I have some photos on an old Samsung E350 mobile that I want to upload to my PC - but the software doesn't recognise that the handset is connected. It doesn't have Bluetooth capability. Can you help?

If the information you want is locked in your old sim card, then all you'll need is a card reader. This inexpensive gizmo (about £15) plugs into your USB port and should let you pull your data straight on to your PC. However, lots of people with this model phone have reported similar problems without many answers. You could try downloading a newer version from the support pages at uk.samsungmobile.com, or buy a cable and software pack from a website such as datakits.co.uk (£6). In the end, though, your best bet may be sending the pictures as a multi-media message to somebody else and asking them to download them.

I have an Ion USB turntable that lets me download my vinyl records as files. Can I use it as an ordinary deck to play LPs and hear them through the speakers on my mini hi-fi?

The Ion has RCA outputs - that means you should be able to plug it into a hi-fi's AUX port using ordinary phono cables, although many mini stereo systems can't take external outputs.

Car names can be pretty stupid, can't they? I mean, take this one. Agila means eagle, I believe. And yet this nippy little city car is about as uneagle-like as it's possible for a car to be. Vauxhall Sparrow would have been better. Perhaps it is named after the Visigothic King of Hispania who ruled the Iberian Peninsula in the middle of the sixth century. I doubt it, though - unless King Agila was a small and frugal man, smart but hardly regal. Or maybe it's meant to sound like agile (is the g soft?). To make things even more complicated, the Agila is almost exactly the same as a Suzuki Splash, presumably so called because you have to splash out a bit more on it.

Anyway, name aside, the new Agila is very nice. It's certainly a big improvement on the old Agila, which should have been called the Vauxhall Box. Perhaps it doesn't have the character of the new Fiat Panda, but I can still see owners giving theirs names. I would call mine Christina. Christina Agila.

I can also imagine the kind of driver an Agila would attract: a confidently stylish, professional woman, possibly in PR, nipping cheekily through the traffic. Look, here she is, in fact, in the Vauxhall brochure. Judging by this, and the other pictures, it's certainly women they've got their eye on. I think I need to get the opinion of one ...

Oh. My so-called girlfriend's gone backpacking in bloody Bolivia, and she's the only one I know. Knew. Well, there is my mum, I suppose - she's not exactly in PR, but she is a woman, she'll have to do. I go round to see my mum, to introduce her to Christina.

Mum thinks I could have done a bit better. The seats - which are blue - are quite hard, she says, not as comfy as the ones in my brother's ancient Volvo. And the noise of the indicators annoys her. I think she's being harsh on the seats, but she's certainly got a point about the indicators, which emit a mournful wheezing sound, as if to say, "This corner is my last, before I die."

We don't have any PR meetings to drive to, and neither of us wants to go to the gym, which is somewhere else I can imagine an Agila going. So we head instead to a garden centre. I want to get a fuchsia, so we can put it behind us and say we're driving back to the fuchsia, but Mum doesn't want a fuchsia. So we get a nice bushy cistus instead. So bushy it doesn't fit in the boot. There's just about room for a laptop back there, and your gym kit. And, if you believe the pictures in the brochure, a buggy - though this isn't really a car to put kids into. Or shrubs. The cistus has to go on the back seat.

On the road, it's exactly as you'd imagine - nippy, agile, without being exciting. You wouldn't want to throw it into corners, and not just because of the cistus on the back seat. This car is for the city, not the racetrack. My only criticism, apart from the indicators, is that I'm too tall to read the rev meter that pops out of the top of the dashboard like an afterthought, or a frog's eye. But then this is a lady's car, and ladies are less tall, on the whole. And actually it's superfluous because ladies are, on the whole, less interested in revs. Mum doesn't even know what they are, apart from the ones you find in churches.

Price: £9,959
Top speed 109mph
Acceleration 0-62 in 12.3 seconds
Average consumption 51.4mpg
CO2 emissions 131g/km
Eco rating 8/10
At the wheel Bridget Jones
In a word Uneagle-like

Over recent years, it has become a staple image of the technology industry: hundreds of gadget fans queueing all night to get their hands on the latest trendy gizmo from Apple. But eager devotees across Britain were left angry and frustrated yesterday after a series of problems hit the launch of the Californian company's latest product, the iPhone 3G.

The latest version of Apple's mobile phone - a faster model than the original iPhone released last November - was unveiled at shops around the world with much fanfare yesterday morning.

Instead of getting their new toy, however, thousands of British customers were delayed as a glitch hit the computerised credit checking system belonging to the mobile network operator O2.

"We can confirm that Apple stores are having technical issues connecting to the O2 systems," a spokesman said at the height of the problems. "We are working to get the systems back up to full speed as quickly as possible." Hundreds of customers arrived early at shops around the country for the launch at 8.02am - even the time itself chosen to squeeze out a little extra publicity for the launch. Minutes later, however, queues began to back up and new purchases failed to register.

"I was in the queue from 7am and didn't get served until 11.30am as their systems went down," said one disgruntled customer on the Guardian website. "It took around 40 minutes for each customer's credit decision to be made and at the end of all that they only had four 16 gigabyte models in stock - and this was the flagship Manchester store." Some dedicated customers took several hours to get their hands on an iPhone, while others simply gave up. "It's not ideal, but that's life," said 26-year-old Chris Moorby, who had queued outside the flagship Apple shop in Regent Street, London. "I'm leaving now because I've got to go to work."

Last night the problems were being blamed on the sudden influx of customers, which crashed the system and forced staff to run manual checks on all new accounts. However, it remains unclear why O2 did not anticipate the surge in demand. Carphone Warehouse, another chain selling the handset, had already announced that interest in the iPhone 3G was up to 10 times greater than its predecessor, and last week O2's website collapsed under the weight of traffic when it opened for orders.

But it was not only O2 which was struggling. A customer from Stafford, who had ordered his iPhone 3G online through Carphone Warehouse, said he had received a guarantee on Thursday evening that it would be delivered the next day. "I stayed at home for the delivery, but it never arrived," he said. "I finally got through to them on the phone and they said nobody would be receiving their orders until after the weekend. I've now cancelled my order."

