Now their gluing the SIM cards in: "This has got to be the dummest thing I have seen from a carrier in a long time. Apparently now in the UK, 3 is going to start gluing the SIM cards into their pre-paid phones in an effort to thwart resellers who are buying the discounted phones and selling them overseas for profit. The plan is to pot the SIM cards into the pre-paid phone with epoxy. Gotta wonder who the rocket scientist who came up with this solution is. Maybe it's time to stop subsidizing phones; At least for pre-paid."

Why is this a bad thing? 3 suffer from a great deal of fraud - folks exporting PAYG phones which they subsidise and reselling them. If 3 are going to offer cut-price 3G handsets it doesn't seem unreasonable to me for purchasers to be locked to their network.

As for stopping subsidies: experiences elsewhere (e.g. Italy) show that lack of subsidies doesn't affect purchasing behaviour, but it'll be a brave operator in the UK 5-way mobile telco scrummage to take the plunge and do it first. Quite unlikely to be 3, too: they need to grow their customer-base still, so anything which dissuades customers from joining their network would be ruled out, I'd imagine.

Apologies for the quietitude here. I've just had what is undoubtedly the worst week of my life - perhaps I'll write about it here in time, certain (small) aspects of it have been interesting. If you know me In Real Life, and don't know what I'm talking about, feel free to drop me an email and I'll explain all.

In the meantime... links have piled up, and posting shall resume.

The boy melon captures it with a monkey.

next gen mobile interface thoughts: "So, my advice to mobile UI developers – instead of designing a miniaturized version of desktop OS, better imagine that you are designing a small game. Simple, engaging and easy to play."

There will be a slight pause for breath here. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.