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The answer: not much more than five months! http://www.ebuyer.com/product/190145 I expect the VAT rise on 22nd June will provide (a purely temporary) setback.

A lot more functionality for your money than an iPhone. They were about £550 at launch, and you can buy them new for £399 now, without a contract, and unlocked. But I will wait until they launch the N910 and pick up a brand new one for £200 or so. I'd only be tempted at below £300 at the moment. An Intel Atom powered phone running Linux would grab my attention immediately though, as might a cracking Android one. I've got a N770, N800 & N810 in my collection so far! None were bought new at anything like original retail. None of those tablet models are actual phones like the N900 though.

It's going to happen again and again! No amount of new law or gun control is going to make any difference. It appears to be that he was driven to it by the UK tax man. Now there's no possible excuse for what happened, BUT I think there's a social failing in that there's no one to go to for genuine help in such desperate circumstances. Lawyers are constantly on the take themselves, and CAB is wholly inadequate. There's a whole lot of crap being talked by Labour about GP's needing to do follow-up mental health checks on people with gun licences. GP's are neither qualified to do this, nor need any extra burdens. Firearms will always be easy to obtain illegally if you are determined, and I think most of the gun control in recent years has been counterproductive. Gun clubs were the best way of monitoring firearms activity, and they've been legislated out of existence. And, what's this nonsense about "investigating if his licences covered the weapons being held". The whole point of a licence is that it's an up front and fully transparent declaration that you are doing something legally. Any licence that "needs investigating" is completely self defeating. Once again bureaucracy totally loses sight of what it was put in place for!

Except the N900! Which is open mostly source (Not Symbian), has a proper keyboard as well as touch; a higher resolution screen; supports flash well; you can swap the battery; you can use standard MicroSDs, and there's loads of PD software for it. http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n900-2917.php You should have waited a few months as you can now get them on contract! On a usability and practicality note I have to concede that the iPhone has certainly improved your contactability, or maybe not! Try ringing my old Nokia E70 (with full keyboard) - it cost me £130 (no subsidy) and still gets answered!

First person to say "Coasters" is disqualified!! Make a Bird Scarer Nail them to and old door and put it in the front garden. (to pretend you are green and have a solar array) Stick them on a south facing wall to make a solarium. A four legged wooden chair with one leg missing.

Is that £36 part of the $7.50 total in-the-box contents? http://uk.gear.ign.c.../1068348p1.html It would be interesting to know what they charge for replacing a battery that costs them $17.50 = £12.07. Note that the Chinese get as much as $10 = £6.90 for building this machine!

By having one of the lowest parts buy-in costs - and so highest factory gate to retail price ratios - it can make billions more dollars for Apple. Your laptop certainly can't do that! BTW somehow I never got around to asking whether you can swap the battery without returning it to Apple. Not having a battery door can shave as much as 50p off the production cost, not to mention the additional megabucks you can earn from punters who aren't prepared to jemmy open £500+ machines! All part of Apple "usability" and superb value for money!

There's much better available in touch screen for the same money, and the software to use it won't cost you an arm and a leg either. You have to remember that this is a highly proprietary CPU that's way out of mainstream at the moment, and a closed operating system from a highly secretive company. So why not buy a machine that you don't need to ask is this or that available for it? With Intel Atom powered you don't really need to ask the question, and often it's available for free. Here's a way more powerful touch machine, and for more or less the same money: http://www.laptopsdi...018/version.asp It's in the next class up from Atom and with decent graphics hardware; you don't have to join a queue of fan-boys to get one, and the cost of ownership is far less. Check out the videos on Youtube to get a feel for it. Verdict: The iPad is only for people who know B... A... about computers, and with more money than sense!

Seedling Pots String Telephone Party Hats A non-working TV

True; it's going to be a long countdown, ending in May 2015. It SHOULD only be four years in any civilised democracy, but at least we've now got rid of the PM's silly game of calling an election at a date that suits him - all in the national interest of course! That has to be more democratic progress than we've seen for decades! Could it be that the sight of Gordon Brown trying to BS the public about his real intentions and motives was the last scene in this farce? http://news.bbc.co.u...pt=true&bbcws=2 There's *perhaps* a case that this time that it's going to take at least five years to clean up Gordos spending spree and return the country to some sort of solvency. But there's no case in this day and age for not holding referendums on constitutional matters. And, in such referendums the questions should be formed by an independent non-political group, and not by the government of the day, to elicit the answer it wants to hear.

