Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-co ... z0nzqmH5aj

Is it too early to set sail the Fail boat?

No, I think we've waited long enough.
Bon Voyage.

And in related news.....

BT effectively have the anti midas touch, anything they touch turns to poop

Just look at BT Vision, (having worked on the development and seen other telco implementations) it's one of the worst IPTV systems I have seen given their network capabilities and the quality of the hardware provided. It's pretty pants compared to the real thing

Compare it to AT&T U-Verse (exactly the same software and backend) and it's received a number of awards in the USA

Then there is the "We'll give everyone really fast internet" promise they need to fulfill apart from in a handful of towns.

It’s going to be a “me too” thing. A bit like Alan Sugar’s epic piece of kit.



Anyone see Jason Bradbury trashing one on The Gadget Show the other week?

I saw it. It did seem a useless device, yet still 170 000 sold!

Has BT ever created anything half decent?

emailer was a "why?" from the beginning. No, just no. Talk about 3 years too late. Thought (lord) sugar would have had more sense and just pulled it.

Not knowingly

I think they embedded a (monochrome) ZX Spectrum emulator in later models so people could play games.

oooh!

Well, I don't think you can actually buy them anymore - can you? And let's not forget that just because it makes no sense to you, me and everyone else here, it doesn't mean it's a totally useless piece of crap for everyone. Well, OK it is, but I have many customers (mostly elderly, some surprisingly not) who are just not interested in computers, don't have one and can't understand why they'd want one, but for whom the idea of something like this - a small, simple device for email and phone calls without the overhead of broadband - would be ideal.

It's easy to sit in front of our PC/laptop/netbook/smartphone and postulate on the pointlessness of something like this for us, but if you don't have an interest in tech, don't have a mobile phone, certainly don't have a computer or broadband or, possibly, the spare cash (or the justification) to throw at it in order to set yourself up, then something like the "em@iler" (but without the stupidly high running costs etc...) could easily have fulfilled a need. Hey, they sold 170,000 of them - that's almost as many as Apple sold Newtons - it couldn't all have been down to Amstrad's slick marketing, could it, lol?

But yes, Sugar should have pulled the plug on this long, long ago - didn't the finance director of Amtrad quit a few years back because 'SurrAlan' was still pumping money into it regardless of the diminishing returns, totally convinced it was a great idea??

Pete