Apple has sold more than 1m of its new 3G iPhone handsets, the consumer electronics giant announced today, just three days since the chaotic launch of the second version of the smartphone.

Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs said that the new 3G iPhone has had "a stunning opening weekend".

"It took 74 days to sell the first 1m original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world," Jobs added.

However, the surge of demand for the new smartphone caused problems for Apple customers as sales system and upgrades were hit with technical difficulties across Europe and the US.

Analysts at RBC Capital Markets said lower pricing, pent-up demand and expanded distribution had contributed to increased interest, adding that buyers will be frustrated by limited stock and logistical problems caused by launching across 28 mobile operators in 22 countries.

But Apple will still achieve overall worldwide sales of 5.1m 3G iPhones for the third quarter of 2008, according to RBC's forecast.

The market analysts dismissed concerns over battery life for the new 3G iPhone, raised by some reviewers, claiming the phone still outperforms comparable handsets such as the LG Voyager and HTC Tilt.

RBC also praised the new Apple Applications store, a feature enthusiastically welcomed by the web development community, saying the simple interface for selling games, location tools and messaging features "is reminiscent of the huge success of the marriage of iPod with iTunes".

Apple is expected to meet its target of launching the new 3G handset in 70 countries, said RBC, and will sell around 14m iPhones in the next year.

Some Apple fans in the US bought new handsets but were unable to use their new phones for several hours because the iTunes store, through which users administer their phone accounts, ground to a halt under the weight of requests.

In the UK, O2, the exclusive mobile retailer for iPhone, saw its web-based retail system collapse on Friday, making it impossible to register and sell new handsets.

The problem persisted into Saturday when stores were unable to sell the new phones, despite adequate stock.

The gadget blog Gizmodo christened the problems the "iPocalypse", while the Information Week columnist Mitch Wagner said Apple had compounded problems through "negligence and failure to anticipate demand".

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In 1997, the name Slashdot was cool, because most people really weren't familiar with the idea of web addresses: we'd tell them to go to "slash slash slash-dot dot org" and their eyes would glaze over. The /. site was pretty cool, too. It was billed as "News for Nerds" and the net had a very high proportion of nerds back then.

What it didn't have was a plethora of blogs where someone could post a short story with a link so that thousands of people could pile in and discuss it. But at the time, I thought of Slashdot more as a replacement for Usenet newsgroup discussions than a precursor of blogging.

Either way, Slashdot soon became so popular that it gave rise to "the Slashdot effect". Slashdotters would see a new user-submitted story and click the link, and the target site would promptly collapse under the sheer weight of visitors. Sites that carried stories about Linux and open source, and geeky science news, usually hadn't been set up to handle huge spikes in traffic.

Naturally, many people tried to exploit the Slashdot effect, including me. There was no quicker way to get noticed.

Unfortunately, one of the downsides of nerdy sites is that they attract loads of nerds. These are the people who don't have girlfriends or proper jobs; who live on pizza in their parents' basement, and rarely see the sun; who have an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars but no common sense. It's a running gag on Slashdot that everyone is like that, even though they're not.

Slashdot's standard nerd hypocrisy is another running gag. Everyone knows that anything related to Apple/Linux/open source is innovative and cool, whereas if Microsoft had done exactly the same thing, it would be evil and monopolistic. Double standards rule.

But unlike Usenet, Slashdot has an innovative and cool Karma system to bury a lot of the rubbish. Comments are labelled (flamebait, troll, redundant, insightful, interesting, informative, funny etc) and rated, and Slashdotters can vote them up or down. The perceptive comments should therefore get voted up to +4 or +5 while the stupid ones are voted down to -1. If you browse Slashdot with a threshold set at +3, you can read the best and ignore the rest.

The good stuff on Slashdot is still very good, but perhaps the site is past its best. Although it has expanded beyond the nerd ghetto into politics and YRO (Your Rights Online), the site has been superseded by newcomers such as Digg and Reddit, Techmeme and Tailrank and other sources of news links. Slashdot's responses to this competition - which include Idle and Firehose - don't seem to have the same sort of momentum.

Any site that has signed up more than a million members and has several million visitors a month is clearly getting lots of things right. It's still the primary place for nerds to discuss news. However, as the internet grows, the proportion of nerds declines, and so does Slashdot's relative importance.

Channel 4 for is launching a careers guidance project tonight with the help of Mighty Boosh writer Roger Drew.

The Insiders, based on the real-life diaries of six professionals including a doctor, police officer and actress, is designed to offer teenagers an insight into their work, but with a comedy spin.

Channel 4 is offering a warts-and-all take on the six jobs, which also include a fashion assistant, musician and a teacher, by commissioning Drew to adapt the contributors' stories.

Matt Locke, the Channel 4 commissioner for new media education, said the project will be most useful to sixth form-age youngsters.

"Lots of teens get career information but they want to know the struggles and the daily grind of jobs," Locke added.

"The comedy angle is for people who haven't already made up their minds, and is not trying to replace the hundreds of sites out there where they can find career information."

Last year, Channel 4 shifted much of its £6m annual education budget away from TV to digital media projects to try to reach more of its target 14- to 19-year-old audience.

The first instalment of The Insiders will go live from 6pm tonight on the show's MySpace page and www.insiderjob.co.uk, with blog posts, video and games related to each of the characters' stories.

Locke said around a third of the budget was spent on commissioning, casting and writing the project, a third on technical production and a third on marketing online through sites including Holy Moly and Monkeyslum.

