Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down

Thumbs Up: Type the text Instead of faffing around pressing tiny mobile phone numbers to send a text message, why not use your computer and big keyboard to log on to your mobile network website and use the webtext facility?

Prepaid and post-paid customers of Vodafone and Meteor get 300 free texts per month, while O2 gives 250. A good alternative, if you have problems sending texts to other networks, or if you want to text abroad, or if you don't have a mobile phone, is to log on to www.smsmac.com, where a subscription of €15 gets you a year's use of the "Send SMS widget" and 50 texts (10c each to any network in any country). It works with MS Windows as well as with theMac OS, and you need to download some software to connect your addresses.

A shot of luxury

An impossibly upmarket brand of tequila - 100 per cent blue Agave aged for six years and sold in a limited edition platinum bottle with fancy artwork on the label - went on sale in Mexico on Thursday night for $225,000 (€177,444) a bottle. Reuters reports that Tequila Ley .925 has produced 66 bottles of the "Pasion Azteca" tequila, half of them pure platinum bottles and half of them gold and platinum-decorated bottles that sell for the slightly lower price of $150,000 (€118,289).

Thumbs Down

The daily grind

This month, the Insomnia coffee chain upped its prices and some customers didn't take it lightly. Specifically, the price of a regular (or "tall") cappuccino has increased from €2.50 to €2.70. A spokeswoman for Insomnia pointed out its prices had not increased since June 2004 and that the new price was lower than Starbucks, where a regular cappuccino costs €2.80. O'Briens charges €2.40 for the same cuppa. In Barnie's, if you get the daily trivia question right you get a free coffee.

Five a day? No way

Should the guideline of "five a day" portions of fruit and veg be amended to "a fiver a day"? One reader was horrified to discover that the average sized Granny Smith - not even a big apple - she bought in West Coast Coffee on D'Olier Street in Dublin cost a bitter 75 cent.