Observers largely blamed the crash on onerous new sign-up procedures to try to reduce so-called "unlockers". These customers - who fail to sign up to a contract and use their iPhones on a different mobile network - are now forced to sign on the spot, and must provide photographic ID and detailed personal information.

Apple is desperate to make an impact on the enormous mobile phone market. The iPhone 3G boasts faster internet connection, satellite navigation and access to an online shop full of downloadable programs.

O2 has an exclusive contract to provide service to iPhones in Britain, and could come under pressure from the US technology giant if such problems continue.

Ian Fogg, a mobile industry analyst with Jupiter Research, said that all would be forgotten if O2 managed to get its systems working smoothly - but customers could still find it hard to get hold of an iPhone 3G if the gadget proved as popular as it appears. "Really these day one teething problems are just that," he said. "One of the big challenges for hit products is making sure that you've got enough to meet demand."

1978, Blantyre, Malawi. Beneath a bough of bougainvillea, a 10 year old is talking about a revolution. Crouched by a wire fence, I'm using a large spoon and my mother's Grundig Music Boy to liaise with President Nyerere's troops across the border in Tanzania. Our joint mission: to overthrow the dictatorship of Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the Malawian leader.

Soon after, I'm in serious trouble, having snapped the Grundig's telescopic antenna. Of this I am certain: had I had my father's much larger Eddystone Marine short-wave set, with its own wire aerial that drapes from tree to tree, President Nyerere would have replied.

1980, Tarbert, Kerry. At the back of the stables, a big Bakelite radio is unearthed. It works! I wheel the creaking dial back through Helsinki, Luxembourg, Athlone ... I decide I'm going to dismantle it, in order to make a transmitter. I remove valves from their sockets, lift the cable from tuning wheel, unwind transformers. In the midst of it all, wax is discovered, slathering chunky capacitors, covering insect-like resistors. Nothing comes of the dissection. No transmission is ever heard again, never mind sent.

It is fantasy. These radios are just receivers. When in the depot of my boarding school's army cadet corps, I glimpse from under my beret a big British Army wireless (complete with microphone and headset), I set my heart on genuine transmission. Seeing the vast array of equipment of a blind great-uncle who is a radio amateur whets my appetite further.

1982, Malvern, Worcestershire. Beginning with a Radio Shack breadboard, I assemble according to instructions a morse code transmitter. It makes dots and dashes appear on nearby television screens. Later, I graduate to an illegal CB radio set, complete with whippy aerial. I stash the transceiver in my study bedroom, running coaxial cable up to a roof parapet where the antenna can stand.

I achieve some success with my "one four for a copy" bids for contact. For a brief period, CB becomes a means of meeting girls in town. And there they end, my radio days. The desperate need to communicate is diverted into relationships - and that other world of joy and pain, writing.

As the years go by, CB goes legit. Mobile phones arrive, the internet comes on stream. On a vast scale, the desperate need is fulfilled; yet at the same time, curiously, it's denied all the more. Meanwhile the radio amateur, like his shed-bound confrère the practical engineer, is edged further to the fringes of society.

What use, then, the Motorola Tlkr T5s, a pair of stylish two-way radios (£59.99, from amazon.co.uk, or Currys stores nationwide)? They're certainly not much cop in the city - obstructions affect the range of transmission - but the baby monitor function is useful. The T5s come into their own during outdoor adventures. I achieved good results testing ours on Exmoor, in a spot where mobile phone reception was not available. There are five call tones, so a number of T5s could effectively be used as a mini phone net. After mobiles, it's hard getting used to the stop-start effect of send and receive.

My Motorolas come under the PMR 446 (Personal Mobile Radio, 446 Mhz) licence exemption of the European Union. This exemption is for consumer-grade walkie-talkies to be used anywhere in Europe. PMRs give an average range of four miles, depending on terrain.

But radio waves can do strange things. The long-distance record for PMR 446 is more than 300 miles, from Blyth in Northumberland to Almere in the Netherlands. There are eight standard channels and any PMR 446 radio from any brand should be compatible with any other PMR 446 radio. The Motorolas also have 121 subchannels, which gets round the problem of too many other people using them. Then again, I didn't hear another soul apart from my young son squawking "over, over". His radio days are just beginning.

They may involve these kinds of radios; all over Europe, people are using a combination of the internet and PMRs to set up outfits such as the Free Radio Network (freeradionetwork.nl) as a way of sidestepping mobile phone operators. So the revolution continues.

Executives from Activision and Vivendi Games are celebrating the completion of their $19bn (£9.7bn) merger today, after shareholders approved the deal.

The new company - to be known as Activision Blizzard - brings together two of the expanding interactive entertainment industry's largest players, which between them are responsible for some of its most successful titles.

Activision, headquartered in Santa Monica, is most famous for games such as Guitar Hero and the Spider-Man franchise, while Vivendi Games is best known for its flagship studio Blizzard - creators of the hugely popular World of Warcraft online game, which has more than 10 million paying subscribers.

Activision Blizzard is set to be the single most profitable video games company in the world, with one analyst suggesting that annual profits in its first year are likely to exceed $1bn (£511m).

It also allows the new organisation to challenge the dominance of Electronic Arts, maker of popular games such as The Sims and the Fifa football series, and surpass it with combined annual revenues in excess of £2bn.

"Activision is a leader in the console business, and Vivendi is a leader in the online PC games industry," said Jean-Bernard Levy, chief executive of parent company Vivendi. "I think this combination makes us a very powerful leader in the industry."

Although Vivendi will own a 52% stake in the new group, executives decided to ditch the French parent company's brand in favour of its better-known subsidiary.

Robert Kotick, the chief executive of the new company, said that he aimed to build on recent successes in Asia, adding that Blizzard had "a level of awareness among consumers in Asian countries that is much higher than usual for a western company".

"They've also invested hundreds of millions in infrastructure around the world which we can use," he said. "Plus we get the association with Vivendi and the opportunities that brings - the chance to work more closely with Universal Music in our Guitar Hero games, for example, is an affiliation which is bound to be helpful."

Despite concerns that an economic downturn could lead to a drop in consumer spending, Levy said he was confident that the new company could survive a downturn.