Just as Channel 4's TV education shows have no associated advertising, there are no ads on the online projects other than the standard adverts run on MySpace, although Locke added that ads could be introduced next year.

He said he expected several hundred thousand users for The Insiders online.

Locke is hoping around 9% will become "friends" of the project and a further 1% will become intensive users.

· 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.

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Channel 4 has recruited Mighty Boosh writer Roger Drew to fictionalise the professional lives of a doctor, police officer and actress as part of a careers guidance project.

The Insiders, based on the real-life diaries of six professionals, is designed to offer teenagers an insight into their work, but with a comedy spin.

Channel 4 is offering a warts-and-all take on the six jobs, which also include a fashion assistant, musician and a teacher, by commissioning Drew to adapt the contributors' stories.

Matt Locke, Channel 4's commissioner for new media education, said the project will be most useful to sixth form-age youngsters.

"Lots of teens get career information but they want to know the struggles and the daily grind of jobs," Locke added.

"The comedy angle is for people who haven't already made up their minds, and is not trying to replace the hundreds of sites out there where they can find career information."

Last year, Channel 4 shifted much of its £6m annual education budget away from TV to digital media projects to try to reach more of its target 14- to 19-year-old audience.

The first instalment of The Insiders will go live from 6pm tonight on the show's MySpace page and www.insiderjob.co.uk, with blog posts, video and games related to each of the characters' stories.

Locke said around a third of the budget was spent on commissioning, casting and writing the project, a third on technical production and a third on marketing online through sites including Holy Moly and Monkeyslum.

Just as Channel 4's TV education shows have no associated advertising, there are no ads on the online projects other than the standard adverts run on MySpace, although Locke added that ads could be introduced next year.

He said he expected several hundred thousand users for The Insiders online.

Locke is hoping around 9% will become "friends" of the project and a further 1% will become intensive users.

· 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".

Yahoo rejected a joint takeover proposal from Microsoft and dissident investor Carl Icahn this weekend, saying the proposal to oust its board and break up the company's assets was "opportunistic" and "ludicrous".

The joint offer, made late on Friday, involved selling Yahoo's search business to Microsoft for $1bn (£504m), as well as a guaranteed payment of $2.3bn every year for five years.

Microsoft would also buy $3.9bn in Yahoo shares and $2.8bn of the company's debt, with some payout to shareholders.

Icahn said a condition of the deal would be the complete removal of the Yahoo board, including the co-founder and current chief executive, Jerry Yang, claiming they were "willing to watch the ship go down rather than sell the company".

Yahoo said Icahn and his proposed board would not be suited to leading the firm because he has virtually no working knowledge of Yahoo and that breaking up the company would preclude any more lucrative and less risky deal for the whole business.

"This odd and opportunistic alliance of Microsoft and Carl Icahn has anything but the interests of Yahoo's stockholders in mind," said Yahoo's chairman, Roy Bostock, in a statement on Saturday.

"Clearly, Microsoft, having failed to advance in search, is aligning with the short-term objectives of Mr Icahn to coerce Yahoo into selling its core strategic search assets on terms that are highly advantageous to Microsoft, but disadvantageous to Yahoo stockholders," Bostock added.

"It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a proposal. While this type of erratic and unpredictable behaviour is consistent with what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our stockholders," he said.

Bostock also said that an additional proposal to spin off Yahoo's Asian assets to return cash to shareholders could be conducted by the company on its own and was one option being considered by the board.

Yahoo conceded that the offer had some financial benefits, but reiterated that it would be prepared to sell the company as a whole to Microsoft for at least $33 per share.

Icahn, who bought $2.5bn in Yahoo shares after the Microsoft offer in February, has been steadily increasing pressure on the current executive ahead of the annual shareholder meeting on August 1.

The stand-off is now likely to end in a proxy battle at the meeting, with shareholders asked to decide whether to support the current management or vote in Icahn's proposed alternative executive board.

· 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.

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It may cause some dispute at the next family dinner, but James Murdoch has overtaken his father, Rupert, for the first time in this year's MediaGuardian 100 power list.

For the first time since the list was introduced in 2001, James has leapfrogged the News Corp chairman after taking over as chief executive of the company's European and Asian operations, while retaining a role as chairman of BSkyB.

The list, which measures economic, cultural and political influence and is decided by a panel of industry experts, was topped by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in recognition of the all-pervasive impact of Google on the media.

Last year, they were replaced in the list by Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, but they returned to the top spot this year in recognition of their higher-profile role at the Silicon Valley search giant.

The 2007 list was a shakeup of the established order, with several high-profile new media players storming the top 10 and many established names dropping out.

That process has continued this year, with more players who have taken advantage of the opportunities for global distribution and instant interaction in the digital age represented. Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer also make the top 10.

Elisabeth, chief executive of independent production giant Shine, was the third Murdoch to make the list and one of the biggest climbers after buying Life on Mars producer Kudos and Reveille, the makers of Ugly Betty, in an acquisition spree.

James bypassed his father, whom he is expected to succeed one day as head of the sprawling News Corp empire, partly because Rupert has been more focused on the US since buying the Wall Street Journal publisher, Dow Jones. The list is based on influence on the UK's media scene, where James now oversees the News International newspaper empire.

The Daily Mail's Paul Dacre is the best-placed newspaper editor, while BBC Fiction chief Jane Tranter is a new entry at 10, making her the second most important person at the BBC, according to the panel, after director general Mark Thompson.

