Apple Iphone set for UK launch on Tuesday

At least, the outfit is to hold a press conference in London on that date but it won't say what it is about. Reuters reckons it has to be the Iphone, and hacks will be mightily, um, hacked off it they all tip up to find the firm launching a new USB stick, or a two-buttoned mouse.

The Iphone, for those not in the know, is a sort of mobile phone unlike any you've yet seen. The battery is welded in so you can't change it and it was so expensive on launch Apple soon cut the price. This sent shareholders like Forrest Gump apoplectic with rage as they thought their dividends would suffer.

The price cut also so miffed Yanks who had already bought the phone that Apple's boss, The Man Named Jobs, wrote to them all on the Interweb, offering them a hundred bucks each to keep quiet, so long as they spent it on similarly over-priced gear.

O2 seems to be the bookies' favourite to become the network on which Iphone will work. Until the battery runs out that is. µ