And the run-away winner is.... Did it again, but perhaps I had the advantage of seeing it on German satellite without the benefit of any running commentary (I could understand). It's not entirely surprising that it was another UK total disaster. Are we going for the record on being last? In recent years we've completely lost sight of what this is all about. We fail to appreciate changing European taste, and consistently over-produce our entries, sometimes to the point of a complete screw-up. Simon Cowell commercial types shouldn't be let within a mile of this. Even the Irish have now completely lost the plot. A little bit of strategy (from someone definitely not in the commercial music biz) could see us consistently in the top five, and take it a lot of the time. Sure there's politics in this, but not as much as people would have you believe; often why countries vote for their neighbours is simply that they share similar tastes.

Thought the German girl was quite cute and not a bad singer. Portugal a poor rip-off of A Weekend in New England. Only caught the reprise of the UK entry, but it sounded passable.

Real soon, but Andy is very occupied at the moment, what with the new job (not entirely unrelated to the issue at hand ), putting a new car on the road, and supporting paying customers! We are also bringing up a new UK server at the mo. - which might just be the one tasked to handle the forthcoming YOURNAME@bedlington.co.uk e-mail service.

It's the saturated fats that are bad for you. Watch out for the mayonnaise too! Far too much salt in most commercial products, and when that salt is combined with sugar... !!!!! McLitter should be taxed. Appalling, and seems to go with many of the "convenience" food customers who patronise McD's. I've found McD's very poor value for money, and the WiFi at the two I tried (different countries) was crap! Curry can be good for you - depends on what you are currying I think. Pizzas aren't intrinsically unhealthy; again depends on exactly what they contain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/27/asda-buys-netto "Staffing levels will be increased from an average of 14 per store to 25." ...so the "cues" should be shorter before too long! That's approx 11 more local jobs too.

You might get away with that rose coloured glasses view with any other Labour government, but you forget two things. 1) New Labour inherited one of the soundest economies in recent history. 2) Gordon Brown has been in charge of the economy for an incredible thirteen years. It's very easy to throw huge chunks of other people's money at things and claim an improvement, but have we had value for the huge sums involved, all the useless jobs-for-the-boys, and all the beaurocracy? Sooner or later the bills have to be paid. Despite the nonsense talked at the election about "putting the recovery at risk" that time is *now*. If we don't do something right away then Sterling (the only thing we have done right in not joining the Euro) will suffer a crisis of confidence, imports will rocket in price and we will re-run the history of previous Labour governments. Only, considering the scale of the deficit, it will be FAR worse this time. Saying our problems are "Global" is total propaganda. It's nonsense to say that every other country (except Australia) is suffering the same problems! China is running obscene balance of payments surpluses, The whole of Asia is in very good financial shape. The Arabs only have their investments in the West to mope about; otherwise they are coining it. Russia is doing very well thank you. Scandinavia - and particularly Norway (where they haven't squandered their North Sea inheritance) are doing OK. The USA is recovering very nicely - because they don't have the same mad job-costing "employment protection". The Euro-zone is in trouble for entirely different reasons - mainly politics getting in the way of business. Apart from basket case Greece, Spain is in the same trouble as the UK because of the same socalist madness. No coincidence that Gordon and the Spanish PM were bosom buddies! Our problems didn't start in the USA, they started here! The started because unlike previous chancellors Gordon started to believe he could walk on water - he'd "ended boom & bust". Read the posts here about Northern Rock that were made without the benefit of hindsight. They proved uncannily accurate in forecasting the meltdown, and the folly of putting public money into Northern Rock. He didn't act to reign in stupid lending, like all other governments did in the past. Lots of senior economists were warning of impending disaster year in and year out, his economic forecasts were consistently wrong year in and year out, yet he thought he knew better than the experts. He was entirely in charge of our economy, and no one else. He's entirely to blame for our financial crisis! No contest there - Major wasn't a very effective PM. But it has b .... all to do with the topic. Of course "the cuts" are coming. And they'd have come whoever won the election. You want to praise Brown for the sound finances he inherited, and to blame the new government for the absolute necessity of balancing the books again after his profligacy? That doesn't sound a very tenable view. Do you honestly think that the motivation for "the cuts" is something to do with your class war? Do you think that they aren't absolutely necessary? How do you propose that we close a £170,000,000,000 structural deficit without cutting government spending? Gordon's case was that it would all come right over the course of the economic cycle. It didn't; it won't; he never came clean on what he meant; and we don't have the luxury of waiting any longer to see if things pick-up anyway. The consequences of carrying on spending at the current rate will be devastating and long-term. Some short term pain can probably avoid a Sterling meltdown - there is no other sane option!

