Despite the fact the iPhone has been scientifically proven by scientists to be much better than any other smartphone, some people just won’t accept the facts. You can’t argue with science, folks - it puts the sun in the sky and the beat in your heart, and it says the iPhone rocks.

You may disagree, of course. Like Creationists, you may choose to deny the science and live without the Jesus Phone. Yes, the iPhone does in fact prove the existence of God. No, there are no contradictions in those last two statements. Be quiet. So what are you going to do for a smartphone, then? You’re going to buy the Palm Pre, which is edging ever closer to these shores on a slow boat across the oceans.

It turns out the Pre enjoyed a modestly decent debut, selling over 300,000 handsets in the US in just a fortnight; not quite as spectacular as the iPhone 3GS shifting over a million units in three days, but then Palm hardly has the profile of Apple. And there’s news on a service provider for the Pre in the UK - it’s expected that Palm will this week confirm O2 have exclusive rights to sell the handset in this country.

Given the importance of the Pre to Palm’s future - it’s widely regarded as the company’s last-gasp attempt to stay in business - it may seem a bizarre choice to hand it to O2. While the service provider currently has the largest share of the market by revenue, it’ll be difficult for O2 to aggressively market an iPhone rival without harming their own sales. Perhaps Palm should have awarded the deal to Orange who, according to the Guardian, were biting Palm’s hand off for it?

But pitching Orange against O2 could have been even more disastrous for Palm; O2 could have went to town with the iPhone and sunk the Pre. At least this way, by effectively placing the Pre in the hands of the enemy, O2 is accountable and can’t attack it - O2 will be forced to manage the competition between the two products, perhaps to Palm’s advantage and Apple’s detrement.

How will O2 market the Pre, exactly? Well, given Palm’s history and Pre features such as a physical keyboard, it’s possible O2 will target business users rather than the masses attracted to the iPhone. Still no word on a UK launch date, but expect it sometime in the Autumn.

[Guardian]

As great as pubs are, sometimes it’s just easier to get out your chair and open the fridge for another can of Stella. But don’t you miss that smell of wet dog and piss? What if you had your own pub? You’d be able to get buggered on lager and not have to socialise while you did it! If that’s the sort of worthless existence you see yourself leading, it’s time you dropped by Red Baron’s Antiques:

The US antiques dealer doesn’t just sell trinkets and vases, but whole authentic bars from American and British pubs, stretching from floor to ceiling. Whether you’ve a one bedroom flat or a house as capacious as an elephant’s gut, there’s a spot of turn-of the century drinking to be done in the comfort of your own home. You know you want it. Think of the fun. And the drink.

[BallerHouse]

Decimal points are the bane of the e-retailer’s existence.

All they have to do is jump over by a digit or two and all hell breaks loose.

Here are five “too good to be true” pricing errors, most of them due to truant decimal points.

1. £119 return flights for 2 to NYC: When US company Hoover set a special sales promotion from its South Wales HQ in 1993, they underestimated consumers. They offered 2 free return tickets to NYC or a European destination, for purchases of any Hoover product of over £100. The idea was that the small print should put off consumers applying, which involved various hurdles to get the flights. These include mail-in receipts, application forms to be returned with 14 days, time consuming airport procedures, and limited airport availability. They were wrong. Over 100,000 saavy consumers applied for free tickets after purchasing the cheapest hoover available, which cost £119. After Trading Standard investigations and over 300 complaints received from customers who were refused tickets, the company had to pull out its own money from its £20m first quarter profits to honour over 20,000 extra tickets from BA. What about the hundreds of thousands of brand new in the box Hoovers flooding the market? Well, eBay first launched in 1995, so they could have helped establish the marketplace!  Who knows. Lesson: Never underestimate consumers. We’re smarter than you think.

2. Amazon 29p albums: When you’re as enormous as Amazon, you’re bound to misplace a decimal now and again. Six years ago they listed iPaq PDAs for less than £10, there was a virtual stampede, and the firm that made them had to batten down their virtual hatches to undo the mistake. Last month, the online behemoth was selling some albums for 29p each (just shortly after a loophole HUKDers found on free amazon album downloads) The artists involved (Calvin Harris, James Morrison, the Yeah Yeah Yeas, and MGMT) saw sales skyrocket. Amazon pulled the price error the next day.

