As I mentioned last Saturday, I now have a new phone, an HTC Wildfire S which runs the Android operating system. Needless to say, I have been spending a lot of time figuring it out (trying to figure it out might be a better description – you’ve got to be smart if you want to get one of these phones working as a multi-purpose tool) and am getting the hang of things. For example, this morning, I used it to guide us to and from the site of a walk and to guide us round and keep a map of the route.

I will probably post more about that in the next few days but, right now, I am trying to get out of the door to do some shopping. That means figuring out how to use my phone as a shopping list. Over the past few years I have been using HandyShopper on my Palm but there isn’t a version of exactly the same (brilliant!) software that I can find for Android. OI Shopping seems a contender and that has a link to another program, a recipe database called Bites. The blocky picture on the right is a QR code, a way of compacting information like a URL, which I can read via the camera on my phone – quicker than typing an address in via the onscreen keyboard.

All I need to do now is test that it works and then get myself out of the door to get the shopping done (no application for that!).