Mobile phones help battle Yuletide boozing and bonking
Mobile phones are being enlisted in the fight against Christmas shenanigans, with an iPhone app that tracks your drinking, and free top-up credit that advocates the use of condoms
Christmas is traditionally a time of babies in mangers, warm family embraces, and pagan tree worship. But, for those of us who are more into Babycham than the baby Jesus, Christmas can be a liver-destroying drink-a-thon.
You Booze, You Lose, a new iPhone app from Channel 4, hopes to help you rein in the Christmas spirit by giving you a playful way to track how much you drink, and what the volume of consumed liquor equates to in calories, cash and health effects.
There's also a bunch of sobriety tests so you can watch your reaction times plummet after you've quaffed a few beers. You can store several profiles in the app, so you can play with your iPhone-deprived mates, and you can post your drunken state on Facebook, backing up your incoherent status updates.
We took the app for a test run during the consumption of our usual morning pick-me-up of half a bottle of Jack Daniel's. We found entering drinks in the virtual pub easy, but the buttons are rather small, so this could turn into a sobriety test in itself after a few tipples.
The sheer scale of how many units we consumed in one night of PR-fuelled drinking was truly scary when we saw it added up, so, if you're concerned about the amount you drink, this app is a good, non-judgemental way to keep tabs on it. The ability to post to Facebook could tempt us to enter into a battle of the boozers, however, trying to out-drink our friends and beat their high scores.
You Booze, You Lose costs 59p from the Apple App Store (iTunes link).
Booze and bonking go together like beans and toast, so drinky-timez charity Drinkaware and sexy-timez charity Brook have joined forces to tempt you with mobile top-ups that encourage you to wrap the sausage.
They're offering free Christmas survival packs that include £1 of top-up credit and two condoms. On 30 December, everyone who redeems their credit will get a text message reminding them that condoms are for life and not just for Christmas, sweetened with another £1 of top-up credit.
You can use the top-up on 3, Orange, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile or Vodafone, but you must be 16 or 17 to qualify.
Happy Christmas, and, in the words of a rozzer from Hill Street Blues, let's be careful out there. Hiccup.