Esat Digifone's Mr Barry Maloney is livid about the Eircell "one for someone in the audience" slot on the Late Late Show.

Esat introduced its dot digifone-on-line WAP service on Thursday last, allowing subscribers to surf the Net via their mobile phones. Then on Friday night Pat Kenny announced that Eircell would be the first operator in the Republic to bring this service to the marketplace and promptly gave away one of the super-duper phones.

Esat is a little confused about how the Late Late didn't know about its new service given that it had been covered the day before on RTE news bulletins and several senior RTE personnel attended the announcement of its introduction.

Eircell, for its part, says it announced its WAP service on August 10th, nearly a month before Esat and that - in any event - its service will feature several firsts including the ability to move money around when it comes on stream.

All of this date juggling seems highly academic, as both Eircell and Esat are at the mercy of Nokia who won't deliver the special WAP phones until sometime in October.