In the video for their most recent single, Pork and Beans, US rockers Weezer decided to get some of YouTube's most memorable - and sometimes downright odd - stars to sing along to the track. The video, which was itself a YouTube hit, was also a testament to the site's extra-ordinary star-making ability. And while some people have become famous for posting video rants about Britney Spears, or re-enacting scenes from Star Wars, others are making their names by sharing their skills with a worldwide audience. On the site you can find home-made tutorials on everything from crochet, gardening, learning Korean and the foxtrot, to more controversial skills such as picking locks. If one of your favourite gurus isn't offering the specific advice that you'd like, then you can request it through the comment streams, or by sending a personal message. Most of those who share their expertise want little in return except for a few nice comments. Here, we talk to 10 of the most innovative YouTube advice gurus ...

Lauren Luke, 26, South Shields

youtube.com/panacea81
Most popular video: How to create Leona Lewis's look in the video for Bleeding Love

"I was actually shocked - I thought people knew how to put on makeup!" says Lauren Luke, the UK's most successful YouTube guru. For the past year, Luke has been posting beauty videos on the site, aiming to make two tutorials a week, using an old Canon Powershot camera which is "dropping to bits". She is most proud of her Leona Lewis-inspired makeup tutorial, which has had more than 1.5m views since it was uploaded six months ago; at their busiest, each of Luke's videos attracts up to 300 comments a day, while Luke herself receives around 100 emails. The comments can be "absolutely horrible", she says, "where you want to jump off a cliff". But it's not always like this. "This morning there was a fan mail sent with a mascara. I get things like that which just completely counteract the crap."

The home-made videos have certainly got Luke, a mother of one, noticed. Since January, she has been working with cosmetics brand Barry M, hosting makeup tutorials on its website. "They said they had watched my videos and were fans of mine and would I come down to London to meet them for a bit of a talk. I decided I was just going to go for it," she says, "because I don't get many opportunities like that."

Francisco Bujan, 42

youtube.com/vitalcoaching
Most popular video: How to flirt with girls - for men only

Francisco Bujan, who describes himself as a citizen of Europe, offers a more esoteric form of advice via his YouTube page. To date, the professional life coach has posted 275 videos, offering viewers help with the emotional side of their lives. "My main subjects are dating, break-ups, staying healthy, personal power and spiritual development," says Bujan, whose most-watched videos are "How to flirt with girls - for men only!" and "How to get a guy to fall in love with you". Bujan has been posting videos for the past two years and says that "You are the designer of your life" is the best piece of guidance he has given "because, once you get that, you realise how much power you have to create". This means that, as well as posting videos on topics such as "Learn to say yes" and "Learn to say no", Bujan doles out information on using Sanskrit in your everyday life and why raw food is good for you.

The appeal of posting videos, he says, is that "it's fast - very fast! There is no delay like with publishing a book for instance. You wake up, have an idea - within 30 minutes it's recorded and posted." For those thinking of doing the same, he has some sage advice: film indoors. "Recording outdoors is always more challenging - I end up half-naked in the freezing cold wind."

Clare Dowling, 29, Huddersfield

youtube.com/claredowling
Most popular video: How to play No Woman No Cry on the guitar

"I first heard of YouTube in 2006," says Dowling, "when a friend showed us some videos and explained we could upload our own music for free." Soon after, Dowling - a carer by day, a musician by night - uploaded videos of her band, The Moot, playing home-recorded versions of their songs. She quickly found that not only did people want to listen to the two-piece reggae and ska band, they also wanted to sound like them, so in April this year, Dowling began creating online guitar lessons. Using her own renditions of classic reggae songs, she demonstrates strumming styles, ska rhythms and teaches viewers how to play full songs. "I make them at home," she says, "so a dog might bark or the phone might ring. I just put up with it as the viewers don't seem to mind - in fact, they often comment on the dogs."

Rob Barrett, 42, Eden Prairie, Minnesota, USA

youtube.com/cookingfordads
Most popular video: How to make game day party snacks, part one

Rob Barrett has been cooking since the day he asked his mother for some biscuits and she gave him a cookbook and told him to work it out for himself. Now he is the brains behind the man-friendly online food show Cooking for Dads, which, thanks to sponsorship from a local food market, has slightly higher production values than many other YouTube "how tos".

Despite having its own theme tune, title sequence and slick location filming, though, things don't always run smoothly. "We have super-low Minnesota temperatures, which make my mouth freeze," he says, "and sometimes my kids come home in the middle of shooting, like in the party appetisers episode. In the cheesy chicken episode, which was the first one I shot, the interruptions got so bad that we decided to make it a game and see if people could find all the mistakes." Barrett also once posted a video stating that he had been banned from YouTube after putting out a recipe for "yellow snow" and making his children eat it. "It was obviously a joke and I tried very hard to show that," says Barrett, "but no one got it."

John Steventon, 33, Glasgow

youtube.com/DJRecess
Most popular video: How to beatmatch

When he started learning how to DJ in the mid-90s, John Steventon says, "There was nothing at all to read, or to go to, to see what to do, so I stumbled my way through it for ages." He watched professionals such as Sasha and Paul Oakenfold at clubs, and slowly began to learn the skill, sharing his new-found knowledge with thousands of people across the world via his own website. In 2006 he wrote DJing for Dummies, and began using YouTube to market the book. Steventon's approach to filming is simple: "I just set up a tripod and try to keep the cats out of the way." His most popular video is one that describes a quick and easy way to beatmatch. "It has opened a lot of people's eyes to how to do it and also attracted a lot of rather vicious emails because I'm giving away the secrets of DJing. I've been called a ginger sheep-shagger," says Steventon, even though, as he notes, "I neither have those feelings for sheep or am ginger."

