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What use is a folding plug? If you could find one, you'd know...

Four years ago, a small company called Teleadapt reached its tenth birthday - ten years of saving the bacon of tech travellers, by providing the right plugs and sockets. To celebrate, they ran a promotion, selling a folding plug.

A folding plug may sound like a weird idea. "But in fact," said Gordon Brown, managing director of Teleadapt, "it is one of those things most people agree on - that there really isn't anything you can do to yourself which causes quite as much pain as standing on a British standard 13 amp mains plug." And, of course, you normally only tread on one barefoot, in the night, in your hotel room, in the dark...

The solution is illustrated.  Not only does it avoid leaving unprotected prongs waiting in ambush for your tender toes, but it also stops the plug from puncturing your toothpaste tube or shampoo bottle in the suitcase.

Or... so we thought. In fact, despite winning http://www.42technology.com/examples/plug.html Design Awards for extreme cleverness, the plug never actually made it into the real world. It's not for want of public demand, it seems.

As often happens, this week a NewsWireless reader contacted us, trying to find one. "The picture has vanished from your story," he lamented, "and the product no longer exists on the Teleadapt web site!" - and a little investigation revealed that indeed, there is no such product on the market.

"I think the problem was that it fell foul of international testing regulations," said Brown. "But I'll investigate, and see if there actually are any samples..."

If any NewsWireless reader did ever manage to buy a folding plug, do tell us where!