He told the Guardian that he expected the price of the recent generation of games consoles - including Microsoft's Xbox 360 and the Sony PlayStation 3 - to continue falling, without consumers cutting back on the amount they spend on games.

"We are a very cheap way to get entertained in terms of cost per hour," he said. "If and when people tighten their belts in terms of entertainment - which won't happen as quickly as with travel costs, for example - it's quite likely that we won't suffer too much."

The UK is moving rapidly towards digital switchover, with the number of analogue-only homes falling 34% in the year to the end of March, according to the latest figures from Ofcom, the communications regulator.

Ofcom's latest quarterly Digital Progress Report, released today, suggests the number of households without any digital TV dropped to 3.3m in the first quarter of 2008 - 1.7m fewer than the same period in 2007.

The total number of UK households with digital TV is now 22.2m, or 87.2% of homes, the research suggests.

Ofcom has changed its research system since the last report in March and this would have been 88.2% under the old methodology.

In the first quarter of this year there was a net growth of 190,000 homes with multichannel TV, with two-thirds of the new adopters taking free services - Freeview or free satellite.

The upsurge in digital TV takeup is mainly propelled by the growth of Freeview, with a further 1.3m homes adopting the free digital terrestrial television service for their main sets in the 12 months ending March 31, 2008.

Another 14m households now have Freeview on their second TV set, bringing the total number of DTT sets to 23m.

Meanwhile, the number of homes with pay TV digital services reached 12.2m by the end of the first quarter of 2008.

Digital satellite, including Sky and Freesat, is the second most popular way of receiving digital TV in British homes after Freeview.

There are now 9.3m homes using digital satellite for their main TV set, a 37% share and a rise of 230,000 since the first quarter of 2007.

Meanwhile, 3.2m homes are using cable TV as their primary multichannel service, the research suggests. Of these, about 30,000 are still using analogue cable TV.

Virgin Media has 3.5m subscribers and the Ofcom report suggests the discrepancy could be partly due to non-residential subscriptions and some overlap with homes that have both satellite and cable.

· To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332.

· If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

The UK is moving rapidly towards digital switchover, with the number of analogue-only homes falling 34% in the year to the end of March, according to the latest figures from Ofcom, the communications regulator.

Ofcom's latest quarterly Digital Progress Report, released today, suggests the number of households without any digital TV dropped to 3.3m in the first quarter of 2008 - 1.7m fewer than the same period in 2007.

The total number of UK households with digital TV is now 22.2m, or 87.2% of homes, the research suggests.

Ofcom has changed its research system since the last report in March and this would have been 88.2% under the old methodology.

In the first quarter of this year there was a net growth of 190,000 homes with multichannel TV, with two-thirds of the new adopters taking free services - Freeview or free satellite.

The upsurge in digital TV takeup is mainly propelled by the growth of Freeview, with a further 1.3m homes adopting the free digital terrestrial television service in the 12 months ending March 31, 2008.

Another 14m households adopted Freeview on their second TV set, bringing the total number of DTT sets to 23m.

Meanwhile, the number of homes with pay TV digital services reached 12.2m by the end of the first quarter of 2008.

Digital satellite, including Sky and Freesat, is the second most popular way of receiving digital TV in British homes after Freeview.

There are now 9.3m homes using digital satellite for their main TV set, a 37% share and a rise of 230,000 since the first quarter of 2007.

Meanwhile, 3.2m homes are using cable TV, mostly pay services with Virgin Media but including some free cable, as their primary multichannel service, the research suggests. Of these, about 30,000 are still using analogue cable TV.

Virgin Media has 3.5m subscribers and the Ofcom report suggests the discrepancy could be partly due to non-residential subscriptions and some overlap with homes that have both satellite and cable.

· To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332.

· If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

So, finally, the third-party iPhone and iPod Touch apps are here. It's only taken Apple, what, a month or two short of seven years to turn the iPod from something that people laughed at and dismissed into a fully-fledged platform on which other people build applications. (I've written previously about how important these third-party iPhone and iPod applications are to Apple.) For the phone itself, only about 18 months.

And what do we find are the fruits of that labour? Courtesy of John Gruber, who's been watching what people downloaded on the first day, we discover that the most popular paid-for application was Sega's Super Monkey Ball, with 10,955 downloads (at $9.99 each) in the first 24 hours. He calculates that to be $109,440 in total, about $76,000 for Sega and $33,000 for Apple under the 70-30 revenue deal.

He also notes that when people have a choice of free vs paid apps, they split (at least to begin with) about 50-1 in favour of free. That 2% "conversion rate" is certainly interesting (though of course once people have been using the phone for longer, the figure will probably rise).

But if you thought that the first appearance of the iPhone's third-party apps would be marked by people producing fantastically clever applications that would let you calculate your carbon footprint and amortise the price of a gallon of petrol while controlling your washing machine, you'll be disappointed. And if you thought too that Apple's reputation for producing products with great engineering and user interfaces would somehow be transmitted over to third-party builders, prepare to be doubly disappointed. People have such strange ideas of what makes a good interface.

For example, have a look at the Sudoku game (with sound effects!) on the linked video. Now ask yourself: is that as legible as it could possibly be? Is it as simple to use as it could be? Why, for example, have a dark star background? Why not white? And when you're entering a number in a square, why not have the list of possible numbers come up in the square? (I'll admit to a slight Sudoku addiction - though obviously I could give it up any time - and use Sudoku Susser on my computer, which while having a quite horrendous user interface away from the grid, does at least start with a clean, black-on-white grid. Honest.)

There's also plenty of criticism of iPhone interface design: Gruber and commenters pretty much flayed the work of a company that wrote a "trip-meter" called TripLog1040 to measure your distance travelled. At first glance you might think it was acceptable. On the iPhone, though, millimetres matter. It may be the first screen where that's the case. (Other people tried redesigns: here's one, and another.

But such elementary mistakes in design are the sorts of things that you have to expect from a nascent platform. After all, what do we all remember from our first unfettered experiences of using Microsoft's Windows? Yup, discovering the games - solitaire and Minesweeper, which were designed to train people not used to using the mouse, while they thought they were just bunking off.