Iris Jay, 31, San Bernardino, California, USA

youtube.com/ilovegerardo
Most popular video: How to create a pin-up hairstyle

Office director by day, vintage glamour girl and YouTube legend come the evening, Iris Jay began posting videos online after wowing her friends with her 50s housewife hairdo at a fancy dress party. "Everyone at the party was asking me how I did my hair," says Jay, "and when I stopped to explain, I noticed they were actually paying attention to my detailed description." Jay borrowed her husband's Playstation EyeToy camera and made a video to post on YouTube for the benefit of her friends.

Within two days her video had had more than a thousand views, and there were enthusiastic requests for her to post more. Although she is not a professional hairdresser, her hair twisting and twirling tutorials - which include advice on creating Rosie the Riveter looks and feathered 70s styles - have a huge fanbase. The most popular pin-up hair tutorial has drawn 693,000 views since it was posted last September, while other YouTube users have even posted thank you videos dedicated to Jay and her styling techniques.

Steve Majes, 37, Oulton, Suffolk

youtube.com/thetrickytwister
Most popular video: How to make a balloon dog

"When I do balloons, a lot of people show an interest in making them and ask me how to do it," says magician Steve Majes. "I don't have a lot of time to spend with people if I'm doing a show so I thought I'd put these videos on YouTube and then direct them that way." The most popular video made by the former Butlins Redcoat is the one in which he makes a balloon dog. "It is kind of a classic," says Majes. "Once you can make a dog, then really you can make anything." Majes' videos also teach viewers how to make a whole menagerie of other animals, including swans, elephants, giraffes and teddy bears. While most of the responses are positive, some are less so. "You get the odd teenage response - people comparing balloons to phallic symbols," says Majes, "but you're always going to get that, and I tend to delete those very quickly."

Walt Ribeiro, 24, Philadelphia, USA

youtube.com/waltribeiro
Most popular video: How to read music

Thanks to the videos he started posting on YouTube in June last year, musician Walt Ribeiro is now employed to teach online music lessons for Ustream.TV. As well as fronting these live lessons, he continues to add new videos to YouTube almost daily, explaining arpeggios, power chords and how to read music. "I started doing it because there were no videos on teaching music theory," says Ribeiro, "and if there were, they weren't any good." Making sure he responds to every email and every question he is asked via the website, Ribeiro takes a zen-like approach to sharing his knowledge online: "I feel if you know something, you should pay it forward - in the hope that, one day, someone is able to teach someone else in the way it was given to me." As well as helping people across the world get to grips with music, Ribeiro has also helped people in love. "A boy wanted to play guitar for a girl he liked but he didn't know a certain chord. He sent me this email about how no one would help him, so I made a video for him showing how to play it. He wrote back: it had led to his first kiss."

Barry Taylor, 21, Hertfordshire

youtube.com/sortedstudents
Most popular video: How to make a citrus cocktail

Alongside seven of his former schoolmates, Barry Taylor is attempting to put together the ultimate student guide to cooking. Having written a book - Sorted: A Recipe For Student Survival - the friends decided to jump head first into the world of viral marketing, using videos to "capture the banter between the group and the fun involved in actually making the food". So as well as an all-singing, all-dancing website, they've got a YouTube channel featuring them whizzing up chocolate cherry pots, Portuguese soup, banana smoothies, and, most importantly, boozy drinks, all inspired by the chef in their ranks who once trained with Jean-Christophe Novelli. All the videos were filmed during a long lads' weekend away in Cornwall, including the dance-based clip for their citrus cocktail. "It was pretty full on - we were drinking throughout the day to help us along and at one in the morning we stopped and slept for a few hours and then we carried on the next day." Alongside the recipe videos, the Sorted gang also offer Tips and Tricks videos, with advice including: "Make the most of your first year, because you only need 40%."

Gavin Walsh, 27, London

youtube.com/gavinwalsh1
Most popular video: How to do a deadlift

Gavin Walsh discovered YouTube while at university, watching its quirky clips as a form of procrastination. But over the past six months he has been using the website more productively: to supplement his work as a personal trainer. "I think people are starting to realise you can actually use it as part of your business, to help your clients try to improve and also to market yourself." Filming clips in the gym in the afternoon and putting them on YouTube in the evening, Walsh experienced a few hiccups when starting out, including stumbling over his words, "but after a while you have an internal script in your head and you know what to say". The clips were initially posted for the benefit of his clients, but now his videos are watched by people who have never even met him, as well as other personal trainers, who have got in touch to discuss how he does certain exercises. His favourite video is the one of him doing a tricky press up on two Swiss Balls. Why? "Well," he laughs, "it's more showing off than anything else".

If the stickers dotted around coffee shops are to be believed, the UK is one big Wi-Fi hotspot. But unfortunately, a hotspot is often not a free spot. While it's nice to believe we're living in a free wireless internet utopia, in fact you'll probably have to pay for your web surfing along with your skinny mocha. Combine that with the fact hotspots are location-dependent, and getting online no longer seems quite so easy.

