the “camera connector” kit from Apple What? No USB?
2. Plug in camera.
3. Bring photos into iPhoto on the iPad.
4. Have very limited options for manipulating those photos inside iPhoto on the device. Can’t create events. Can’t do much.
5. Use Safari to visit Windows Live. Find that Safari disables any file upload buttons on HTML pages
6. Look for an alternative. Find that Windows Live Messenger iPhone app allows photo upload to Windows Live ( Microsoft 1, Apple 0 )
7. Upload photos.

It’s not particularly intuitive and you realise that you’re “not working the way that Apple wants you to work” when you’re doing it

I also find the experience of “connect iPad to iMac and both iTunes and iPhoto pop up and start trying to sync” a little bit weird – I’m not sure that pretending that the iPad is a camera is the right experience here.

Anyway, the overall experience is a positive one and I’m hoping that there’ll soon be some Windows powered devices with this form factor that give the iPad a genuine run for its money with perhaps more flexibility to make the device open to a few more scenarios.

Verdict: 8/10. Hold.

Laptop

Compared to the other devices, I spend tonnes of time with my laptop and so it’s more important than any of the other devices I’m using.

I’m still running my trusty Dell XPS 1640 which is the best laptop I’ve ever owned. I’m (of course) running Windows 7 Ultimate on it which is the best version of Windows client I’ve ever run so this makes for a very happy experience all round. I had a panic with the XPS this year when the keyboard broke but Dell were great in getting an engineer out to fix it really quickly.

My only worry is that Dell will ditch the XPS 16 series without replacing it with something better.

When I’m not on the road somewhere, I have the XPS connected to the Dell SX2210T touch-screen monitor that I bought this year;

I only connect the “touch screen” part of this when I actually need it ( it’s a separate USB cable ) but I’m pretty happy with it as a second monitor as it’s nice and bright and matches the 1920×1080 of my laptop screen.

I also plug it into a set of speakers that I’ve had for ages, the Logitech THX Z2300;

which are more than good enough for the “home office” and, being a bit of a mouse-collector, I’m still running with my Explorer Mini Mouse which I’ve had for ages and really like;

In terms of storage, the laptop also syncs up to my very simple NAS, the Lacie-2Big 1TB which is just a 2-disk mirrored affair that I use for storing photos, music and a few other bits and pieces. Because it got updated to support Universal Plug n Play I find it’s quite a useful little box so I’ve kept it;

and, elsewhere, I’ve a Philips Streamium device which connects to this and plays music off it remotely;

and they seem to get along with each other most of the time connecting over Belkin “1Gbps” Powerline ethernet;

which seems to generally deliver about 200Mbps which I’m very happy with although I do find that I have to reboot these devices perhaps on average once per week in order to keep them running smoothly.

Verdict: 9/10. Hold.

Desktop

In the desktop world, I have an old Windows desktop kicking around that I haven’t switched on for quite a while and I have an ageing iMac which gets used for some general web-browsing and it plays a part in managing music and photos collections.

I bought this machine as an experiment a few years ago when, in all honesty, using a Windows Vista machine as a “general purpose desktop” in the house wasn’t working out too well. Sorry Vista

If I was looking at it again today, I’d probably ditch the iMac and replace it with a cheaper Windows machine as I find that there’s nothing much that works “better” for me on the iMac than it does on Windows 7 and, in truth, I find that this particular machine is always dropping its IP address settings and I have a devil of a time getting it to print so I’m a bit fed up with it although I’d quite like to try my hand at a little development for it this coming year if I “find the time”.

Verdict: 6/10. Sell ( or, more likely, just avoid and use other kit ).