The Weekly Round-Up: 08.08.08

The Round-Up has never been a big fan of DIY. At least, not since that incident with the electric drill and the very large plumber's bill. And anyway the Round-Up still maintains it was a stupid place to put a pipe.

But, perhaps to lure similar gadget-loving DIY-phobes, the Scandinavian purveyor of flat-packed boxes of delight, Ikea, has launched its own budget phone deal.

Disappointingly for the DIY fans out there, buyers won't fashion their own handset from a bag of keys, a tube of glue and circuit board (and no, you won't end up with one of these). The Round-Up is thus spared the joys of hunting for missing numbers while picking buttons out of its hair, and trying to work out whether it is a bad thing that there are three screws left over.

Ikea is offering a pay-as-you-go mobile SIM it claims has the lowest price pay as you go calls and texts in the UK. It's as easy as fitting panel A into slot B. Or is that D?

And no word yet on whether you can unlock one with an Allen key…

But this isn't the most unusual device to be conjured up this week. It seems, like that, just as summer follows spring (apparently), so an Apple launch is followed by feverish speculation about what is coming next.

The iPhone has been out in all its 3G glory for all of, like, a month, so clearly it's time to whip the faithful into a frenzy about possible future products.

Hence a story in The Mail on Sunday revisiting the iPhone Nano rumours which did the rounds a while back.

It's going to be launched in the UK by Christmas, apparently. But one of the stranger details of the story is the predictions of how it will make calls. Apparently the Nano Phone "would have a touch wheel on the back and display on the front so that numbers would be dialled from behind".

The Round-Up will stick with its trusty iPhone for a while yet, thank you very much. Until Apple's marketing magic tricks it into once again queuing in the rain that is.

Also, making gadgets more complicated is a staggeringly bad idea when it seems many of us are baffled by the humble washing machine.

Faced with anything more complicated than a button marked "On", the British mind turns to mush according to a survey by review website Revoo.

The survey "revealed" more than a quarter of us have no idea how to use digital cameras properly, 21 per cent of people have problems getting to grips with their sat-nav systems and one in five adults are stumped by many functions on their mobile phones (unfortunately they've mastered the novelty ring tone download).

Given our permanent state of confusion perhaps we shouldn't even trust the survey results - after all how can they expect our addled-brains to cope with a multiple choice questionnaire?

Of course the mobile phone's days are numbered anyway, as soon our friends and colleagues will only be a rocket ride away.

Along with BacoFoil suits and 50-tonne robots giving foot massages, the jet pack has been on the horizon since the Round-Up was tiny.

But it's finally here. Witness inventor Glenn Martin hovering all of six inches above the ground while two burly assistants stop him shooting into the atmosphere.

Even though on this outing he didn't get further off the ground than a trampolining toddler the inventor assures us his jet pack can stay up for 30 minutes and ascend to 1,800 metres, so get ready to strap yourself in tight.

But before window cleaners everywhere start investing in some heavy duty scrapers, it seems London's skies won't be full of jet packing commuters any time soon.

Although the machines can be used without a pilot's licence they can't be used over built up areas. Also, it runs on petrol, which at the time of writing is about as valuable as platinum.

So perhaps it's time to put away the cape and wait for the flying car, which the Round-Up is pretty sure was also on that list of stuff that we'd all be getting in the first few years of the brand new 21st century.

It seems that office workers just can't stand trees.

That's if you believe a study by Envirowise who say profligate desk drones are printing off 120 billion pages of paper each year.

Forests across the world are being pulped to enable the printing of vital missives, such as maps to the pub and 100-page corporate social responsibility guidelines on sustainability.

Characterising staff as either stupid, Luddites, lazy, or all three, the report says the worst offenders are "old school printers" - who can't read emails unless they're printed out, the "competitive printer" - who spreads paperwork around to make them look important and "hasty printers" - who print long documents without checking their length beforehand.

Those 22 sheets of paper per worker per day are costing their companies a bunch of money, suggesting salvation in recycling, double-sided printing and writing on your hand in teeny-tiny letters. Alright, we made that last one up.

So, while the preceding items in this week's Round-Up may have you thinking that as a nation we are incompetent with gadgets and quite possibly Luddites, it was not always thus.

This week silicon.com celebrates (with some rather fantastic black and white photos) the invention of packet switching, 40 years ago.

The technology developed in the National Physical Laboratory in Bushy Park, Middlesex that holds up the entire internet.

It's this ability to chunk up information into parcels that has been refined over the decades and transformed the world, so today we can post videos of cats sliding down bannisters on YouTube and leave comments such as "OMG LMAO LOL".

Almost brings a tear to the eye.

Of course one of the innovations made possible by packet switching is auntie's beloved BBC iPlayer.

The snazzy new home page of the on demand online TV and radio service urges browsers to listen to the hit parade and watch hard-hitting drama House of Saddam.

Except what's this? Research commissioned by the BBC has found the typical user is a 40-year-old bloke in a relationship with no kids. Expect the Beeb to respond with wall-to-wall episodes of Countryfile and Top Gear plus lots of Radio 2.

iPlayer has good levels of repeat viewing with 17 per cent of users having watched more than 20 programmes using the service. Just 13 per cent said they've only used the service once.

Just over half of users (51 per cent) access iPlayer via a desktop computer, with 32 per cent using their laptops.

And finally this week. Children can't be trusted. Something, it seems, that all parents know that, which is why three-quarters of them admit to snooping on their offspring's online behaviour, according to online identity experts.

Thank goodness we've left all that behind us and can be expected to be responsible for our own behaviour as adults.

What's that? We can't? Oh.

It seems the government has a different idea about whether we are grown up enough and admits to funnelling £18m to ISPs so they can keep an eye on what we're doing.

The code of practice for the retention of communications data by ISPs was approved by Parliament in 2003. Data that is retained includes who is making and receiving phone calls, duration of call, geographical location of those having the conversation, text senders and recipients, date, time and geographical location of both parties.

It's all in our best interests.

And don't argue or you'll be sent to bed with no dinner.

Got a minute? Test your wit on this week's caption competition.