Steve Litchfield

I was contacted by ITV and subsequently filmed on this subject, but the final footage was cut massively short by time, so I thought my notes would be helpful to others in full.The trigger point for recording was instances of people being locked out of or locked into hybrids or EVs when their car's 12V battery had run too low. I did a video on 12V battery drain a couple of years ago and it had come to the attention of the ITV reporting team. My response   Despite the concern, there really shouldn’t be any alarm from a safety standpoint. All car makers put in place failsafes for such an eventuality. E.g. when electronic door latches don’t work on a Toyota or Lexus hybrid, from the inside you can pull the door opening handle twice. The first pull unlocks a mechanism and the second pull physically opens the door latch.  And from the outside, you can use the (usually hidden) mechanical key included in every key fob. This fits into the keyway on one of the front two doors. O...

I/you/someone decides to set up a phone museum. Well, I guess it depends on how many phones/smartphones we're talking about. Most of us have a batch of previous phones, sitting in a drawer, but it becomes a collection when you start organising them, cataloguing them, and then... maintaining them. For it to be notable, there has to be a point to such a collection, of course. I've been collecting, in a way, old smartphones since 2000, this being my work until I retired recently. But my passion was always for the Symbian OS-based devices, from Nokia Communicators through to the Nokia 808, via the likes of the Sony Ericsson P series.  So, ignoring other classics in my possession (e.g. Windows Phones), I settled on properly organising and cataloguing a ' Symbian museum '. For my own enjoyment and for others. Including a load of relevant background content, clear photos of all the devices in use , and with my own (ahem) expert comment on what made each phone so good or so bad...