This - although it currently exists only as a fantasy - is what the Apple mobile could have looked like. The HiPod is the creation of Isamu Sanada, a photographer who designs fantasy Apple products for a hobby. But, given that he created a design for a new laptop that predicted Apple's distinctive titanium powerbook months before it came out, perhaps a nice, shiny, music-playing HiPod is not so very far away after all.Nokia 8800The just-launched 8800 has been described as Nokia's answer to the successful V3, but to give credit where it's due, the phone is also a very simple evolution of those two landmark phones in the company's history - the 8810 (the hot- metal, shiny banana phone of 1998) and its successor, the 8850, which replaced the shiny plastic with matt aluminium. Both showed there was a big market for phones as status symbol, and the 8800, while proving this continues to be true, also reminds us that Nokia still has the knack of making nice phones.Vodafone SimplyWhat is remarkable about the Vodafone Simply phone is how unremarkable it is It's a phone It's mobile That's it. It won't take pictures, it won't receive email or play music. In fact you can do very little with it at all, apart from sending and receiving texts, and ringing people Bills come in low and the battery lasts for ages. Ostensibly a phone for children and the elderly, the wider appeal of this back-to-basics model is easy to see.
It's part of a trend towards gadgets that are easy to use, and do what they do well, rather than doing a bit of everything in a fiddly, life-complicating and compromised way.'Phone Book' by Henrietta Thompson is published 31 October by Thames & Hudson, price £9.99. The letters page of The Guardian carried an extended piece of self-exculpation last Monday. Under the title "Seeing and believing in China" the readers' editor, Ian Mayes, recounted how Shanghai correspondent Benjamin Joffe-Walt has "threatened the credibility of the Guardian's reporting in China" It happened like this. On 10 October, The Guardian carried, under Mr Joffe- Walt's byline, a sensational report entitled "They beat him until he was lifeless". The "he" was Chinese pro-democracy activist Lu Banglie who had taken Joffe-Walt to the village of Taishi, south of Guanghzhou, where locals have been protesting against a corrupt local communist party chief. The Chinese government is concerned that Taishi's anger might provoke a domino effect in a region riddled with land-related corruption It has sought to restrict reporting on the village. But Joffe-Walt reported encountering more than official resistance.
He described seeing Lu Banglie pulled from the car they were sharing and so badly beaten that "his eye [lay] out of its socket" and "the ligaments in his neck were broken". It soon emerged there was, Mayes said, "a huge disparity" between the report and reality.Lu Banglie's neck was not broken, nor had his eye come out of its socket. Indeed, just two days after publishing the tale of his apparent demise, The Guardian reported that Lu Banglie was alive and determined to continue his pro-democracy activities. A subsequent medical examination, arranged by the newspaper, revealed that he had "no serious injuries". Ian Mayes reported that, among Guardian readers, "Relief that Lu Banglie had survived was mixed with serious concern about grave flaws in the correspondent's report."Joffe-Walt was recalled to London where he was interviewed by Guardian editors.
