Up to now these devices have been a bit awkward to use because you needed both a mobile phone and a separate handheld computer. The new generation handheld computers now have the mobile phone built into them so you only need the one device. The mobile phone company 0₂ provide a neat little device called an XDA which does exactly this. It has a permanent Internet connection via GPRS so I can collect my emails and look at web pages as well. My company (Road Tech) wrote some software to load onto the XDA handheld computer that enabled it to communicate with our Roadrunner transport software so there was now also a seamless connection between your Roadrunner traffic office software and your drivers who had these devices. Proof of delivery information was displayed to a customer on the handheld computer, the customer would be able to sign the screen of the handheld computer and their signature would immediately be transmitted back to your office based Roadrunner system, great stuff.

I decided that I would take one of these XDA handheld computers with me when I attended the RHA conference in Portugal last month. I bought a new one from the 0₂ shop in Watford, loaded the Road Tech software to provide the Roadrunner link and off I went. For the first two days everyone I showed it to was suitably delighted and amazed by my clever new phone come computer, on the third day it stopped working! It suddenly decided that it would no longer make any phone calls so I put it back in my bag and forgot about it for the rest of the conference.

When I arrived home I decided to investigate why my new XDA computer had stopped working. I phoned 0₂ and was told that my new XDA had been cut off by them. The problem was that I had been using it. In the three weeks that I had owned the device I had run up a phone bill of £100, not surprising being as I was demonstrating the thing to 400 RHA delegates at their conference. However the credit control department of 0₂ decided that although they had run a credit check on me when I bought it and I had also signed a direct debit form for payments, enough was enough and once the bill had reached the dizzy height of £100 they cut me off. OK they could have been worried that the phone had been stolen because it was getting a lot of use, but why cut me off, why not phone me on my new XDA phone and ask me if all was well?

Even more bizarrely, after I explained to them that I was quite happy with the phone, it had not been stolen and I am not worried about the £100 phone bill they still didn't reconnect my phone

Now the biggest users of these new mobile data phones will of course be businesses and the behaviour of 0₂ credit control department, or should we call them the sales prevention department, has not been encouraging for business use. I will now have to watch 0₂ TV adverts for a couple of weeks, with no mobile phone working, and wait for my direct debit to clear listening to Sean Bean saying "see what you can do… 0₂".