Vodafone's new launch: 'It's like a hacksaw in a cake'

NEWS This week has seen two mobile giants square up with major new product launches. On Tuesday, Orange joined Microsoft to extol the virtues of the SBV Smartphone. Yesterday, Vodafone unveiled its Vodafone live! offering. Orange and Microsoft decided to invite employees, analysts, investors and press from all over Europe to London, where four marketing types proceeded to explain the phone's features and banged on about how "cool" it is (that was the guy from Microsoft talking). The presentation lasted about an hour and a half. The product is an "holistic solution" and will "change the world" - or so we were told. Vodafone had a bit of a do last night at which Boy George played some records and Johnny Vaughan did the big marketing spiel. We're not quite sure what Amanda Holden was doing there, but it was a step up from a load of men in suits wearing 'wacky' Orange ties... These are the edited highlights of Vaughan's speech (if you insist, we'll bring you a transcript of the other event next week.) Anyway, here's Johnny... "I've been asked to tell you a bit about this amazing little thing, and it IS an amazing little thing, but I have to tell you I haven't had it for long. In actual fact if I'm honest with you, I was a bit of a late call up for the gig. Apparently John Leslie had been earmarked for it, but something came up. Well in fact it was meant to be Angus Deayton's gig but it turned out he was double booked... and he was only filling in for Barrymore. Anyway the fact is I'm here now and as I said, I haven't had it for long - I only took delivery of it on Monday, but it really has kept me engrossed. It's like getting a new girlfriend - so many new and exciting features and buttons to explore..." Vaughan went on to talk about the phone's features - you can use it to take photos and then send them to another Vodafone live! handset with voice attachments (if you so wish). Phone-to PC (or Mac) emails cost 'just' 36p. You can even play space invaders on it. The chat show host then gave us an interesting insight into his psyche. "The Vodafone live! site is just one click away. I tried it out this morning. I put in 'gay' and it gave me thousands of choices, same with 'snooker'... interestingly though, nothing for 'gay snooker'." He continued in typically cheeky fashion: "Now of course everyone's going to have their favourite feature, and you're probably wondering what mine is, and I'll tell you: That Jeffrey Archer hasn't got one, because take it from me, if he did, this little sucker would break the back of even the longest stretch. "Think if Jeffrey had one of these. How he'd love Mary to send him pictures of his empty bed in his empty penthouse. He could check up on his 'share dealing' on the FT website and if he wanted to corrupt a prison officer in a local restaurant and subsequently get the man the sack - no problemo - details of all the local restaurants are just a click away. If he wanted to know which prison he was in this week all he'd have to do is use the 'where am I now' function. "And what if Jeff's being threatened by the C Wing psycho? Imagine this man had made it clear that he was definitely going to slam Jeff's writing fingers in the cell door - oh just imagine! - tattoo 'Unscrupulous W*nker' on Jeff's forehead using just boot polish and a rusty nail or was planning to slam a chair into Jeff's lower back so hard that it would shatter his spine and deprive Jeff of basic motor skills, or he got a bucket of boiling water full of fairy liquid& sorry, I'm getting carried away... Anyway, Jeff could calm the psycho simply by waving his handset at the nutter and soothing him with a high quality polyphonic ring-tone like this... (plays ringtone). "And there is a point to all this, because at some point in every day we're ALL prisoners: Prisoners to traffic jams, Prescott's train delays, prisoners to bank queues, prisoners of boring conferences... and this baby offers your escape. It's like a hacksaw in a cake." So now you know.