It's like the evolution of a rainforest: you can't have the soaring canopy of trees and the rich wildlife below without first having all the compost at the bottom. Some of the free apps are probably of negative value, inasmuch as they take up storage space you could use for something else: anyone for Yes/No (iTunes-only URL)? This app will make those hard decisions for you without your having to toss one of those expensive "coins". Or Hold On, in which you "compete to see how long you can hold the button"?

Yeah, well, don't worry. The trivia won't necessarily get washed away; it'll exist, somewhere in cyberspace. But in time we'll start to get the really useful products. Indeed, some of them may already be there. Fraser Speirs's Exposure, a Flickr client, has the fascinating "Near Me" button: click it and any geotagged photos on Flickr that were taken near your current location will be shown - because the new iPhone has GPS, of course. That's just the start. The rainforest is growing. Don't worry about all the compost on the ground. It's all just getting started.

Nicolas S has 17 online friends, among them the glamorous Rachida D and debonair Bernard K. His religion is listed as "all of them - as long as they love me," and favourite quotes include "How much is that Rolex?" and "Can I borrow your yacht?"

Facebook fans have no fear: President Sarkozy has not decided to bare all on the ever-growing social networking site. But he has fallen victim to the latest internet craze in France: a satirical website that harnesses the collective clout of the internet and takes aim at the political elite.

The brainchild of two students who wanted to create an irreverent portrait of the country's leaders and their opponents, Failbook is a spoof networking site which allows members of the public to create politicians' profiles.

Although still in its early days - the site only launched last week - thousands of visitors are already logging on and delighting in the opportunity to poke fun at their chosen target.

For its creators, who want to remain anonymous, the similarity between forensic media coverage and obsessive social networking was too tempting to ignore.

"We live in a world where the slightest development is covered in the media, and, at the same time, we have Facebook, where people have killed off their private lives and build up reputations by putting everything up in public," said one. "We wanted to use this analogy for a lighter treatment of politics. We're so used to seeing the same analyses day in, day out that we wanted to dramatise it a bit - and send it up."

Yesterday on Failbook the understated prime minister, Francois Fillon, joined a group called: "I don't like Carla Bruni's new album and I don't mind admitting it." Marine LP (Le Pen) writes excitedly on her father's wall about a film she has just seen portraying an all-white Paris "with no Arabs and no blacks".

The spoof of Jean Sarkozy - the president's son, who himself was recently elected to political office, describes his religion as "ambition", while Justice Minister Rachida Dati's interests are listed succinctly as: "Dior tailoring, Chanel shirts and Stalinist authoritarianism."

According to Pierre Brechon, professor at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Grenoble, the younger generation in France is less idealistic and more critical of its political leaders than those before it. That tendency, combined with the new platform of the internet, has led to new forms of parody, he said.

"French satire has always existed, long before the web did, and it has often been extremely ferocious," he said. "Nowadays, through the web, it can reach a public which is much larger and much more varied than before."

Excitement over the launch of the iPhone 3G turned to chaos today as computer problems meant customers could not buy the new gadget.

Around 150 fans were waiting at the Apple store in Regent Street, London, for the launch of the new phone but had to wait several hours to be connected.

Problems with the O2 network, Apple's exclusive partner in the UK, meant hundreds of customers in the store were unable to register their details or process payments. Staff said the large volume of customers trying to register their new phones on the O2 server appeared to have caused the problem.

A spokesman for O2 said Apple stores were having "technical issues" connecting to the telecoms company's online systems.

"Customer interest in iPhone has been phenomenal this morning," he said.

"We can confirm that Apple stores are having technical issues connecting to O2 systems. The systems are currently working but quite slowly. We are working to get the systems back up to full speed as quickly as possible."

Both O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores nationwide have reportedly been affected by the server problems.

The new iPhone 3G combines a mobile phone with the capabilities of an iPod to play music and videos, plus an improved web browser with a high-speed internet connection and GPS satellite positioning.

Excitement over the launch of Apple's latest offering spread world-wide as some fans queued for up to 60 hours to be among the first to buy one.

In London, David Suen, a 27-year-old economics student from Australia, was the first outside the Apple store at 6.30am. He had bought his place in the queue on eBay "for less than £50" from another man who had been waiting since 11am on Thursday.

He said he was not blaming Apple for the delay in buying the new phone. "It's fine. It's O2's server that has the fault. It's not really Apple's problem," he said.

Second-in-line Antonio Guerra, 19, a London fashion student, said he had been waiting for 19 hours but was happy to wait "a few more".

Yesterday O2 warned customers that they did not have enough phones to keep up with demand.

A message on O2's website said each of its stores would have just "a few dozen" iPhones to sell today. It said supply issues meant numbers would be limited for weeks but all customers who wanted one would have it "by the end of this summer".

Both O2 and Carphone Warehouse had to suspend online orders for the iPhone earlier this week, citing "incredible demand".

The new phone costs less than its £269 predecessor, but is still only available in the UK from O2, Carphone Warehouse and Apple stores. O2 and the Carphone Warehouse are giving away the 8Gb version of the iPhone to customers who sign up for tariffs costing £45 or £75 a month.

The phone will cost between £59 and £159 for customers on other tariffs.

Gadget fans across the globe queued through the night in a bid to be some of the first to pick up the new iPhone 3G as it goes on sale today.

At the Apple store in Regent Street, around 150 people were waiting for the launch of the new phone at 8am, while crowds of cheering people in Hong Kong - some of whom had queued for days - greeted the launch of the hotly anticipated phone.

By 9.45am, customers in the London store were still unable to buy the phone as the online registration system was unable to register details or process payments. Staff said the large volume of customers trying to register their new phones on the O2 network appeared to have caused the problem.

A 22-year-old student from New Zealand is believed to be the first in the world to own the new iPhone. Jonny Gladwell reportedly queued for 60 hours to claim the title and his new phone.

The new iPhone combines a mobile phone with the capabilities of an iPod to play music and videos, plus an improved web browser with a high-speed internet connection and GPS satellite positioning.

In London, David Suen, a 27-year-old economics student from Australia, was the first outside the Apple store at 6.30am. He had bought his place in the queue on eBay "for less than £50" from another man who had been waiting since 11am on Thursday.