Signing up for a dedicated mobile broadband service removes some of the guesswork involved in attempting to access the internet out and about; you still have to pay, but you're not at the mercy of temperamental Wi-Fi zones. All of the major mobile phone companies now offer the service: a USB receiver plugs into your computer, utilising the 3G network to access the internet. Speeds vary according to your provider and the strength of the signal in any given area.

Like mobile phone tariffs, monthly subscription rates depend on different criteria such as contract length and download speeds. But the most important numbers to look out for are the download limits imposed by providers. Usually these are around two or three gigabytes, so if you're looking to watch TV programmes or download music and videos it's best to go for the higher tariffs. It's wise to sort it out: going over your monthly allowance can prove costly - as can using mobile broadband overseas. Both are best avoided.

It would be the most audacious and technologically challenging space mission since the Apollo programme landed Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin on the moon in 1969. An international team of scientists has put together detailed plans for a mission to bring back samples of rock, and possibly microscopic life, from the surface of Mars.

To be successful the mission, which is proposed for launch between 2018 and 2023 and could cost up to $8bn, would require expertise and funding from both Nasa and the European Space Agency, as well as other national space agencies. "This is going to be extremely expensive and no one space agency can afford it," said Professor Monica Grady, at the Open University, who co-chaired the expert panel that wrote the mission proposal.

She said it was a vital next step before a possible crewed mission to the Red Planet. "If you can't bring a rock back you are not going to be able to bring people back. There's a real feeling that bringing samples back from Mars is absolutely essential if we are going to continue our Martian exploration programme."

Sending people to Mars will probably not be possible before 2050, but if a crewed mission were ever to go ahead scientists and engineers would need to demonstrate that it is possible to land a craft on the surface of Mars and bring it back to Earth safely. There have been seven successful landings on the Red Planet since the US spacecraft Mariner 4 flew past Mars for the first time in 1965, but no lander has ever taken off from the surface again or brought anything back to Earth.

The mission proposal is the result of an eight-month study by 31 scientists from around the world.

Grady and her colleagues presented it to delegates at a conference of the International Mars Exploration Working Group (IMEWG) in Paris last week. The group is made up of delegates from national space agencies and puts together plans for future missions. The heads of both Nasa and the ESA have received copies and the two agencies will decide in November whether to fund the mission's next planning stage. To hit the proposed timescale, technology development for the mission will need to begin by 2011.

Professor Colin Pillinger, at the Open University, who led Britain's unsuccessful Beagle II mission to Mars in 2003, said returning samples from the Red Planet would allow scientists to carry out much more sophisticated analyses on the rocks and permit a more detailed search for simple Martian life forms. "Everybody knows this is what you have got to do if you want to really get to the bottom of Mars," he said. But he said avoiding contamination would be extremely difficult.

"There's a big caveat when you start playing with Mars, and that's planetary protection. You have to be very careful not to bring anything back that might be harmful to Earth," he said. "Your mission has to be guaranteed, and I really mean guaranteed, to get into the Earth's atmosphere without damaging itself."

If Martian microbes do exist they must be extremely hardy, having survived the planet's freezing, desiccating surface and bombardment with UV radiation, so if the returning spacecraft blew up on re-entry scientists could not be sure that Martian life forms on board would be destroyed in the blast. It would also be impossible to know what they would do to life on Earth. Although samples have been returned successfully from space by robotic vehicles, the first attempt to bring samples from beyond the moon ended disastrously. The Genesis probe, which carried particles collected from the solar wind, crash landed in the Utah desert in September 2004.

The mission would involve the launch of two separate craft from Earth - a "lander composite" and an "orbiter composite". Both would make the trip to Mars, where the lander would touch down on the surface. It would then release a rover which would collect a variety of rock samples totalling around half a kilogram.

It would bring these back to the lander, where the rocks, plus a sample of Martian atmosphere, would be encased in a sealed pod within the so-called Mars Ascent Vehicle - part of the lander composite. This would then blast off from the surface and dock with the orbiter before transferring its precious cargo. The orbiter would then return to Earth, enter the atmosphere and land. At this point, scientists would rush in and transfer the samples to a top-level biosecurity lab, where they would be analysed for any possible signs of life.

Scientists have long fantasised about the possibility of bringing back rocks from the Red Planet. But the backing of IMEWG is a significant boost for the current plan.

They have also been emboldened by the success of several recent missions to Mars, including Nasa's Phoenix lander, which touched down in May. If the mission is to get off the ground, though, it will need strong political backing both in Europe and from the incoming US president, said Pillinger.

Martian chronicles: Previous missions

After a string of failures in the early 1960s by both the Soviet Union and the US, Mariner 4 in July 1965 became the first spacecraft to fly past Mars and send back images.

Following other successful flybys, Nasa orbited Mars in November 1971 for the first time with Mariner 9. The orbiter mapped 80% of the planet's surface by taking 7,329 images.

The Soviet Mars 3 mission was the first to successfully land on the planet in December 1971. It was severely damaged in a Martian dust storm, though, and sent back just 20 seconds of data.

Nasa's two Viking missions, which arrived at the Red Planet in 1976, landed successfully and transmitted more than 50,000 images. Nasa's Mars Pathfinder mission, pictured, which touched down in July 1997, was the first successful rover to probe the planet.

The European Space Agency's Mars Express mission reached Mars in December 2003 and is still operational. But its cargo, the British-led Beagle II lander, crashed on Christmas Day 2003 and failed to send back any data.

