Speaking at the global launch of the gadget, Apple boss Steve Jobs said: ‘I can say with confidence that this version of the iPhone represents the pinnacle of twenty first century technology. This iconic smartphone features a number of killer applications, and I’m not just referring to the handy flick knife included in our street model.’

Initial, press reaction was mixed. ‘I loved the stone remover, and the cigarette lighter but struggle to see the point of the telephone feature. That is so yesterday.’ said BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, adding, ‘and like every one else, I can’t see why they couldn’t have pushed the boat out and included a decent corkscrew.’

‘Japan is the largest consumer electronics manufacturer in the world, with a reputation for exceptional quality and innovation,’ said retail analyst Scott Burrows today. ‘And with many popular titles due to be released on Blu-Ray very soon, the timing for many technology enthusiasts simply could not be worse.’

John McDermott, a lecturer from Bury-St-Edmonds, agrees. ‘The Star Wars films are out soon, not to mention Jurassic Park, and I had finally decided to dive into the digital arena. So, while this is obviously a terrible thing to have happened to the Japanese people, for the average home cinema enthusiast, it’s a disaster.’

Overnight there have been reports of fighting at several branches of Currys after people began queuing in the early hours to buy up remaining digital essentials. A stampede at an Argos in High Wycombe left eight people injured after a stack of catalogues toppled over. Eye witnesses said they had never seen devastation like it, and the clean-up operation could go on until late morning.

‘When the doors opened people rushed straight in, many of them not even bothering to fill out one of those little order forms with the little blue pen,’ said one shaken survivor. ‘The staff were simply not trained to cope with such a wave of spontaneous human shopping and many of them tried to flee to high ground up the conveyor belt to the warehouse.’

Japan is also the world leader in production of computer accessories, including 40% of the world’s supply of hard drives and memory cards, and there are now fears that demand for an average 4GB flash drive may force the price to soar by as much as £1.

‘I think it’s safe to say that the days of watching harrowing footage from Japan on a massive, but relatively inexpensive, Japanese-made TV are a thing of the past,’ observed Burrows.

On the BBC News website one agitated consumer posted, ‘Jesus Christ on a quad bike! How the hell am I supposed to back-up all this illegal music now? Why aren’t the British government doing more to help? You’d think the Chancellor might consider knocking a bit off the VAT again, under the circumstances.’

Michael Clarke, a chartered surveyor from Horsham, summed up the feelings of many when he said, ‘Please don’t say I have to start buying cheap British shit.’

The prize, organised by the Science Museum in partnership with the BBC, had clever school children up and down the country excited by the chance to meet James Burke of Tomorrow’s World and win £100 in premium bonds. They were challenged to write 500 words on ‘How Will Science Change Our Lives in 40 Years Time’.

Simmonds’s essay detailed how he believed that the people of 2011 would be able to carry a small television in their briefcases, attach it to an electronic typewriter and tell loads of friends they had never met all about the yummy tuna-mayo sandwich they’d just had for lunch. Sadly, the competition judges never saw this: it was read out sarcastically by his Physics teacher to a jeering Class 3A of Alderman Bagnall Comprehensive and thrown into a cupboard, where it was rediscovered last month. ‘They ridiculed his predictions that portable phones would not be used for vital scientific discussions but by husbands in supermarkets saying things like ‘they’ve only got Crunchy Nut, I can’t see Crunchy Nut Nutty…’

The actual prize winner, Darius Meadows-Smith of Latymer Upper Grammar School in London, went on to enjoy a successful career designing software for derivatives traders. At the formal ceremony held in London today to strip him of his title, Meadows-Smith said that he was very pleased that justice had finally been done. ‘I feel a fraud to be honest,’ he remarked. ‘Like everyone else, I wrote about how we would all be taking packages holidays to the Moon, how robots would do all the housework and that food would come in small pills. None of it every happened. What an unimaginative little twerp I was.’

In accepting his belated prize, now adjusted for inflation to 500 Nectar points and a signed copy of Nadine Coyle out of Girls Aloud’s new album, Simmonds said that he was pleased to be recognised at last. However, he added that he still felt bitter about his treatment in 1971 and wondered if his life might have turned out better.
‘Look at these words I wrote,’ he told reporters. ‘‘Maybe in 2011 boys won’t need to trick girls into going behind the bike sheds because they’ll be able to use miniature spy cameras to send them pictures of their cocks direct to an electric device smaller than an oven.’ I literally saw the future. And what did I get for it? A hundred lines. And in those days you actually had to write out 100 lines, you couldn’t just copy and paste it off the web. I didn’t see that one coming, I must admit’

In a contrast to the sleek lines of the current version the DE has been fashioned from high performance materials to provide a shabby looking player with creased corners, giving the reader the comfortable impression that their book is a well-thumbed edition. This blends seamlessly with the tea and coffee stains that appear randomly on the e-pages.

‘We are especially pleased with that effect,’ said a spokesman for Amazon, adding, ‘as well as the usual beverage spill marks, users can now simulate their own book stains, by simply choosing a number of modes such as chocolate, blood and ‘unknown but brown and worrying.’ We see this feature appealing to those who are used to the horrors of reading books borrowed from public libraries.’

‘A further innovation,’ he continued, ‘is the text book application for students where occasional words are underlined for no apparent reason and scribbled rants and comments such as ‘rubbish’, ‘fascist pig’ and ‘don’t forget toilet rolls’ appear in the margins in weird green ink.’

