And here's one new link

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Most of my current work appears in newspapers (The Sunday Mirror, Evening Standard and Sunday Times are regular gigs). But often it's not published online. So here's a recent Sunday Times electric scooters test, just to prove to the world that I am gainfully self employed.

I whizzed round Wapping on half a dozen of these battery-powered machines. Great fun. The cobbles on this photo are eerily reminiscent of Pennington Street, but I can confirm that this photo is not me, that is definitely not my hair, and I did wear protection.

Old links that made me laugh

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Two links I came across while moving over to this new blog...

Do we need the Bridget Jones phone? in The Evening Standard, October 2001. My story about this cute but sexist mobile phone caught the Bridget Jones zeitgeist and was picked up by national TV news. I'm told that Samsung UK canned promotion of the A400 as a result. Oops! But what do they expect if they launch a handset that counts the calories women burn doing 10 activities that include cleaning, dishwashing, cooking, shopping and "chattering"?

The best of slim pickings in The Evening Standard, April 2002: "Small LCD TVs start at under £700 and large plasma TVs can be found for less than £5,000." Years have passed and prices of some of these screens have dropped by, ooh, 95%. Suddenly today's flat tellies seem like bargains.

A quick biography

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Caramel Quin is a freelance journalist and copywriter specialising in consumer technology and the internet: from PCs and DACs to robotic lawnmowers and fitness monitors. She has appeared as a technology expert on Sky News, GMTV and BBC Choice, and done countless radio interviews.

Caramel has interviewed everyone from film stars to Nasa astronauts, and written on subjects as diverse as hi-tech rosaries and Japanese trainer collectors, but her favourite gig was testing ice cream makers.

A self-proclaimed ‘gadget girl’, Caramel started out studying engineering and has gradually become less techie ever since. After spending the nineties on the staff of various computer and gadget mags, including launching Stuff magazine in both London and New York, she's been freelance for more than two decades. In 2006 she won Best Writer in the BlackBerry Women & Technology Awards. And in 2011 she won the CEDIA award for Best Technology Feature, for a piece in Grand Designs magazine. She's also part of the E&T Magazine gadgets team that has won four Tabbie awards, most recently in 2023.

Caramel has brought two junior product testers into the world (their speciality is destruction testing, the dog and other animals help). She enjoys trying out the latest gizmos, then telling readers, listeners and viewers about them in plain English. Her pet hates are unnecessary jargon, pointless products, planned obsolescence and over-complicated instruction manuals. Gadgets should work well and enrich our lives... otherwise they're a disturbing waste of plastics and precious metals.

She's written an exciting book: The Gadget Show Big Book of Cool Stuff. Order now on Amazon or via your favourite independent bookshop! :-)

You can contact Caramel at gadgetgirl@gmail.com, read her CV on LinkedIn or visit her Linktree for all the links.