"I've been waiting for this since the last iPhone because of 3G. It's very exciting," he said.

The iPhone is only available on the O2 network, Apple's exclusive partner, but yesterday the communications company warned customers they did not have enough phones to keep up with demand.

It said that each of its stores would have on just "a few dozen" iPhones to sell today. It said supply issues meant numbers would be limited for weeks but customers would have one "by the end of this summer".

A message on 02's website said: "We are experiencing unprecedented demand for the device and, whilst we are confident that all customers who want iPhone 3G will get one by the end of this summer, initial supply is limited and will be for some weeks."

Both O2 and the Carphone Warehouse had to suspend online orders for the iPhone earlier this week, citing "incredible demand".

The new phone costs less than its £269 predecessor, but is still only available in the UK from O2, Carphone Warehouse and Apple stores. O2 and the Carphone Warehouse are giving away the 8Gb version of the iPhone to customers who sign up to tariffs costing £45 or £75 a month.

The gadgets will cost between £59 and £159 for customers on other tariffs.

Apple's new iPhone 3G went on sale this morning, as the Californian company's latest attempt to capture the public imagination.

The first UK iPhone 3G was sold at 8.02am, in a stunt designed to promote the O2 network, which has an exclusive deal to provide iPhone service in the UK.

Around 150 people lined up outside the Apple store on London's Regent Street for the chance to get their hands on the new gadget. First in the queue was David Suen, a 27-year-old student at the London School of Economics, who said he had bought his place in the line for "less than £50" from a man who had arrived at 11am yesterday.

"I've been waiting for this since the last iPhone because of 3G," he said. "It's very exciting."

Suen is not alone in holding off buying the gizmo because of its previous lack of higher-speed 3G connectivity. That had been a common complaint among European consumers, who are used to subsidised handsets with faster connections than those in America.

Both Apple and O2 hope that the new, faster model - which also incorporates satellite navigation - can drive up sales. The network and Carphone Warehouse, the only independent retailer that will stock the phone in the UK, have both reported greater consumer interest in the new device than its previous model, which went on sale in Britain last November.

Not all customers will be able to buy a handset, however, with O2 warning last night that it only had limited stock.

"On average, we will only have a few dozen iPhone 3Gs per store (some stores more, some stores less, dependant upon store size so we expect to sell out quickly)," the company warned on its website.

The new iPhone also has access to a new online shop, which sells downloadable applications including games, web tools and even full copies of the Bible.

The store launched yesterday amid much confusion, with customers around the world able to buy applications but not to download them, because the new version of the iPhone software had not yet been made available.

What's your favourite piece of technology?
Predictably, my iPhone. I wasn't sure it was all that incredible at first, but realised that the more I use it and the longer I have it, the more useful and impressive it is. I like the way it makes itself better from time to time. It'd be good if all technology could do that.

How has it improved your life?
Well, "improved" is a strong word. It's still a phone, first and foremost, and at the moment it's just a much slicker and cooler BlackBerry, but I'm confident that in the next couple of years you'll be able to ask me that question again, and I'll be able to answer …

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
To type the words you're reading now, and in a moment I'll use it to send it to the man who asked me to do so. I'm walking down Upper Street in Islington right now, trying not to bump into bins as I type.

What additional features would you add if you could?
A torch and a shrill mugging alarm.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
Of course. It will be laughable. But we'll still be telling our children: "It was actually very impressive back then." And they'll mock us, and ask us what steam trains were like.

What one tip would you give to non-iPhone users?
Buy an iPhone. Or come up with a decent argument against them, that does not involve the word "camera".

Do you consider yourself to be a Luddite or a nerd?
A bit of a nerd. I wear glasses for a start, so I am fundamentally halfway there, but I love new gadgets. Someone sent me a toaster that both toasts your bread and poaches your eggs the other day. It's only worth about 30 quid, but I was ridiculously happy.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
When I was a student I stupidly spent all my savings on a home cinema centre with 10 speakers. I only had a 10-inch TV and a room the size of a table. The entire place was just a bed and speakers.

Mac or PC?
Mac. Let us finally put this debate to rest.

What song is at the top of your iPod's top 25 most played?
At the moment, it's Vampire Weekend, Oxford Comma.

Will robots rule the world?
Yes. I actually asked a leading roboticist this. He said they will definitely rise up against us. At the moment the only idea to stop them doing this is keeping their batteries within easy reach.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
I think a really decent projector. I have a dream of a house in France, the side of a barn, a huge projector, a bunch of mates, an open fire, a crate of beers, and Wii golf …

Danny Wallace's new book, Friends Like These, is out now

BT is in talks to buy Silicon Valley internet-phone software developer Ribbit as it looks to create a one-number web-based communications platform to take on the likes of Google and Skype in the burgeoning online telecoms market.

Ribbit, founded two years ago and based near Google's headquarters in Mountain View, claims to be "Silicon Valley's first phone company". It has created software that allows programmers to design applications that tie together mobile phones, fixed-line phones and even social networking sites into a single online communications hub.

Ribbit allows any software developer to use its technology to create applications, in the same way as Google has opened up its soon to launch mobile phone operating system android and Apple has allowed other people to develop software for the iPhone.

There are a number of communications tools such as Evernote - which allows forgetful iPhone users to access their "to do" lists from their phone or computer - which are designed to integrate the mobile phone with internet-based services.

Bringing together the information stored on the web with mobile phones, a trend known as unified communications, has been mooted for many years. But the take-up of broadband and the creation of fast mobile phone networks has made it easier to achieve. Last year Google snapped up another Californian company involved in this area, called GrandCentral, for about $50m.

BT is understood to have offered as much as $55m (£28m) for Ribbit, although a deal has not yet been signed. BT refused to comment yesterday.

Ribbit's technology has already been used by a number of third party application developers. American business communications group Salesforce.com has a Ribbit-based application that lets the company's sales people keep track of all their calls and contacts through a single web page.

