A company by the name of Novothink has come up with product that should be warmly welcomed by green Apple types - a 'strap on' solar panel/case-thingy for iPhone 3G and 3Gs.

The 'Surge' allows you to jibber jabber on your Jesus phone for 30 mins using 3G after it's spent two hours soaking up the sun - so the manufacturers claim.  Using 2G, the Surge will allow you to talk for an hour.

Surge - solar charging for your iPhone

At only $70 I'm thinking this thing sounds too good to be true and I can think of one problem, at least here in the UK... er, sunshine!  If it does live up to expectations, can we please have a version or two for Nokia's more popular smart phones?

The folk at Cupertino have OKed music streaming application, Spotify, for their iPhone mobile telecommunication thingy-majigs.

From Spotify's blog:

"Premium subscribers in the UK, Sweden, France, Spain, Norway and Finland will be able to download Spotify for free from the App Store soon"

Will it work in the background though..?

Google Goats for the Mountain View

Forget Google Street View, now there's Catacomb View!

In 2008, NHS spent £350M on management consultants

Leaked picture of new iPhone...

How's this for a rotten Apple..?  Mobile developer comes up with a handy application for the iPhone, one which is perfectly legal, moral and above board. Good, no?  Well not in Apple's eyes!  Why not?  Well, let's look into what the app does, shall we?

Those in the UK will know only too well about having to dial what are effectively premium rate numbers to talk to the companies, goverment departments, charities and, well, almost any organisation!  If that's not bad enough, it gets worse when you have no choice but to dial one of these numbers from a mobile phone.  That can be a huge pain in the neck and a huge whole in the wallet.

The British, being British, have come up with a 'stick two fingers' up approach to those businesses and organisations that use these numbers.  What's this?  It's SayNoTo0870!  It's a handy website where you can find a geographic or freephone alternative for thousands of 0870, 0845 and a bunch of other PITA numbers.  It's an invaluable resource for anyone in the UK that has ever had to call a company.

Despite all this, Apple are denying iPhone users from using an ingenious app that would benefit their loyal customers and would be, quite frankly, a 'killer' service to have on one's phone.  On what grounds are Apple effectively banning this?  Well the big fruit is claiming it 'circumvents carrier features and policies'.  I wonder what O2 (the carrier that has the exclusive contract for iPhone in the UK) think about the matter?  They may not be happy to miss getting a cut from an 0870 number but I can't see how it circumvents their features or policies and I can't see how they'd see that either.  I think I might have to ask them.  If they don't have a problem, can they persuade Apple to allow it?

One can still get the app if their iPhone is 'jailbroken'.  For details on how, check out the developer, Simon Maddox' site.  You can check out some pictures of the app in action on Flickr here.

Apple's locked down phone, closed, not open - that's one of the many reasons why I'd not touch any of their silly phones with a bargepole.

Very funny and very silly story found on L'Inq... Help!  iPhone snapped my husbands genitals which then takes you to the source... Apple Support: Pictures automatically attach to e-mail

My sister is halfway through a business trip to China, Hong Kong and Vietnam.  Right now she's in HK and I'm kicking myself that I didn't loan her a Skypephone.  That's the second time I've forgotten since getting my hands on a pair of 3's Skypephones last year.

After her recent trip to New York, where she carried three handsets that didn't work, I don't think I could've persuaded her anyway.  Why did she bring three handsets to the Big Apple?  Let me explain with bullet points:

• her jailbroken iPhone on Vodafone couldn't receive texts for some bizarre reason
• her replacement iPhone 3G on O2 wasn't enabled for roaming (no one in the O2 store warned her of this)
• the Motorola on AT&T's prepaid service that I loaned her was cut off because it hadn't been used in a couple of months

I believe the current trend for one word summaries could sum it up best as: FAIL

In theory, I could've lent her my N73 (for the Far East, not NY) and we could've had 25 mins of video-telephony for free (or thereabouts - I have those included each month and never use 'em!)

I need more pictures on my blog and I need to um, blog about something that doesn't involve premium-rate services for once!  So here we go, some pictures I took a little earlier on my Nokia N95 8GB of the E71, my sister's old iPhone and an original Skypephone from 3.

As you'll see the N95 8GB ain't all that great when taking pictures, or maybe I've just gotten used to the far superior camera on the 6220 Classic?  There was plenty of light, but even that couldn't save me from dull, dark, patchy and blurry pictures...

As you can see, they're all phones

They both lay flat well

Slightly more buttons on the E71 and they stand up quite well

Anyone that's visited lately will, unless they've been on mobile phones, have noticed that I've been playing around with animated GIFs.  They're hardly the most cutting edge technical achievement ever, but I like them and can knock 'em out pretty damn quick.

However, they don't work on the Nokia S60 browser nor Opera Mini.  I've not tested the GIFs on Opera Mobile yet or any other mobile browser.  I'll have to rope in my sister to test the iPhone.