Henry Desktop Vacuum

Desktop keyboard vacuums, functional if niche items — it’s inevitable that crumbs and dust will get into your keyboard, and if that’s a laptop it’s not only disconcerting but responsible for that burnt toast smell. Heart-attack or your CPU slowly toasting itself and that remnant of crumpet?

Henry the vacuum, no roomba but he has personality. Enough for gadget sellers to think that a mini version would be a hot seller. Cute he may be, amusing in a Colin Hunt way, but his nose-tube thing is too long and also too short. Too long to sit tidily, too short to fold neatly, he stretches his hovery appendage across your desk.

But worst of all, fill it full of batteries and switch on and nothing. Not enough power to get even the fluffiest bit of toast up.

Henry not only simultaneously sucks and blows, but doesn’t even suck. Worthless.

3 Mobile INQ-1

Let’s start with this worthless piece of crap, shall we?

I was sent the 3 Mobile ‘Facebook phone’ - the INQ-1 (pronounced ink-one) to try for a month. It was back in its box within the week. It’s rubbish.

No fun at all to use, a nonsensical navigation system and scrolling down long pages is absurdly slow.

Worst of all, it’s one of those things where someone has decided that you make something cool by adding as many features as you can into as small a space as possible. Naturally, they’ve not only made it completely counter-intuitive along the way, they’ve also left out some of the most obvious and useful stuff that, had you asked anyone who knew, would have been an essential component.

Twitter, anyone?

The INQ-1 can do Facebook and Skype (that is to say - it can connect to the Internet) - but it has special buttons for each of the websites it knows how to display. It’s a bit like using a Swiss army knife to cut a piece of paper.

Baffling nonsense.

Nice enough box - shame about the phone.

It also comes with ‘instruction cards’ that not only contain little or no information at all, but they do have patronising cartoons on the other side. Yes - I wanted a Hello Kitty knockoff Top Trumps set with my rubbishphone. Thanks a bunch.

In its defense, it’s shiny. Also, they’ll give you one in gratitude for signing up to an 18-month, £15 a month contract. So - cheap, and a little bit iPhoney (iFauxn?) - without any of the things that make the iPhone cool.

In other words, it’s a desperate bid to sweep up the crumbs that fall from the iPhone’s table, and in order to make it appealing, they’ve made it affordable and crap, so as to give off that ‘ah well - at least I can afford one of these’ sensation.

Destined to be a disappointing Christmas present.

If we had a rating system, this would be something pretty poor out of whatever. I wish we’d thought of some of our Worthless Piece of Crap tests before I sent this back. I would have subjected it to the ‘does it burn?’ test, the ‘overnight in the freezer’ test and the ‘whoops, I dropped it in the toilet’ test.

These, I’m afraid will have to wait for other gadgets.

Meanwhile, this is the prototypical ‘Worthless Piece of Crap’ this site was launched to warn you about.