Ribbit is also testing a consumer platform called amphibian, which looks like a social networking site with a phone attached. It allows users to convert voicemail messages left on their mobile into text which can be read online, so users can search for keywords. Calls can be patched through from a mobile to a computer; not only will the caller's number be displayed but amphibian can pull up their profile and latest postings from sites such as Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter. Calls from other web-based telephone services such as GoogleTalk and Skype can also be accessed.

David Caminer, who has died aged 92, was one of the leaders of the postwar computer revolution. When the modern electronic computer was invented in the last years of the second world war, it was seen as a technology that could help in scientific and technical computations - the first American electronic computer, Eniac, was designed specifically to help the military with the calculation of the trajectories of shells.

At that time, David was a soldier in the Green Howards, serving in north Africa. He was wounded at Mareth in Tunisia in 1943, losing a leg, and returned to civilian life by going back to his prewar job with J Lyons & Co, of teashop and Swiss roll fame. He had joined in 1936 as a management trainee. On his return, he was appointed manager of the influential systems analysis office under the direction of John Simmons.

In 1947 Simmons sent two colleagues, TR Thompson and Oliver Standingford, to study office innovations in the US. They came across the new electronic computers and realised that they could be used to solve the problems of keeping track of and accounting for Lyons' multiple activities in the catering and food processing world. Astonishingly, the idea was accepted by Simmons and the Lyons board.

A new venture, the Leo (Lyons electronic office), was started under the direction of Thompson: its task was to build and bring into use in Lyons offices the world's first business computer, based on the Cambridge University Edsac. David joined this band of pioneers and saw immediately that the computer could do more than copy what was being done in offices by clerks with conventional business machines. With proper design, the computer could be used to support management activities and improve the way the company was run. As a result, many of the systems designed by David and his team were as advanced in concept as any are today. For a brief period, the work at Lyons led the world in the application of computers to business problems.

As one of his team, John Aris, later suggested, David invented what we now call systems engineering. By 1953 the team, under David's detailed and imaginative guidance, were turning out a succession of business applications for Lyons and other companies, and in the following year the Lyons weekly payroll for nearly 1,700 bakery workers was automated, along with a stock system for the 250 teashops. The systems analysis office learned that successful systems depend on a complete under-standing of the business processes being examined and the need to work with the people who operate them.

For those of us who worked for him, there was constant excitement as new ground was being broken. At the same time David's fierce and rigorous enforcement of meticulous standards could become a source of misery. He frequently drove his team to achieve the unattainable. By the time a piece of documentation had been returned to its author half a dozen times to correct the content, language and style, frustration might have set in. But the lessons were learned. Working with David proved to be the most important period in our lives.

In the 1970s, with the merger of the various branches of the UK computer industry into ICL, David was entrusted with the management of one of the largest projects attempted at that time, for the European Community. For completing that project on time and budget, David received his OBE (for services to British commercial interests overseas) in 1980 and, in 2006, he received an honorary doctorate from Middlesex University. In his later years, he could not understand the prevalence of failed computer projects. Would the methods he devised in the early years, combined with his vision, have saved many of the failed or failing projects?

David retired in 1980, then set up the Leo Foundation and spearheaded the 2001 conference at the London Guildhall to celebrate the running of the world's first business application on a computer 50 years earlier at the Cadby Hall headquarters of Lyons. He was the principal author of Leo: The Incredible Story of the World's First Business Computer (1998).

Born in Hackney, east London, David went to Sloane school, Fulham, and was a keen rugby player in his earlier years. He never lost his love for cricket - he was a member of the MCC - football (Chelsea) and rugby union. He was also an opera lover. He and his wife Jackie were still going to concerts, plays and sporting events until his final illness. Though not a man of strong religious beliefs, he had a high regard for the traditions of the Jewish community, to which he was highly committed.

He took an active part in the battles against Oswald Mosley in the 1930s and 40s, culminating with his appearance as a platform speaker at a rally in Trafalgar Square rally in 1943. He continued to have a lively and trenchant view of politics. In later years, he took an active role in his local Labour party and spearheaded the Anti-Apartheid Movement, personally welcoming Archbishop Desmond Tutu to his borough of Richmond upon Thames in support of the campaign.

He is survived by his wife, two daughters, a son and five grandchildren.

· David Tresman Caminer, business computer engineer, born June 26 1915; died June 19 2008

It is a bizarre tale of a would-be assassin who turned out to be an Egyptian poker dealer in Las Vegas, a woman in an unhappy relationship with a tycoon and revelations of a fake marriage, sex clubs in Spain and a Jacobean-style poison plot.

They were the ingredients of one of the most unusual murder trials ever heard by Ireland's central criminal court. The case reached its climax this week after a 45-year-old mother-of-two, Sharon Collins, was found guilty of conspiring to hire a hitman through a website to kill her partner and his two sons.

PJ Howard was worth €12m (£9.6m) through property rentals. He owned homes in the west of Ireland and Spain as well as a boat called Heartbeat, named after his quadruple heart-bypass in 2000.

Five years after his heart surgery Howard was dating blonde divorcee Collins who, like him, had two sons from a previous marriage. But the match was not made in heaven, the court was told. Collins admitted that in April 2005 she wrote to Gerry Ryan, a popular Irish radio DJ, accusing Howard of frequenting prostitutes, transvestites and swingers' clubs near Malaga on the Costa del Sol.

Yet despite this, she was so obsessed with marrying Howard that she turned to the internet, paying $1, 000 to Proxymarriage.com for a Mexican marriage certificate in the name of Sharon Howard.

In August 2006, Collins contacted the website www.Hitman.us.com. The jury was told that correspondence began between her and a man from the site who called himself Tony Luciano. Luciano was in fact an Egyptian poker dealer in Las Vegas, Essam Eid. Collins allegedly suggested arranging an accident for Howard and his sons, and supplied him with details of where the family lived and socialised. The would-be assassin offered an alternative - poison that would induce heart attacks.

The plot unravelled in September 2006 after Eid flew to Ireland and burgled the Howard family's business, taking computers. He then arranged to meet Robert Howard, one of PJ's sons, claiming to be able to identify the whereabouts of the equipment. He also warned the son that there was a contract out on him, his brother and their father, demanding €100,000 to have the contract terminated.