Nasa's successful Spirit and Opportunity rovers arrived on Mars in January 2004 and are still operating. The latest lander, Nasa's Phoenix mission, touched down in May this year.

Europe's mobile phone companies are braced for a clash with EU regulators this week as telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding calls for the cost of sending texts when abroad to be more than halved. The EU is also set to announce a clampdown on mobile ringtone services that offer "free" downloads to snare teenagers into signing expensive monthly contracts.

The EU's consumer protection chief Meglena Kuneva has looked at more than 500 such services across the EU as part of an investigation into possible breaches of consumer protection legislation. She is understood to want national regulators to take legal action against ringtone providers that do not make it plain to consumers they are signing up for a paid subscription service. She wants anyone selling subscription services - which cost consumers several pounds a day - to be barred from using the term "free" on promotional texts and adverts.

The Office of Fair Trading and the UK's premium-rate content regulator, PhonepayPlus, have been involved in the inquiry and on Thursday - the same day as Kuneva's announcement - PhonepayPlus will unveil its proposals for a wide-ranging shakeup of an industry that across Europe is worth more than €500m (£400m) a year. PhonepayPlus said recently that it has seen complaints about such services double over the first three months of this year.

The hidden charges behind ringtones hit the headlines in the UK three years ago when parents complained that their children had unknowingly signed up for subscription services when they downloaded the popular Crazy Frog ringtone.

PhonepayPlus's new proposals, however, include not just ringtones but cover the advertising and promotion of other forms of mobile content such as games and are designed to make it very clear to consumers what they are paying and what they will get when they sign up.

Reding, meanwhile, has become increasingly annoyed with the mobile phone industry's failure to reduce the cost of using a mobile phone overseas. She has already clamped down on the cost of making calls abroad and will tomorrow set her sights on text roaming prices.

The commission reckons that the average consumer is charged about €0.30 (24p) to send a text from abroad and Reding wants that slashed to €0.12. She will also call for reductions in the cost of using the internet abroad through a mobile phone, known as "data roaming", which has become a particularly contentious subject recently because of the introduction of the iPhone.

The average cost of downloading 1MB of data in the EU is €5.24 (£4). The commission is understood to be considering calling for the price that the mobile phone companies charge each other - known as the wholesale price - for that amount of data to be slashed to €0.35.

Had I but world enough and time, my coyness about blogging would be a crime, but at my back I always hear email, texts and Facebook messages hurrying near. And yonder all before me lie vast deserts of things to which I should reply.

I'm sure I'm not alone in occasionally feeling pursued by the new technology that allows us to engage in all these silent conversations. Keeping several lines of communication open at once is time-consuming, and that's one of the reasons why, so far, I haven't published regular blogposts. I'm wondering whether I should.

The question of whether blogs can be used to increase a news organisation's accountability is the topic for a panel discussion I'm taking part in today, organised by the editor of the BBC Internet Blog, Nick Reynolds, so I've been thinking about what the Guardian is already doing and where I fit in.

The readers' editor's office gets around 400 emails a week from readers. Many result in corrections to the Guardian's content. Some lead to investigations and decisions about its journalism, which are often discussed in this column. What could a regular blogpost add to these existing channels of communication?

Blogs are a staple of the Guardian website. The best-known, Comment is free, is one of 27 on a range of subjects including news, sport, technology, the arts, politics and allotments. "Blogs enable a level of rapid self-publishing which makes sense where you are trying to cover something in a very chronological way," says Emily Bell, the Guardian's director of digital content. "You can present news and comment as something not finished; it's a way of saying this is what's happening right now and letting people respond."

If I were to represent Guardian readers and users in a Venn diagram, I'd put on one side readers of the paper who never visit the website and on the other users who are completely unfamiliar with the print product. In the overlapping section would be those people who sometimes read the paper but are also online users.

Add to the mix that the Guardian site contains a huge amount of content - blogs, video, podcasts, talkboards, pictures and text - that paper-only readers never see or hear, and you can see that it's difficult to find a single channel of communication that works equally well for all readers and users. This column, for example, appears with reasonable prominence in the paper, but is less visible online. I'm beginning to think that a short blogpost midweek about significant corrections or the following week's column might create a useful additional dialogue with online users.

The Guardian's Inside blog (blogs.guardian.co.uk/inside) already provides a level of transparency about what is going on behind the scenes with posts written by web editors and developers. "Journalistic organisations have to open themselves up to discussion," says Bell, who has posted to the Inside blog herself. "We can't expect others to be wholly open and accountable unless we are open and accountable ourselves." She believes that blogs are ideally suited to increasing transparency but that some things are "not for blogging" because there will be times when it is not appropriate, or considerate to colleagues, to go into minute detail.

Blogposts can help newspapers become accountable, but not if they turn into corporate spin, says Meg Pickard, the Guardian's head of communities. "Blogs are a very good way of organisations being transparent, but only if they are genuine," she says. "There's nothing worse than a blog that is a series of press releases."

Like Bell, she believes that some things are not for blogging: "The aim is to provide some of the thinking behind some of the decisions and to hear what users have to say," she says. From this perspective, when journalists and editors blog about what they've been doing they can provide an as-it-happens level of transparency, but it may not be a substitute for the news organisation holding itself up to detailed scrutiny. In some cases more will need to be done to show that the newspaper is open and accountable.

reader@guardian.co.uk

Jupiter, by far the brightest star-like object in our southern night sky, is unmistakable well to the left of the Moon tonight and even closer over the next three nights. The giant planet reached opposition last Wednesday and is now at its best for the year as it stands highest in the S in the middle of the night. On the other hand, since it is close to the Sun's position in early January, it is uncomfortably low in our sky.

