Charlie Brooker hates the Samsung E900 7 Mar 2007

"It seems to have been designed specifically to irritate anyone with a mind. It starts gently - a pinch of annoyance here, an inconvenience there - but before long the steady drip, drip, drip of minor frustrations begins to affect your quality of life, like a mouth ulcer, or a stone in your boot, or the lingering memory of love gone sour."

Last month he savaged the Mac, this month it's the Samsung E900's turn for the Brooker treatment. Yes, Charlie Brooker (creator of Nathan Barley, TV Go Home and Screenwipe) is back with another article for the Guardian about the mobile phone that he lovingly refers to as a "twittering handheld crapstone".

"The menu system is a confusing mangle of branching dead ends. It has touch-sensitive buttons that either refuse to work, or leap into action if you breathe on them. One such button also terminates calls, so it is easy to cut people off merely by holding the phone against your ear to hear them. It has no apparent 'silent' mode, and when you set it to vibrate, it buzzes like a hornet in a matchbox.

"It is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary 'features' aimed at idiots, including a mode that scans each text message and turns some of the words into tiny animations, so if someone texts to say they have just run over your child in their car, the word 'car' is replaced by a wacky cartoon vehicle putt-putting onto the screen. There is also a crap built-in game in which you play a rabbit"

Reminds us of Mr Barley's Wasp T12 Speechtool. Hoot your trap off!

[via O'Reilly Radar]