Howard contacted the Irish police and thus began a transatlantic investigation which included the FBI. Collins was arrested in February 2007 after examination of one of the stolen computers, which had been dumped in a Limerick hotel. It contained emails between her and the hitman, which included complaints from Collins that PJ Howard wanted to control her life, even down to asking her to have "stranger sex".

In one email, Collins wrote: "His boys are going to suffer. I wish it didn't have to be like this, but I know that if my husband was dead and they were still here, they'd screw me."

Collins and Eid, who was found guilty of demanding €100,000 from Howard and handling stolen property, will be sentenced on October 8. Collins has secured the help of a Los Angeles-based literary agent, after she told Ireland's director of public prosecutions: "I'll write a book yet."

It is a bizarre tale of a would-be assassin who turned out to be an Egyptian poker dealer in Las Vegas, a woman in an unhappy relationship with a tycoon and revelations of a fake marriage, sex clubs in Spain and a Jacobean-style poison plot.

They were the ingredients of one of the most unusual murder trials ever heard by Ireland's central criminal court. The case reached its climax this week after a 45-year-old mother-of-two, Sharon Collins, was found guilty of conspiring to hire a hitman through a website to kill her partner and his two sons.

PJ Howard was worth €12m (£9.6m) through property rentals. He owned homes in the west of Ireland and Spain as well as a boat called Heartbeat, named after his quadruple heart-bypass in 2000.

Five years after his heart surgery Howard was dating blonde divorcee Collins who, like him, had two sons from a previous marriage. But the match was not made in heaven, the court was told. Collins admitted that in April 2005 she wrote to Gerry Ryan, a popular Irish radio DJ, accusing Howard of frequenting prostitutes, transvestites and swingers' clubs near Malaga on the Costa del Sol.

Yet despite this, she was so obsessed with marrying Howard that she turned to the internet, paying $1, 000 to Proxymarriage.com for a Mexican marriage certificate in the name of Sharon Howard.

In August 2006, Collins contacted the website www.Hitman.us.com. The jury was told that correspondence began between her and a man from the site who called himself Tony Luciano. Luciano was in fact an Egyptian poker dealer in Las Vegas, Essam Eid. Collins allegedly suggested arranging an accident for Howard and his sons, and supplied him with details of where the family lived and socialised. The would-be assassin offered an alternative - poison that would induce heart attacks.

The plot unravelled in September 2006 after Eid flew to Ireland and burgled the Howard family's business, taking computers. He then arranged to meet Robert Howard, one of PJ's sons, claiming to be able to identify the whereabouts of the equipment. He also warned the son that there was a contract out on him, his brother and their father, demanding €100,000 to have the contract terminated.

Howard contacted the Irish police and thus began a transatlantic investigation which included the FBI. Collins was arrested in February 2007 after examination of one of the stolen computers, which had been dumped in a Limerick hotel. It contained emails between her and the hitman, which included complaints from Collins that PJ Howard wanted to control her life, even down to asking her to have "stranger sex".

In one email, Collins wrote: "His boys are going to suffer. I wish it didn't have to be like this, but I know that if my husband was dead and they were still here, they'd screw me."

Collins and Eid, who was found guilty of demanding €100,000 from Howard and handling stolen property, will be sentenced on October 8. Collins has secured the help of a Los Angeles-based literary agent, after she told Ireland's director of public prosecutions: "I'll write a book yet."

O2 is preparing to face thousands of disappointed customers as the mobile phone company looks set to run out of the latest version of Apple's iPhone within minutes of some of its stores opening on Friday morning.

The company is suffering from what one insider termed "Hype 2.0" - a play on the fashionable social networking term Web 2.0 - as the new 3G version of the iPhone goes on sale in the UK and 21 other countries on Friday.

O2, Apple's exclusive network partner in the UK, ran out of stock for pre-orders within a few hours of the phone becoming available on its website on Monday. Many customers will be expecting to be able to go into its stores when they open on Friday and buy a phone over the counter.

O2, however, warned tonight that it has only limited stock and is limiting purchases to one per customer.

"On average, we will only have a few dozen iPhone 3Gs per store (some stores more, some stores less, dependant upon store size so we expect to sell out quickly)" the company warned on its website.

O2 claims that more than 200,000 people registered an interest in the 3G iPhone while 35,000 people registered interest in the previous version of the phone before it went on sale last year.

Carphone Warehouse, the only independent retailer that will stock the phone in the UK, reckons interest in the new phone is 10 times greater than it was for the original version.

The new phone coincides with Apple's opening up of the device so that third party application developers can create software for it. From Thursday the iTunes store will stock these applications and already there are 500 available - ranging from games and full copies of The Bible to iPhone versions of social networking sites and tools such as MySpace and Twitter.

The new 3G version of the phone is expected to be more popular in Europe than the device sold last year because it runs over the new 3G networks which European operators have rolled out over the past few years.

The 8GB version of the new phone - which can store about 2,000 songs - is free for O2 customers willing to sign up for 18 months at £45 a month, while the larger capacity 16GB phone is free for anyone on a £75-a-month deal.

Yesterday, virtual worlds such as Habbo Hotel and Second Life, in which people interact with each other through their alter egos, or avatars, were niche markets, albeit very large ones; today, they may be on the road to becoming a mass phenomenon.

Why? Because Google, the most popular search engine on the planet, with a massive fan base, has moved in with its own virtual world, Lively (For the moment it is only on Pcs, not on Apple computers).

The world offers users their own "virtual" rooms, which they can kit out from an inventory of armchairs, tables and lamp stands. I found it easy to do this; and to pull down a TV set from the inventory, then click on it and insert the web address of a YouTube video, which then started playing inside my virtual apartment. Rooms can be either private or public so all your friends, and strangers as well, can come and chat.

As is Google's style, it didn't spend a cent on advertising: it just quietly added Lively to its list of services and allowed the rest of the world do the marketing for it - yes, as I am doing now.

When I dipped into it yesterday, I was unimpressed: just a mass of cartoony characters in makeshift rooms saying "Hi" to each other as if imprisoned in their comic balloons. For anyone used to the creativity of Second Life, it all looked elementary.