Our chart depicts the lower third of our southern sky at midnight BST tonight, with an arrow to show Jupiter's motion against the stars over the coming month. It lies in Sagittarius to the E of the Teapot, an asterism of stars that resembles a teapot with its handle to the left and its spout to the right.

Kaus Australis, magnitude 1.8 and the brightest star in Sagittarius, is so deep in the horizon haze that we might need binoculars to spot it. Indeed, it never makes it above the horizon for starwatchers N of Edinburgh. Of course, the whole of the Teapot climbs higher in the sky if you travel south - a fact to keep in mind during this holiday season.

Jupiter passes below the Teaspoon this month, a lesser asterism that hovers above Sagittarius's second star, the blue-hot Nunki in the Teapot's handle.

Viewed through a telescope, the planet appears 47 arcsec wide tonight as it shines at mag -2.7 across a gulf of 623 million km. Despite the inferior "seeing" at its low altitude, its cloud belts should be obvious as should its four Galilean moons arrayed to left and right of its disc.

Jupiter's rotation in under 10 hours sweeps cloud features westwards across the disc - the most famous, the Great Red Spot, being well placed for spotting tomorrow evening and again on Thursday night.

The heart of our Galaxy lies just 5° right of the tip of the Teapot's spout, so it is not surprising that the whole of this region is peppered with star clusters and nebulae. Many appear as fuzzy knots through binoculars, with the brighter ones verging on naked-eye visibility. Both M22 and M55 are globular clusters, ancient balls of stars. Binoculars show some of the individual stars making up the looser open clusters M23 and M25. These lie some 2,000 light years (ly) away while M22 is at 10,600ly and M55 at 17,300ly.

Further N in Scutum the Shield is M11, a much tighter open cluster at a distance of some 6,200ly. Almost half as wide as the Moon, it is sometimes dubbed the Wild Duck Cluster from the V-formation arrangement of some of the brighter stars when seen telescopically.

On 2 July, a US district judge, Louis L Stanton, lobbed a grenade into the cosy world of social networking, user-generated content and so-called 'cloud' computing. He ordered Google to turn over to Viacom all of its logs relating to viewing of YouTube video clips since the search engine giant acquired the video hosting site in November 2006.

That amounts to 12 terabytes (or more than 12 million megabytes) of data: each log entry records the user name and IP (machine) address of the user who viewed the video, plus a timestamp and a code identifying the clip. What the judgment means is that if you have watched a YouTube clip at any time since November 2006, a record of that will be passed to Viacom's lawyers.

On the face of it, this looks like a massive breach of user privacy. Indeed, it makes the lapses of HM Revenue and Customs in this regard seem positively amateurish. The result is widespread alarm all round the world. There are a lot of sensitivities surrounding YouTube videos - and not just in Islamic countries. So everyone involved in the Google-Viacom case has been making soothing noises. Viacom told the judge that 'the login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube' which 'cannot identify specific individuals'. Stanton noted this assertion - and also the fact that Google did not refute it. He went on to quote a blog posted by a Google employee, Alma Whitten, saying that 'in most cases, an IP address without additional information cannot [identify a particular user]' - as if this supported the Viacom assertion.

But in fact, Whitten pointed out, the situation is more complicated. IP addresses contain personal information which in some cases allows personal identification and in others does not. And several expert commentators have pointed out that the assertion that login names do not reveal personal identities is also questionable.

So it looks as though the judge made his decision on grounds that are less secure than he had supposed. The truth is that, given sufficient resources and a legal justification, it's often possible to link an IP address to a named individual. Indeed, that is the basis under which Virgin Media, a UK ISP, is acceding to the demands of the BPI (formerly known as the British Phonographic Industry) to disconnect subscribers suspected of sharing copyrighted music online.

Viacom is clearly alarmed by the hornet's nest that its lawyers have disturbed and is dispensing reassurance. Jeremy Zweig, the company's vice-president for media and editorial, declared last week that it is interested merely in patterns of YouTube viewing, not in the online behaviour of individual users. 'Viacom is not looking to identify any particular end-user, let alone discover what he may be watching,' he wrote in a blog post. 'The logs will be subject to an extraordinarily high security and confidentiality threshold, and the raw data won't be accessible to Viacom,'

I believe him but - given the aggressive behaviour of copyright owners - thousands of other people won't.

Whatever happens in the Google-Viacom case, this has been a wake-up call for internet users. It is, as Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic), put it, one of those 'I told you so' moments. We are moving inexorably into a world dominated by 'cloud computing' in which most of us get services such as email, word-processing, data storage and hosting from huge server farms operated by companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

As a result, colossal amounts of private data are now held on these companies' computers. But the implication of Stanton's decision is that all that information can, at the stroke of a judicial pen, be handed over to third parties.

Or, as the BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones put it, the Google-Viacom case shows that we have no real control over our data once it is lodged on a corporate server: 'Every detail of my viewing activities over the years - the times I've watched videos in the office, the clips of colleagues making idiots of themselves, the unauthorised clip of goals from a Premier League game - is contained in those YouTube logs ... I may protest that I am a British citizen and that the judge has no business giving some foreign company a window on my world. No use - my data is in California, and it belongs to Google, not me.'

