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What will a playboy-virgin do to our eye-sight?

"It will make you go blind!" When Playboy finds a Virgin to play with instead of a phone to fiddle with, the young men of the nation could find themselves needing stronger glasses.

One of the strangest sights of last year was the number of young men sitting on the train, playing solo games with a phone. In reality, they were probably playing Connect 4 or draughts. This year, reality could be as strange as it looked, as Virgin Mobile attempts a tie-in with Playboy for "adult content" sent over phones.

The initial temptation is to dismiss it as nonsense, or just an interesting headline in a boring technical area; but these things tend to get bigger as time goes by.

The first time I saw a graphic representation of a nubile female on a PC, it was a joke; it was a game on an antique machine - the Amiga - called Strip Poker. If you won the game against the computer (which played like a three-year-old) you got to see more and more of the woman pictured on the screen. By the time she was naked, you could barely be sure whether she was indeed female; the image was so grainy and blotchy, because of the resolution of the screen.

Today's phones are about the same resolution as that old Amiga, and about the same proportion of home computers had colour then, as there are colour phones now. The only difference is that at least the old Amiga screen was, itself, big enough to see without reading glasses.

It was tempting, in those days, to suggest that anybody who could possibly find any stimulation from the image on the Amiga would have found the same excitement from a handful of confetti strewn on the ground. And yet, in an incredibly short time, computers had improved to the point where most people who wanted porn made the Internet their first choice of viewing.

The trick is to look a little way into the future, and ask: "Is this really going to be the way phones are forever? or will displays get bigger, screens get more colour, and images become higher resolution? - and the answer to all those questions is: "Well, duh!" - yes, of course they will.

Whether Virgin is really onto a good thing, however, is harder to guess.

That people will continue to be fascinated by the sight of each other, naked, indulging in erotic poses, can't be doubted. But the idea of sending the ultra-pneumatic images generated for Playboy to people on phones may be harder to turn into a business plan.

The way forward may well be to let the images be self-generating. When Sony-Ericsson announced its P800 phone with an optional camera, the City wasn't impressed. "Too technological" said some.

Perhaps they should have asked themselves what sort of messages kids send when texting - and extrapolated from there. The text screen may be technology, but "U TRN ME ON" is a niche which lots of people have been trying to fill for a long time. And something like "LIKE MY HAIR?" is capable of more than just textual interpretation.

In a world where kids will sit on photocopiers, this gimmick could do wonders for traffic. Whether they'll spend the same money to look at someone from Playboy, is a harder question to answer.