Then it dawned on me: most of them had probably never been in a virtual world before. All of the other worlds - and there are more than 100 of them - have been start-ups coming from nowhere and are often too complex to navigate through (though not the new generation aimed at youngsters); this one is simple.

And, more to the point, this is the first virtual world to be launched using the leverage of a company whose icon is on the screen of well over 70% of the world's computers. This doesn't guarantee success, but Google hopes it has found the common denominator of virtual worlds. Google has had plenty of failures, but mass leverage isn't exactly a handicap.

When I went back on to Lively this morning, newcomers were already getting the hang of it, with well furnished rooms, bars, discos, chess games and, inevitably, erotica appearing all over the place and in many different languages, a sign of Google's global reach. There are already ominous signs of "lag", when your room takes ages to "rez", or materialise; and rooms get filled petty quickly, so it is not always possible to get into the popular ones.

Like others, I was caught on the hop with this announcement. A virtual world has been expected from Google for yonks, but a lot of the speculation presumed it would be glued on to Google Earth. Maybe that is still a work in progress. I had written a tour d'horizon of virtual worlds, which appears in today's Technology Guardian, including the Finnish Habbo Hotel and the British RuneScape, both of which claim more than 100m registrations, and the article went to press the day before Google's announcement (or non-announcement).

What does all this mean? For Google, this is a new direction. The company is built on searching other people's content, whether text, photos or videos. Now, for the first time on a big scale, it is putting its own content up, though user-generated material will inevitably follow when they have built up experience.

Second, users can embed Lively on their own websites or blogs, so they don't have to go to a different screen to enter a virtual world because now it has converged with the real world.

They are all just different ways of connecting with other people. This won't stop critics of virtual world devotees asking: "Why don't you get a real life?" But it is a major step towards breaking barriers.

Most of the three-dimensional projects in the pipeline, such as metaplace.com, are trying to do two things: merge virtual worlds with the rest of the web and make them interoperable, so you can move from one world to another, in contrast to the present "walled garden" approach, in which avatars can't move from World of Warcraft to Entropia Universe or Second Life. If virtual worlds want to replicate the real world, then inhabitants must be able to move from one country to another.

One of the attractions of virtual worlds is that they enable you to meet not just friends, or friends of friends (as with Facebook, MySpace and Bebo) in a static way, but to meet people in a live environment whom you have come across randomly or because they share your interests.

This carries obvious dangers, not least of children straying into an adult environment, so Google is wise to take it slowly. But as a way of linking people, whether for political or artistic reasons, with others across the globe, virtual worlds have awesome possibilities.

This doesn't mean Google will win the race: the experience of the so-called Web 2.0 revolution is that small start-ups take the cream not the dinosaurs of the dotcom boom. For instance, Google had its own video site but couldn't use its massive leverage to achieve critical mass, so it had to buy YouTube instead. It remains to be seen whether it will be different with virtual worlds.

I lived in London for almost four years and I miss many parts of Britain's infrastructure. I miss the NHS and British trains (try Amtrak if you don't believe me). I listened to the BBC with wistfulness last week as the country celebrated Ernest Bevan and the NHS's 60th birthday. But when I think of British government, I don't think of a dynamic, internet-powered wired government. That's Barack Obama's turf, right? I think I might be wrong.

At a presentation recently, I was stunned to see shots of members of Parliament actually talking online, to each other and to voters. I had the privilege of hearing Tom Steinberg of mysociety.org, whose organisation uses technology to help citizens actively participate in government, from a site like FixMyStreet, to the No10 petitions website. This was quite stunning to an American audience, since it's built on an open source platform and seemingly unmediated. And in Britain you can try to ask the prime minister questions on YouTube. Granted, there are some exceptions within the American federal system, but Governing 2.0, as it's been dubbed, may be a long time coming. Instead, in the US we like to focus on the campaign.

I think many Americans have the wrong conception of what an online-empowered political system looks like. Many say Obama would never be the Democratic nominee if it were not for the internet. And the statistics are mind-blowing: more than $45m raised online in February 2008 alone. Over a million donors with an average gift of below $100. Apparently, 50% of February's donors gave less than $50, and a third of those donors went on to volunteer by signing up at my.barackobama.com, the candidate's social networking community.

You might think we're so online-empowered here. Yes, my.barackobama.com has millions of users but it's a remarkably directed environment. The ideal outcome would seem to be the creation of many self-organising teams who meet to cheer on Obama. Based on past campaigns, the site will probably shut down on November 5 this year, the day after the presidential election, and those teams will disperse, only to come back in four years' time.

It's fair to say this attitude extends to most American political operations. Internet operations are valuable to campaigns for cash-gathering capabilities (one can turn on the spigot, in effect, by sending out online fundraising solicitations) and cool online programmes make for great process stories in the media. The huge need for cash in American campaigns coupled with what I understand to be sometimes arcane and particular rules about political communication within the federal government means online communities are less valuable when governing is actually happening.

I've written before that Obama is a very well-marketed candidate, and like all good marketing campaigns, this necessitates a short-term, laser-focused approach. Recent articles have questioned whether the campaign values its online community beyond fundraising.

Obama has caught a lot of well-deserved flack recently for his support for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) amendments that the Senate passed on Wednesday. This issue is a hot button for the netroots supporters who were important to Obama's primary success. The Fisa legislation broadly expands executive powers to conduct warrantless wiretaps and grants immunity to the telecom companies that have already participated in illegal wiretaps at the request of the Bush administration. Concerned Obama supporters started a new group on my.barackobama.com to ask the senator to vote against the Fisa revisions. Obama responded, via his blog, appropriately. Obama (or his policy team) wrote: "I intend to run as president of the United States - a White House that takes the constitution seriously, conducts the peoples' business out in the open, welcomes and listens to dissenting views, and asks you to play your part in shaping our country's destiny."

Obama's blog post garnered 2,443 reader comments. It's a start. Obama could be the first president to use the internet as a tool for real civic action, in addition to electioneering. Obama has pledged to use digital technology to open up government to the public and appoint the first White House chief technology officer. But it's a slow road to change in a country addicted to the excitement of campaigning, and sceptical about the realities of governing. Maybe we should take a page from the UK.