Loyal readers may remember the ongoing story I've been engaged with Virgin Mobile. I posted on it last in December 2006 in an item called 'Virgin Mobile: "The Story So Far Of a Promise Broken".'

To bring you up todate I've had several equally pathetic replacements for the Lobster 575 mobile I'd been given as part of my monthly mobile non-contract.

I'd been phoning up Virgin on a regular schedule to complain about how the phones were worse than useless as I couldn't hear what anyone said.

I rang Virgin again on Thursday last week and as usual went through why the phone wasn't working. They said fine they'd get a replacement but I said I wanted a completely different phone and pointed out the stupidity of replacing another Lobster with another ... Lobster.

In the end commonsense won out and a new DIFFERENT phone was sanctioned and I received a lovely Samsung SGH-E900 tri-band, blue-toothed Lemming playing mobile phone.

And, it works. In fact I was so surprised that I almost dropped it. The only slight niggle is that the soft keys seem hyper-sensitive so if you're not careful you find yourself dialing voicemail or the last number you phoned without wanting to.

Other than that I want to say a big thankyou to Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Mobile and the very helpful operator I spoke to last time!

Cable TV Repeats Itself

Speaking of which the Virgin Media group has really gone from strength to strength on the cable TV front. They've implemented a replay option so you can watch recent episodes from BBC, Bravo, Channel 4, Living and a few other channels again and also have access to hundreds of other episodes of great series.

Well done again. This is moving us closer to the time when TV stations wont need a scheduler because everyone becomes their own scheduler. Roll on that day!