Talk Me Through It - Mobile Phone Support On average we spend just 15 seconds reading our mobile instruction manuals: no wonder we're hopelessly lost. Now a new company promises to take the misery - and the mystery - out of that smart new gizmo you just acquired. Back in the dawn of time, when the first crude video players crawled from their boxes to take up residence under the nation's TV sets, there was a lot of whinging and whining in the press and the pubs that only people with a PhD in consumer electronics would be able to programme them. Twenty-odd years later we're surely much cleverer, merrily coping with digital cameras, DVD, 3-G mobiles, laptops, mini-discs and multi-programmable nuclear toasters (not got one yet?). Or are we? There's a school of thought, with hard facts to support it, that we’ve simply lost the confidence to admit our technophobia. We don't really want anyone to know just how hopeless we are. However many "features and functions" the manufacturers pack into our latest piece of kit, new research shows that the British spend an average of only 15 seconds reading the instruction manual. That's about enough time to register that it IS an instruction manual, to think, "Oh, I must take a look at that sometime." and to put it down never to see it again. Which is shame, really. After all, we're paying enough for our gadgets and gizmos and our appetite for them shows no sign of dwindling: handsets offering games and photos appear to have pushed the total number of mobiles in the UK past the 50 million mark in May 2003. With all that acreage of so-called "Instructions" (most of it translated by computer from Finnish, Swedish or Japanese) surely someone somewhere should throw the poor consumer a lifebelt. Step forward Talk Me Through It (TMTi). At TMTI they are creating the ultimate help-line by putting knowledgeable, friendly "phonaholics" on-line and giving them access to the most sophisticated technical database they can muster. Mobile phones are the obvious place to start, if only because the introduction of camera-phones over the winter created a complete void in the public's ability to cope. At one point only 3% of camera-phone owners had actually sent a picture. You can contact TMTi now on 09065 702905. Calls are charged at £1.50 per minute. Phones currently supported are - All Nokia's Motorola T720i, C350, T720 Orange SPV Panasonic GD67, GD87 Siemens A50, CL50, S55, MT50 Samsung A800, V100, V200 Sharp GX10 Sony Ericsson T300, T68i, P800 New handsets are always being added to the database.