There's no such thing as 'hands-free'!

A particular bugbear of mine is technology which is advertised as 'hands-free' but isn't!

Christine and I have been trying for years to find a genuinely hands-free mobile phone. You may wonder what I'm going on about as virtually all mobile phones advertise a 'hands-free' facility, and yes they do all have this, particularly in relation to voice dialling. But they are not hands-free - you have to press a button to access the facility, and that is something that Christine cannot do.

Now I can see that we are about to go through the same frustrating process with e-book readers. Like them or loathe them, they do away with the need to turn pages, a complex skill which is beyond many disabled and older people. E-book's should be the ideal solution. But they won't be, not because the technology isn't available, but because the designers haven't bothered to apply it.

I've already checked with the Sony e-book, and I see that the Amazon Kindle 2 is about to be launched in the UK. Same problem - you have to be able to press buttons to use them.

There would be two solutions, neither of them beyond the reach of current technology. The first is the control (Christine uses a Sony Ericsson K 700i mobile phone at the moment which has partial voice control), or alternatively an interface that would allow phones, e-book readers etc to be operated with environmental controls such as Fox and Possum.

I would love to be wrong, so if anyone knows of a mobile phone (or e-book reader) that has a genuine hands-free facility Christine and I would be very pleased to hear from you.