The Chocolate turned out to be pretty sweet last night. It's hero feature is a heat-sensitive keypad. There's no need to actually press any of the keys. Rather, you just have to glide your fingertips across the phone's buttons, which automatically sense and react to your body heat (try to press the keys with cold long fingernails and nothing happens).

Other good stuff: it's very small for a 3G Vodafone Live handset - about the size of a pack of cards and just 98g - and for a phone with a slide-down keypad it feels very robustly engineered. And it does have a very groovy look, complete with a glowing red panels (see it here). On the downside, the heat-sensitive keys were a little too sensitive for most at first. Most people at last night's preview took five or 10 minutes to acclimatise. Officially called the LG KG800, the Chocolate costs $799, and comes with a 2mP camera and 512MB miniSD card. Read a full review in our March issue's Mobile and Wireless section.

But anyhow, we're heading into the weekend, and time for some lighter reading. Although I'm as high brow as the next editor, and am a card-carry subscriber to The New Yorker and The Economist, among others, I did used to have a nasty habit on the side, slyly slipping a copy of Aussie celebrity trash mag New Weekly into my shopping trolley every Saturday ("It's for the wife").

That was until the Deputy Editor turned me on to the more immediate fix of People.com, which has now started to link to the far less polite TMZ.com, which pursues its rubbish news tenaciously, often with sneaky video or lurid photo galleries on the side, and has delivered several scoops - if indeed Britney Spears forgetting to wear underwear or Mel Gibson’s DUI photo can be considered civilisation-enhancing news.

TMZ was only created recently, incidentally, and its existence does reflect a serious trend. Time Warner (which also publishes People) used to wall off AOL.com editorial content, which was only accessible to people who paid for an ISP account with AOL (which is also owned by Time Warner). Now, as broadband thrives and AOL's mainly dial-up subscribers start to seriously wane (though it's still the US's largest ISP), it's home page's content is being made free to everyone, and is supposed to pay its way through advertising. Little kickers like TMZ are supposed to attract new visitors to the site - like chump here.