Tech Eye: Gimme, gimme, gimme

Whether it's animal karaoke night at the village pub, finishing the dregs of drinks that have been callously left behind by other pub patrons with money to burn, or the lusty promise of Celia the Fishwife's adult-only midnight dance routines in the pub's function room, we are rarely the one to say no. And when it's a group event, so much the better.

We are as fickle as the next peasant, and are forever getting ourselves caught up in whatever mass popular movement has broken out in the village. Many moons ago, communism took the fancy of the local vicar and after he stoked the congregation into a fire-breathing show of spontaneous socialism with a particularly feisty sermon of a Sunday, we were the first to try and reclaim private property for the good of the common worker, pitchfork in hand and foam frothing around the mouth. However, when it turned out that the new village communal workers' agrarian utopia wasn't quite the lazy man's paradise we had come to expect, we quickly junked it for a more feudal system, installed by the self-proclaimed king of the village and dictator-for-life, Bob the Brewer.

King Bob kept his hold on power thanks to the fact that he owned the local brewery and, much like OPEC controls the world by regulating the flow of oil, he ruled the local village by regulating the flow of beer. So when he declared that some of the village women who had the temerity to brew their own concoctions in their bathtubs were witches, we were the first in line at the village pond, burning stick in hand and ready to give them a good ducking.

And so it is with the latest mass hysteria to sweep through the village, the Apple iPhone. The bloody thing won't be out for months, but we already want one and are currently joining the rest of the village in the queue at Dave the Fence's Knock-Off Electronics. When we do eventually get our greasy mitts on one, what we will essentially have is a three-in-one gadget: a swish phone, a widescreen iPod, and an internet browser with all the usual e-mail and organizational bells and whistles. Apple says it will cost roughly $499 (zł.1,480) for a 4GB model in the US, and it should be available in Europe towards the end of the year.