"Spoiling pets is huge in the UK and US, and so we did our homework about nutrition and started making luxury Kobe beef dog food. "Our biggest headache was deciding what to do with our beautiful herd," says Mr Walsh at Lucies Farm. "But then we had an idea." Mr Walsh comes originally from Hawaii, where Japanese residents and tourists have eaten a type of meat called Kobe beef for years. Producing it involves massaging the cattle regularly and feeding them a daily diet that includes large amounts of beer. This, he says, produces meat that is extra-ordinarily tender, finely marbled and full flavoured.So he sought to use his own cattle in this way.
"While the beef is a special grade from cattle raised in Kobe, Japan, I saw no reason why I couldn't apply the same process here."And the idea worked - up to a point. Running a unit on the T-Mobile network proved reliable in our tests, with email generally arriving on the handheld within a minute of it reaching the email server Nor were there any problems with missed messages. But one word of caution: it took almost a week to set up our test Blackberry, due to problems with its PIN.So if you do hope to take one on holiday, plan ahead.THE VERDICTRating: 4.5 out of 5.Pros: reliable and cost effective.Cons: Bluetooth support limited to headsets.Cost: £159 on 12-month data-only contract with T-Mobile. That's the philosophy of Craig and Marjorie Walsh, whose Worcester business raising Highland cattle was ravaged by foot-and-mouth disease and the introduction of cattle passports.
Also available on O2, Vodafone and Orange (corporate only).Contact: Research in Motion, ; T-Mobile, . When one door closes, another one opens. Subscribers who take out a voice calling plan will pay around £10 a month for Blackberry email.Standalone tariffs are a little more expensive T-Mobile, for example, charges £17 a month (including VAT). This includes 55MB of email a month, and 0.5MB of web surfing.Corporate Blackberry subscriptions - where a company puts in a Blackberry server to support additional features such as online diaries - typically cost about £35 a month, although there are also set-up costs.The best thing about the Blackberry, however, is that it simply gets on with the job. Blackberries might not work with all free services, although they will work with some, such as Google's gmail.Running costs vary from operator to operator, and according to the contract.