3. Sony VAIO laptops for £70: In 2002, e-commerce retailer Foris either mismatched prices with merchandise or flung a decimal without aiming first. They offered Sony VAIO laptop computers for £70 and Compaq monitors for £36.31. They had to turn off their checkout system. They did not honour the prices.

4. Nicam Digital TV for £2.99: A decade ago, Argos listed a Nicam digital television for £2.99 instead of £299 (slippery decimal again), then in 2003 they did the same thing with Bush televisions, pricing them at £0.49. A customer tried to order 100 of them, but was not successful. Nobody actually got the items at the mistaken price.

5. 3.1 megapixel camera for £100 only (really!): In 2002, Kodak mispriced its 3.1 megapixel camera for what was then the low, low price of £100. A couple thousand people pounced, and guess what? Kodak honoured the price! Well done, Kodak. At least it came with a whooping 32 MB MMC card…

Are there any other major pricing errors and gaffes that you have come across? Or hot deals that were honoured / not honoured that are worth mentioning? We would love to know, so please share them with us in the comments below!

Due to an unforeseen clerical error or the tennis or something, Deal Of The Day’s near-legendary True Or False Friday has been shunted back a day to the here and now. So it’s True Or False Thursday instead.

You know how it works and you know that all the bargains come from HotUKDeals so why are you even bothering to read this paragraph. Move along now…

THE DEAL: 15-can pack of 5% Stella Artois 440ml cans. Just £7.49. Giddy up!

TRUE OR FALSE?  The lager was invented by Belgian Jean Luc Pfffaff and Stella Artois was the secret love of his life. The drink acquired its nickname of ‘Wife Beater’ after Pffaff’s missus kicked the living shite out of him when she found out about his obsession with Mme Artois.

THE DEAL: A 9-roll pack of Charmin toilet tissue for just £2.50. Follow the link from HUKD and you could get a further 50p off, taking the price down to just £2.00.

TRUE OR FALSE?  Although he appears in advertising as a cartoon, the Charmin bear is actually based on a real bear. He’s based on Paddington Bear’s second cousin, Len Randall.

THE DEAL: Reservoir Dogs. A 2-disc BluRay offering for just £6.99, with free delivery. Quentin Tarantino’s directorial debut, and a film he has yet to surpass. Before you start, Pulp Fiction could have had at least 30 minutes cut out of it. Boring.

TRUE OR FALSE?  Quentin Tarantino’s real name is Alfred Bitchcock, but he changed it as he didn’t want to be unfairly compared with the legendary thriller director.

(deals found by HUKD members SupaGeek, michelleleemoo and andywedge)

This week’s TRUE OR FALSE statements were all TRUE. No, what’s the other one? Yeah, they’re all that one.

Family Guy, recession proof

I recently read an editorial on Physorg.com. It discussed the social phenomena of fads - how things very rapidly soar in popularity, then seemingly disappear just as quickly. I was ready to file it under “Well, duh”, but to my surprise, there is actually much more to the story than this.

Researchers from the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and Stanford/UPenn put numbers to the test. They took trendy baby names versus the ones that stick around perpetually and found out that the faster a name becomes popular, the faster it goes back out of style. Subsequently, they found that the more slowly a name gains traction in popularity, the longer it takes to die out as a trend. That’s why you have a harder time guessing the age of someone named “William” than you do someone named “Britney.”

Oddly enough, the 2006 book by former Wired and Economist writer Chris Anderson titled The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More itself experienced a spike in popularity, followed by some backlash, followed by a string of blogs and books saying that the “long tail” theory is bunk. To perhaps oversimplify, imagine a graph with time on the x-axis and popularity on the y-axis. The “long tail” theory says that the area under the curve for fads that become popular overnight and then quickly evaporate is about the same as the area under the curve for ideas or trends that are slow to catch on, because they tend to wane in popularity more slowly.

The baby name research appears to bear this out, and there are other examples too, like Uggs boots and Mohawk hairdos. But there are plenty of other things that contradict the “easy come, easy go”  theory. The iPhone is one example of a product that shot to success and held onto it, though what happens when Android phones are added to the mix is uncertain.

There’s clearly more teasing out of social phenomenon data to be done. Perhaps things that do not change your lifestyle or habits (like a baby name) are more prone to fads, while things that do change the way you live your life (an iPhone or netbook) have the potential to burst onto the scene and remain popular.

