Watchdog, BBC 1. A teenager has made a complaint to the programme about a mobile phone company’s use of the words ‘unlimited texts’ in their terms and conditions. It seems that the word ‘unlimited’ hits the buffers when 3,000 texts have been sent in one calendar month. The complainant had sent 3,500 and was now faced with a surcharge of £460. Or rather, his pale-faced father was. The mobile phone company weaselled away claiming ‘this exceeded their fair use’ policy, without defining what that policy was.  So, how many texts do you need to send in one month? At around ten to fifteen words per text that is a total of 35,000 – 50,000 words per month. A PhD thesis averages 80,000 words.  Hope he doesn’t get diagnosed with the RSI ‘Blackberry Thumb’.

Yes it's the Carling iphone app. Still no news on a real ale version.

If there is one thing marginally more boring than listening to someone drone on endlessly about the number of apps on their iPhone, it is listening to four iphone users drone on together about how the iPhone has, like, you know completely changed their lives.  I happened to be talking to four iPhone obsessives as the sole non-iphone user and my phone rang.  As I answered my phone, everyone burst into laughter.  ‘A Blackberry????  What a loser!’ ‘Look’ I said, ‘The phone works, I can send and receive emails, manage my appointments, take photographs and clips of film and even navigate with GPS. It’s all I need’.  But to no avail.  They were back sharing their app stories.  ‘Bet your Blackberry can’t do this’, one of them said. It was a motion detector. ‘Look’ he said excitedly ‘I can measure the vibration in the floor – it could be really useful in an earthquake’. I sighed and tried to visualise being somewhere when an earthquake began and whether I would have the presence of mind to put my iphone on the floor to check the reading on the richter scale. Probably not.  I have got nothing against the iPhone.  I just wish their owners stop trying to convert the rest of us……