On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Next week sees the release of the latest Smartphone to run on Google's Android OS. Already speculated to be the next "iPhone" killer. It runs no the latest Android software "2.0". "The platform was conceived to help bring a desktop computing experience to mobile devices, and make things like email, instant messaging and quick web browsing accessible to the masses. When the first Android phone went on sale last year , reaction was lukewarm; the handset, the G1, was clunky and didn’t compare favourably to Apple’s iPhone, the new gold standard for design." Known as the Droid in the US. It has sole more than 800,000 pieces since the start of November. Android allows users to do more on their handsets than the iPhone. Like instant Facebook and Twitter updates, listening to music while writing an email, and threading conversation. So you get to see your chats, email, and text messages in a single place rather than spread across programs. It is al...