Suggestions for the latest pop fad that’s destined to die a quick death include Facebook and Twitter. What do you think? Do you have any examples of flash in the pan phenomena, “long tail” phenomena, or things that run totally counter to those concepts, especially with consumer products and services? Let’s hear your thoughts.

One of the more vibrant areas of the property market these days is the sale-and-rent-back sector. We’ve all seen the ads for companies that promise to help you clear your debts by buying your house from you then continuing to allow you to live there for a monthly rent.

It sounds like a potential win-win situation if you’re in a bit of a fiscal pickle, but when it comes to an overall victory, the odds are severely stacked against you. Short-term leasing is the biggest concern, and housing charity Shelter are worried that sellers run the risk of eviction shortly after handing over the keys to their home. Not to mention the fact that these companies are taking advantage of the desperate by buying their houses at well below market value in the first place.

But now the Financial Services Authority have come shambling into view, promising to clean up what looks like a pretty mucky business. The only trouble is, all they’ve got is some vague guidelines and a few half-baked promises, with full regulation not due until July 2010. Those crazy bastards!

In a nutshell, if you’re thinking about selling your house then renting it back from one of these companies, don’t. You’ll be leaving yourself wide open to being ripped off. Seek professional advice to find an alternative solution to your money worries.

For more info on the sale-and-rent-back cowboys, check out this excellent piece from lovemoney along with their in-depth investigation from earlier this year.

Like some failing uncle with a Facebook account, LloydsTSB is getting down with the modern kids by implementing a groovy new way of banking… the ‘balance on demand’ text update. Cool! They’ll be doing the Moonwalk next, eh readers?

The new scheme enables the customer to find out how much moolah they’ve got in their account at any time of the day or night via their mobile. But (and we’d love it if for once there wasn’t a ‘but’) in order to use the service, most customers will have to sign up for Lloyds’ mobile banking service. That costs £2.50 per month, although they do offer some accounts that include it at as part of the package. Ones that cost more than £2.50 a month we’d expect.

A mobile phone, yesterday

Also, smiling assassins Lloyds have said that mobile phone operators may charge for the cost of the text requesting the balance. Wonder if they do a special text that shows you how much has spilled out of your account as a result of trying to find out your balance.

LloydsTSB are billing balance on demand as a fab new service, but if they and other banks were genuinely keen on delivering a ‘service’ they’d text you every time your balance veered dangerously towards zero or its overdraft limit, giving you a chance to rectify matters before you got hit with an excessive or unlawful penalty charge. Instead of dreaming up crappy new ways to felch a few more quid out of us all.

Banks. Howling shits, the lot of them.

[Which]

Happy birthday to comedy genius Larry David, who is 62 today. In case you’re baffled by who Larry David is, he’s only the creator of two of the greatest American sitcoms of the past two decades, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

He’s also a proudly bald man, and that’s what led him to record this appeal advert for cancer research last year – he explains here how cancer has changed his life. As with every great episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, let’s just say that Larry’s standpoint and order of priorities could be seen as somewhat askew from the rest of society. What a man. Happy birthday you miserable old goat.

It’s as if Microsoft want to kill Internet Explorer 8 in the crib. There’s no other explanation for it. First they hire The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story actor Dean Cain to make a ham-fisted stab at taking the piss out of IE8 users, portraying them as vacuous housewives and deviant husbands. Next, Microsoft attempt to lure you into downloading their new browsers with this:

Download IE8 and receive an unreleased track by Nickelback. Really? Is anyone prepared to shovel squitty horse diarrhea into their heads for a new browser? Maybe if Microsoft offer to punch Chad Kroeger in the cock every time it’s downloaded, they may be onto a winner. Don’t encourage the talentless monkeys, they’ll just keep thinking people like it.

We told you recently about Jet2.com embracing social media, encouraging brand loyalty and all that marketing bollocks by setting up a Twitter account and giving away free flights. On the very first day, it was Bitterwallet reader Rob that won the trip to Alicante, the lucky blighter.

