Mobile Broadband - it's all the rage in the UK at the moment and there are loads of different deals and various packages you can buy. Having moved into a new place, I wasn't sure if I would be able to get broadband, so as an interim step, I purchased a Three pay-as-you-go HSDPA modem. Pretty slick and wasn't too expensive.

Got it back to my place, installed the software on my PC and started it up. Reception wasn't great but I managed to get to Three's website to register my new account. One of the first things they wanted was the last six digits of the SIM card. This involved unplugging the device, opening it up and removing the SIM card! I thought that was stupid and a step that should have been put in the beginners guide e.g. Before you put the thing together and plug it in, note these numbers. Anyway, that done I registered and was informed a message would be sent via text message.

The message did indeed arrive very shortly afterwards. Only problem was that all the characters in the message were in Chinese!!! Meaning there was no way for me to read the message, or to guess which bit was the password. i suspect cut'n'paste wouldn't have been much use!! I've been using SMS since 1997 and a friend of mine wrong a piece of software for his 4th year project that could read messages from a phone. That was about eight years ago. Seems that in the 21st Century not even telecomms companies can read texts. Maybe it's for security??

I phoned up the help line and was told I would have to take the phone to a Three store where they would pop the SIM into a Three mobile phone and read the password from that!!

Then I decided to get clever and plugged the thing into my Mac, installed the software and fired it up. That was simple, but it turns out the Mac software doesn't give you access to the messages stored on the SIM card.. How stupid is that? I'm going to have to pop into a Carphone Warehouse and see if they can help me out!

Why do we always seem to make things more complicated than they are? I mean, come on Three, how can you release software that can't even read the messages that you send???