Finally got my paws on a iPhone today, courtesy of Stephen Dukker, chairman of a company called NComputing, who had bought one over from the US. International roaming for the machine had yet to be set up, so I could not try it out as a phone. But the interface is every bit as good as it has been cracked to be.

The gesture navigation is intuitive and effective, allowing you to flick your way through pages, or expand or contract an image by closing or opening your thumb and first finger. The screen quickly gets fingerprints all over it, and we will have to wait to see how well it stands up to long use.

The interface may prove seminal but I stand by my earlier blog that the machine as a whole is a dead-end. We need a proper truly mobile working platform, with a screen large enough to avoid eyestrain, and I wish Apple would apply its undoubted design skills to developing one.

Dukker, perhaps best known here as former head of the cut-price PC vendor eMachines, was in London to promote his new thin-client products - not to mention his old ones, which he says have sold 300,000 worldwide.

These basically allow one machine to be used by several people simultaneously. It is an old idea, but Dukker rightly points out that it is far more viable these days with even entry-level PCs having dual-core processors will capable of multi-tasking.

One product  uses a PCI card with what three standard ethernet sockets; these uses standard Cat5 cabling and plugs for a proprietary link to a box, little bigger than a c igarette packet. into which you can plug a monitor, keyboard, mouse and headphones. The host PC can run XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 or anyt of three flavours of Linux. NComputing provides software to allow it to act as four PCs at once (including one user at the PC itself).

Prices start at £35 a seat which Dukker says includes a good margin for installers, and schools and call centres are a big market, particularly in developing countries. A new version of the PCI system with support seven users per host.

NComputing also offers an Ethernet version, with slightly larger client boxes. Dukker says the build costs of these boxes can be very low, because the host PC is doing all the work, and he agrees that there could be a market for something similar in the home.

Microsoft's Smart Display did something over a wireless link - though of course they packed they own pen-driven monitor. The difference is that the smart display took over the host computer using the Remote Desktop Protocol, originally designed to allow help desks to troubleshoot a PC over the network.

NComputing's software by contrast allows clients to share a PC, with considerable potential savings for schools and other organisations (not to mention the other well-rehearsed advantages of thin clients, such as ease of maintenance and administration).

Schools can get Windows or Office software licences for around $1-3 per seat, according to Dukker, but Microsoft would take a dim view of several home or small-business users using its products simultaneously on a single-user licence.

But this kind of set-up is bound to get into the home. Dukker says current systems uses comparatively sluggish Field Programmable Gate Array chips, but he is about to move to faster custom-built silicon (ASICs). He reckons he could pack a thin client into a TV for as little as £10 per unit - and he is talking to Far Eastern manufacturers about doing it.