So is all well and rosy in the world of Twitter? Not a bit of it. Say hello to Jet2.con, a new Twitter account that appeared yesterday, using the same colour schemes and graphics as Jet2.com’s page, but which is dishing out customer complaints registered with as yet uncredited source, which we’ve tracked down to Skytrax - a website that rates and reviews over 600 airlines and a similar number of airports:

The driving forcing behind Jet2.con is the creator’s claim that the budget airline suggested some specific “advice” which led to them personally losing £381. When the individual complained, the airline failed to produce a recording of the conversation with Customer Services, claiming it was “lost”. “I’ve flown with them many times before,” says the complainant, “but when things go wrong they don’t want to know at all.”

Every message that Jet2.con is posting is presented as a @reply to Jet2.com, meaning that the airline is well aware of all these messages. Will the airline attempt to have the Twitter page shut down? Twitter has so far only closed accounts that misrepresent individuals and companies, but not those that criticise them.

Mobile roaming alternatives, yesterday

Mobile phone roaming bills usually make our eyes water. But new EU ‘roaming’ rules taking effect from today will please those planning their summer holidays.

Sending an SMS from another country inside the EU back to the UK used to cost an average of around 30p. This is now capped at the equivalent of 11 euro cents (around 10p). Receiving text messages remains free.

Making calls to an EU country is now also capped at around 40p (€0.43) per minute (plus VAT) or the national currency’s equivalent, while the cost for receiving calls have also dropped from €0.22 to €0.19. The new rules also dictate that mobile operators must bill customers for roaming calls by the second after the first 30 seconds. This is expected to cut bills by a further 20%.

Customers can now also choose a capping mechanism for a billing limit. The price for downloads will also be capped at a reduced wholesale price of €1 per megabyte downloaded, compared with the previous average EU wholesale price of €1.68. This should minimize nasty surprises, such as the £21k Vodafone bill a British family received for downloading an episode of Top Gear and Kavanagh QC while on holiday.

This move is clearly long anticipated by holidaymakers fed up of ridiculous call charges, and is a great first move in opening up our international communication channels. The commissions plan further cuts in the future, and I’m sure most consumers would welcome this long overdue move. The prediction of the effect of the new rules is to reduce the cost of mobile phone usage abroad by at least 60%.

Do any of you hold off frequent travelling and holidays because you worry about how you can communicate with loved ones back home without being totally ripped off? Does this news change any of your summer holiday plans, or how frequent you plan to utilize your mobile abroad? Let’s hear your opinion.

[BBC]

Right then, here’s our pick from the very latest bargains as unearthed over at HotUKDeals.

If you’re gagging for faster chips, love old comedy films and enjoy being indoors playing cartoon tennis during a heatwave, then you’ve come to the right place.

Are you enjoying Wimbledon and keen to join in but are afraid to take to your local tennis court for fear of dying from (a) shame or (b) a massive cardiac arrest? You are? Great! This could the deal for you then. Provided you’ve got a Nintendo Wii.

A recent release, Mario Power Tennis is currently available on the Wii for an astonishing £4.99, though it probably won’t be for long. It’s possibly a misprice and if it isn’t, stocks will almost certainly run out soon, so get it while you can.

If there’s one thing that unites us all here at Bitterwallet HQ, it’s our certainty that oven chips don’t cook quickly enough. Never mind the economy, just who is charge of the chip-cooking speeds in this country?

We’ll tell you who should be in charge - the boffins who came up with the Quickachip oven proof chip basket. It literally shaves whole minutes off your chip-waiting time – an enormous boon (and we’re always on the lookout for enormous boons.) Yours for only £1.99.

Finally, a phenomenal DVD box set filled with five classic Ealing comedies, (Kind Hearts And Coronets, The Ladykillers, The Man In The White Suit, Passport To Pimlico / The Lavender Hill Mob and available for just £9.99 – that’s £2 per film.

You have to own this, it’s that simple. We’re not sure we want to see you around here any more if you don’t. Trailer for The Ladykillers below. Go on then, order it! What are you waiting for?

(deals found by HUKD members love my boots, waldo and don’tdothatagain)

Christine Gilbert is one of the rare breed of folk that has the stones to do something about life when it fails to meet expectations. Fun, excitement, travel, adventure? Gilbert was seeing none of it as a middle-manager working 9 til 5. So she told the world of regular work and steady hours to do one, and became a digital nomad; as long as there’s a wifi connection nearby, Gilbert works from anywhere in the world.