The idiotic Home Information Packs have just been scrapped. Ten years of "work" (and six figure salaries) by that waste of space John Prescott gone in ten minutes - brilliant! Everyone will be better off (except the purveyors of this nonsense) as a result. Like much Labour lunacy they started out as a quite good idea, but rapidly became detached from reality or stated purpose, and ended up only as a meal ticket for bureaucrats. If only it was as easy to roll back all the other elements of thirteen squandered years of Labour big government!

How can we have a poll when we don't know who the runners are? Nominations now extended to 9th June. Anyway they are ooot for the next five years, at least. So does it matter anyway? You don't know who Diane Abbott is!? http://www.dianeabbott.org.uk/ You can't have been watching much political TV as she frequently appears, and seems to get on quite well with arch Tory, Michael Portillo. Diane seems less wooden and more up-front than most Labour wimmin. Definitely someone I'd buy a used car from (but not a used political party).

There have been *lots* of non-prime ministers (both Tory and Labour), and I can't argue with you that John Major wasn't ineffective. But they didn't wreck the economy, and, operating under some sort of self delusion, mortgage the future for decades to come. The history books will show that Gordon Brown was the uncontested all-time champion. Not just the astonishing £1.4 Trillion in debt that this prize idiot was planning to rack up on the crazy assumption that it would somehow all come right in the end, but the vast number of non-jobs in the public sector, and the layers of unenforcible, pointless and counterproductive legislation that were introduced in the last thirteen years. Nick Clegg seems to have accepted the mission to unravel some of this; the best of luck to him!

No one has mentioned "contention ratio" - simply put: the number of other people sharing that bandwidth. 50:1 is normal; 20:1 is premium; lower is very expensive! Always ask what yours is - you could be sharing exchange gear with Monsta!

I wonder how long Global Gordon's "not putting the recovery at risk" election stance would have lasted? Happily we'll never know, but it didn't take the LDs very long to be convinced that we had to do something right away about the Labour binge. Course he'd have declared it another completely unforeseen global problem, that started somewhere else, and was all someone else's fault. I think we can be fairly sure now that we've only done the bare minimum to prevent the markets rounding on the pound. We have to be seen to be more than fiscally prudent (something Gordon was in the first couple of years, but then he inherited a reasonably sound economy before he completely lost touch with reality). I can remember Wim Duisenberg, chairman of the ECB, on the money program back in the late 90's confidently lecturing us on how we were doomed if we didn't join the Euro. Wonder what happened to him? Oops... probably bad taste to make a "floating exchange rate" joke out of that ...but so tempting. Amusing to see Mrs Merkel writing bigger and bigger cheques by the day. Someone should have told her that banning short selling is ranked alongside ministerial pronouncements there will be NO devaluation. Now what's that German word? Ah, yes: schadenfreude. Proposal for a future film: Dr. Strangelove 2, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Inflation. Going to be a hard sell in Germany! (except to wheelbarrow manufacturers)

I don't think the no "disc thing" is the problem. You seldom use "disk things" on notebooks these days, so it's not worth the extra weight carrying an internal "disk thing" around when external USB ones are as cheap as chips. It's also an extra mechanical "failure point". No, I think the prob with the machine is the power-hungry CPU and so the very poor battery life. There are obviously quality issues too. You could have got a netbook with better battery life and far more portability for the same sort of price. Always a good idea to state your requirements here first, and see what the local "experts" suggest before parting with cash. If the shop has to send things away then there's probably no point dealing with them, and you'd do better on price and service by buying from a reputable on-line retailer like laptopsdirect.co.uk - where you can make the distance selling regulations your friend. Anyway, we look forward to the next instalment of the Curried Lemon with Chips Saga.

Of course! Name 'n' Shame! Currys; Dixons; PC World?? I think maybe you'd have done better with an Atom powered netbook. I've got several now!

Come on Deb, tell us where you bought it and the make and model. No need to be shy about such things. Cympil is right: if the repair isn't satisfactory ask for a replacement, or a refund.as it's obviously not readily repairable. The problem with any goods you accept a repair on is that you've sort of acquiesced to keep them, and are then on weak ground demanding a refund later. But if they can't then be satisfactorily repaired they are at least obliged to replace them. ALWAYS politely ask for the outcome you want first, and if they won't oblige you then tell them that you are taking their alternative only "under protest". That way they can't say you agreed to whatever if you find you need to bring a claim later - it was a situation they forced on you.