To date, Cellan-Jones continues, he has never worried too much about the threat to his privacy. 'I'm relaxed about appearing on CCTV, happy enough for my data to be used for marketing purposes, as long as I've ticked a box, and never really cared that Google knows about every search I've done for the past 18 months. But suddenly I'm feeling a little less confident. How about you?'

Well, dear reader, how about you?

john.naughton@observer.co.uk

Hoteliers, restaurateurs and artists have known the tension for years. They unveil their work and then stand back to await an avalanche of either praise or derision from the public, the critics and, more recently, an army of bloggers.

Now the nation's doctors are about to be exposed to the same sometimes arbitrary process of internet democracy. A website launching today, iwantgreatcare.org, will let patients rate and review every medic who has treated them. Doctors are still one of the most respected groups of professionals, but for how much longer?

Leaders of Britain's medical profession are furious about the site, which they claim will expose them to abuse, libel and even personal attack. It will carry everything from praise to vitriol about every one of the country's 40,000 general practitioners and 120,000 hospital doctors.

The doctor behind the site claims that letting the public give medics individual reviews and rate their performance - as they already do routinely with restaurants, West End shows and books bought through Amazon.com - will help to bring about higher standards of care.

But the British Medical Association, the doctors' trade union, claims it will leave their members exposed to malicious vendettas and lead to libel actions over critical comments, which the website admits it will not vet before they are published.

Iwantgreatcare has been set up by Dr Neil Bacon, a hospital doctor for 18 years, until recently as a renal specialist at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford. He previously created doctors.net.uk, which is by far the most popular social networking site for Britain's clinicians. The website, which restricts access to its 155,000 members, has already been used by doctors to post a stream of comments attacking Bacon's latest project.

But he has hit back, arguing that the threat of negative feedback on his new website will force doctors to listen more to patients, explain themselves better and improve the treatment they provide. It would help the public to choose which doctor to go to when they are ill by seeing if previous patients were satisfied with their experience, added Bacon. He said he had held talks with the Department of Health, medical royal colleges, patient groups and the General Medical Council (GMC), the doctors' regulatory body, while planning the site.

It asks patients to answer three questions, by giving ratings from one to 100, about a doctor who has treated them or a relative: 'Do you trust them?', 'Did they listen to you?' and 'Would you recommend them?' They can then post a 'review' of the doctor. Only reviews which use swear words will not be put online. 'There will be no editing or censorship of any reviews unless they are profane, libellous or scandalous,' said Bacon.

'It's a bit like Amazon reviews. Patients will use us to rate clinicians. We are producing a credible, independent forum for that discussion.

Dr Richard Vautrey, vice-chairman of the BMA's GPs committee, said he was very concerned. 'There's a significant possibility of it being used in a malicious way, leading to doctors finding themselves under incredible stress and worry, and leaving them open to potential abuse from individuals with a vendetta. It would be of great concern if any doctor was put in jeopardy through a malicious campaign, maybe through viral email, to attack or undermine a doctor at a hospital or GP's practice, which could easily happen.'

Patients who have suffered a major trauma such as a bereavement can be impossible to placate and sometimes look for a doctor to blame, said Vautrey. 'It's very difficult to find yourself in the firing line through no fault of your own,' he said. 'It is unfair that patients posting comments are anonymous and that the information is subjective, with no evidence to support particular statements.'

Doctors.net is not the only chatboard buzzing with opposition. 'It does open up the possibility of anonymous hounding and persecution of doctors by malicious or mad patients, with no possibility of redress, and is deeply worrying,' wrote one critic at the ferretfancier blogspot.

But patients' representatives and some doctors welcomed the website. 'This information is long overdue. Why shouldn't patients, taxpayers who fund the NHS, have this information, just as they would do research before buying a washing machine?', said Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association. 'It's going to cause uproar because doctors want to feel protected. They like to think they're the best, whether they are or not.'

Four hospitals, including a major London treatment centre, and around 600 doctors have agreed to use the comments posted on the site as a way of monitoring patients' views about themselves and their colleagues, said Bacon.

Professor Chris Bulstrode, of Oxford University, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon and member of the GMC, said: 'This website is a great idea and will put the cat among the pigeons with the medical profession, which is just what's needed. Doctors will feel threatened, and rightly, as one or two will find their trousers round their ankles.'

Dr Sam Everington, a GP in east London, said: 'Feedback from patients, both positive and negative, is helpful. But I fear this website is going to go too far and scientifically it's full of holes. The self-selecting nature of the comments and those making them makes it very arbitrary, open to bias and not truly representative, in the way that a Mori poll about the Prime Minister would be credible.'

Dan Tench, a libel lawyer with Olswang solicitors in London, said that iwantgreatcare was taking a risk in publishing potentially defamatory claims against doctors. 'The site is sailing a bit close to the wind,' said Tench. 'A patient could write, "This doctor killed my mother through his incompetence" and the website would then have the agonising choice of whether to publish it or not.' Doctors have shown themselves ready to launch libel actions to protect their reputation, he said. 'The people running this website should be cautious and ensure that their procedures for taking down a comment that's been complained about work well.'

The Department of Health declined to comment, but Health Minister Lord Darzi, the architect of recent radical reforms of the NHS, is understood to believe the website will prompt doctors to provide better care.

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.