That’s not to say her website Almost Fearless looks down the nose at those who make different choices in life; some of us want families and nice homes and are more suited to the predictability of a monthly pay packet. The site is about providing those who want to live life differently with the tools and support they need, but there’s also plenty of thoughtful stuff that’s relevant to those of us wading through the recession.

Even if you’re not interested in packing your family into a tent and taking to the footpaths of Mato Grosso, there are lessons to be gleaned for improving life, both financially and emotionally. Here are three of Gilbert’s 10 Unexpected Costs of Owning Things:

The things you own have a cost of ownership
Even if you don’t use it, you’re paying for it. Over the years we’ve lived in bigger and bigger places. When we first met, I was renting a single room in a house. Everything I owned fit in the 15X20 space. Our first apartment was 2 bedrooms and 700 sq feet. When a few years we graduated to a 1300 sq ft house with 3 bedrooms. Soon it was the 2000 sq ft home that we had to buy more furniture to fill up. It seems insane now, to pay for larger and larger living spaces just to store our stuff- but that’s what we did. Over the years, we could have saved thousands on housing and utilities, just by downsizing our lives.

You like the idea of owning something more than the reality
For years I held onto all my books, because I really liked owning them. But two things happened this weekend. First, I realized I hadn’t opened many of them after the first time I read them. Second, I was passing on my favorite books to other people, who were excited to read them. Instead of keeping a great book for my collection, I will now always pass it on.

You are carrying around the emotional weight of the things you don’t use
I always wanted to play the guitar. Six years ago, my husband bought me one for my birthday. I learned “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “Eight Days a Week”, got some blisters and promptly gave up. But the guitar stayed with us, and periodically I would feel bad about not playing. Now my guitar has found a home with a drummer who had been looking for a cheap ax for months. And now I can finally admit it: I am not interested in learning the guitar; I don’t want to spend my time focusing on that particular skill. It’s ok; there are lots of other things I am interested in. And now I can just let that aspiration go.

[Almost Fearless]

The dread of watching an Onion News broadcast is that you know, you just know their ideas for clumsy corporate innovation have been considered by companies at boardroom level. Watch the video below - I’ll eat a whole hat if a Taco Bell executive hasn’t previously considered a green menu for their restaurants:

Taco Bell’s New Green Menu Takes No Ingredients From Nature

Ooh, crikey!

2009 is all going right for Esther Rantzen. First, she stepped up to volunteer herself as a sleaze-free independent prospective MP for Luton, railing against the expenses scandal in the House Of Commons. It led to a disturbing performance by her on BBC1’s Question Time where she nakedly displayed as much raw ego and self-regard as the politicians she claims to be against.

Now, the very heartbeat of her old hit show That’s Life is back – we’re talking of course about wonkily-shaped fruit and vegetables. The 20 year-old EU ban on odd-looking plums and carrots that strongly resemble men’s cocks has been lifted in a bid to reduce bureaucracy.

Amazingly, in a world where children die of starvation, around 20% of produce is rejected by shops across the EU for failing to meet the current requirements. Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel made one of he most blindingly obvious statements of all time when she said: “It makes no sense to throw perfectly good products away, just because they are the ‘wrong’ size and shape”

No longer living under the jackbooted tyranny of bonkers EU law are apricots, artichokes, asparagus, aubergines, avocados, beans, Brussels sprouts, carrots, cauliflowers, cherries, courgettes, cucumbers, cultivated mushrooms, garlic, hazelnuts in shell, headed cabbage, leeks, melons, onions, peas, plums, ribbed celery, spinach, walnuts in shell, water melons and witloof/chicory. Witloof there, whatever the fuck that is.

1980's Esther Rantzen. Sexy Thatcher.

BUT… the rules still apply to the most popular types of produce, namely: apples, citrus fruit, kiwi fruit, lettuces, peaches and nectarines, pears, strawberries, sweet peppers, table grapes and tomatoes. They make up 75% of EU fruit and vegetable sales, and any wonky examples will have to be stickered with something like “product intended for processing” in a way of placating shoppers who may have been spooked by their appearances.

But now that we’ve learned to live without these freaks of nature, will you be comfortable going back to buying them, or will you shun them as though they are scarcely-edible versions of the Elephant Man? Let us know.

Esther Rantzen was unavailable for comment as we went to press. Because we haven’t got her phone number. What we do have though, is a potato that resembles how we imagine one of her boobs would look like. Happy days!