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What's cynical about putting an iPhone in a bikini top? or running a swimsuit edition of Geekzone?

Call me cynical, but my eyes did close in a tired sigh when I got my AOL email this morning. "What's Hot!" it said, and went on to encourage me to get a swimsuit by referring me to the AOL search page:

Summer equals bathing suits. Instead of shopping for disappointment, find bathing suits that fit you on AOL Search. Search less and discover more.

Look, how old do you have to be to realise that entering "bathing suits" into a search engine will get you lots of "acceptable" images of young women, not over-dressed? And that's all AOL was giving me: a search engine window with a search term already loaded. As if anybody would buy swimming costumes when it's already summer! - go to any shop, and you'll find they're showcasing their winter sports gear already.

So, let's be cynical, I thought. Let's enter "+swimsuit +iphone" as our search term.

Sure enough: "Bikini Swimsuit Featuring Integrated iPod Controls" says iPodhacks. "With this latest example of technology integration from Korea, jumping to the next track is as simple as touching your upper chest."

Ahem. Moving on, how many hits would you expect our search term to throw up? "Results 1 - 10 of about 472,000 for +iphone +swimsuit" says Google.

OK, so some of those are just web sites which have "swimsuit" in one story, and "iPhone in another, as does Luxlist [see gold swimsuit, right] with its $80,000 gold swimsuit. The iPhone story is a completely different one (an anti-scratch condom for the screen). But what the heck (says the cynic) if we can run a photo of a scantily clad lass?

For what it's worth, your dedicated swimsuit reporter abandoned the search at the point where "Miss Hooters" (no, really!) turned out to be a story which Geekzone was prepared to run. Excuse?

"This post has absolutely nothing to do with technology. Or perhaps it has a lot, after all we are all geeks, right?"

I know when I'm being out-cynicked. So I searched for "+bikini +iphone" and at that point, I realised I was being out-geeked, too: Incipio has come up with a leather case for the phone. And Incipio cleverly calls it a bikini [right] and someone has posted this picture of the phone wearing "her" new garment.

In the interests of modesty, we've pixellated out that bit at the bottom, just in case...