These are severe bugs for a beta release, and render the OS effectively useless, even for those who don't mind taking on the chin the occasional crash or loss of data.

Incidentally, and perhaps surprisingly, Moblin appears not to know that Google exists. You can setup Google Talk for chatting, but its browser suggests searching Yahoo! by default. Does anybody below the age of 50 still use Yahoo!?

It felt a little like the Moblin developers have backed the wrong horse here. I would have liked to have seen tie-ins with the likes of Gmail and Google Docs. Where's Google Gears, so my data can be backed up locally?

Moblin includes an actual email client, seemingly based on Evolution, and I found this astonishing. If you're still in the groove of downloading email to your computer in our modern age then you're doing it wrong. If you're downloading it to a portable computer designed to be a secondary computing device then you've definitely doing it wrong.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's start with a description of how Moblin looks and feels.

Look and Feel

Put simply, Moblin looks and feels terrific. We're talking Apple-like levels of attractiveness. Similarly, intuition is the name of the game with the user-interface, and it invites an Apple-like sensibility of following your nose to work out how things work.

Across the top of the screen is a range of icons representing various activities you can do. This is effectively a floating toolbar, because it disappears when you don't need it. When the mouse runs over the toolbar, its icons jiggle about in a neat way, a feature provided by the Clutter OpenGL graphics and animation toolkit that underpins the whole OS. This gives everything a fun feel, and reminds you that this is not a business-oriented OS. Moblin is for things you want to do, not things you have to do.

Once you select an icon, its program window pop-out beneath the toolbar. The program window might fill just half of the screen, such as with the Status Update tool by which you can post to Twitter, or it might fill the entire screen, as with the browser.

The Web browser is a good example of the design philosophy and polish applied to Moblin. Click on the browser icon on the main toolbar, and a small panel folds out showing thumbnail previews of your favorite websites. Alternatively, you can type an address in the relevant field. Once this is done, the browser then takes over the entire window. Along the top of the screen is the address bar, along with a tab bar, but the rest of the screen contains nothing but the website.