Oddly enough I've read other articles by people saying their iPhone 4 made their iPad seem redundant. It all depends on how much you travel and whether your always have your Pad to hand - I couldn't see myself taking a tablet out to check Twitter, for example, though I gladly would for reading something long.

Really, though, the fact you want this is an indictment of smartphones. Why should you need to downgrade to a featurephone to get something with 'long battery life, [that's] able to grab and hold on to a voice signal with the tenacity of a bear trap, and be compact yet ruggedly durable'? Hopefully that'll be the smartphone norm sooner or later. You could try an Nokia N82 - essentially as simple as you want, with an excellent camera, but with a little more brains for the occasions you leave your iPad at home.

With regard to auto-submit, I think you need to see this in the context of where the web is going. Digg are, I think, trying to create a system which is less about getting users spending time at their website, and more about getting a big increase in the number of people Digging stories from around the web. They need to do this to compete with the Facebook like button, and we should all want them to succeed if we don't want Facebook to become too dominant.

For non-regular Digg users to use 'digg this' buttons around the web, they need to be able to digg things with one click; that means things need to be pre-submitted. It's about users thinking digging something is easy.

That does mean that getting submitted will be less of a filter of stuff, but that just means they'll need to make getting Dugg a lot more of a filter. If you get enough people Digging around the web, you could end up with stories needing, say, five Diggs to even appear in the site's listings.

Just think this - if more users are Digging, they won't tweet links so much, making Twitter a bit more bearable.

There's a core of users that won't leave Foursquare for Facebook, or will run both together, just as people run Twitter and Facebook. But it won't work as well. People use Twitter for sharing with the world, and Facebook for sharing with their friends, right? I just don't think location info is something many people want to share with the world, so I think the potential base for Foursquare is small.

Having said that, the real threat to 4Sq now is surely Twitter. Twitter's the only other social network most people use other than Facebook and it's already enabled adding location to a tweet. If they add some way to check-in without leaving a message, Foursquare will be screwed.

But, Twitter are showing no signs of actually doing that. So my advice to 4sq: screw Facebook, stay very close to Twitter, and suck up as many of their users as you possibly can.

I did ask Ed Milliband about the deficit at the Next Left conference, though the exchange was based more on how we got here than where we go. He did say that the tax base was too narrow under New Labour. I don't have the economics to parse that: does that mean too reliant on the wealthy, as is suggested below? I suspect it simply means we weren't bringing enough money in, should have gone to 50% earlier.

He also said, though, that there was no excessive spending and the central problem was over-reliance on the financial sector for growth, which backfired, hence crisis, hence recession, hence deficit.

I suspect if you take this explanation for where we are and extrapolate forward, you have the Milliband plan, and probably the rough plan for all the contenders: keep the top rate of tax at 50%, reverse any Tory tax cuts, and generally tax a bit more than under New Labour; keep investing in public services; and try to rebalance the economy to get back to pre-crisis growth levels on a more stable footing.

Economically, this is probably valid-ish; I suspect it's a recipe for a slow increase in the deficit, but in a stable, non-market-alarming way. But politically, I fear it's a non-starter.

But this all speaks to a bigger question which you've referred to previously, Hopi. So far, all I've heard from any leadership contender is talk about how to win back the millions of C2s who abandoned Labour this year. There's very little talk right now about rebuilding the 1997 coalition including C1s and a few ABs, which together make up nearly 50% of the electorate. I'm planning to write a blog post about this this weekend, though you know how plans are.

This is rather unfair to the IFS, which does not recommend any particular level of spending cuts in this paper, but simply tests how the parties have laid out their own deficit reduction plans.

Your analysis of the multiplier effect of Government spending is highly simplistic. Why is all the spending at stake assessed at the single multiplier rate for health and education spending? Much of the cuts, all parties agree, need to be elsewhere. Furthermore, the multiplier is an extremely broad average, masking government spending which is highly stimulative and plenty which is not. It is at least theoretically possible that the new Government will be able to "trim some fat" without taking this amount of money out of the system.

The more fundamental point you miss, however, is that the multipliers you describe only function in the context of a generally healthy fiscal environment. Yes, Greece's austerity measures will harm its economic growth; and yet, nobody believes they aren't necessary. Why? Because unless a country has the luxury of being without debt - no country does - they must above all retain the faith of the bond markets. When you're building a small business, you might feel you could expand more quickly with more funding, but that doesn't mean you can simply go over your overdraft limit.

The fact that the public are opposed to many specific spending cuts (although highly in favour of deficit reduction in general) is entirely irrelevant to an economic discussion. I see you make no effort to calculate the cost to the economy of scrapping Trident.

It is a valuable point to remind people that Government spending is stimulative and not, as many seem to think, a drag on the economy; and that, therefore, spending cuts will have a growth-reducing effect. But unfortunately you undermine the value of that point with selective statistics, irrelevant sermonizing and flawed analysis.