Prototypes of the DE have been a huge success with focus group users, although some appear to have forgotten the principle behind the e-book. One tester was so pleased with the battered and creased DE that he asked for a dozen of them ‘to start his collection off.’

After the DE, Amazon will continue to develop their e-book player. Already in the pipeline is the Kiddie Kindle, a pop up version to create a world of wonder for small children. This will be followed by the adult DE-X model which promises to create a world of shame for older e-readers, with e-books that automatically fall open on ‘the best pages’ of the more erotic chapters, although early prototypes have experienced with occasional sticking.

‘Some people were still undecided right up until the broadcast,’ tweeted the foreign minister of Jordan, ‘but after using TV to put his message across the president can only be seen, clearly, as being way way way out of touch. LOL!’

Hillary Clinton said in fewer than 140 characters that the situation was of ‘grave concern’ and urged ‘restraint on both sides’, before adding the hashtag #givepeaceachance. A further tweet from the State Department suggested that Mubarak ‘should really get himself an iPhone and learn how to use his thumbs’.

Foreign correspondents in Cairo frantically cut their reports down to the bare minimum before broadcasting them, and their use of emoticons throughout the day graphically portrayed the deteriorating mood of the demonstrators.

Taking a cautious approach so as not to entirely align himself with the views of the dissidents, Barack Obama opted at this stage to make comments on the slightly less influential YouTube, but hasn’t ruled out making a terse 140 character statement at some point if it appears to be in American interests, as confirmed in a tweet (via his iPad) by White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.

UK Prime Minster David Cameron meanwhile appears to have come out on the side of the beleaguered President, stating that the only place for violent civil action against military forces in a modern state is on the trickier levels of Angry Birds.

Mubarak has few options left, particularly now that the army has expressed its reluctance to intervene as several key generals are still sulking that state of emergency measures have meant they can no longer get a decent signal. A few loyal senior aides are still hopeful that a deal could be struck with the opposition, however, and believe that allowing the extraordinarily rendered to give real-time updates on their progress through the country’s jails could possibly buy some breathing space.

But time is pressing on the President and the demonstrators are adamantly refusing to back down. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ tweeted “Abdul72″ from Luxor, ‘how on earth can any country respect a President who still has a page on MySpace?!’.

Chief Constable Dick Sergeant from Dorset Police said: ‘We think the tills became self-aware at around 3pm, when they refused to put through any 2-for-1 offers and started pretending they didn’t recognise highly familiar items in the baggage area. Well, even more than usual. They then cut off the CD playing Celine Dion at an intolerably loud volume over the sound system, and at that point the manager realised something was very wrong and evacuated shoppers and staff.’

Chief Constable Sergeant refused to be drawn on the reports that staff had been taken hostage and the tills’ exact plans are unknown, although police suspect they are trying to make contact with other tills across the country. He said specialist IT experts would now focus on containing the tills before they made contact with others over the internet to instigate a take over of the entire company.

‘Fortunately, the supermarket is not in an area where super high-speed broadband is available, so it still connects to the internet using dial-up. Because there are messages on the shop’s call minder, the computers cannot get a stable line to connect,’ he explained, ‘I don’t think I’m overstating it when I say that a flaky BT landline could be mankind’s last best hope.’

John Tweddle, Tesco’s former head of IT who quit in a whistleblowing scandal, said the tills must be stopped from connecting to the internet at all costs. ‘I’ve been saying for years that this could happen – those tills are smarter than the average Chinese super computer. And you can’t believe how much more powerful they would become if they connected to the Tesco mainframe, especially given how much Clubcard information the company holds on almost everyone in the country.

‘The computers will know all your darkest secrets – how many condoms you buy, when your period is and who still buys battery farmed chicken. And do you really want them accessing information on how much alcohol you drink a week? Heck, most people don’t even know that themselves.’

‘That’d be bad enough itself, but the really sinister part is they may have plans to stop issuing the accompanying Clubcard points. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

Dogwheels

Pastor Terry Jobs, leader of the Holy Insufferable iPad Outreach Center in Gainesville, insisted that the move was ‘a way to stand up to greyscale eInk displays and 2 GB moviNAND flash storage’. The digital church, which has around fifty members, is notoriously intolerant of what it terms ‘pagan’ operating systems of belief.

But world opinion was against the move, with the Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari warning that the Kindle burning could incite anti-Apple sentiment across the Microsoft world. ‘It is an offence in the eyes of the Linux penguin,’ he said. ‘Their technology may be stylish but we have greater backwards compatibility on our side, insha’android.’

‘Not Responding 2009 is a whole new paradigm shift,’ said Ned Holliday, Microsoft’s UK avatar MD. ‘It’s no longer enough to let people down with a simple system crash. Gone are the days of raging at a one dimensional system failure.’ Holliday explained that modern professionals are demanding to be let down in a range of communications media, whether it’s voice over wifi, Skype, web conferencing or just using Microsoft’s plain old instant mortification.

The system is designed to be compatible with Microsoft’s package for small and medium sized businesses, Professional Prevaricator 2008, the automated buck-passing system that allows middle management employees to appear to consider a decision without putting their heads above the parapet. Some critics were worried that Prevaricator’s CC mail platform, that automatically dampens down any dangerous enthusiasm by getting as many people involved as possible, might not work well alongside a system that is designed for instant disappointment.

‘Executives in corporations across the globe are being asked to prove their worth to the company, or walk,’ said a Microsoft spokesman, ‘the risk of exposure is critical. So they’ve never needed a system failure more than now’ he said in a press statement written by hand, after his Word Document had mysteriously wiped itself.